The justices are scheduled to hear oral arguments on Feb. 20 on the legality of the state's six-year-old tuition voucher program, which is open only to parents in Cleveland, where barely a third of public school students graduate from high school.
But he soon pivoted to a tradition students hold even dearer: the college's century-old tuition-free policy, which students have fought this year to preserve as the school announced that financial shortfalls had made charging undergraduate tuition necessary starting with students admitted next year.
This is the threshold at which experts calculate that the government will lose more money than it would have saved by keeping the old £3,000 tuition fee system.
London Economics' Dr Gavan Conlon said that this meant the specific write-off costs of the new loan system were expected to be above 45% and it would effectively be cheaper for the government to have kept the old £3,000 tuition fee system.
This year, in a fascinating exercise, he asked his final-year education studies undergraduates, all among the final cohort to pay the old £3,000 tuition fees, to write down some advice for a younger friend or relative who would have to pay the new rate of £9,000.
Mr. Ratha needed no reminder that his 9-year-old's tuition at a Washington private school, $26,000, would support 65 villagers for a year.
Jennifer Turner, who lives outside Harrisburg, Pa., has younger children — 6 and 8 years old — so the tuition dilemma is still distant on the horizon.
Either way, at least in the United States, with rampant adultescence and the steady rise of college tuition, older parents may be increasingly beleaguered, too.
Colleges and universities largely looked inward, relying on older assumptions that tuition fees, government loans, student debt, institutional retrenchment - and for the lucky few - endowments draw downs made possible.
Mr. Marzec, 27, studied economics in Warsaw, where he set tile in the old town to earn tuition money.
