> No amount of legal wrangling or tax-offsetting will defeat that. In fact, by increasing tax-offsets for public universities, the apparent price of the service

> No amount of legal wrangling or tax-offsetting will defeat that. In fact, by increasing tax-offsets for public universities, the apparent price of the service supplied by public universities drops (relative to the market price), which is a signal to buyers that they should buy MORE of that service. This signal would naturally increase demand until the price of a public education on the market matches the price of the same education at private institutions. This is an interesting claim, because tax-offsets of tuition have been going down over the last 30 years, not up. Look at the percentage of educational costs covered by state general funds in the late 60s compared to today. It's night and day different. > Prices drive expense-side efficiency. An operation (such as a University) will not be mechanically driven to keep costs significantly lower than income - most are non-profit. There is no reason to "increase margin". Most Universities are already teaching at capacity. Since the price is set by the market, there is no reason to keep prices significantly below the market rate. Instead, the costs associated with an education simply rise to meet whatever revenue can be generated from a fixed pool of buyers. These buyers have virtually no spending limit, since their purchasing is de facto underwritten by enormous Federal programs. The result year-over-year dramatic price increases. This is a interesting point, but the data doesn't back it up. We have data from the Department of Education on expenditures by universities. It doesn't show dramatic expenditure increases. The prices went up because state legislatures cut higher ed funding, and universities had to raise tuition to balance the books. Here's that data: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.10.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.10.a... If you have data showing that universities are spending dramatically more in expenditures on a per-student constant-dollar basis, I'd love to see it.