In a recent post at College Insurrection, we profiled Swarthmore’s descent into madness over divestment.

What will the student activists demanding divestment say when they’re hit with a massive tuition increase?

Kevin Kiley of Inside Higher Ed reports.

How to Weigh the Future

Would you be willing to pay about $13,000 more a year in tuition to go to a college that doesn’t invest in fossil fuels?

That’s the amount of revenue – a total of about $204 million over 10 years — that Swarthmore College administrators recently estimated the college would forgo in endowment returns if the college’s governing board decided to divest from fossil fuels.

“There is no way in advance to predict the cost of something,” said Suzanne P. Welsh, vice president for finance and treasurer at Swarthmore. “But as the board looks at this, there is a reasonable case that can be made that there would be a significant cost that the board should take into account.”

Swarthmore, like many higher education institutions, has been under pressure for the past few years from a variety of student, faculty and outside groups to divest from companies that extract and burn fossil fuels. Those activists, pointing to the perceived success of a 1980s divestment movement that many say helped end South African apartheid, say divestment could be an effective tool to get companies and the government to address issues of climate change.

That pressure has ramped up in recent months, with groups targeting institutions with some of the largest endowments.