It only makes sense if you believe education is just like any other commodity whose price should be driven by market forces. Should government have any say in whether its citizenry gets educated? Is there a public interest in it?
I can’t think of an easier way for e.g. China to win the 21st century. American undergrad enrollment is already down. As the world gets more technical, that is not a good sign.
When an entire generation of Americans are priced out of higher education, who is going to develop the technologies of tomorrow? Should we assume foreign students will always want to come to our schools and stay to work in our companies? It’s not sustainable.
The rise in prices has largely been driven by schools going on real estate binges and bloating administrations.
Right before I graduated, my school decided to build a new football stadium, because they decided using the city's stadium wasn't attractive enough for students. They promised tuition wouldn't be used to pay for it, and it wasn't. We just got something like $500 added to student "fees" instead.
I have no sympathy for universities and colleges in the US, only for the students who were duped into thinking they didn't have another choice.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter if the cause is administrative bloat, government-backed student loans that can’t be defaulted on, or space aliens. What is not debatable is that higher education is necessary in an advanced economy, and starving the job market of highly skilled workers is a fast track to companies shifting to other places where they are more abundant.
Either the US will figure it out like every other developed nation has seemed to do, or there will be grave geopolitical consequences. Whether the US political/economic machine can figure it out is a question that only time can answer.
When I went to school ages ago when it was reasonably priced, they did a breakdown of the tuition. Half of it was stupid bullshit the student government voted on over the years.
> Should government have any say in whether its citizenry gets educated? Is there a public interest in it?
That's a very dangerous road.
Governments are not some benevolent creature which always acts in the best interests of the People. As a practical matter, governments are usually incompetent and corrupt (usually in that order), and try to get the masses to further the interests of the politicians, the bureaucrats and the donor class.
I want an educated populace. For that reason, I want government as far away from it as possible.
Strangely, almost all other advanced economies have been able to provide affordable education for their citizenry without it devolving into Nineteen Eighty Four. I wonder what makes the US government so uniquely malevolent.
I can’t think of an easier way for e.g. China to win the 21st century. American undergrad enrollment is already down. As the world gets more technical, that is not a good sign.
When an entire generation of Americans are priced out of higher education, who is going to develop the technologies of tomorrow? Should we assume foreign students will always want to come to our schools and stay to work in our companies? It’s not sustainable.