by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-11-10 19:39:53+00:00
> Theres simply no reason why college is as expensive as it is.

There is a perfect reason, though I might sympathize if you say there is no excuse. If one wanted to engineer some incredible Rube Goldberg machine to cause prices to spiral out of control beyond all lunacy, one could hardly do better than what we have in the United States right now.

Young people were told that without college/university they were doomed to a life of destitution and misery. They were hounded by teachers, guidance counselors, pundits, politicians, advice columnists, celebrities, journalists, you name it. The propaganda machine was relentless, gigantic, and hilariously un-self-aware. Then grants were minimized and replaced with student loans (unforgivable in bankruptcy, thanks Biden!).

This sets the stage. College administrators knew that everyone could now attend, and that they were guaranteed loans to pay for it, that they were young and foolish and didn't see debt as a millstone around their necks during mandatory swim time, and that they were fickle, fashion-seeking, and indifferent to lack of academic rigor. These universities needed to expand capacity to capture all those loan dollars, they were competing with other universities, and they knew their market. They built resort spa dorms... no longer were these places the dormitories of old, where you packed 6 freshman into a broom closet and made them sleep on floors. They build gorgeous grounds that looks like royal gardens. Expensive new labs and facilities and lecture halls. Why not? The kids would be paying for it (all their lives, thanks to the omnipotently powerful force of compount interest).

The kids, on the other hand, barely more than children, didn't choose the best value schools. They chose the prettiest... it's not as if they couldn't afford them. For most people, the fanciest product seems like the highest quality, and who would choose low quality? Nor could universities be the sanity limit here even if they wanted to. If they refused to build out their own little Versailles, they'd just see enrollment drop. And their costs were going up quite a bit too, when you double the size of the institution, you need more than double the staff. When the buildings are fancier than yesteryear, full of computer labs and high tech, you need more than just janitors. Entire bureaucracies were spun up just to deal with it all.

But a curious thing happened, with every university and college competing for those dollars, none really got ahead near as much as they wanted to or expected to. So they just doubled down, and tried to make their schools more attractive to prospective students. The state school in my city still strives to reach an enrollment of 50,000 last I heard (this would put it more than double its late 1980s enrollment, I think).

In summary, we have a gigantic slush fund of money that means no one has to be price-conscious, perverse incentives prodding those who administrate to jack their own expenses/costs to astronomical levels, and a society that still insists and even demands that everyone be college-bound despite the ambiguous evidence that it is good-value. Until one (or ideally all) of those things changes, there's no way for college to be any less expensive than it is.