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It is difficult to overstate how mistaken this article is. College has mostly gotten more expensive because state support for public universities has dramatica

It is difficult to overstate how mistaken this article is. College has mostly gotten more expensive because state support for public universities has dramatically decreased, from over 80% in the 1970's to less than 20% now. Since the taxpayer no longer pays for public higher education, the student does. The logic of this made some sense at the time; very high tuition subsidies were a gift to the upper middle and upper class -- few poor students went to college back when subsidies were high. Ideally, states would have continued to fund higher education, and the increased tuition would be used to support lower income students. But the states took the money away from their universities in bad times, and did not replace it -- in my state (Virginia) it went to prisons and medicaid. There are lots of other problems with student loan statistics -- it is true that the current student loan program has been a tremendous boon to for profit colleges and trade schools, which is where most of the default occurs. And the media likes to publicize the outliers; the average debt at public universities is about $26K, at private non-profits $31K. But the overall cost of higher education has only slightly beaten the cost of living (and has certainly increased less than health costs); the price has gone up because students are responsible for more of the cost.

twic 6y ago
Has the inflation-adjusted cash value of that support decreased, or the fraction of the costs it covers? "80%" and "20%" makes it sound like the latter. Because if it's the latter and not the former, the cause isn't declining support, it's increasing cost.
- ummonk 6y ago
  The latter. We've seen an increase in cost of education (as evidenced by private school tuitions, which have gone up and never had taxpayer support). In addition to this, student enrollment has increased, so per-student taxpayer funding has not kept pace even as taxpayer funding for public universities has gone up relative to the overall population.
  - mjn 6y ago
    In some state university systems the inflation-adjusted total funding has actually decreased. For example, the University of California system was budgeted about $2.1 billion in state money in 1990, which is $4.3 billion in 2020 dollars. At the time, there were 9 campuses, serving 125,000 undergraduates, in a state with population 30 million. Fast-forward to 2020, and the system is budgeted $3.9 billion in state funds, which have to cover 10 campuses, serving 225,000 undergraduates, in a state with population 39.5 million. If state funding had kept pace solely with inflation and state population, not taking into account any above-inflation cost increases, or the increase in percentage of high-school students who go to college, the budget in 2020 ought to be $5.6 billion instead of $3.9 billion, about 45% higher. If it had kept pace with both the number of students and inflation (but still no cost increases), it'd be $7.7 billion, or almost double. My read of why it's been cut isn't that CA politicians really think the UC isn't worth funding in 2020 like it was in 1990, but more that it's been a victim of convenience in fiscal crises. CA has had a few state budget crunches over the past 30 years, and the annual UC budget is "discretionary spending" and not locked in, so is procedurally easy to cut. It was slashed significantly during both the dot-com crash and the 2008-2012 budget crisis, leaving us with today's lower level of support.
    - ummonk 6y ago
      You're cherrypicking by focusing on UC in isolation. Higher education funding in California has gone up from ~5.5 billion to ~16 billion nominal from 1990 to now. Overall funding has gone up - it was just focused on community colleges at the expense of UC, as it should be to avoid exacerbating economic inequality.
      - mjn 6y ago
        That's true! This thread I thought was about whether tuition at places like UCs has gone up because of cost increases or state funding decreases though. As far as I can tell from the budgets, it's primarily due to per-student state funding decreases, which match almost dollar-for-dollar with tuition hikes. I.e. the UC is hiking tuition to make up for declining per-student state support, not because the UC is spending more per-student to deliver the education (in real terms). The community college system has been funded more generously, and not coincidentally, hasn't seen the same tuition hikes. You can still get an associate's degree that's almost 100% taxpayer-funded in CA, just no longer a bachelor's. (Cal State is kind of halfway in between, still much more state-funded than the UCs, but not anywhere near the per-student levels of 1990, which is why in-state tuition there is creeping towards $10k.)
