RUMOR - Biden to announce cancellation of student debt

[Dill]

(08-24-2022, 08:30 AM)pally Wrote: The current college loan program has made attending college more expensive.  Large Loans are easy to get and as long as students can get them, costs will continue to rise.  Just like with medical care,home ownership, shoot, even with new cars these days, we focus too much on how to pay not how to control the actual price of the product.

The cost of college for many years has far outpaced the rate of inflation in part, because students had easy access to loans. Universities, gloss over the realities of the actual costs of these loans when talking about them to students and parent because they only care about getting their money. So many families have gotten in too deep because they didn’t understand the real cost of the loans or the real world salary implications of their major.  There are far too many stories about people who have spent decades paying back the principle of their loans only to still owe decades of payments due to compounding interest.  

Pally, I usually agree with you, but not this time, at least with your assessment of what is driving college costs higher.

People often view universities as "businesses" which simply respond to market signals. That's not quite true, especially for public universities.

The most direct driver of tuition rise, especially in public universities, is their steady defunding. 

E.g., in most states, public universities cannot decide their own tuition rates, like corporations charging whatever the market will bear. Rather, state legislatures do that, and also determine their budgets. Since the 1980s, there has been a concerted effort on the part of the American right to make universities more and more market dependent, in part by eroding tenure and academic freedom--thus undermining an institutional source of "leftism." From the 60s onward, Republicans began defunding universities and pushing business "alliances" to make up for the lost income, and to make their research programs more responsive to business needs and ideology.

There are other drivers as well, to the degree that universities, while not businesses, have become more and more like them, competing for students with brand new dorms with student "suites" and exercise gyms. Also, Administrations have become more top heavy, in some cases to the point that administrators outnumber faculty by 2-1.  But first and foremost is the public defunding.