How much has the public college tuition increased? [br] [originaltext]Listen to

Listen to the conversation, and mark each question as A, B, C or D according to your listening.
W: Costs at four-year public schools posted the smallest increase in more than 30 years, up 2. 9 percent. It just got more expensive to go to public college and university in the United States more slowly, right?
M: Exactly. This is the smallest increase we’ve seen in a couple of decades, but that’s on a larger base. We’re still talking about several hundred dollars on the average public college tuition.
W: Prices in the economy went up 1. 7 percent last year. College went up 2. 9 percent. What’s been driving the much faster increases in the cost of buying a college education?
M: Well, unlike most other pieces of the economy, where technology has reduced the number of people you need, you still need one professor to teach 20 students, just like you did in 1980.
W: The high school graduation rates are going up. This is a pretty big generational cohort. There’re still a lot of kids looking for seats in colleges, aren’t there?
M: There’re still a lot. But it depends where you live. And there’re a lot of colleges in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast where high school graduation rates are actually falling because of demographics. And there’re not as many colleges in the West and the South, where those rates are increasing.
W: Are we opening up a national conversation to look at radically different ways of paying for school, reducing some of the pressure on parents?
M: Well, I think we definitely are. We’re going to look at new ways of delivering college courses through technology and other ways. On the other side, you’re going to see income-based contingent loans, where students can pay a piece of their income after college toward their loans.
W: There’re even some suggestions that it not be four years anymore, aren’t there?
M: There are. And there’re ways of doing this. We base learning on how much time somebody spends in a seat. There’s nothing magical about four years of college and 120 credits for a bachelor’s degree. And so there’s a move now towards competency-based education and in some cases, you can finish college in less than four years.