>I think the real story is that it's difficult to have government subsidies for students without putting some form of price controls on the schools. What we see

>I think the real story is that it's difficult to have government subsidies for students without putting some form of price controls on the schools. What we see in practice is that the subsidies cost the government (which is fine -- that's what a subsidy is) but the value is being captured by the school, not the student. Well, uh, yeah, what did people expect? This was a pretty deliberate policy shift. Public higher education used to be funded by per-student block grants at the state level, whose conditions said that tuition and fees had to be kept below some maximum level and could not rise faster than some maximum rate. Now it's mostly funded via subsidized loans. When you subsidize education-usury instead of education, you get more usury and less education, because that's what you paid for.