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With how expensive college is, and the fact that kids can borrow money from the government to pay for it, how is it possible for them to go broke?

• kansface 11y ago
  The interest on their endowments does not exceed their operating expenses. They literally live on tuition; raising tuition is often counterproductive as students without aid will choose cheaper schools since prestige doesn't really come into play. Similarly, lowering tuition puts a bigger burden on the school - professors don't have grad students to abuse.
• ghaff 11y ago
  Because they're expensive to run as they're set up today (large administration, tenured faculty--although there's less of that than there was, fancy physical plant). Small liberal arts colleges don't typically have especially large endowments. They don't have access to a lot of the government dollars that large research universities do. And, expensive as they are, they're still constrained in how much they can charge and enrollments are trending downward because they are expensive and the degree isn't necessarily worth a whole lot. (In the case of Sweet Briar specifically and a variety of other schools that are at or over the edge, they're also the victim of changing preferences or demographics: all-women colleges in Sweet Briar's case and many religious schools in the case of a college in my town.)