By comparison you could go off campus and rent an entire 1bd for like $750/mo. A similar living situation off campus with 3 roommates would set you back $300-400/mo and $550 if you really wanted the nice place.
The thing that always bugged me about dorms is they aren't treated as regular residences. School having a week long break? You have to be out of your dorm during the break with no where to go but back to your parents. Also that 30k for a year only covers two semesters, about 6-7 months of actual housing, which works out to $2.5k/mo for board if we take half of that 30k you mentioned.
I don't know where this college is but I'm going to bet that you can get a seriously nice place, probably a small house for that amount.
/sarcasm (in case it wasn't obvious).
$1250 a month housing
$1250 a month on education and staff
The numbers aren't crazy with the housing prices we're experiencing right now.
You will not be paying 30K a year for OSU e-campus. More like 10-15K a year or so.
Yeah, last time I looked it is the same tuition as if you were using the in-person facilities. I think that's too much for an online program. I paid less than $10K for my master's degree at Georgia Tech. That works out to about a third of what OSU is charging for the online undergrad CS degree, if my math is right. For online videos recorded once and watched many times, I think it should not cost anywhere close to what sitting in a room with a professor does.
Back in the 70's and 80's state appropriations covered between 70-80% of tuition. Now my state covers roughly 35-40% of funding for most public universities [1]. Part of this is the university offering more programs - athletics, counseling, therapy, other student services, which all need additional funding. The other part is that state funding is going down due to a variety of political budget reasons.
[1]: https://www.house.mi.gov/hfa/PDF/Summaries/21h4400h2cr1_Educ...
I never applied to any public school, but I was legitimately worried about not being accepted. I wouldn't depend on it.
I'm really glad I went to a private college in the end. People who went to state schools said class sizes were huge (like 150 students per class) and they were being taught by TAs. I really don't think I would have succeeded in that sort of environment - At my private school we didn't have any TAs and I never had a class over ~30 people, which was important because classes were very interactive.
