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It's ridiculous to try pin down one thing as the reason that tuition is going up. However, it is just as ridiculous to completely dismiss financing (both publi
by carsongross 15y ago
It's ridiculous to try pin down one thing as the reason that tuition is going up. However, it is just as ridiculous to completely dismiss financing (both public and private) as a primary driver of tuition costs: always and everywhere we see a bubble (and prices increasing at 5x GDP for decades is a bubble) we also see debt-based financing.
Sometimes this is due to a predatory private sector, sometimes it is due to a benighted and nominally-well intentioned public sector. Typically it involves both, with baser true motives in the public sector. Why let either of them off the hook? Just to remain comfortably ensconced in our ideological womb?
And NB: the author works as a professor at a public university, so Upton Sinclair's dictum is in play.
- _delirium 15y agoI agree financing can be a factor, and is probably the driving one for private universities. But the fact that tuition at public universities has been increasing at a rate very close to the rate at which state funding has been decreasing is at least pretty suggestive that it's a compensatory increase--- lower per-student state funding being replaced almost $1-for-$1 by higher per-student fees. For example, the UC system has had its per-student funding over the past 20 years cut by a little over $10k, and has raised per-student tuition by just about the same amount.