baron816 6y ago
There are other things that often get overlooked: 1) sticker price != how much students pay. Pretty much everyone gets a discount. This is designed to get super rich families to pay much more. 2) About half of student debt is incurred from graduate school, and those students are much more capable of handling that load (with some notable exceptions). 3) As was said here, the average debt upon graduation from private universities is $31K, which is very reasonable for most people. That comes out to a little of $7K/year of education. Can you just imagine living out on your own for $7/year, without gaining a degree? That seems like a steal. The problematic debt is usually held by those who don’t complete their degree, or who attend for-profit institutions. If there’s legislative action that should be done, it should be in those arenas.
Spooky23 6y ago
College became a political whipping boy in the 80s when the student loan rules changed. My dad went to City College in NYC in the late 60s/early 70s for $0. Like most of his fellow students, he was a 1st generation child of immigrants, and that enabled him to pursue a world unknown to the family. His dad was a proprietor of a bar; his uncle an able seaman on a tugboat, and other uncles NYC Firemen and Sanitation workers respectively. Today in the name of equality we have resorts. Students get "deals" from colleges, etc, but those deals have strings and often push out students. I graduated from a SUNY college in 1999; every single one of my friends who went to private schools like Clarkson, RPI, Carnegie Mellon, etc ended up with $80-100k in crushing debt. I owed less than $10k.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  > City College in NYC in the late 60s/early 70s for $0 Ah, the peak of an era. Check out "Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics" if you haven't, and cry some.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
whyenot 6y ago
California's CSU system has more than half a million undergraduate students. Tuition and fees are still not much more than $8,000 a year. You can still get a very good education for not a lot of money. Just a comparison: San Jose State University (public) and Santa Clara University (private) are less than ten miles from each other. Tuition at SJSU is $7,852 (+ fees). Tuition at SCU is $53,634. Yes, SCU has labs with all the latest equipment. A biology field class at SCU may go to Yellowstone, or Hawaii on a field trip while a similar course t SJSU would only go to the Sierras, but what you are going to learn is basically the same stuff, the level of interaction with faculty will be the same, opportunities for doing research as an undergraduate are about the same. There is no reason to spend huge sums of money to get a good education!
- lost953 6y ago
  The SCU biology class is going to go to Monterey, the SJSU is going to go nowhere. SCU doesn't have the latest equipment in its labs, but it does have decent labs, SJSU is probably similar. What you are paying for is lifestyle, access, connections, and a system to prevent people from falling through the cracks. Most people graduate in 4 years at SCU, not as true at SJSU. After 10 years SCU graduates are some of the highest paid in the country, not so much for SJSU. Plus the sticker price isn't everything SCU has tons of aid although its probably still 3 to 4 times more expensive (for average people).
- kart23 6y ago
  And SJSU in-state tuition cost $900 in the year 1990. What justifies this increase?
shadowgovt 6y ago
This explanation doesn't really explain why both private and public university tuitions have been rising without bound.
- tzs 6y ago
  I've not been able to find much tuition data going back a long time online, but for the little I could find (Stanford going back something like 110 years, and one public school whose name I don't recall), it has almost always been raising a bit faster than inflation. When I graphed the data over time, there was no place that stood out as being a place after which tuition increases were consistently worse than what they had been before. There would be a couple years or so here or there where it rose more rapidly during those years, and a couple years here or there where it did not rise as rapidly as in prior years, but mostly its been pretty steady. Most articles I've seen where someone says the high cost of college is because of change X appear only look at the growth since X and just assume that X was the cause. So if tuition goes up 4% a year for 10 years, then some change is made, and it goes up 4% a year for the next 10 years, you'll see articles blaming the previous 10 years of 4% annual rise on X.
michaelchisari 6y ago
