The dubious administrators are a symptom, not a cause. The root cause is guaranteed loan money. About a decade ago, I remember seeing a study posted here that s

The dubious administrators are a symptom, not a cause. The root cause is guaranteed loan money. About a decade ago, I remember seeing a study posted here that said that for every dollar of increased guaranteed loans, tuition went up 71 cents. There’s just no incentive for a university to charge much less than the maximum amount that the student can borrow. The first step to addressing the college affordability crisis is to get the government out of student loans to attend private universities and colleges. If private lenders want to step in, that’s fine, but then they have to do an actual actuarial process to determine which students will be capable of repaying. Once the government is only involved in public education, they can start working on cost cutting, but that too has to start with cutting back on loans, because those just make tuition go up. I get that guaranteed loans come from a place of wanting to make education more accessible and not just a part of the entrenched privilege of the wealthy, but guaranteed loans are one of those zombie policies that makes the situation worse rather than accomplishing its goal.