If your great grandparents only had to pay a few quarters for College turn why does it cost us hundreds upon thousands?
Why is college so expensive?
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If your great grandparents only had to pay a few quarters for College turn why does it cost us hundreds upon thousands?
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Supply and Demand… and exploitation
My great grandparents were college age roughly around the 1850s. At the time only white males of high status went to such things. Primary school was standard and around the age 14 or so they stopped going to school. This was also around the time states mandated how much schooling a child needed and honestly before then, entire families would never attend school. They would learn social school at home and work to live like their parents taught them how.
Since you brought money into it. It was about $100-$200 per year at the time which was a ghastly amount of money to even see in one location, equivalent to someone tossing a stack of $4000 on a table.
Fuck you that’s why
I’m 10,000 in debt for one semester
Greed of the education system. Many schools have endowments totaling BILLIONS and none pay taxes on all those buildings and land. Circle jerk for big alumni donors.
Where is all this money going? 🤔
Goods and services are worth whatever people are willing to pay for them.
No labor or supply chains go into the production of a pearl. Its just something a clam does to isolate irritations. But people are willing to pay a mint for it because its rare and shiny.
Administrative bloat
Student loans. Once those became a big thing, it was guaranteed funds, basically, for universities. They could charge whatever they wanted bc the government would give 17 year old children unsecured loans for tens of thousands of dollars to pay for it.
Money
Ask your great grandparents how the wifi coverage on campus was when they attended college.
And…the federally guaranteed student loan program that gives money risk free (for the lender, because you the tax payer will cover any default) to any student for any degree is the classic definition of inflation (pouring effectively an infinite of money into a system guarantees rapid increases in costs).
Because the Government is willing to grant massive loans to kids who have no idea if they will be able to reasonably pay them off, nor the experience with loans to properly understand what they are getting themselves into.
Government backed loans have allowed Colleges to massively raise prices to prey upon young students, because normally a loan needs to be weighed against its risks, but with these college loans, the Government is backing them, so they inflate the price because they know their money is ultimately backed by the US tax payer, if the student gets a terrible degree and cant pay off their loan, that’s their problem with the government, not the college.
There would be no reason to give a $50,000 loan to a kid fresh out of highschool to go to college for a marketing degree normally, the bank has no idea if the kid will actually finish the school, get the degree and get a job that can cover the loan repayment, but now if the government backs it, fuck it, the money is yours no matter what, just raise the price to get as much government money as possible.
Back when my grandfather went for his degree, most people finished highschool and went straight into the workforce, to go to college required a lot of personal investment, because the banks wouldn’t fund those loans, so the colleges had to keep prices reasonable for people who usually were working alongside schooling to pay for it.
Colleges now are paid resorts you live at while going to classes as your dayjob for the majority of college goers, and that is all by design to justify driving the price as high as they can go.
It’s not if you are smart about it. Community college for 2 years and then state college for the other 2. Better yet, join the military. Private schools and out of state tuition is expensive.
Perhaps a class in economics is in order. It will help you understand a lot about how the world works.
This is a US focused explanation. In other countries, it isn’t.
The government wanted to make sure anyone could go to college. For decades, the wisdom has been that if you don’t go to college, you’ll fail at life. Consider the woman walking with her son, pointing to the garbage man and saying “If you don’t go to college, you’ll end up like him”, not realizing that the garbage man makes more than her husband.
So the government guaranteed loans to everyone. As much money as the tuition costs, basically. And the colleges went “how much?” and the government went “As much as you charge, plus room and board.”
So the colleges went “bet”, and started increasing how much they charged. And kept it up. Each year, raising their tuition. Because each year, the government raised how much it would loan people.
And everyone was happy. The colleges made more money, the government was just loaning the money, the processors were all paid on the margin… everyone was happy.
I mean, the kids were happy too. They got to go to college, and they never saw a bill.
Until they graduated. Imagine Sally took out a $100K loan to get her degree in English Literature and Women’s Studies. These are important subjects. But they don’t lead to a well paying job. So she makes $30K a year, editing a journal of Women’s Studies essays… and the part time work at the coffee shop.