What also works against the idea of subsidies being the culprit is that it's not just universities that have seen this cost inflation. The community college in the town I grew up in was $17 a credit hour in 1997. Adjusted for inflation, that's $26.17 a credit hour. A 4 credit hour class would cost $104.68. That's something many working people could cover to take a class here and there to further themselves or their job prospects. There were subsidies for those who couldn't afford that as well. That same community college today? $132 a credit hour. That's a 500% increase over inflation. This isn't being talked about because university costs affect middle and upper-middle class people more, so pundits and the media are going to be more affected. But this gross inflation has definitely pushed working class and poor people out of the classroom and that's a terrible thing for society at large.
- seibelj 6y ago
  I don’t understand your logic. People take out loans all the time to get community college degrees. Those loans are federally backed. So the increase in credit would indeed inflate community college costs.
  - jsemrau 6y ago
    Judging from a European perspective, I think society as a whole is better off if more people have access to affordable education and don't need to take out a loan to take classes.
    - chris_va 6y ago
      I think most Americans (at least on HN) would agree with you. Of course, there are complications. In Europe, the effective tax rate is generally much higher, and the fraction of population that is university aged is generally lower. My understanding is that a non-trivial fraction of the population also goes into a trade school (?), which the US does not have in the same way. In the US, lower taxes+loan is sometimes seen as more equitable (i.e. only those that use something pay for it) than a population wide tax. It is quite the risk you force onto someone young, though. If you could drop your tax rate by 50%, but had to pay back $80-100k for college, would you take it? Obviously that tax goes to pay for many other things besides education, but the US-average mentality generally leans towards individual choice over broad social programs (with various political parties widely disagreeing).
baconandeggs 6y ago
> the price has gone up because students are responsible for more of the cost. That is not how prices work, the prices can't go up if the only buyers have no money. The price went up because they got access to credit. To government mandated credit.
- ldiracdelta 6y ago
  Exact same mechanism as lowering the interest rate on housing mortgages. The buyer says "I am willing to pay $2000/month", and the interest rate just changes how much of that payment is principle vs interest.
- apta 6y ago
  Whenever credit is introduced, prices go up. No wonder why lending money with interest is prohibited in the major religions.
- fastaguy88 6y ago
  I suppose this seems to make sense if you believe that higher education costs are a true market that has found some kind of equilibrium. But it's not. College graduate parents are going to try very hard to send their kids to college, and today, the vast majority of students at 4 year colleges come from families with college graduate parents. When tuitions were low, this did not require much sacrifice for those parents. When prices went up, those parents continued to send their kids to college, making greater sacrifices, but often without taking out a loan (at least for public universities). Today, 42% of undergraduates at public universities have no debt.[0] No doubt loans also had an effect -- among other things, they made it easier for state politicians to reduce support for public universities. But since 40% of students at public universities have no debt, and costs increased more than 5 fold, it is hard to argue that loans were the major factor driving up the cost. To support the loan driving argument, it would be useful to see relationship between the fraction of students with loans and college costs. Simply saying that costs went up when loans became more available ignores many other changes in education finance. [0] https://www.aplu.org/projects-and-initiatives/college-costs-tuition-and-financial-aid/publicuvalues/student-debt.html https://www.aplu.org/projects-and-initiatives/college-costs-...
deleted 6y ago
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OnlyOneCannolo 6y ago
Another problem is how the money is allocated. State schools' budgets used to be mostly general funds, but now they're overwhelmingly non-general. Even if they're getting the same amount of money, that money is already earmarked. If it doesn't cover all their expenses, they need to figure out how to monetize their assets to make up the difference. Universities have gotten much better at finance out of necessity.
joe_the_user 6y ago
