You are identifying one of the deeper premises beneath the paper's financial critique. The issue is not only price. It is the prior assumption that serious Catholic formation normally requires geographic departure into a credentialed residential enclave.
Your zoning laws framing is precise. The ecosystem functions by getting families to accept a kind of spiritual zoning: ordinary life, local parish, domestic church, is implicitly coded as insufficient formation territory, and the credentialed enclave becomes the only legitimate address for serious Catholics.
Once that premise is absorbed, the local path is silently downgraded without argument, even though that downgrade has no basis in Catholic doctrine. At that point the college is no longer merely offering education. It is monetizing a displacement of the domestic church that has already occurred in the imagination. The insufficiency premise must be accepted before the sale can close.
That is why the problem is not solved by finding a cheaper school. The deeper question is why so many Catholics now assume that faithful formation must be purchased through institutional separation at all, and when exactly that assumption displaced the older model without anyone noticing or consenting to the displacement.
There are alternatives. While I think we could stand to be more transparent, University of St Thomas, Houston is a Newman school that collects less than $20k/yr from undergrads, teaches Aquinas in a format he would recognize, and assesses every student for the knowledge they learn in our core.
Ryan, I appreciate the comment, and I’m genuinely glad UST Houston is doing what you describe. A Newman Guide institution teaching Aquinas in a form he would recognize at under $20k is in a better position than many of its peers, and that matters.
But your comment also helps clarify the paper’s actual claim. The argument does not require bad intent or even especially high tuition. It requires only that families often lack the kind of information justice demands at the point of consent. Your acknowledgment that more transparency would be welcome points in that direction.
The falsifiability test I offer in Section VIII applies to UST Houston no less than to every other Newman Guide institution: does the school publish standardized net price and debt distributions by income band, with percentiles? Does the Newman Guide publish its recommendation rubric, written findings, disqualifying factors, and an appeals process? If UST Houston already meets that standard, then it falls outside the critique by definition, and I would want to know that.
If not, then the basic argument remains. A school can teach Aquinas beautifully and still ask families to make a morally serious decision without decision-grade information. Those two things are not contradictory.
The structural critique is not answered by pointing to the ecosystem’s better performers. To answer it on its own terms would require evidence about how many families across the Newman Guide system actually receive adequate disclosure before enrollment.
Sure, and I didn't intend my comment to be a pure counter-example or falsification of your post. There is a structural issue. But I do think it's a little more nuanced than you say.
First, where we agree: college pricing and college outcomes should both be radically more transparent. These are issues for almost everybody, and they are prominent in the Yale report: https://president.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2026-04/Report-of-the-Committee-on-Trust-in-Higher-Education.pdf Newman Guide institutions, and the Guide itself, should be exemplars here rather than playing to the average or the worst we can get away with, and I doubt that we are. Many colleges, UST Houston very much included, prefer a shiny image over transparency.
Second, though, the kind of information that justice demands does depend on the kind of institution. UST doesn't have early decision, we make financial aid information clear before the point of decision, and we have a simple and inexpensive application. For Guide schools with these criteria (of which there are a number), more transparency pre-application is desirable but not really an injustice.
Third, while transparency is desirable at any price, when (a) the price charged is in the same range as neighboring public institutions and (b) the institution advertises itself in basically positive terms rather than trying to foment a moral crisis for those who choose elsewhere (e.g. 2/3 of our student body are transfers from public institutions), it's again much less a matter of injustice.
So yes, I wish Newman institutions worked with their accreditors to produce actionable information for prospective students rather than (as they generally do) seeing accreditors as an annoying outside burden. That would be good for everybody. But the marketing, the admissions practices, and the actual cost have as much bearing on the justice of the interaction as transparency in cost and outcomes does.
Ryan, thank you for the substantive follow-up. You have made genuinely useful distinctions and I want to engage them carefully.
On the numbers: I want to make sure we are working from the same figures. UST Houston's own published cost of attendance for 2025-2026 shows $51,927 for a student living on campus, broken down as $35,754 in tuition and fees, $11,166 for housing and food, $1,121 for books, $1,879 for transportation, and $2,007 for personal expenses. For a student living with parents the published figure is $44,722. If your "under $20k" figure refers to average net tuition after institutional aid, I understand what you mean, but that number and cost of attendance are not the same thing, and the gap between them is precisely what the paper argues should be disclosed explicitly rather than left for families to reconstruct on their own. A family hearing "under $20k" from an administrator and a family reading the full published cost of attendance table are making decisions under materially different informational conditions. That asymmetry is the paper's core concern, and UST Houston's own published numbers illustrate it rather than refuting it.
If UST Houston publishes standardized net price distributions by income band with percentiles, that would address the transparency concern directly and I would want to acknowledge it. The falsifiability test in Section VIII is genuine. But a favorable characterization of institutional practice, however well-intentioned, is not the same as auditable published disclosure, and the distinction matters because every institution in this ecosystem describes its own practices favorably.
Your point about moral framing carries more weight. If UST Houston genuinely does not frame enrollment as spiritual insurance or invoke moral crisis for families who choose elsewhere, that is a real structural difference from the institutions the paper examines most closely. The mechanism requires both moralized urgency and preserved ignorance working together. Where the urgency framing is absent the critique's force is reduced, and I take that seriously.
But there is a prior question your response does not reach, and it may be the more consequential one. Your entire defense assumes the residential away-from-home model as the natural baseline for Catholic formation. The paper's deeper argument is that Catholics have absorbed that assumption from American culture rather than deriving it from anything Catholic. The residential college model is not a natural law requirement and it is not traceable to any classical Catholic educational tradition. It is a mid-twentieth century American cultural artifact, and Catholic families adopted it through the same formation channels the earlier papers in this series describe. Going away to college feels like the obvious thing because American formation made it feel obvious, not because Aquinas or Augustine or the Catholic tradition required it.
A school executing the residential model more transparently than its peers is genuinely better than one that does not. But transparency within the residential model does not answer the prior question of whether the model itself serves Catholic formation or whether it extends the Americanist assumption that maturity means leaving, that formation means purchasing an institutional environment, and that staying home represents a failure of seriousness. The alternative is not a counsel of despair. It is the recovery of an older Catholic instinct: live at home, maintain the family and parish as primary formation agents, carry near-zero debt, and refuse the cultural script that the Newman Guide ecosystem, whatever its internal variations, has never questioned and continues to monetize.
The unexamined dependency of the residential model is a great point, leading to delayed family formation. The "Americanism" of it all too. We could have fairly easily had coherent, integrated geographic/moral ecosystems, but have adapted to "zoning laws" for our souls and families
Correctedness or incorrectness of the Society of St. Pius X aside, you can see what true belief can produce: a four-year liberal arts degree with room and board included for UNDER $15,000
$8,630 Tuition and Fees, $6,300 Room and Board for 2025-2026
Matthew, a low published price is relevant, but it does not answer the paper’s claim.
St. Mary’s is also an SSPX institution, which places it outside the Newman Guide ecosystem the paper examines. It is not certified by the Cardinal Newman Society, not marketed through the premium-signaling apparatus the critique targets, and not part of the certifier-to-recommended-school loop the paper documents. An institution outside that ecosystem does not answer a structural critique of that ecosystem.
Your example actually points in an interesting direction. Institutions that rejected the mainstream Catholic institutional settlement do not seem to need $40,000 tuition to signal doctrinal seriousness. That pattern is more consistent with the paper’s argument than a rebuttal to it.
In any case, the governing question remains unchanged. The argument is not that every institution is equally expensive. It is that families are asked to make a morally serious financial decision without the disclosure justice requires at the point of consent.
