There shouldn't be a debate on why higher education is expensive, it was answered in a 1973 paper that won a 2001 Nobel prize: https://msu.edu/~conlinmi/teachi

There shouldn't be a debate on why higher education is expensive, it was answered in a 1973 paper that won a 2001 Nobel prize: https://msu.edu/~conlinmi/teaching/EC860/signallingscreening/SpenceQJE1973.pdf https://msu.edu/~conlinmi/teaching/EC860/signallingscreening... tl;dr: In markets where the cost of education is less than the increase in wages, the real cost of education isn't the fee, it's the relative effort of passing it.