The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much
8th April 2015
BLUF: Taxpayer subsidies of tuition and loans has increased demand and so increased costs to match.
ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after.
This is the story college administrators like to tell when they’re asked to explain why, over the past 35 years, college tuition at public universities has nearly quadrupled, to $9,139 in 2014 dollars. It is a fairy tale in the worst sense, in that it is not merely false, but rather almost the inverse of the truth.
April 9th, 2015 at 09:22
If a university charges $X, then subsidies of some percentage of X will appear and the gov’t will back loans to make up the difference.
If the university charges $2X, then the subsidies double and so do the loans.
Healthcare – If a doctor charges X, the gov’t pays some percentage of X. So the doctor charges more than X so that the amount collected is at least sufficient to show a profit.
Cause of skyrocketing prices? Government.
Competition reduces prices and improves quality. Subsidizing costs, setting manditory structures, establishing a deep bureaucracy to dispense funds, and setting quotas will increase the cost. Every. Single. Time.
April 26th, 2015 at 15:42
Don’t forget all the administrative staff that have been hired to monitor all the government regulations that the universities must follow such as “diversity.” When you have more administrators than actual teachers, costs are going to go up without any increase in anything actually useful to students. The Crust takes care of its own.