A recent blog post on The Daily Beast presented some pretty interesting information. According to the writer, college costs are continuing to rise at more than twice the rate of inflation, but there are many steps the colleges can take to help ease their financial burdens so they don’t have to increase tuition costs even more. Here’s a look at some of the suggestions made in the post.

· Think “outside of the box” when looking for ways to raise money – including asking students and faculty members to provide cost-reducing and money-raising suggestions
· Sell items that are put away in storage or that are considered to be “rare” documents, such as book collections and poetry written by now-famous poets (the blog post claims, for example, that Indiana University at Bloomington has a collection of Sylvia Path journals and a single poem written by path once sold for more than $11,000)
· Stop making unnecessary renovations and use the money for other purposes, such as reducing tuition costs (the blog claims Princeton recently spent $200,000 per bed when completing a dormitory renovation and the University of Massachusetts spent $14,000 per seat after spending $11.2 million on a dining hall renovation)
· Take lessons from Wal-Mart, which is a company that has managed to trim away the excess fat while still offering streamlined services, by cutting out the bureaucratic red tap
· Rent out extra dorm rooms or sell them as hotel-condominiums to real estate investors and parents, in the same way hotels have sold off some of their rooms

The bottom line is that many ground colleges and universities are facing financial troubles, which means they are increasing their tuition costs and essentially turning to their students to foot the bill. As a result, you may find your tuition costs to be a bit more expensive than you had originally thought it would be. Of course, if you turn to online schools for your educational needs, you shouldn’t have to face these same problems. After all, they don’t have large stockpiles of rare items stored away and they have already managed to streamline the educational process. So, if you are looking for a cost-effective way to attend school, you might want to turn to the Internet.