by ModernMech | 2025-10-03 17:56:42+00:00
> There’s still the reality of college tuition grossly outstripping inflation and COLA, even accounting for the prior government subsidies on tuition older generations enjoyed.

I talked about this a little in my reply to your comment's sibling, but I'll say more here. Yes this is a reality, but it's also vastly more complicated than that because the cost one actually pays to attend an institution can vary between sticker price and them actually being paid to attend (through tuition remission and stipends). There are still free community college, elite institutions offer free tuition to low income students, there are merit programs at state colleges that are free, you can get into PhD programs without having to pay tuition...

But yes, we can broadly say college is getting more expensive to attend. But it's also true that colleges are expected to teach more. 50 years ago there were hardly any Computer Science departments. Today, every school has a CS program, and now they are starting to have AI programs. Schools that started serving small towns have now grown to eclipse the size of those towns, becoming cities of their own. This kind of growth is nonlinear -- once you reach a certain size the security office becomes a police department, the nurse's office becomes a full health clinic, the cafeteria becomes a food distribution network, the IT department becomes an ISP. Tuition at these schools is less about credits for classes and more like a membership fee for a private city.

But then there's the question of ROI. The ROI for attending college is twofold:

1) education. For some reason, this is never really included when people talk about ROI of college because maybe it's implicit, or maybe it's not actually part of what they value, but that is the whole point.

2) the network. Even if you don't value the education per se, the network is probably more economically valuable to you. But also it's socially valuable, as you'll meet a lot of friends and lovers in college. As they say the real value was the friends made along the way.

That brings me to the value of the credential. It's true, for most of my life at least, this has been the selling point of attending college: you go to college to earn more money. But the problem with this selling point is it's self-defeating -- the only reason the credential was ever valuable in the first place was because corporations were willing to pay more for degree holders if it absolved them of having to train them. But of course as it became normalized to hold a degree, they now simply expect it as a given, and won't pay more for it. So the value of the credential has dwindled, and maybe that makes going to college less appealing to the middle class given the tuition. I feel that, which is why they should have more affordable options. I don't think the value of the credential is coming back.

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Anyway I've talked a lot about problems, and I don't have any solutions. But I think the pathway forward is to stop treating every school the same in these discussions. Some schools are mini cities and should be treated differently from a school that's a couple departments and a handful of students and faculty. To a large extent, small schools are just existing in a marketplace that's set by larger institutions.

They also have difficulty operating as nonprofits in a capitalist system, where the product they deliver (education) is regarded has not being a return for what they pay. It's very frustrating delivering a quality education to someone, for them to turn around and say "Yeah, but corporations won't pay me more, so you haven't done anything for me".

What they're really saying is "it wasn't worth it" and I feel that, education should be cheaper and accessible to anyone. To that end, I think if we want to go back to the tuition of the 80s we should start by going back to a 46% corporate tax rate. Maybe that means fewer people are able to pay that sticker price. But in a world where the rich pay $100k for a car and $150K for a country club dues, I don't see a $70k tuition bill at Stanford coming down anytime soon.