I'm not sure how your argument actually contradicts the argument of the article. State support for public universities declined while state issued loans to students increased. Both would seem to facilitate higher priced private universities and work together - if you just have student loans, student might still prefer lower priced public universities. If you just defund public universities without the massive expansion of student loans, many student might be not be able to attend university. Also, I get the figure of inflation-adjust college education cost doubling over thirty years. You can spin that as "only slightly beating the cost of living" but education is a major part of society's expenditure of resources and so such a doubling, over a longish time is still majorly important.
jpeloquin 6y ago
To support and elaborate on the parent comment: College tuition has increased faster than inflation, but this is not unique among service industries [1] [2]. The causes include [2]: 1. "Cost disease." Labor productivity has not increased in higher education, but has increased in industries that produce physical products, so costs have risen in general. Because educator productivity is flat, yet costs are increasing, the price of college increases faster than average. 2. Higher education needs highly educated workers. The wage gap between workers with and without a degree has grown over time [3], so the price of college grows faster than average. There may be a feedback loop here. 3. Technology adds cost to higher education because it has to be acquired, supported, and taught, without (yet) any commensurate increase in educator productivity. So the price rises. Although tuition inevitably rises in /price/, it could still be /affordable/. It is less affordable now in the US than it used to be mainly because wages have not kept pace with GDP and, as the parent comment mentioned, state support for public colleges has decreased. Note that [2] is a higher education industry publication, so it may have some bias. In particular its defense of the relative growth in college administrative staff compared to the growth of enrollment seems shaky. But the above points appear valid. [1] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century/ [2] http://www.ntrp16.org/sites/default/files/Resources/ACE-%20The%20Anatomy%20of%20College%20Tuition.pdf http://www.ntrp16.org/sites/default/files/Resources/ACE-%20T... [3] https://www.bls.gov/charts/usual-weekly-earnings/usual-weekly-earnings-over-time-by-education.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/usual-weekly-earnings/usual-weekl...
eanzenberg 6y ago
A big reason college costs have increased is due to students who pay in full are subsidizing students who cannot, or get a completely free ride.
deleted 6y ago
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jariel 6y ago
The relative share of people attending college from 1970-2020 has increased dramatically. So spending per-student may be down, but spending overall certainly is not. ... is one of many complicating factors. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
apsec112 6y ago
Calculating state support as a percentage of total cost is misleading, since universities can make "total cost" be whatever they please. California spends 34% more on higher education than it did in 1975, adjusted both for inflation and for state population growth. If a university wants their budget to double, and the state won't double their funding, then the remainder will have to come from tuition. But that's not the state's fault, it's the universities' fault for spending more. (Sources: https://lao.ca.gov/analysis/1975/01_transmittal_1975.pdf https://lao.ca.gov/analysis/1975/01_transmittal_1975.pdf http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2019-20/pdf/Enacted/BudgetSummary/FullBudgetSummary.pdf http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2019-20/pdf/Enacted/BudgetSummary/... https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_California)
- secabeen 6y ago
  34% is a decent number, but that includes both Community Colleges, Cal State Schools and UC, all of which have opened additional locations in the last 45 years, as more and more jobs in the state require a college education. If you want to accuse the universities of spending more, do you have data to back up that assertion that they are spending significantly more on a real, per-student basis?
brightball 6y ago
Is it though? Costs can’t rise if people can’t pay them. With student loans, no matter what people can pay them...so they keep rising. We have high demand, limited supply and no sensitivity to price to drive down demand. It’s only now that the costs have become so high that the payback cost can’t be ignored that we are seeing a societal shift questioning the value of college for the price. And even then, people still choose to pay the price.