She struggles and pays the amount of money that the student loan people say she owes – $500 a month. She’s paid this amount for 10 years, that’s $60,000. She borrowed $100K, she’s paid $60K, and now she owes… $120K. Because her payment didn’t even cover the accruing interest.
Everyone is happy. Except the people who owe the money, but no one really cares about them.
Lower Standards.
Back when my parents and grandparents were of college age, acceptance into colleges, universities and even trade school was more dependent on skill, ability and aptitude. Now, it’s a matter of whether or not you can secure the financial commitment to attend; which student loans make stupid easy to gain access to – though not necessarily a good financial decision.
Because boomers turned education into a business instead of a right
Student loans, public funding cutbacks, refusal to use donations to enhance the academic rigor, oversized endowments. From postwar to the mid 1980s, college was either free or affordable.
Reagan
IMO, because the government guarantees the loans. So the colleges can charge what they want.
If the government guaranteed car loans, car prices would double overnight.
Because there are no alternatives and they have an unspoken agreement to screw their students
My kids all went to the state college. It wasn’t cheap but it also wasn’t Ivy League crazy expensive. At the end of 4 years, one son had his degree debt free and his best friend who went to Harvard had a bachelor’s degree as well with a mountain of debt.
My eldest got an architecture degree. At graduation, some of the graduates were strutting across the stage with degrees in dance! That carries weight at Juilliard but not at a state college. I don’t know how students are so blind to accumulate tens of thousands in debt to acquire a degree that has almost no chance of getting them a job.
Greed
Because they’ve become a business.
Government doesn’t subsidize college as much as it used to. UC system used to have free tuition for California residents. I think that ended in the late 60s early 70s.
Is it? It was free for me… oh, wait…
Because it used to be there for learning. now colleges spend a shitload of money on amenities to make it more “fun” to be there.
ALSO! The sticker price is not what you pay. Colleges typically soak you for as much as they can. The people paying $80k a year are paying that because they are rich. People middle class are paying more like $30K or $40K a year.
That’s an American greedy money-grab thing. It’s not like that around the world. Way cheaper everywhere else.
It’s free in the state of Georgia.
It’s free if you join the military and earn the GI Bill.
Community college is cheap.
I
Because colleges are businesses and not learning institutions, that’s the bottom line. Why do college football teams make more money than the income from students?. 🤷
Colleges now have Boards of Directors who want to see profit.
The Nixon administration blamed student protests for the American public turning against the Vietnam War. They decided if college cost more then students would have to work more to pay for it. If they were working more they would have less time to protest.
College is a profit-oriented business in the west. Remember when COVID happened and all classes were online and tuition prices remained the same despite all the eliminated overhead. They will try and extract as much cash out of the average student as possible.
The price of everything goes up. If you go to a state college or university it is IAF and you will walk away with a just as good education as a private school and still have cash in your pocket.
My grand parents didn’t even get to go to high school. They lived out in the country and would have had to board with a family in town to go to high school. Their families didn’t have the money for that so their education stopped in 8th grade.
My mother was the first person in her family to graduate high school. She was already a mother when she graduated.
My big sis was the first person my in family to go away to college.
I was the first person in my family to get a graduate degree.
College in the US is overpriced, but the way you phrased your point takes out the real history. Education is far more widely available now than it was in the past.
Government subsidizing via loans + 30 years of brainwash that college was better than trades
Many colleges got huge grants and other payment from the U.S. government in the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s. This was to endorse people going to college to better create and maintain the infrastructure started during the New Deal in the 30’s by FDR. This lead to schools giving free or very inexpensive educations to everyone, even those who might not have been able to go like African Americans and immigrants from South and Central America. That’s why ending that kind of spending was a central part of the gubernatorial campaign of one Ronald Reagan. Once he passed spending cuts in CA to “get rid of undesirables […] those who are there to carry signs and not to study”, what a great dog whistle, measures like that were used all over the Country.
