For the record, I’m not American nor live in the US, but I have a 19-year-old son who started attending the University of Chicago this year, studying economics. Just the tuition itself is $70k. My husband and I are lucky enough to be able to afford it - I still believe it’s an outrageous amount of money to attend college.
US universities engage in price discrimination between different students.
For public schools, there is different tuition between in state and out of state students. There are also some state government programs based on merit and financial considerations.
For well endowed private schools, the universities will provide scholarships based on a variety of reasons. For students from rich families, those families are generally paying full price and there generally is the implication of additional donations.
This is the reason. Every public school, like University of Chicago, has non-resident pricing that’s typically two to four times higher than in-state resident tuition. Source: used to work at a state university.
The original idea was probably to encourage people to stay within their state and boost the state economy, but greed from the admins kinda changed the nature of things.
Given that state taxes heavily support higher education, it’s not the craziest idea in the world to give lower tuition to those who’ve been paying those taxes their whole lives.
The University of Chicago is private. The University of Illinois Chicago is public. They have the added issue the people definitely use the names interchangeably because they don’t know there’s more than one.
When I worked at the state University, we had lists to check that stuff. Sometimes it’s obvious, other times, not so much. Good catch!