So the unanswered questions remain: do Newman Guide institutions publish standardized net price and debt distributions by income band with percentiles? Does the Cardinal Newman Society publish its recommendation rubric, written findings, disqualifying factors, and an appeals process? If those standards are met, an institution meeting them falls outside the critique by definition. If they are not, low tuition alone does not resolve the problem.
"Catholic Education" is a brand as well as a symbol. Each term deserves its own essay (e.g., a "brand" is a marketing tool that claims both its unique value and its distinction from all competition; a "symbol" can be seized, emptied of its content, and filled with an alternative reality (Lenin 1917: "Christ was the First Communist," said his first minister of Education)).
Words matter.
I started teaching college 50 years ago (even interview interviewed at TAC in 1974). My colleagues from the intervening years have observed that the incoming college freshman are increasingly unprepared, even at the schools which you have mentioned as well as others.
"College education" is also a symbol that has been stolen, perverted, and peddled to a bewildered and often clueless generation, no matter how well-meaning.
Your essay is provocative, as the comments indicate. Perhaps you might next address what "formation" really means.
Thank you for your comment and sharing your experience.
The brand/symbol distinction is useful and the parallel is real: when a symbol can be emptied and refilled, its vagueness becomes economically useful, which is precisely the structural condition this essay presses. But the central problem here is not semantic. It is what justice requires when the language of formation is invoked with moral force at the point where families are being asked to assume irreversible financial burdens, without proportionate disclosure about cost, debt exposure, or curricular substance.
The question of what formation actually means is not unaddressed. "Americanism as a Heresy of Formation," argues that formation is not a propositional program but a pre-reflective installation, which is why symbol recovery efforts consistently fail to reach the mechanism. A symbol can in principle be recaptured; formation capture operates below the level at which that recovery becomes possible. I think it answers the question you are raising more directly than another definitional essay would.
Thanks for your kind reply. On Americanism, I was baptized about 25 feet above Orestes Brownson's tomb at Notre Dame 80 years ago. Cardinal Gibbons got my father into Catholic U grad school in 1915, and daad was forever grateful, even tho he was drafted 18 months later before he got his Ph.D. He was the lawyer for America First in 1941... and E Michael Jones is an old friend.
Welcome to Substack, where I occasionally write. After growing up at Notre Dame and knowing Father Hesburgh since I was three, I finally wrote it all down - from Cardinal Gibbons on - last year. Let me know if you want a review copy.
Great post, and thank you for raising awareness. I especially appreciate you saying “A system cannot credibly proclaim large families as ideal while narrowing the economic conditions ordinary graduates need.” It is also worth noting how many graduates go on to enter professions historically marked by underpayment or outright volunteerism—especially the professional musicians central to Catholic worship, who often cannot afford even solitary stability, much less raise a family. If Aquinas is right that “to sell a thing for more than its worth, or to buy it for less than its worth, is in itself unjust and unlawful,” then that principle applies not only to tuition and debt, but to the hidden ledgers of labor and formation the wider ecosystem still expects others to absorb.
This is exactly the kind of extension I hoped the piece would provoke. The tuition question is only one part of a wider Catholic moral economy in which piety is often used to obscure real costs.
If Catholic institutions invoke vocation, sacrifice, beauty, and worship while depending on labor they are unwilling to price justly, then the same principle applies. The hidden ledger is not only family debt. It is also delayed marriage, unstable household formation, underpaid musicians, adjuncts, teachers, and other workers whose sacrifice becomes the unacknowledged subsidy for the institution’s moral self-image.
A system cannot appeal to Aquinas on truth, beauty, and just formation while ignoring Aquinas on just exchange. That contradiction deserves to be named.
Thank you, Erik. What you’re naming here is very close to what I’ve been trying to surface from the church musician side: how appeals to vocation, beauty, and worship can end up obscuring the demands of justice in exchange. I just posted an essay on that very tension, and I think it connects directly to the wider hidden-ledger problem you’re identifying here. I’d be honored if you gave it a read.
Thank you for taking the time to share your article. Reading your essay carefully, I find the structural convergence striking enough to be worth naming explicitly.
The mechanism you're identifying in church musician compensation is, at its core, the same hidden-ledger problem I'm examining in the Catholic college economy, approached from the opposite side of the transaction. You are working the labor supply side: institutions that convert a musician's genuine vocational commitment into an extraction mechanism, using the sacred framing of the work to disable the ordinary faculty by which workers judge proportionality, demand transparency, and protect their own economic dignity. I am working the demand side: institutions that convert parental piety into pricing power, using moralized urgency to suppress the rational evaluation a family would otherwise bring to a major financial commitment.
The sacred appeal does the same economic work in both cases. It doesn't matter whether the person being captured is paying in or giving labor out. The mechanism is identical: transcendence is invoked at precisely the point where clear-eyed judgment would otherwise interrupt the transaction.
Your phrase about the 20th-century corporate employment model functioning as an invisible subsidy that churches consumed without cost is one of the sharpest formulations I've encountered of what I'd call the hidden ledger problem. The true cost was always being paid. It simply wasn't being paid by the institution benefiting from it. Musicians absorbed it through below-market rates and subsidized availability. Families absorb it through debt and suppressed comparison. In neither case does the institution have to answer for the gap, because the gap has been filled by someone else's sacrifice, reframed as devotion.
What your essay does that mine cannot, operating as it does within a Thomistic moral framework aimed at a Catholic intellectual audience, is give the labor-side analysis a practical, institution-facing register that reformers and musicians can actually use. The 95 Theses are a genuine contribution to that end. Your diagnostic questions at the close are particularly well-constructed: they function as an audit instrument, and the fact that most institutions would struggle to answer them affirmatively without hesitation is itself the finding.
Where my work lands differently is that it operates at a structural legitimacy level that your reform framework doesn't require and perhaps shouldn't carry. You are asking institutions that depend on musicians to finally account honestly for what that labor costs and to build systems capable of sustaining the people they depend on. That is necessary and urgent work on its own terms. I am asking whether the institutions doing the sacred framing have adequately examined the moral authority on which that framing rests at all, and whether consent secured through moralized urgency and avoidable ignorance constitutes a genuine transaction or a structural injury regardless of intent. Those are different endpoints, but they diagnose the same underlying disorder from opposite directions.
The labor-side and demand-side analyses belong together, and I think the combined picture is more explosive than either one alone. If sacred institutions can simultaneously extract underpaid labor from the musicians who make their worship possible and extract overleveraged tuition commitments from the families they promise to form, what exactly is being transacted under the name of the sacred? That question is worth sitting with.
I think that’s exactly right. And it seems to reach beyond religious institutions into the arts, nonprofits, and really any setting where the transaction is treated as too intangible or elevated to be named plainly. Once ordinary exchange is suppressed, the hidden ledger rarely stays empty; it is often filled by softer currencies like access, patronage, influence, and sometimes forms of moral or political compromise that would look much less acceptable if the actual transaction were visible in the first place.
Wow. I’ve never thought about this so explicitly before, but it really brings to mind the image of Jesus overthrowing tables in the temple and a recent read, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta. -Kaitlyn
I don’t think ‘hit piece’ is a fair description. TAC receives extended treatment because it functions in the paper as a case study, not as a personal target. If I make a structural argument about moralized pricing, limited auditability, and defective consent, that argument has to be grounded in at least one institution where the relevant claims can actually be checked against public evidence. TAC is useful for that precisely because its naming, pedagogical lineage, pricing structure, and transparency gaps are publicly examinable in a way that makes the larger argument testable rather than abstract.