Once college started being paid only through tuition there were two things that kept the costs increasing, easy access to federal loans and a need for schools to appear better and more wealthy to attract wealthy families. Free of total federal funding colleges entered good old Capitalism, where they need to spend more and charge more to keep up their appearance as “elite” and look like the best investment an American can make.
If you are talking about in the US, it’s really complicated but the highlight reel:
– College/university was historically too expensive for the majority of the population to attend until the last 80+ years so only the wealthy and landed gentry could afford it.
– Following WW2, the US Federal and State governments heavily subsidized college tuition through grants given to schools or directly to students to make it more affordable for more people. Men who had served in the military during WW2 were granted free or practically free tuition as well as stipends for books and housing through the GI Bill. This meant more people than ever could afford to go to college. The government did this because during the war, the gov’t realized we had a shortage of citizens trained in STEM fields and we were entering a space race with Russia.
– GIs who went college and got good jobs as part of the post-war boom encouraged their children to go as well. Children of GIs could use their benefits (Boomers) which increased demand for college dramatically with many were coming direct from high school.
– As more people received degrees and we shifted from manufacturing to a service economy, more corporations began requiring degrees for employment.
– As degrees became required for most salaried employment, more and more students attended which place a higher demand on the institutions. In addition too classroom space and faculty, colleges were expected to provide more services like housing and student medical care, as well as social activities which increased the cost of attendance and the budget.
– Cue the 80s and Reganomics. Federal and State governments slashed higher education funding which has not been restored to this day. Without subsidization from the government, schools began looking for alternate revenue streams – corporate partnerships and tuition/fee hikes. This required students to borrow more and more in order to attend, making it more expensive.
TL;DR: Things have changed. Degrees are required for most salaried jobs but the government doesn’t subsidized tuition or fund colleges like they used to it’s expense to the individual. Students expect to live in a small city catered to them due to the price tag and without subsidization from the government, you are paying for it.
Racism and Reagan
because teachers/advisors/principles/the it team/facilities/ all cost money and it’s run like a corporation now where the top corporate people all want big mansions and rich lifestyle.
everybody wants to be rich. somebodies gotta pay for it.
Well, in the US and Canada it is. Many other countries have zero or minimal tuition.
A glut of administrators taking over operations while instruction is relegated to underpaid adjuncts and understaffed full timers.
Because the government made it super simple for students to get large student loans. So the universities all jacked up the tuition. Guess who got left holding the bag ?
Because it’s a business and like all businesses if they keep increasing the price and you keep paying that price they will charge whatever they can get away with
The Obama admin decoupled ability to pay back student loans from being able to get them and also made it irrelevant what kind of degree you got. Now anyone can get essentially infinite student loans for any degree regardless of likelihood of paying it off.
A combination of student loans and the government cutting funding for higher education.
Tuitions have increased at over five times the rate of inflation, largely due to unlimited money from the federal government. If Sally Mae was a bank, it would be shut down for predatory lending. Telling a bunch of 18 to 21-year-olds to take out tens of thousands of dollars of loans on the premise that they’ll somehow be able to pay them back with all the money they’re making is criminal.
States have been cutting their contributions to public universities for about 50 years. That puts more burden on the students and their tuition bills. Students (and their families) are also demanding more services (single occupancy dorm rooms, private bathrooms, air conditioning, private tutors, etc) which drives up other fees like room & board, etc.
We didn’t really “notice” because in the 90s suddenly student loans became limitless and weren’t restricted to a 10 year payback period.
So,to summarize: reduced public funding, increased demand, and a new funding pathway to defer those costs.
Maybe send then to another country?
Corruption… In the last 25 years we’ve seen the legacy enrollment, the pay to play millionaires, getting their way with the world. The disgusting aspect of capitalism catapulting the elites into positions of ruling from the high tower.
Because it’s a grift.
I worked through school to live on my own
my student loan was only $4,500 (1992) today that same education is $30,000-,$40,000
Mind you I could go out to dinner and party all night for less than $100
Inflation I guess
Almost everyone here has it flat out wrong.