twic 6y ago

Has the inflation-adjusted cash value of that support decreased, or the fraction of the costs it covers? "80%" and "20%" makes it sound like the latter. Because if it's the latter and not the former, the cause isn't declining support, it's increasing cost.

ummonk 6y ago
The latter. We've seen an increase in cost of education (as evidenced by private school tuitions, which have gone up and never had taxpayer support). In addition to this, student enrollment has increased, so per-student taxpayer funding has not kept pace even as taxpayer funding for public universities has gone up relative to the overall population.
- mjn 6y ago
  In some state university systems the inflation-adjusted total funding has actually decreased. For example, the University of California system was budgeted about $2.1 billion in state money in 1990, which is $4.3 billion in 2020 dollars. At the time, there were 9 campuses, serving 125,000 undergraduates, in a state with population 30 million. Fast-forward to 2020, and the system is budgeted $3.9 billion in state funds, which have to cover 10 campuses, serving 225,000 undergraduates, in a state with population 39.5 million. If state funding had kept pace solely with inflation and state population, not taking into account any above-inflation cost increases, or the increase in percentage of high-school students who go to college, the budget in 2020 ought to be $5.6 billion instead of $3.9 billion, about 45% higher. If it had kept pace with both the number of students and inflation (but still no cost increases), it'd be $7.7 billion, or almost double. My read of why it's been cut isn't that CA politicians really think the UC isn't worth funding in 2020 like it was in 1990, but more that it's been a victim of convenience in fiscal crises. CA has had a few state budget crunches over the past 30 years, and the annual UC budget is "discretionary spending" and not locked in, so is procedurally easy to cut. It was slashed significantly during both the dot-com crash and the 2008-2012 budget crisis, leaving us with today's lower level of support.
  - ummonk 6y ago
    You're cherrypicking by focusing on UC in isolation. Higher education funding in California has gone up from ~5.5 billion to ~16 billion nominal from 1990 to now. Overall funding has gone up - it was just focused on community colleges at the expense of UC, as it should be to avoid exacerbating economic inequality.
    - mjn 6y ago
      That's true! This thread I thought was about whether tuition at places like UCs has gone up because of cost increases or state funding decreases though. As far as I can tell from the budgets, it's primarily due to per-student state funding decreases, which match almost dollar-for-dollar with tuition hikes. I.e. the UC is hiking tuition to make up for declining per-student state support, not because the UC is spending more per-student to deliver the education (in real terms). The community college system has been funded more generously, and not coincidentally, hasn't seen the same tuition hikes. You can still get an associate's degree that's almost 100% taxpayer-funded in CA, just no longer a bachelor's. (Cal State is kind of halfway in between, still much more state-funded than the UCs, but not anywhere near the per-student levels of 1990, which is why in-state tuition there is creeping towards $10k.)

baron816 6y ago

There are other things that often get overlooked: 1) sticker price != how much students pay. Pretty much everyone gets a discount. This is designed to get super rich families to pay much more. 2) About half of student debt is incurred from graduate school, and those students are much more capable of handling that load (with some notable exceptions). 3) As was said here, the average debt upon graduation from private universities is $31K, which is very reasonable for most people. That comes out to a little of $7K/year of education. Can you just imagine living out on your own for $7/year, without gaining a degree? That seems like a steal. The problematic debt is usually held by those who don’t complete their degree, or who attend for-profit institutions. If there’s legislative action that should be done, it should be in those arenas.

Spooky23 6y ago

College became a political whipping boy in the 80s when the student loan rules changed. My dad went to City College in NYC in the late 60s/early 70s for $0. Like most of his fellow students, he was a 1st generation child of immigrants, and that enabled him to pursue a world unknown to the family. His dad was a proprietor of a bar; his uncle an able seaman on a tugboat, and other uncles NYC Firemen and Sanitation workers respectively. Today in the name of equality we have resorts. Students get "deals" from colleges, etc, but those deals have strings and often push out students. I graduated from a SUNY college in 1999; every single one of my friends who went to private schools like Clarkson, RPI, Carnegie Mellon, etc ended up with $80-100k in crushing debt. I owed less than $10k.

Ericson2314 6y ago
> City College in NYC in the late 60s/early 70s for $0 Ah, the peak of an era. Check out "Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics" if you haven't, and cry some.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

whyenot 6y ago

California's CSU system has more than half a million undergraduate students. Tuition and fees are still not much more than $8,000 a year. You can still get a very good education for not a lot of money. Just a comparison: San Jose State University (public) and Santa Clara University (private) are less than ten miles from each other. Tuition at SJSU is $7,852 (+ fees). Tuition at SCU is $53,634. Yes, SCU has labs with all the latest equipment. A biology field class at SCU may go to Yellowstone, or Hawaii on a field trip while a similar course t SJSU would only go to the Sierras, but what you are going to learn is basically the same stuff, the level of interaction with faculty will be the same, opportunities for doing research as an undergraduate are about the same. There is no reason to spend huge sums of money to get a good education!

lost953 6y ago
The SCU biology class is going to go to Monterey, the SJSU is going to go nowhere. SCU doesn't have the latest equipment in its labs, but it does have decent labs, SJSU is probably similar. What you are paying for is lifestyle, access, connections, and a system to prevent people from falling through the cracks. Most people graduate in 4 years at SCU, not as true at SJSU. After 10 years SCU graduates are some of the highest paid in the country, not so much for SJSU. Plus the sticker price isn't everything SCU has tons of aid although its probably still 3 to 4 times more expensive (for average people).
kart23 6y ago
And SJSU in-state tuition cost $900 in the year 1990. What justifies this increase?

