Paying tuition doesn't buy an education, it gives the student an opportunity to become educated. You're not buying an item like a laptop with specs, you're buy

Paying tuition doesn't buy an education, it gives the student an opportunity to become educated. You're not buying an item like a laptop with specs, you're buying admission to participate. The challenge is that many people bring exactly this consumerist attitude to tuition, which then ruins the signalling capacity of the price. "If it's expensive, it must be good." That pushes up demand for enrollment and increases the selectivity and reputation of the university in US News, etc. The university therefore has an incentive to keep tuition high. Unfortunately, then students and parents think, "I'm paying so much for this degree, I should (get A's/not flunk out/...)" [1] Professors who grade rigorously are evaluated harshly; since most instructors aren't tenured, there's no incentive for them to make classes challenging. Then many employers use the earned degree as a crude signal of diligence, since what was actually learned is likely irrelevant to the job at hand. Finally, most families send only a handful of children to college, and there's a significant lag between when graduates and the evaluation of the "success" of the degree. There's no way tuition can accurately price the variation in outcomes with all these inefficiencies. [1] http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/ http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/