I'm not at all convinced by the "higher education bubble" articles. There's a difference between a bubble and lack of price elasticity. The stock bubble was d

I'm not at all convinced by the "higher education bubble" articles. There's a difference between a bubble and lack of price elasticity. The stock bubble was different, because there are periods where stock prices are driven well beyond their inherent value by humans acting emotionally. Then the prices crash and get closer to their inherent value. The same irrational behavior happened with housing bubble where speculative behavior driven by cheap (and irrationally given) credit drove house prices up to a level where there was no one left to bid up and speculators were left with unpaid credit and houses whose value plummeted, hence the crash. Bubbles are tricky to predict before the crash happens. Just showing that a price of something goes up faster than income is not enough. When oil prices hit the stratosphere not that long ago no-one called it an "oil bubble". The fact that Apple computers consistently cost more than an average PC doesn't constitute an "Apple bubble". Prices are still governed by supply and demand and there's another explanations for quickly rising prices of higher education: there was money left on the table and universities caught on to that fact and are rising the prices until they find a price that people are not willing to pay. Even then I don't expect a crash, as in dramatic reduction, just a small correction to the acceptable level. I can imagine some structural changes that would lead to lowering cost of higher education. 1. Supply side increases i.e. more universities, leading to more competition for students and lower prices as a result. 2. Demand side decrease e.g. a mass change of people's opinion of the value of higher ed leading to massive drop in number of people applying to college and going to work instead. Or a mysterious virus decimating college-eligible population. I don't see neither of those scenarios playing out on a scale big enough to change the fundamental supply/demand dynamic. The problem with the "higher ed bubble" articles that I've seen so far is that they focus on one variable (cost of higher education raising faster than income) and making simplistic analogies to bubbles of the past. They don't consider that those past bubbles had systematic changes that were the root causes of said bubbles and they don't provide data to show a systematic change that leads to unrealistically inflated prices of higher ed and how that systematic change is not sustainable in the long run. High prices are symptoms, not causes, of bubbles. However, just because you cough, doesn't mean you have a flu and being gray doesn't automatically make you an elephant. I don't see society as a whole suddenly deciding that higher education is not worthwhile or a sudden surge in number of available options or any other scenario that would alter supply/demand curve.