shadowgovt 6y ago

This explanation doesn't really explain why both private and public university tuitions have been rising without bound.

tzs 6y ago
I've not been able to find much tuition data going back a long time online, but for the little I could find (Stanford going back something like 110 years, and one public school whose name I don't recall), it has almost always been raising a bit faster than inflation. When I graphed the data over time, there was no place that stood out as being a place after which tuition increases were consistently worse than what they had been before. There would be a couple years or so here or there where it rose more rapidly during those years, and a couple years here or there where it did not rise as rapidly as in prior years, but mostly its been pretty steady. Most articles I've seen where someone says the high cost of college is because of change X appear only look at the growth since X and just assume that X was the cause. So if tuition goes up 4% a year for 10 years, then some change is made, and it goes up 4% a year for the next 10 years, you'll see articles blaming the previous 10 years of 4% annual rise on X.

michaelchisari 6y ago

What also works against the idea of subsidies being the culprit is that it's not just universities that have seen this cost inflation. The community college in the town I grew up in was $17 a credit hour in 1997. Adjusted for inflation, that's $26.17 a credit hour. A 4 credit hour class would cost $104.68. That's something many working people could cover to take a class here and there to further themselves or their job prospects. There were subsidies for those who couldn't afford that as well. That same community college today? $132 a credit hour. That's a 500% increase over inflation. This isn't being talked about because university costs affect middle and upper-middle class people more, so pundits and the media are going to be more affected. But this gross inflation has definitely pushed working class and poor people out of the classroom and that's a terrible thing for society at large.

seibelj 6y ago
I don’t understand your logic. People take out loans all the time to get community college degrees. Those loans are federally backed. So the increase in credit would indeed inflate community college costs.
- jsemrau 6y ago
  Judging from a European perspective, I think society as a whole is better off if more people have access to affordable education and don't need to take out a loan to take classes.
  - chris_va 6y ago
    I think most Americans (at least on HN) would agree with you. Of course, there are complications. In Europe, the effective tax rate is generally much higher, and the fraction of population that is university aged is generally lower. My understanding is that a non-trivial fraction of the population also goes into a trade school (?), which the US does not have in the same way. In the US, lower taxes+loan is sometimes seen as more equitable (i.e. only those that use something pay for it) than a population wide tax. It is quite the risk you force onto someone young, though. If you could drop your tax rate by 50%, but had to pay back $80-100k for college, would you take it? Obviously that tax goes to pay for many other things besides education, but the US-average mentality generally leans towards individual choice over broad social programs (with various political parties widely disagreeing).

baconandeggs 6y ago

> the price has gone up because students are responsible for more of the cost. That is not how prices work, the prices can't go up if the only buyers have no money. The price went up because they got access to credit. To government mandated credit.

ldiracdelta 6y ago
Exact same mechanism as lowering the interest rate on housing mortgages. The buyer says "I am willing to pay $2000/month", and the interest rate just changes how much of that payment is principle vs interest.
apta 6y ago
Whenever credit is introduced, prices go up. No wonder why lending money with interest is prohibited in the major religions.
fastaguy88 6y ago
I suppose this seems to make sense if you believe that higher education costs are a true market that has found some kind of equilibrium. But it's not. College graduate parents are going to try very hard to send their kids to college, and today, the vast majority of students at 4 year colleges come from families with college graduate parents. When tuitions were low, this did not require much sacrifice for those parents. When prices went up, those parents continued to send their kids to college, making greater sacrifices, but often without taking out a loan (at least for public universities). Today, 42% of undergraduates at public universities have no debt.[0] No doubt loans also had an effect -- among other things, they made it easier for state politicians to reduce support for public universities. But since 40% of students at public universities have no debt, and costs increased more than 5 fold, it is hard to argue that loans were the major factor driving up the cost. To support the loan driving argument, it would be useful to see relationship between the fraction of students with loans and college costs. Simply saying that costs went up when loans became more available ignores many other changes in education finance. [0] https://www.aplu.org/projects-and-initiatives/college-costs-tuition-and-financial-aid/publicuvalues/student-debt.html https://www.aplu.org/projects-and-initiatives/college-costs-...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