I also think part of the reaction here is that the paper is pressing on something deeper than TAC itself. Criticizing the Newman Guide is one thing. Criticizing a school that represents, for many orthodox Catholics, the idealized form of serious residential formation is another. That touches the prior Americanist assumption the paper is also trying to expose: that serious Catholic formation normally requires leaving home, leaving the domestic church, and entering a credentialed residential enclave at eighteen. That premise is so normalized that it often goes unexamined. So the question is not whether TAC is admired in good faith. The question is whether the model it represents can bear scrutiny at the level of justice, transparency, and the displacement of domestic and parish formation.
Thanks for the reply! Upon further reflection, my comment probably reflects my own view which is that the “auditableness” of a school is less of a personal concern than the fear mongering. I understand the auditing issue you are trying to capture however. I don’t have any personal attachments to TAC at all, my oldest is currently most interested in local state college nursing programs and we are 100% in support of that!
I agree the fear-based marketing is often the most immediately visible part of the problem. My point was that the auditability issue matters because once families are being pressed morally, they also need decision-grade information in order for consent to be genuinely informed. But I’m glad we at least have some agreement on the broader concern.
Thank you. That was exactly my aim. The point wasn’t just to criticize particular schools, but to show the structure by which parental anxiety, moral urgency, and limited disclosure are turned into leverage. Many families feel the pressure. Fewer are willing to name the mechanism.
If by Catholic “classical” schools you mean the K–12 world, then only in a qualified sense. The argument in Formation for Sale applies most fully to colleges, because it is not only about price or moralized branding. It is also about the residential model: the assumption that serious Catholic formation requires leaving home for an institution, thereby displacing the domestic church and local parish as primary sites of formation. That part of the critique does not carry over in the same way to K–12, since the child ordinarily remains at home.
So while a related concern could arise at the K–12 level where schools moralize enrollment and attach premium pricing to parental anxiety, the full argument in the paper is aimed at the college ecosystem, where high cost, weaker decision-grade disclosure, debt exposure, and residential departure are fused together. In that respect, the college model reflects a more distinctly Americanist pattern than K–12 schooling does.
I appreciate the comment. However, my argument is not that secular schools are superior, or that the job market is healthy.
My point is narrower: Catholic colleges making elevated moral claims should meet an elevated standard of transparency and justice. The practical comparison in the essay is not “elite secular school versus Catholic school,” but “premium Catholic enclave versus living at home, commuting locally, and avoiding debt.”
Secular schools are not getting a free pass here. They are simply not the subject of the critique because they are not presenting themselves as morally superior formation ecosystems.
That has often been my impression as well. There is a certain TAC graduate type that comes across as though he has passed through the one truly serious Catholic formation on earth, while everyone else is operating at some lower level of Catholic consciousness.
That is exactly the danger I am trying to identify. The model does not merely educate; it can breed a kind of enclave elitism, where Catholic seriousness becomes tied to having passed through a particular branded institution. Once that happens, formation is no longer ordered simply toward truth, humility, and service. It becomes an identity marker like mentioning how many kids you have in your bio on social media.
And when the institution itself is premium priced, socially insulated, and wrapped in Great Books prestige, that attitude is not accidental. It is one of the predictable fruits of the system.
You make some interesting points. First, I recommend reading the college's founding document. I studied it before I attended in the 90s. The title is something like, A Proposal on the Fullfilment of Catholic Education. This might help alleviate some of the feelings of pressure that Catholic families may have and help them make a decision that is more concrete. On the cost of attendance, one can apply for financial aid early and see exactly what the cost is before committing. It varies on the financial state of the parents. My daughter is attending and we are paying nearly full price, minus the Cal Grant and Pell Grant. I am making ten monthly payments, each is slightly more than my eldest son is currently paying for renting a two bedroom apartment. That my daughter is getting tuition, books, lodging and food for this price is more than reasonable given the denominator is fiat currency.
I did read the founding document before writing the paper. In fact, the document helps clarify the issue rather than resolve it. It explains Thomas Aquinas College’s (TAC’s) self-understanding as a project of Catholic liberal education ordered to faith, philosophy, theology, and the Great Books. I do not dispute that aspiration.
The question is whether that aspiration answers the specific problems I identify: the actual lineage of the pedagogy, the lack of decision-grade curricular scope, the financial disclosure problem, and the deeper assumption that serious Catholic formation normally requires residential departure into a premium institutional enclave.
On the first point, the founding document does not really answer the naming problem. TAC invokes St. Thomas Aquinas as patron and intellectual authority, but its actual classroom method is not Thomistic or Scholastic in origin. St. Thomas did not teach by modern group seminar. His pedagogical world was ordered around lectio and disputatio.
TAC’s method comes much more directly from the twentieth-century Great Books movement, especially Hutchins, Adler, and St. John’s College. That does not make the method worthless. It does mean that the name “Thomas Aquinas College” carries a Thomistic and Scholastic implication that the actual pedagogy does not fully bear.
The same applies to the curriculum. A founding document can explain the philosophy of education. It cannot substitute for decision-grade disclosure of what students are actually assigned, how much they read, how many contact hours are tied to specific texts, what writing is required, and how mastery is assessed. A family paying a four-year direct cost approaching $174,800 should not have to infer depth from the prestige of names like Homer, Plato, Augustine, Euclid, and Aquinas. If the formation is as rigorous as claimed, then publishing the full curricular scope should strengthen the case, not threaten it.
On cost, the argument is not that a family can never eventually learn its own price. The argument is that “apply and see what aid you receive” is not public transparency. That is individualized negotiation after the family has already entered the admissions process and often after emotional, moral, and relational commitment has begun. That sequence matters.
Standardized net price distributions by income band, median debt at graduation, private-loan exposure, and distributional outcomes should be public before families enter the moral commitment funnel, not disclosed piecemeal after the process is underway.
Your own example actually illustrates the problem. You are paying nearly full price, less grants, through ten monthly payments. That may be manageable for an already established household. But that does not prove the model is proportionate for ordinary Catholic families generally, nor does it prove that the burden imposed downstream on graduates is benign.
The relevant question is not whether one father of seven with an established household can make the payment. The question is whether this model should be treated as the normal or privileged path of serious Catholic formation.
The fiat-currency argument also proves too much. Of course the currency is debased. But that applies to groceries, housing, vehicles, healthcare, parish schools, weddings, and every other family expenditure. It cannot be used selectively to remove one preferred Catholic expenditure from proportionality analysis. If fiat debasement makes the price reasonable by itself, then the same argument can justify almost any price for almost anything. Catholic moral reasoning still requires prudence, proportionality, just price, and concern for the concrete burdens placed on families.
The deeper assumption remains the most important one. Your comment treats sending a daughter away to a residential enclave at eighteen as an obvious path of formation. That assumption is not in the Catechism. It is not Catholic doctrine. Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno states the principle plainly: it is gravely wrong to assign to a greater association what a lesser one can do. Leo XIII grounds the family’s rights as antecedent to the state and to larger associations. Once institutional departure at eighteen becomes the default premise for serious Catholic formation, the domestic church ceases to be primary in practice, regardless of what families may profess in theory.
That is the Americanist element I am trying to expose. The premium enclave does not create the displacement of the domestic church. It monetizes an assumption already absorbed from American institutional culture: that maturity means leaving home, formation means institutional immersion, seriousness means credentialing, and Catholic parental responsibility is fulfilled by finding the right branded campus.
That assumption deserves scrutiny, especially when the model can impose large costs precisely at the stage of life when young Catholics should be preparing for marriage, household formation, and stable family life. A formation model that praises Catholic family life while making the early conditions for family formation more financially burdensome has not resolved the tension. It has simply avoided having to account for it.
Fair enough. My comment about the cost considers the cost incurred by the college whose costs are rising due to debasenent. I should have made that more clear. And, no, this consideration does not justify the cost of anything, it provides context for comparing its costs to other goods and deciding if it seems reasonable. My analysis is they will probably incur costs not borne by me that will require donations from others.
