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Comment by acchow | Hacker News Reader

No, college tuition will rise with middle-class incomes.

This is a cultural phenomenon. We're "supposed" to get our children the best education we can possibly afford, otherwise we are bad parents. Since colleges don't have price discrimination, this essentially means tuition is set at the absolute maximum that the middle class can afford - squeeze every penny out of them. This is why aid won't reduce the burden of tuition on the middle class (tuition will just rise to meet the aid amount). It's also why tax breaks won't help the middle class either (same idea), although the tax breaks can help those above the middle class (since they have a higher tax rate, and the tuition rises to match exactly the effective aid for the middle class).

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Or rather it will rise with availability of debt. Tuition is not paid cash and incomes have been barely going up by a couple of percent per year

Ah, sorry. You're right. Income is a bad proxy for the real source of the funding and availability of debt is far more precise.

College tuition has been going up much faster than incomes. When I went, the only people I knew getting student loans were those getting professional degrees: medical doctors and lawyers.

Tuition used to be very low. When we adopted a culture of "college is everything" that's when tuitions rose rapidly to meet what could be maximally extracted from the middle class. We've now reached that point so they will rise slowly now - only to meet increases in government aid (direct and indirect aid) and increases in middle class incomes.

Food is more everything than college and it didnt raise prices the same way. College tuition has specific market conditions to be the way it is.

Huh? Parents buy their kids crap fast food all the time. We have no cultural push to buy whatever food our kid has access to no matter how high the cost.

Contrast this with college acceptances and tuition. As soon as they get accepted, the tuition can be however high it is it doesn't matter. You still pay it. This culture of spending all and everything on tuition has allowed tuition to rise to maximally extract from the middle class.

Maybe i can clarify: there are many things people would pay through their teeth to keep or get, but not all of those has raised prices like tuition. First of all, tuition around the world hasnt increased like in the us, and the same cultural effect has to be present in the west.

My explanation for it is the debt conditions: if students were able to default on their debts, colleges would not charge what they do for majors that dont provide the value to students: if a student spends 80k for poli-sci but his job cant pay for it, he would default, and the college would lose that money , and hence have an ineterest in pricing accordingly to the value it can provide to its students.

But since the debt is federal and permanent, the college's incentives is to increase the price as much as possible since it doesn't have a sustainability problem: the students and the government do.

Just make the loans defaultable, you would have a default crisis by next month, and prices would crash quickly.

Yes, someone pointed out it isn't rising with incomes but instead access to debt. I agree that's more accurate - tuitions have risen to maximally extract the middle class's access to debt.

If you made student loans defaultable, suddenly they would lose much access to this debt, and tuition would fall.

My points about aid and tax breaks on tuition not working still apply.

College tuition has been rising more than incomes for a long time. It's very rare for someone to be able to go to college without a loan.

> According to the College Board, the average cost of tuition and fees for the 2016–2017 school year was $33,480 at private colleges, $9,650 for state residents at public colleges, and $24,930 for out-of-state residents attending public universities. [1]

1: http://www.collegedata.com/cs/content/content_payarticle_tmp...

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