http://nces.ed.gov/globallocator/col_info_popup.asp?ID=178411

Its kind of sick to see how the cost of room and board has so drastically increased

How did "other expenses" go up by 1k - In a year...? 50% increase?

Room and board has always been a ripoff here though. I don't know of many other schools where offcampus housing is both Cheaper AND Better. But thats not a surprise due to the mandatory 2 year in the dorms minimum. Thankfully a years worth of AP credits got me out after freshmen year - but MAN was reslife pissed off.

Something to note is that that lists last years prices. This year things are even higher.

If I remember correctly, there was a vote to add a fee to pay for something about the football stadium, and it passed, and the Multi-Purpose fee got a big increase too ($20). There's also that Science/Engineering credit fee, and I don't have the data to track that. You can see some of it (at least current data) from looking at the cashier's office and the SAFB. Oddly, financial aid only has unhelpful information about the costs and fees of attending school here.

Room and board I can kind of understand (though that's probably a misleading figure since there's a $4000 gap between a triple in Kelly and a single in RC1. I can't tell how they calculated that room and board number for last year. This year, it looks like most will spend about $2500 on meals (it's very unlikely anyone will pay less than $2475), and the average (accounting for number of beds at that price) is probably going to be around $5500 (5500 in TJ, 6000 in RC, 4500 in the Quad), so the total should be about $8000 for this year. That's another $1000 jump.

Also, coming from a different school, and talking to my friends who have gone elsewhere, it's normal for off-campus to be cheaper and better than on-campus.

So, I wrote all that, then I went and read the costs index from the financial aid office, and that is probably where the numbers come from. That "other expenses" line looks like it's probably the estimated "personal needs" line, which, I'm pretty sure, is a made up number.

Get ready for it to hurt more next year. Tuition is supposed to go up ~7.5%

and credit for that huge jump can be given to the locked-in tuition rate that the school has been subject to for the last two years. Seriously, if you are graduating after four or five years of attendance this upcoming spring, you had the best tuition price scenario of all of us. 3 years of the same costs vs. paying a 2.5%-5% rate hike every year worked out very well for you.

Our government may be run by idiots that can't spend someone else's money fast enough rather than like a proper business, but the University of Missouri network is run too much like a business, with administrators looking to line their own pockets before improving the quality of the schools and education.

It makes me glad I don't have to be a part of it anymore.

that's my $0.02

Here's someone else's 2 cents that I saw on Reddit on the cost of college, paying it off, student loans, and the way the government handles them.

Other expenses jumped, I presume, due to a cost of living or quality of life increase.

I just paid off all my loans, pretty much the only benefit of living at home after school

you probably wouldn't otherwise have a brand new mustang either

I probably would have regardless, I only put $5k down and got 0% financing