![](https://higheredreporter.carnegie.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/post_44_01_thumb.jpg)
By L. Rafael Reif, President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
While students worry that they cannot afford a college education, U.S. colleges and universities know they cannot really afford to educate them either. At technology-intensive research universities, it costs three times as much to educate an undergraduate as they receive in net tuition.