> What you are ignoring is that government is more involved in colleges in these other countries and they manage to keep it under control. Again, how is the US

> What you are ignoring is that government is more involved in colleges in these other countries and they manage to keep it under control. Again, how is the US screwing up whereas everyone else has it working properly? You haven't actually addressed this. With college in the US, the specific mechanism seems to be a combination of (a) colleges that have an incentive to raise tuition as high as people will pay, (b) people who consider a college degree important enough that they'll pay as much as they can afford, and (c) government action that greatly increases people's ability to pay, either via subsidies or by expanding the availability of student loan debt. Compare this to the public K-12 school system, which doesn't have the same split between a seller and a cost-insensitive, subsidized buyer in its funding structure. (This is similar, I believe, to the way college is funded in a lot of other countries.) The cost per pupil in public K-12 school is also rising faster than inflation, but at a much slower rate than higher education. Same country, different funding structures, different results.