I am not following the invoking of rights. College is a choice and the selection is a preference. I have never had the thought TAC is a default moral preference. You have cited some text that reads like advertising put out by a third party. I agree with you that I do not find it persuasive, but perhaps this is because we are not the intended audience.
I don’t think you are arguing that Catholic families have a right to others’ labor. So, it’s unclear what is meant by rights. I agree how wonderful it would be to have this education locally, but I don’t see how there exists a natural right to it. TAC exists because of decades of investment and commitment from a community that has decided it is worthy of it. If you are arguing that such a commitment should be made on the local level, I think that is a fine idea.
The clarification on cost is noted and appreciated.
On subsidiarity, the argument is not that Catholic families have a natural right to locally provided Great Books education, or that Thomas Aquinas College (TAC) owes anyone that model. The argument is structural and prior to those questions.
Subsidiarity, as Pius XI states it, is not first a claim about what must be provided locally. It is a principle about which level of association holds primary authority. The family holds primary authority over formation by nature, and the parish supports that formation within the life of the Church. Larger institutions remain auxiliary.
So the question is not whether TAC may exist or whether families may choose it. Of course they may. The question is what it means when institutional departure at eighteen becomes the assumed and socially reinforced path for serious Catholic formation, such that a family choosing to remain locally embedded is made to feel that it is settling for something less.
That is more than a preference question. It is a formation question. The displacement happens at the level of imagination before it happens at the level of decision. When the enclave stops being auxiliary and becomes essential in the minds of orthodox Catholic families, the domestic church has already lost its primary status in practice, regardless of what anyone professes in theory.
On cost, learning one’s own aid package through the admissions process is not the same thing as public accountability. Individualized disclosure tells one family what its offer is. It does not give Catholic families as a class public visibility into net price distributions by income band, median borrower debt, private-loan exposure, or the range of actual burdens families are assuming. Individualized disclosure is not the same thing as public accountability.
Your final sentence actually confirms the point. You agree that local commitment would be a fine idea. The paper’s argument is that the ecosystem works against that conclusion being reached, not through prohibition, but through the moral framing of enrollment as the serious and faithful path. That framing is what subsidiarity requires us to examine.
The argument seems to presuppose that all disclosures must be made by publishing information online rather than having a conversation, which feels depersonalized to me.
Perhaps I missed this, so forgive me if I did. Did you reach out to CNS and interview them?
I understand your perpective, but would love to understand theirs.
From what I see, they operate as best they can as a 501(c)3. Their goals are clear when one goes beyond just looking at their Newman School Guide.
I do not disagree with some of your questions, but the framingbof them seems to presuppose intentions that I do not believe exist.
Additionally, while I would love to see some of the data that you think would be helpful, it also mm presupposes that it would be generally available to CNS and that CNS has the capability and the structured expertise to provide it.
I did not interview with CNS, and that’s not an oversight.
I do want to address the framing of the question itself before answering it.
The suggestion that a structural critique requires interviewing the institution before publication imports a journalistic norm into an analytical context where it doesn’t belong.
Journalists seek comment before publishing profiles. Analytical arguments are evaluated on the quality of their evidence and reasoning, not on whether the subject was given an opportunity to explain itself first. The obligation you’re describing doesn’t exist in this context, and invoking it shifts the burden from the argument’s substance to a procedural ritual of institutional deference.
That shift is worth noticing. The question is not whether CNS was treated fairly in the writing process. The question is whether the Newman Guide contains what justice requires at the point where families make six-figure enrollment decisions. Those are different questions and conflating them redirects attention from the evidentiary finding to a procedural objection.
On the evidence directly: I obtained the 2025-2026 Newman Guide PDF from CNS myself. I requested it through their site. They followed up by soliciting a donation. The guide contains no standardized metrics, no net price data, no debt distributions, and no auditable recommendation criteria of any kind. That is not an inference or a presumption of intent. It is a description of the document families treat as a moral gate for consequential financial decisions.
The capability question your comment raises is therefore secondary. CNS is not being asked to compile external institutional data it may lack. It is being asked whether its own recommendation process is documented and auditable enough to justify the moral weight families place on inclusion. The guide answers that question by its contents, or rather by what its contents lack.
On intentions: the paper addresses this explicitly and at length. The critique does not require bad intentions and says so directly. Good intentions operating within a structurally unjust arrangement still produce the moral injury the paper describes. John Paul II addresses this in Reconciliatio et Paenitentia: structures of sin persist independently of ongoing malicious intent. I don’t doubt CNS operates with genuine mission commitment. The paper doesn’t require otherwise.
What it requires is that a certifier functioning as a moral gate publish criteria proportionate to the financial and moral risk families bear on the basis of inclusion. The document I obtained from them contains none of it. That finding doesn’t require their cooperation to establish. It required only reading what they published.
I find your point about Thomas Aquinas College being deceptive somehow by being named after the common doctor of the Church and also doing socratic method quite a stretch. Are you implying that the average family looking at TAC sees the name and thinks “surely they would be doing instruction in the same format as Saint Thomas himself, because we are all very familiar with that after all”.
As a graduate I can say that we spend a tremendous amount of time with Saint Thomas but more importantly it is an education according the natural order of knowing understood by the ancient greeks and the Church Fathers and Doctor including Saint Thomas. The method being lecture or socratic is accidental to the education.
Frankly it seems like you just looked at the website and formed a conclusion. Did you try calling anyone to ask these questions? Did you find that someone was evading your questions or trying to mislead you? Anyone who is actually serious about going there can come and visit (for free), come to the summer program for two weeks and live as the students live (kind of), and students and parents alike can talk to almost any of the tutors about the curriculum as much as one might want. I agree that the website is not the greatest source of information, but that is not some sneaky trick to lure people in but just not the kind of thing that is going to effectively communicate. If a student goes to a college based solely on the website that would be ridiculous.
Thank you for the comment, but it does not actually engage the paper’s main argument.
First, the naming argument is not that families literally think St. Thomas taught in seminar format. It is that “Thomas Aquinas College” carries Thomistic and Catholic intellectual authority, while the pedagogy being sold belongs to a different lineage. The point is not that seminar discussion is illegitimate. The point is that symbolic authority is doing credentialing work where the institution does not publicly correct the gap or render the substance of the education in decision-grade terms.
Second, the paper’s central argument is not about whether motivated families can call, visit, attend a summer program, or ask questions. It is about disclosure. TAC publicly asks families to make a six-figure decision while providing no published net price distributions by income band, no published median borrower debt at graduation, and no standardized public account of curricular scope sufficient for proportional judgment. Under Aquinas’s just-price framework, the duty runs to the seller, not to the buyer’s willingness to work harder after entering the funnel. Disclosure-through-effort is not the same thing as disclosure before commitment.
Third, your response quietly assumes the very premise the paper challenges: that serious Catholic formation normally requires going away to a residential college at eighteen. That assumption is not Catholic doctrine, and it does not follow from subsidiarity. The paper argues that this residential-departure model has been absorbed so deeply into orthodox Catholic imagination that even its defenders rarely examine it. On that point, your comment illustrates the argument more than it rebuts it.
You attended TAC and found it formative. That may be true. But that is not the question under examination. The question is whether families are given the public information needed to make a just assessment before committing. Your comment does not answer that.
Thank you for your comment.
You are identifying one of the deeper premises beneath the paper's financial critique. The issue is not only price. It is the prior assumption that serious Catholic formation normally requires geographic departure into a credentialed residential enclave.
Your zoning laws framing is precise. The ecosystem functions by getting families to accept a kind of spiritual zoning: ordinary life, local parish, domestic church, is implicitly coded as insufficient formation territory, and the credentialed enclave becomes the only legitimate address for serious Catholics.
