Hacker News Reader

Comment by pitaj | Hacker News Reader

Remember when college used to be cheap enough for people to afford working summers? I don't remember because that was before my time, but that was also before the subsidies and loans were made available by the feds. Turns out, if you dump money into an industry while increasing demand and not changing supply, prices will increase.

View on HN

That was because states covered most of the budget. Austerity policies changed that. And supply and demand is not applicable to macroeconomics, which education is part of.

States still cover most of the budget. As someone who went to school while poor and on a scholarship, I hated this, the price was so inflated because

1) The government pays the majority of it if you're poor, schools know you'll pay 2) If you're middle class your parents pay half of it, the government pays half of it, schools know they'll pay 3) If you're upper class, you might have a legacy admission and the school knows your parents will pay and probably donate to the school too

There's a difference between the government funding education and the government funding students. Costs are high because the government funds students (sometimes), not education.

And very few people get government scholarships, most get loans which must be repayed: essentially an extra tax on the middle class.

Government funds most public universities to an absurd degree. Tuition is a drop in the bucket for most schools. Government loans are an extra tax on everyone, and are best seen as a money transfer from all taxpayers to public institutions.

Government loans aren't a tax on those who don't need them, who are the very people who should be taxed the most.

And states only fund roughly half of school's out of their budgets and that number has decreased in recent years.

> And very few people get government scholarships,

Untrue. Lots of people get Pell Grants, but the value of each is very small.

Grants and scholarships are different, FWIW. Pell grants can be an extreme amount of money depending on your income bracket, but given the prior knowledge that people at each income bracket will make up the difference in amount (for a service like education), it can be seen as increasing school prices by the highest paid amount.

Yes I suppose you're technically correct. But government grants hardly pay for poor people's education, especially considering they trap them in the cycle of being unable to pay for books and food without earning too much to lose the grant.

I'm not following your comment, Federal student loans started in 1958 [1] but costs didn't start to skyrocket until the late-80s/90s. Since the late-80s costs have more than tripled at public universities after adjusting for inflation from about $3,000 to almost $10,000 [2].

==dump money into an industry while increasing demand==

Did the money create the demand or are you saying they dumped the money while also creating demand?

==not changing supply==

Do public universities have the same number of available seats as they did in 1958? 1980? 2000?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_the_United_St...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/how-much-college-tuition-has...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com