Are professors that much smarter? Are there that many more books in the library? Have classrooms better acoustics? Or are seats more comfortable with larger tablet arms? Does the student union building host more exciting activities? Or perchance the pool water has a more balanced pH? Maybe saunas are hotter and soft drinks colder? Perhaps T.A.s are more brilliant and administrators more caring? Or do custodians clean more diligently each evening?
By now you’ve examined my University of Washington tuition statement for winter quarter – $165 for 18 credits, so a full year of college at Washington’s most expensive public university cost $495. My ten week summer job selling Popsicles paid $1,066, allowing me to fully cover tuition plus put a fair dent into room and board charges.
But you’ve no doubt realized it’s measured in 1972 dollars. Fair enough, the accumulated inflation rate over the past 52 years measures 522%, so 2024 U.W. tuition should equate to $1,240 per quarter or $3,720 per year. Instead, it’s $12,973 annually for Washington residents – 350% higher than inflation suggests. Let’s not even look at the stick-it-to-out-of-state rate of $43,209 per annum. How many ten week summer jobs support those kinds of wages?
So, why is college so expensive? Every time a federal and state grant or loan program further subsidizes student funding, colleges and universities raise tuition rates. That in turn results in the need for larger government grants of financial aid, which encourages institutions to boost rates even higher. The cycle continues with each new attempt to make college more affordable. This is the oxymoronic nature of government support for students – it only leads to increasingly overpriced tuition rates.
Why’s that? The more you subsidize buyers (students) to purchase a service (education), the more opportunity suppliers (colleges) discover to elevate prices. And it wouldn’t make a dime’s worth of difference if every student loan was a grant of free money. That would still drive college administrators to soak up the “free” funds through higher tuition charges.
It is simple economics which even college freshmen can understand . . . if it were ever explained to them. Sadly it won’t be, for the college gravy train is too lucrative a business model to alert anyone of the need to change. As long as the fat cow is there for milking, colleges and universities will get richer, while parents and students sink deeper in debt, with taxpayers footing larger and larger bills.
And when someone suggests, why not just write off the student debt, don’t be fooled. The debt isn’t written off – all that’s changed is who’s going to pay it back. Taxpayers!
So where do all the billions go? According to NYU Professor Scott Galloway’s essay, “Rot” that documents the golden ornaments characterizing university opulence: “From 1976 to 2018, the number of other professionals employed at colleges increased 452%, while full-time faculty grew just 92%.” (No Mercy, No Malice, Feb. 22, 2024).
Add in armies of high-paid administrators in DEI roles, plus academic programs with no measurable outcomes, and you begin to see the fiscal bloat. And don’t forget opulent dining halls, top-notch gyms, lazy rivers, and climbing walls.
One can only hope that the 2020-21 COVID-19 shutdown of campuses provides a road map to check tuition’s steep rise. That year, higher education was exposed as the perfect vehicle for the democratization of opportunity through economies of scale. Hordes of students returned home or stayed safe in dorm rooms with their university education delivered via Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and WebEx.
In my day, 600 students were crowded into Kane Hall for introductory class lectures. Why not 6,000 on an interactive video network? And surely the T.A.s that did a crummy job with 30 undergrads could do an equally second-rate job with ten times that number.
Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist, author, and media commentator recently put his money where his often loud mouth is. Formed in 2024, Peterson Academy is an online educational forum staffed with professors from top-tier colleges and universities who record lectures before live audiences. Peterson claims to have recruited some of the world’s best professors with proven abilities for disciplined and inspirational instruction. The $499 tuition price and no college campus have already attracted 30,000 students. The Academy courses are not yet accredited, but this and other online systems of learning should prove viable alternatives for less expensive instruction.
The answers to curb the high cost of a college education are available – there just needs to be a willingness to think outside the classroom. Plus, the courage to put students first and billion-dollar college endowments second.
4 replies on “Why is college so expensive?”
Excellent analysis, Bill. On top of this, many colleges have become indoctrination camps for leftist theories and dogma (recall the anti-Jew mobs this year) and sources of pseudo degrees in programs with names like “women’s studies.” Grads find these degrees have limited value in the real world and job market.
Colleges and universities began as great centers of learning in the middle ages. Over the past 50 years they’ve degenerated into the indoctrination camps of which you speak. A sad commentary on the Greek ideal of open inquiry they once prided themselves on becoming.
The great recession, 2009, Cal Berkley. A PBS show stated the state paid 70+% of the bills. As California was going broke in 2009
that was reduced to 13%. That may have been the turning point for greedy endowments.
Thanks Robin!