Once that premise is absorbed, the local path is silently downgraded without argument, even though that downgrade has no basis in Catholic doctrine. At that point the college is no longer merely offering education. It is monetizing a displacement of the domestic church that has already occurred in the imagination. The insufficiency premise must be accepted before the sale can close.
That is why the problem is not solved by finding a cheaper school. The deeper question is why so many Catholics now assume that faithful formation must be purchased through institutional separation at all, and when exactly that assumption displaced the older model without anyone noticing or consenting to the displacement.
There are alternatives. While I think we could stand to be more transparent, University of St Thomas, Houston is a Newman school that collects less than $20k/yr from undergrads, teaches Aquinas in a format he would recognize, and assesses every student for the knowledge they learn in our core.
Ryan, I appreciate the comment, and I’m genuinely glad UST Houston is doing what you describe. A Newman Guide institution teaching Aquinas in a form he would recognize at under $20k is in a better position than many of its peers, and that matters.
But your comment also helps clarify the paper’s actual claim. The argument does not require bad intent or even especially high tuition. It requires only that families often lack the kind of information justice demands at the point of consent. Your acknowledgment that more transparency would be welcome points in that direction.
The falsifiability test I offer in Section VIII applies to UST Houston no less than to every other Newman Guide institution: does the school publish standardized net price and debt distributions by income band, with percentiles? Does the Newman Guide publish its recommendation rubric, written findings, disqualifying factors, and an appeals process? If UST Houston already meets that standard, then it falls outside the critique by definition, and I would want to know that.
If not, then the basic argument remains. A school can teach Aquinas beautifully and still ask families to make a morally serious decision without decision-grade information. Those two things are not contradictory.
The structural critique is not answered by pointing to the ecosystem’s better performers. To answer it on its own terms would require evidence about how many families across the Newman Guide system actually receive adequate disclosure before enrollment.
Sure, and I didn't intend my comment to be a pure counter-example or falsification of your post. There is a structural issue. But I do think it's a little more nuanced than you say.
First, where we agree: college pricing and college outcomes should both be radically more transparent. These are issues for almost everybody, and they are prominent in the Yale report: https://president.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2026-04/Report-of-the-Committee-on-Trust-in-Higher-Education.pdf Newman Guide institutions, and the Guide itself, should be exemplars here rather than playing to the average or the worst we can get away with, and I doubt that we are. Many colleges, UST Houston very much included, prefer a shiny image over transparency.
Second, though, the kind of information that justice demands does depend on the kind of institution. UST doesn't have early decision, we make financial aid information clear before the point of decision, and we have a simple and inexpensive application. For Guide schools with these criteria (of which there are a number), more transparency pre-application is desirable but not really an injustice.
Third, while transparency is desirable at any price, when (a) the price charged is in the same range as neighboring public institutions and (b) the institution advertises itself in basically positive terms rather than trying to foment a moral crisis for those who choose elsewhere (e.g. 2/3 of our student body are transfers from public institutions), it's again much less a matter of injustice.
So yes, I wish Newman institutions worked with their accreditors to produce actionable information for prospective students rather than (as they generally do) seeing accreditors as an annoying outside burden. That would be good for everybody. But the marketing, the admissions practices, and the actual cost have as much bearing on the justice of the interaction as transparency in cost and outcomes does.
Ryan, thank you for the substantive follow-up. You have made genuinely useful distinctions and I want to engage them carefully.
On the numbers: I want to make sure we are working from the same figures. UST Houston's own published cost of attendance for 2025-2026 shows $51,927 for a student living on campus, broken down as $35,754 in tuition and fees, $11,166 for housing and food, $1,121 for books, $1,879 for transportation, and $2,007 for personal expenses. For a student living with parents the published figure is $44,722. If your "under $20k" figure refers to average net tuition after institutional aid, I understand what you mean, but that number and cost of attendance are not the same thing, and the gap between them is precisely what the paper argues should be disclosed explicitly rather than left for families to reconstruct on their own. A family hearing "under $20k" from an administrator and a family reading the full published cost of attendance table are making decisions under materially different informational conditions. That asymmetry is the paper's core concern, and UST Houston's own published numbers illustrate it rather than refuting it.
If UST Houston publishes standardized net price distributions by income band with percentiles, that would address the transparency concern directly and I would want to acknowledge it. The falsifiability test in Section VIII is genuine. But a favorable characterization of institutional practice, however well-intentioned, is not the same as auditable published disclosure, and the distinction matters because every institution in this ecosystem describes its own practices favorably.
Your point about moral framing carries more weight. If UST Houston genuinely does not frame enrollment as spiritual insurance or invoke moral crisis for families who choose elsewhere, that is a real structural difference from the institutions the paper examines most closely. The mechanism requires both moralized urgency and preserved ignorance working together. Where the urgency framing is absent the critique's force is reduced, and I take that seriously.
But there is a prior question your response does not reach, and it may be the more consequential one. Your entire defense assumes the residential away-from-home model as the natural baseline for Catholic formation. The paper's deeper argument is that Catholics have absorbed that assumption from American culture rather than deriving it from anything Catholic. The residential college model is not a natural law requirement and it is not traceable to any classical Catholic educational tradition. It is a mid-twentieth century American cultural artifact, and Catholic families adopted it through the same formation channels the earlier papers in this series describe. Going away to college feels like the obvious thing because American formation made it feel obvious, not because Aquinas or Augustine or the Catholic tradition required it.
A school executing the residential model more transparently than its peers is genuinely better than one that does not. But transparency within the residential model does not answer the prior question of whether the model itself serves Catholic formation or whether it extends the Americanist assumption that maturity means leaving, that formation means purchasing an institutional environment, and that staying home represents a failure of seriousness. The alternative is not a counsel of despair. It is the recovery of an older Catholic instinct: live at home, maintain the family and parish as primary formation agents, carry near-zero debt, and refuse the cultural script that the Newman Guide ecosystem, whatever its internal variations, has never questioned and continues to monetize.
The unexamined dependency of the residential model is a great point, leading to delayed family formation. The "Americanism" of it all too. We could have fairly easily had coherent, integrated geographic/moral ecosystems, but have adapted to "zoning laws" for our souls and families
Correctedness or incorrectness of the Society of St. Pius X aside, you can see what true belief can produce: a four-year liberal arts degree with room and board included for UNDER $15,000
$8,630 Tuition and Fees, $6,300 Room and Board for 2025-2026
https://college.smac.edu/cost/
Matthew, a low published price is relevant, but it does not answer the paper’s claim.
St. Mary’s is also an SSPX institution, which places it outside the Newman Guide ecosystem the paper examines. It is not certified by the Cardinal Newman Society, not marketed through the premium-signaling apparatus the critique targets, and not part of the certifier-to-recommended-school loop the paper documents. An institution outside that ecosystem does not answer a structural critique of that ecosystem.
Your example actually points in an interesting direction. Institutions that rejected the mainstream Catholic institutional settlement do not seem to need $40,000 tuition to signal doctrinal seriousness. That pattern is more consistent with the paper’s argument than a rebuttal to it.
In any case, the governing question remains unchanged. The argument is not that every institution is equally expensive. It is that families are asked to make a morally serious financial decision without the disclosure justice requires at the point of consent.
So the unanswered questions remain: do Newman Guide institutions publish standardized net price and debt distributions by income band with percentiles? Does the Cardinal Newman Society publish its recommendation rubric, written findings, disqualifying factors, and an appeals process? If those standards are met, an institution meeting them falls outside the critique by definition. If they are not, low tuition alone does not resolve the problem.
I have found TAC graduates to be the most insufferable Catholics in terms of elitism and arrogance.