In 1995, the average amount of state funding for public institutions constituted roughly 70% of total expenses for institutions. The remaining 30% was about 10% research grants and about 20% tuition dollars. That’s obviously different from specific institution and specific state to specific institution and specific state, but that’s the overall trend.
Now, in 2025, that ratio is about 25% state supported, still about 10% grants, and remaining is 65% tuition. Enrollment hasn’t gone up enough cover the 40%-ish difference. So the only way to cover the costs is increase tuition. The only other option was shut down because running a college/university costs money. It’s going to get worse because enrollment is dropping, so each student has to pay more to cover the breech.
This actually started about 5 years earlier and the Federal Government radically revamped the student loan program to help fill the gap, otherwise schools would have gone under like crazy in under a decade.
Because administrative staffing numbers have exploded, while teachers have not.
The student loan system guarantees anyone can afford almost any price, so there’s no incentive for the schools to keep costs under control.
Money and roping people into the military so they’ll pay for it. My work pays for mine, but I’ve already gotten like 5 emails asking if i want to sell my soul to these assholes.
States used to fund colleges and universities. As Republican ideology infused into the country, funds were gradually removed from education. This meant loans were now required for more students.
As people had to pay more for their education, they started to see themselves not as students of the institution but rather customers who can make demands. As the demands increased, more bureaucracy had to be created to supply the “customers” with what they want.
Decreased funding => increased prices => loans => demands => increased prices
A bloated administration
I think when my husband started college in 1966, the tuition was something around $200 a semester at a big state school. We were married teenagers, struggling to get by so that $200, two or three times a year was a big stretch for us … but we always managed to find the money to get him through school … with no loans. I feel so bad for students these days where the only option is to borrow, borrow, borrow … and then end up with debt that hangs over them for decades. It really puts a strain on the rest of their lives … they have less money for a house, less money to raise a family, less disposable income.
Because we can’t do anything about it
Because most of it is paid for by federal loans, the government will pay it, and then hand the student the bill. Universities dont care because they got paid.
The simple fix would be for colleges to be responsible for their own loans, and keep the government out. They’d cut worthless degrees and drop prices fast, since they would be the ones responsible for getting a return on their investment.
The government started passing out money willy nilly with no credit checks or collateral to go to college,
Colleges then said, “WOW FREE MONEY” and jacked up the prices.
This is what happens when the government meddles in the free market.
Federal government has guaranteed loans for students. So colleges can charge whatever they want and they know students will take a federal loan to cover the full amount.
Well not everywhere only America, in Europe public universities are cheap as they can be 0-1000€ per semester in most Europe.
Because you didn’t join the military, excel in sports, or excel in academics. There are lots of avenues for free education in America they just all require effort to obtain. If you aren’t willing, or aren’t capable, of putting in that work then you have to pay.
They want you in debt for life
Universities are businesses that employ thousands of people. Those people want to get paid a fair wage in order to live. That money only partially comes from tuition fees. If it were not for State and Federal funding to those schools … a college tuition would cost even more!
Average annual tuition for an in state college is $11,610.
But if you want a lazy river, world class athletic facilities, ‘free’ first run movie theater, etc. It’s going to cost you…
Trump would say it’s because of Biden Obama. Not a trump fan
Well, do all colleges cost hundreds of thousands? What are you wanting with your education (lots of resources, libraries, professors, assistants, people to help with housing, career skills, tutoring) do you want to live there – and have lots to do, sports, activities, places to go – be walkable and the center of town? Those things all cost money
Now of course, you could go to community college where it’s much cheaper (many states it’s free) or start there and go to University after 2 years, go to one close to home and commute (save on that housing) Pick a smaller or cheaper option
I’m not saying college should be expensive, but I think we’ve contributed to the inflated costs by everything we demand in addition to an education. We want an experience.
Federally guaranteed loans is the short answer.
Federally guaranteed student loans.
Once the money spigot was turned on, colleges had no reason to keep tuition cheap.
because it’s a business now to get people in debt.
