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What concerns me is how the US college system created a market where colleges have been without price controls for a long time. These grant mechanisms seem like

What concerns me is how the US college system created a market where colleges have been without price controls for a long time. These grant mechanisms seem like another way to just give colleges the ability to crank up fees and drive up prices. Effectively, the "solutions" seem to take the guaranteed loans the students have to pay and making the public pay for it. Have there been any other systems that have successfully converted out of such a out-of-control market without direct price controls from a central authority?

pitaj 8y ago
Guaranteed student loans did most of the damage. If we stopped doing that, prices would almost immediately fall to reasonable levels.
- dv_dt 8y ago
  That may fix prices, but doesn't fix the problem of giving a wide swath of a nation's population the opportunity to attend college.
  - jimbokun 8y ago
    The solution for that is bringing the state college systems back to life, with only token fees low enough so anyone who gets admitted can attend without a serious financial burden.
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > That may fix prices, but doesn't fix the problem of giving a wide swath of a nation's population the opportunity to attend college. No country has really figured out how to solve both of those problems simultaneously on a large scale. The US has high prices, but also one of the highest rates of higher education in the developed world. In addition, it also has provided people from all racial and ethnic backgrounds not just with the theoretical opportunity to earn a degree, but with the tools needed to actually deliver on that in practice. For all the faults of the US educational system (especially at the primary and secondary level), it performs much better than its European counterparts on this criterion if you look at the actual rates of degrees granted.
    - dv_dt 8y ago
      You blithely say that no country has it figured out, but I'd note estimates of covering all tuition for a year to be $58-$75B[1]. The cost of the defense budget increase alone this year was $60B - the total budget is some $700B. So even with the inefficient (nonexistent?) cost controls of our current student loan system, it seems quite feasible in the US to rebalance budget priorities. If one were to start putting more serious cost control strings (e.g. no more than x% in admin budget) on a direct funding stream to public universities, I suspect the cost could get even lower. https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/07/28/487794394/hillary-s-free-tuition-promise-what-would-it-cost-how-would-it-work https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/07/28/487794394/hillary...
      - drngdds 8y ago
        Yeah. To add insult to injury, Trump's useless tax cut actually could have paid for free college for everyone instead: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/05/the-tax-bill-compared-to-other-very-expensive-things/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/05/the-tax-bill-compared-t...

pitaj 8y ago

Guaranteed student loans did most of the damage. If we stopped doing that, prices would almost immediately fall to reasonable levels.

dv_dt 8y ago
That may fix prices, but doesn't fix the problem of giving a wide swath of a nation's population the opportunity to attend college.
- jimbokun 8y ago
  The solution for that is bringing the state college systems back to life, with only token fees low enough so anyone who gets admitted can attend without a serious financial burden.
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  > That may fix prices, but doesn't fix the problem of giving a wide swath of a nation's population the opportunity to attend college. No country has really figured out how to solve both of those problems simultaneously on a large scale. The US has high prices, but also one of the highest rates of higher education in the developed world. In addition, it also has provided people from all racial and ethnic backgrounds not just with the theoretical opportunity to earn a degree, but with the tools needed to actually deliver on that in practice. For all the faults of the US educational system (especially at the primary and secondary level), it performs much better than its European counterparts on this criterion if you look at the actual rates of degrees granted.
  - dv_dt 8y ago
    You blithely say that no country has it figured out, but I'd note estimates of covering all tuition for a year to be $58-$75B[1]. The cost of the defense budget increase alone this year was $60B - the total budget is some $700B. So even with the inefficient (nonexistent?) cost controls of our current student loan system, it seems quite feasible in the US to rebalance budget priorities. If one were to start putting more serious cost control strings (e.g. no more than x% in admin budget) on a direct funding stream to public universities, I suspect the cost could get even lower. https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/07/28/487794394/hillary-s-free-tuition-promise-what-would-it-cost-how-would-it-work https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/07/28/487794394/hillary...
    - drngdds 8y ago
      Yeah. To add insult to injury, Trump's useless tax cut actually could have paid for free college for everyone instead: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/05/the-tax-bill-compared-to-other-very-expensive-things/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/05/the-tax-bill-compared-t...