OnlyOneCannolo 6y ago

Another problem is how the money is allocated. State schools' budgets used to be mostly general funds, but now they're overwhelmingly non-general. Even if they're getting the same amount of money, that money is already earmarked. If it doesn't cover all their expenses, they need to figure out how to monetize their assets to make up the difference. Universities have gotten much better at finance out of necessity.

joe_the_user 6y ago

I'm not sure how your argument actually contradicts the argument of the article. State support for public universities declined while state issued loans to students increased. Both would seem to facilitate higher priced private universities and work together - if you just have student loans, student might still prefer lower priced public universities. If you just defund public universities without the massive expansion of student loans, many student might be not be able to attend university. Also, I get the figure of inflation-adjust college education cost doubling over thirty years. You can spin that as "only slightly beating the cost of living" but education is a major part of society's expenditure of resources and so such a doubling, over a longish time is still majorly important.

jpeloquin 6y ago

To support and elaborate on the parent comment: College tuition has increased faster than inflation, but this is not unique among service industries [1] [2]. The causes include [2]: 1. "Cost disease." Labor productivity has not increased in higher education, but has increased in industries that produce physical products, so costs have risen in general. Because educator productivity is flat, yet costs are increasing, the price of college increases faster than average. 2. Higher education needs highly educated workers. The wage gap between workers with and without a degree has grown over time [3], so the price of college grows faster than average. There may be a feedback loop here. 3. Technology adds cost to higher education because it has to be acquired, supported, and taught, without (yet) any commensurate increase in educator productivity. So the price rises. Although tuition inevitably rises in /price/, it could still be /affordable/. It is less affordable now in the US than it used to be mainly because wages have not kept pace with GDP and, as the parent comment mentioned, state support for public colleges has decreased. Note that [2] is a higher education industry publication, so it may have some bias. In particular its defense of the relative growth in college administrative staff compared to the growth of enrollment seems shaky. But the above points appear valid. [1] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century/ [2] http://www.ntrp16.org/sites/default/files/Resources/ACE-%20The%20Anatomy%20of%20College%20Tuition.pdf http://www.ntrp16.org/sites/default/files/Resources/ACE-%20T... [3] https://www.bls.gov/charts/usual-weekly-earnings/usual-weekly-earnings-over-time-by-education.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/usual-weekly-earnings/usual-weekl...

eanzenberg 6y ago

A big reason college costs have increased is due to students who pay in full are subsidizing students who cannot, or get a completely free ride.

deleted 6y ago

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jariel 6y ago

The relative share of people attending college from 1970-2020 has increased dramatically. So spending per-student may be down, but spending overall certainly is not. ... is one of many complicating factors. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...

apsec112 6y ago

Calculating state support as a percentage of total cost is misleading, since universities can make "total cost" be whatever they please. California spends 34% more on higher education than it did in 1975, adjusted both for inflation and for state population growth. If a university wants their budget to double, and the state won't double their funding, then the remainder will have to come from tuition. But that's not the state's fault, it's the universities' fault for spending more. (Sources: https://lao.ca.gov/analysis/1975/01_transmittal_1975.pdf https://lao.ca.gov/analysis/1975/01_transmittal_1975.pdf http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2019-20/pdf/Enacted/BudgetSummary/FullBudgetSummary.pdf http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2019-20/pdf/Enacted/BudgetSummary/... https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_California)

secabeen 6y ago
34% is a decent number, but that includes both Community Colleges, Cal State Schools and UC, all of which have opened additional locations in the last 45 years, as more and more jobs in the state require a college education. If you want to accuse the universities of spending more, do you have data to back up that assertion that they are spending significantly more on a real, per-student basis?

brightball 6y ago

Is it though? Costs can’t rise if people can’t pay them. With student loans, no matter what people can pay them...so they keep rising. We have high demand, limited supply and no sensitivity to price to drive down demand. It’s only now that the costs have become so high that the payback cost can’t be ignored that we are seeing a societal shift questioning the value of college for the price. And even then, people still choose to pay the price.