I don’t get it. In Europe is free…
The higher education act signed by Lyndon Johnson ruined it. It sent the message that everyone needs to go to college and that the gov would allow for loans to be taken out to attend. There used to be many ways to make a living and this ruined it because it made the same jobs start requiring college. Ruined the value of a degree all while making it more expensive.
The government is the reason college is expensive. It needs to gtfo and things would be normal
Thanks to the DOE student loans were guaranteed colleges amped up the prices
Because people are willing to pay it
Greed
Because staff and faculty with the same degrees you are striving for demand 6 figure incomes because it’s what society over time has told us to do. And student loans.
Fafsa. Guaranteed money for every prospective student, no matter their credit history or major’s earning prospects.
When demand (students with money) exceeds supply (finite seats at worthwhile colleges) prices rise.
Loan interest = free money for the lenders. Plus, with tons of debt, you’ll be forced to do whatever job necessary to pay the bills.
If post-secondary education isn’t going to help you get a job in your field, I’m in favour of skipping it. You’ll still end up working some regular job but you won’t have six figures of debt to pay off.
A good chunk of it is shifting state resources. States used to heavily subsidize college education. State’s have had significant increases in the cost of things like healthcare and prisons, which have moved resource away from funding state colleges.
Beyond that, we’ve gotten a lot richer as a nation since my Boomer parents went to college for basically free, and with that student expectations have changed a lot. I was on campus at my flagship state school between roughly 2000 and 2010 for undergrad, a research job, and then grad school. It was incredible how many new dorms, gyms, and other facilities were built in that period to improve quality of life from the crappy 1960s dorms and other buildings that I had lived in and used when I started.
College is expensive because the government decided that students, rather than the community, should bear the cost of education. Previously the idea was that education was a public good and an informed electorate was necessary to preserve democracy. When we gave up on democracy in the 80s, we decided having a permanent, continually increasing, more easily exploitable underclass was more important.
Governments all around the world used to give large grants to universities for research and this made it so that universities were essentially just places where technology developed and a hand full of students could attend to check it out. Around the late 60s early 70s governments began to realize that educated people earn more money and pay more taxes and created tax structures and grants around expanding universities to make it so that anyone who wants to go can go. The “Ivy League” however did not play a long and mostly kept their student count consistent. Instead they leveraged their reputation so they could charge outlandish fees to enroll.
Around the 80s universities lost a lot of government funding and heavily switched up their business model to maximize profits from each student. Capital programs like student housing, new services, fees, parking passes, etc. were all ways of getting more out of each student. By the time we get to modern times universities are always trying to keep the lights on while trying to balance appropriate levels of milking with not scaring away too many students. A single mega theater of psychology students will help fund less popular programs like philosophy and women’s studies. Both pay the same fees but don’t get the same quality.
Thank Reagan. College in CA used to be free.
Everything went downhill from there.
College costs have risen due to increased administrative expenses, reduced government funding, and the addition of amenities. Schools also know students can take loans, which may encourage higher tuition. It’s a combination of inflation and changes in funding that’s driven up the price.
The cold war.
The US government feared that the USSR would outpace the US in science/military tech. So they started a federal program to make sure smart kids could go to college, even if they were poor.
That eventually was expanded so that everyone could get student loans to study just about anything.
For a long time, the conventional wisdom was that every kid should go to college. It was the only way to live a good life. Universities could charge basically any amount, and students who understood nothing would agree to it. And the government would cover it.
So tuition went up. Loans skyrocketed too.
IBR/IDR and similar meant that kids were even assured by the Federal government that they could go and study anything, and regardless of how much they earned after college, they could afford their payments.
> So I can rack up $260k in student loans and the payment will never be more than 15% of my disposable income?
And the federal government said yes.
They also have programs for things like military service and public service. So kids believed they could just ‘Work for 10 years at a non-profit and the debt is forgiven’.
Who cares if they forgive $10k or $200k? You just work for 10 years and it’s done.
So colleges kept raising tuition and also, making the college experience more appealing, while the government paid the bills and pinky promised these 17 year old kids it would be fine.
Because they became businesses instead of learning institutions. Just like everything else lately stage capitalism ruins.