"Catholic Education" is a brand as well as a symbol. Each term deserves its own essay (e.g., a "brand" is a marketing tool that claims both its unique value and its distinction from all competition; a "symbol" can be seized, emptied of its content, and filled with an alternative reality (Lenin 1917: "Christ was the First Communist," said his first minister of Education)).
Words matter.
I started teaching college 50 years ago (even interview interviewed at TAC in 1974). My colleagues from the intervening years have observed that the incoming college freshman are increasingly unprepared, even at the schools which you have mentioned as well as others.
"College education" is also a symbol that has been stolen, perverted, and peddled to a bewildered and often clueless generation, no matter how well-meaning.
Your essay is provocative, as the comments indicate. Perhaps you might next address what "formation" really means.
Thank you for your comment and sharing your experience.
The brand/symbol distinction is useful and the parallel is real: when a symbol can be emptied and refilled, its vagueness becomes economically useful, which is precisely the structural condition this essay presses. But the central problem here is not semantic. It is what justice requires when the language of formation is invoked with moral force at the point where families are being asked to assume irreversible financial burdens, without proportionate disclosure about cost, debt exposure, or curricular substance.
The question of what formation actually means is not unaddressed. "Americanism as a Heresy of Formation," argues that formation is not a propositional program but a pre-reflective installation, which is why symbol recovery efforts consistently fail to reach the mechanism. A symbol can in principle be recaptured; formation capture operates below the level at which that recovery becomes possible. I think it answers the question you are raising more directly than another definitional essay would.
Thanks for your kind reply. On Americanism, I was baptized about 25 feet above Orestes Brownson's tomb at Notre Dame 80 years ago. Cardinal Gibbons got my father into Catholic U grad school in 1915, and daad was forever grateful, even tho he was drafted 18 months later before he got his Ph.D. He was the lawyer for America First in 1941... and E Michael Jones is an old friend.
Welcome to Substack, where I occasionally write. After growing up at Notre Dame and knowing Father Hesburgh since I was three, I finally wrote it all down - from Cardinal Gibbons on - last year. Let me know if you want a review copy.
cforc.com/charityforsale.
Great post, and thank you for raising awareness. I especially appreciate you saying “A system cannot credibly proclaim large families as ideal while narrowing the economic conditions ordinary graduates need.” It is also worth noting how many graduates go on to enter professions historically marked by underpayment or outright volunteerism—especially the professional musicians central to Catholic worship, who often cannot afford even solitary stability, much less raise a family. If Aquinas is right that “to sell a thing for more than its worth, or to buy it for less than its worth, is in itself unjust and unlawful,” then that principle applies not only to tuition and debt, but to the hidden ledgers of labor and formation the wider ecosystem still expects others to absorb.
Thank you, Brian.
This is exactly the kind of extension I hoped the piece would provoke. The tuition question is only one part of a wider Catholic moral economy in which piety is often used to obscure real costs.
If Catholic institutions invoke vocation, sacrifice, beauty, and worship while depending on labor they are unwilling to price justly, then the same principle applies. The hidden ledger is not only family debt. It is also delayed marriage, unstable household formation, underpaid musicians, adjuncts, teachers, and other workers whose sacrifice becomes the unacknowledged subsidy for the institution’s moral self-image.
A system cannot appeal to Aquinas on truth, beauty, and just formation while ignoring Aquinas on just exchange. That contradiction deserves to be named.
Thank you, Erik. What you’re naming here is very close to what I’ve been trying to surface from the church musician side: how appeals to vocation, beauty, and worship can end up obscuring the demands of justice in exchange. I just posted an essay on that very tension, and I think it connects directly to the wider hidden-ledger problem you’re identifying here. I’d be honored if you gave it a read.
https://thelucrativeartist.substack.com/p/the-pay-is-risen-rebuilding-the-economic
Brian:
Thank you for taking the time to share your article. Reading your essay carefully, I find the structural convergence striking enough to be worth naming explicitly.
The mechanism you're identifying in church musician compensation is, at its core, the same hidden-ledger problem I'm examining in the Catholic college economy, approached from the opposite side of the transaction. You are working the labor supply side: institutions that convert a musician's genuine vocational commitment into an extraction mechanism, using the sacred framing of the work to disable the ordinary faculty by which workers judge proportionality, demand transparency, and protect their own economic dignity. I am working the demand side: institutions that convert parental piety into pricing power, using moralized urgency to suppress the rational evaluation a family would otherwise bring to a major financial commitment.
The sacred appeal does the same economic work in both cases. It doesn't matter whether the person being captured is paying in or giving labor out. The mechanism is identical: transcendence is invoked at precisely the point where clear-eyed judgment would otherwise interrupt the transaction.
Your phrase about the 20th-century corporate employment model functioning as an invisible subsidy that churches consumed without cost is one of the sharpest formulations I've encountered of what I'd call the hidden ledger problem. The true cost was always being paid. It simply wasn't being paid by the institution benefiting from it. Musicians absorbed it through below-market rates and subsidized availability. Families absorb it through debt and suppressed comparison. In neither case does the institution have to answer for the gap, because the gap has been filled by someone else's sacrifice, reframed as devotion.
What your essay does that mine cannot, operating as it does within a Thomistic moral framework aimed at a Catholic intellectual audience, is give the labor-side analysis a practical, institution-facing register that reformers and musicians can actually use. The 95 Theses are a genuine contribution to that end. Your diagnostic questions at the close are particularly well-constructed: they function as an audit instrument, and the fact that most institutions would struggle to answer them affirmatively without hesitation is itself the finding.
Where my work lands differently is that it operates at a structural legitimacy level that your reform framework doesn't require and perhaps shouldn't carry. You are asking institutions that depend on musicians to finally account honestly for what that labor costs and to build systems capable of sustaining the people they depend on. That is necessary and urgent work on its own terms. I am asking whether the institutions doing the sacred framing have adequately examined the moral authority on which that framing rests at all, and whether consent secured through moralized urgency and avoidable ignorance constitutes a genuine transaction or a structural injury regardless of intent. Those are different endpoints, but they diagnose the same underlying disorder from opposite directions.
The labor-side and demand-side analyses belong together, and I think the combined picture is more explosive than either one alone. If sacred institutions can simultaneously extract underpaid labor from the musicians who make their worship possible and extract overleveraged tuition commitments from the families they promise to form, what exactly is being transacted under the name of the sacred? That question is worth sitting with.
Thank you again for your engagement.
Thank you, Erik,
I think that’s exactly right. And it seems to reach beyond religious institutions into the arts, nonprofits, and really any setting where the transaction is treated as too intangible or elevated to be named plainly. Once ordinary exchange is suppressed, the hidden ledger rarely stays empty; it is often filled by softer currencies like access, patronage, influence, and sometimes forms of moral or political compromise that would look much less acceptable if the actual transaction were visible in the first place.
Wow. I’ve never thought about this so explicitly before, but it really brings to mind the image of Jesus overthrowing tables in the temple and a recent read, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta. -Kaitlyn
I agree with your assessment of the Newman Guide as trafficking in fear, etc. but the amount of time you spent on TAC bordered on being a hit piece.
Thank you for your comment.
I don’t think ‘hit piece’ is a fair description. TAC receives extended treatment because it functions in the paper as a case study, not as a personal target. If I make a structural argument about moralized pricing, limited auditability, and defective consent, that argument has to be grounded in at least one institution where the relevant claims can actually be checked against public evidence. TAC is useful for that precisely because its naming, pedagogical lineage, pricing structure, and transparency gaps are publicly examinable in a way that makes the larger argument testable rather than abstract.
I also think part of the reaction here is that the paper is pressing on something deeper than TAC itself. Criticizing the Newman Guide is one thing. Criticizing a school that represents, for many orthodox Catholics, the idealized form of serious residential formation is another. That touches the prior Americanist assumption the paper is also trying to expose: that serious Catholic formation normally requires leaving home, leaving the domestic church, and entering a credentialed residential enclave at eighteen. That premise is so normalized that it often goes unexamined. So the question is not whether TAC is admired in good faith. The question is whether the model it represents can bear scrutiny at the level of justice, transparency, and the displacement of domestic and parish formation.
Thanks for the reply! Upon further reflection, my comment probably reflects my own view which is that the “auditableness” of a school is less of a personal concern than the fear mongering. I understand the auditing issue you are trying to capture however. I don’t have any personal attachments to TAC at all, my oldest is currently most interested in local state college nursing programs and we are 100% in support of that!
I agree the fear-based marketing is often the most immediately visible part of the problem. My point was that the auditability issue matters because once families are being pressed morally, they also need decision-grade information in order for consent to be genuinely informed. But I’m glad we at least have some agreement on the broader concern.
TAC generally produces arrogant egghead neurotic elitists. It deserves a hit piece.
Interesting essay. It gives me a lot of harsh reality that few are strong enough to dare live in. Brilliant!
Thank you. That was exactly my aim. The point wasn’t just to criticize particular schools, but to show the structure by which parental anxiety, moral urgency, and limited disclosure are turned into leverage. Many families feel the pressure. Fewer are willing to name the mechanism.
Do you believe that these arguments could also apply to Catholic “classical” schools?
If by Catholic “classical” schools you mean the K–12 world, then only in a qualified sense. The argument in Formation for Sale applies most fully to colleges, because it is not only about price or moralized branding. It is also about the residential model: the assumption that serious Catholic formation requires leaving home for an institution, thereby displacing the domestic church and local parish as primary sites of formation. That part of the critique does not carry over in the same way to K–12, since the child ordinarily remains at home.
So while a related concern could arise at the K–12 level where schools moralize enrollment and attach premium pricing to parental anxiety, the full argument in the paper is aimed at the college ecosystem, where high cost, weaker decision-grade disclosure, debt exposure, and residential departure are fused together. In that respect, the college model reflects a more distinctly Americanist pattern than K–12 schooling does.
I appreciate the comment. However, my argument is not that secular schools are superior, or that the job market is healthy.
My point is narrower: Catholic colleges making elevated moral claims should meet an elevated standard of transparency and justice. The practical comparison in the essay is not “elite secular school versus Catholic school,” but “premium Catholic enclave versus living at home, commuting locally, and avoiding debt.”
Secular schools are not getting a free pass here. They are simply not the subject of the critique because they are not presenting themselves as morally superior formation ecosystems.
That has often been my impression as well. There is a certain TAC graduate type that comes across as though he has passed through the one truly serious Catholic formation on earth, while everyone else is operating at some lower level of Catholic consciousness.
That is exactly the danger I am trying to identify. The model does not merely educate; it can breed a kind of enclave elitism, where Catholic seriousness becomes tied to having passed through a particular branded institution. Once that happens, formation is no longer ordered simply toward truth, humility, and service. It becomes an identity marker like mentioning how many kids you have in your bio on social media.
And when the institution itself is premium priced, socially insulated, and wrapped in Great Books prestige, that attitude is not accidental. It is one of the predictable fruits of the system.
You make some interesting points. First, I recommend reading the college's founding document. I studied it before I attended in the 90s. The title is something like, A Proposal on the Fullfilment of Catholic Education. This might help alleviate some of the feelings of pressure that Catholic families may have and help them make a decision that is more concrete. On the cost of attendance, one can apply for financial aid early and see exactly what the cost is before committing. It varies on the financial state of the parents. My daughter is attending and we are paying nearly full price, minus the Cal Grant and Pell Grant. I am making ten monthly payments, each is slightly more than my eldest son is currently paying for renting a two bedroom apartment. That my daughter is getting tuition, books, lodging and food for this price is more than reasonable given the denominator is fiat currency.
I appreciate the thoughtful comment.
I did read the founding document before writing the paper. In fact, the document helps clarify the issue rather than resolve it. It explains Thomas Aquinas College’s (TAC’s) self-understanding as a project of Catholic liberal education ordered to faith, philosophy, theology, and the Great Books. I do not dispute that aspiration.
The question is whether that aspiration answers the specific problems I identify: the actual lineage of the pedagogy, the lack of decision-grade curricular scope, the financial disclosure problem, and the deeper assumption that serious Catholic formation normally requires residential departure into a premium institutional enclave.
On the first point, the founding document does not really answer the naming problem. TAC invokes St. Thomas Aquinas as patron and intellectual authority, but its actual classroom method is not Thomistic or Scholastic in origin. St. Thomas did not teach by modern group seminar. His pedagogical world was ordered around lectio and disputatio.
TAC’s method comes much more directly from the twentieth-century Great Books movement, especially Hutchins, Adler, and St. John’s College. That does not make the method worthless. It does mean that the name “Thomas Aquinas College” carries a Thomistic and Scholastic implication that the actual pedagogy does not fully bear.
The same applies to the curriculum. A founding document can explain the philosophy of education. It cannot substitute for decision-grade disclosure of what students are actually assigned, how much they read, how many contact hours are tied to specific texts, what writing is required, and how mastery is assessed. A family paying a four-year direct cost approaching $174,800 should not have to infer depth from the prestige of names like Homer, Plato, Augustine, Euclid, and Aquinas. If the formation is as rigorous as claimed, then publishing the full curricular scope should strengthen the case, not threaten it.
On cost, the argument is not that a family can never eventually learn its own price. The argument is that “apply and see what aid you receive” is not public transparency. That is individualized negotiation after the family has already entered the admissions process and often after emotional, moral, and relational commitment has begun. That sequence matters.
Standardized net price distributions by income band, median debt at graduation, private-loan exposure, and distributional outcomes should be public before families enter the moral commitment funnel, not disclosed piecemeal after the process is underway.
Your own example actually illustrates the problem. You are paying nearly full price, less grants, through ten monthly payments. That may be manageable for an already established household. But that does not prove the model is proportionate for ordinary Catholic families generally, nor does it prove that the burden imposed downstream on graduates is benign.
The relevant question is not whether one father of seven with an established household can make the payment. The question is whether this model should be treated as the normal or privileged path of serious Catholic formation.
The fiat-currency argument also proves too much. Of course the currency is debased. But that applies to groceries, housing, vehicles, healthcare, parish schools, weddings, and every other family expenditure. It cannot be used selectively to remove one preferred Catholic expenditure from proportionality analysis. If fiat debasement makes the price reasonable by itself, then the same argument can justify almost any price for almost anything. Catholic moral reasoning still requires prudence, proportionality, just price, and concern for the concrete burdens placed on families.
The deeper assumption remains the most important one. Your comment treats sending a daughter away to a residential enclave at eighteen as an obvious path of formation. That assumption is not in the Catechism. It is not Catholic doctrine. Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno states the principle plainly: it is gravely wrong to assign to a greater association what a lesser one can do. Leo XIII grounds the family’s rights as antecedent to the state and to larger associations. Once institutional departure at eighteen becomes the default premise for serious Catholic formation, the domestic church ceases to be primary in practice, regardless of what families may profess in theory.
That is the Americanist element I am trying to expose. The premium enclave does not create the displacement of the domestic church. It monetizes an assumption already absorbed from American institutional culture: that maturity means leaving home, formation means institutional immersion, seriousness means credentialing, and Catholic parental responsibility is fulfilled by finding the right branded campus.
That assumption deserves scrutiny, especially when the model can impose large costs precisely at the stage of life when young Catholics should be preparing for marriage, household formation, and stable family life. A formation model that praises Catholic family life while making the early conditions for family formation more financially burdensome has not resolved the tension. It has simply avoided having to account for it.
Fair enough. My comment about the cost considers the cost incurred by the college whose costs are rising due to debasenent. I should have made that more clear. And, no, this consideration does not justify the cost of anything, it provides context for comparing its costs to other goods and deciding if it seems reasonable. My analysis is they will probably incur costs not borne by me that will require donations from others.
I am not following the invoking of rights. College is a choice and the selection is a preference. I have never had the thought TAC is a default moral preference. You have cited some text that reads like advertising put out by a third party. I agree with you that I do not find it persuasive, but perhaps this is because we are not the intended audience.
I don’t think you are arguing that Catholic families have a right to others’ labor. So, it’s unclear what is meant by rights. I agree how wonderful it would be to have this education locally, but I don’t see how there exists a natural right to it. TAC exists because of decades of investment and commitment from a community that has decided it is worthy of it. If you are arguing that such a commitment should be made on the local level, I think that is a fine idea.
The clarification on cost is noted and appreciated.
On subsidiarity, the argument is not that Catholic families have a natural right to locally provided Great Books education, or that Thomas Aquinas College (TAC) owes anyone that model. The argument is structural and prior to those questions.
Subsidiarity, as Pius XI states it, is not first a claim about what must be provided locally. It is a principle about which level of association holds primary authority. The family holds primary authority over formation by nature, and the parish supports that formation within the life of the Church. Larger institutions remain auxiliary.
So the question is not whether TAC may exist or whether families may choose it. Of course they may. The question is what it means when institutional departure at eighteen becomes the assumed and socially reinforced path for serious Catholic formation, such that a family choosing to remain locally embedded is made to feel that it is settling for something less.
That is more than a preference question. It is a formation question. The displacement happens at the level of imagination before it happens at the level of decision. When the enclave stops being auxiliary and becomes essential in the minds of orthodox Catholic families, the domestic church has already lost its primary status in practice, regardless of what anyone professes in theory.
On cost, learning one’s own aid package through the admissions process is not the same thing as public accountability. Individualized disclosure tells one family what its offer is. It does not give Catholic families as a class public visibility into net price distributions by income band, median borrower debt, private-loan exposure, or the range of actual burdens families are assuming. Individualized disclosure is not the same thing as public accountability.
Your final sentence actually confirms the point. You agree that local commitment would be a fine idea. The paper’s argument is that the ecosystem works against that conclusion being reached, not through prohibition, but through the moral framing of enrollment as the serious and faithful path. That framing is what subsidiarity requires us to examine.
The argument seems to presuppose that all disclosures must be made by publishing information online rather than having a conversation, which feels depersonalized to me.
Perhaps I missed this, so forgive me if I did. Did you reach out to CNS and interview them?
I understand your perpective, but would love to understand theirs.
From what I see, they operate as best they can as a 501(c)3. Their goals are clear when one goes beyond just looking at their Newman School Guide.
I do not disagree with some of your questions, but the framingbof them seems to presuppose intentions that I do not believe exist.
Additionally, while I would love to see some of the data that you think would be helpful, it also mm presupposes that it would be generally available to CNS and that CNS has the capability and the structured expertise to provide it.
Thank you for your comment.
I did not interview with CNS, and that’s not an oversight.
I do want to address the framing of the question itself before answering it.
The suggestion that a structural critique requires interviewing the institution before publication imports a journalistic norm into an analytical context where it doesn’t belong.
Journalists seek comment before publishing profiles. Analytical arguments are evaluated on the quality of their evidence and reasoning, not on whether the subject was given an opportunity to explain itself first. The obligation you’re describing doesn’t exist in this context, and invoking it shifts the burden from the argument’s substance to a procedural ritual of institutional deference.
That shift is worth noticing. The question is not whether CNS was treated fairly in the writing process. The question is whether the Newman Guide contains what justice requires at the point where families make six-figure enrollment decisions. Those are different questions and conflating them redirects attention from the evidentiary finding to a procedural objection.
On the evidence directly: I obtained the 2025-2026 Newman Guide PDF from CNS myself. I requested it through their site. They followed up by soliciting a donation. The guide contains no standardized metrics, no net price data, no debt distributions, and no auditable recommendation criteria of any kind. That is not an inference or a presumption of intent. It is a description of the document families treat as a moral gate for consequential financial decisions.
The capability question your comment raises is therefore secondary. CNS is not being asked to compile external institutional data it may lack. It is being asked whether its own recommendation process is documented and auditable enough to justify the moral weight families place on inclusion. The guide answers that question by its contents, or rather by what its contents lack.
On intentions: the paper addresses this explicitly and at length. The critique does not require bad intentions and says so directly. Good intentions operating within a structurally unjust arrangement still produce the moral injury the paper describes. John Paul II addresses this in Reconciliatio et Paenitentia: structures of sin persist independently of ongoing malicious intent. I don’t doubt CNS operates with genuine mission commitment. The paper doesn’t require otherwise.
What it requires is that a certifier functioning as a moral gate publish criteria proportionate to the financial and moral risk families bear on the basis of inclusion. The document I obtained from them contains none of it. That finding doesn’t require their cooperation to establish. It required only reading what they published.
I find your point about Thomas Aquinas College being deceptive somehow by being named after the common doctor of the Church and also doing socratic method quite a stretch. Are you implying that the average family looking at TAC sees the name and thinks “surely they would be doing instruction in the same format as Saint Thomas himself, because we are all very familiar with that after all”.
As a graduate I can say that we spend a tremendous amount of time with Saint Thomas but more importantly it is an education according the natural order of knowing understood by the ancient greeks and the Church Fathers and Doctor including Saint Thomas. The method being lecture or socratic is accidental to the education.
Frankly it seems like you just looked at the website and formed a conclusion. Did you try calling anyone to ask these questions? Did you find that someone was evading your questions or trying to mislead you? Anyone who is actually serious about going there can come and visit (for free), come to the summer program for two weeks and live as the students live (kind of), and students and parents alike can talk to almost any of the tutors about the curriculum as much as one might want. I agree that the website is not the greatest source of information, but that is not some sneaky trick to lure people in but just not the kind of thing that is going to effectively communicate. If a student goes to a college based solely on the website that would be ridiculous.
Thank you for the comment, but it does not actually engage the paper’s main argument.
First, the naming argument is not that families literally think St. Thomas taught in seminar format. It is that “Thomas Aquinas College” carries Thomistic and Catholic intellectual authority, while the pedagogy being sold belongs to a different lineage. The point is not that seminar discussion is illegitimate. The point is that symbolic authority is doing credentialing work where the institution does not publicly correct the gap or render the substance of the education in decision-grade terms.
Second, the paper’s central argument is not about whether motivated families can call, visit, attend a summer program, or ask questions. It is about disclosure. TAC publicly asks families to make a six-figure decision while providing no published net price distributions by income band, no published median borrower debt at graduation, and no standardized public account of curricular scope sufficient for proportional judgment. Under Aquinas’s just-price framework, the duty runs to the seller, not to the buyer’s willingness to work harder after entering the funnel. Disclosure-through-effort is not the same thing as disclosure before commitment.
Third, your response quietly assumes the very premise the paper challenges: that serious Catholic formation normally requires going away to a residential college at eighteen. That assumption is not Catholic doctrine, and it does not follow from subsidiarity. The paper argues that this residential-departure model has been absorbed so deeply into orthodox Catholic imagination that even its defenders rarely examine it. On that point, your comment illustrates the argument more than it rebuts it.
You attended TAC and found it formative. That may be true. But that is not the question under examination. The question is whether families are given the public information needed to make a just assessment before committing. Your comment does not answer that.