If students could not borrow enough to attend, they would be forced to lower costs (not necessarily the very top universities, but all the rest).
And if that was the proposal, would that be better or worse than the current status quo?
A major part of why it's so expensive is because of government subsidies to private healthcare insurance. No or little public option is exactly what allows insurance companies to go hog wild on their premiums.
The ACA subsidies are simply a bandaid on a broken system which allows insurance to further break the system as they adapt to what people are willing to pay for a necessity.
The ACA is a bandaid, and may be making things worse over time, at least in some areas. But Americans don't see to have the appetite to really change anything. Probably because most voters are insulated from this by good (enough) employees plans.
Any functioning health care system is going to have a "band-aid" exactly ACA subsidies: make sure that those with the lowest incomes can still afford health care. Something in between Medicaid and the full cost. But as we rein in the costs and get healthcare to be a smaller fraction of GDP, the size of the band-aid can shrink.
The US has real problem that require real changes, but the political system is not responding.
IMO, people sense this, grow frustrated, and become willing to take a chance on someone who seems to speak (more) truth, and claims to be willing to pursue real changes.
We are starting to see more moderate mainstream politicians willing to speak more truthfully, and propose policy changes that may not appeal to everyone. But I'm not sure it's happening fast enough.
The incentives are not so naively simple
Cost is certainly also a factor, but I suspect population is a bigger factor.
The reason universities are so expensive is there is no limit on how much they can charge for tuition and no requirements on how much they pay their professors. It allows them to dump a huge portion of their funds into the marketing and athletic departments.
I know of a few religious universities who's mission is mainly to educate (so their well educated members can pay back more money to the church). While they do subsidize the educational costs, it isn't by as much as you'd think and it does result in some very cheap education.
There's no reason the government couldn't do exactly the same thing. It did right up until reagan.
Any system that can juice itself by increasing both funding and cost will scale both until the natural incentive gradients (are you smart? do you actually want to do stuff or do you just want a desk job?) vanish into the noise. When everyone went to college, nobody learned anything.
University is one of those things you always want to be capability rather than means gated, but those of means will always want their kids to get in regardless of how they were raised. After all, they worked hard. Why should their kids? They will ally with every convenient rationalization in order to moralize for the politics, taking advantage of arguments about "disadvantaged backgrounds" etc to treat everything as a means problem, but the goal is to dilute the capability aspect, and that robs talent.
If you have exceptional talent, you need to know the truth. Systems naturally try to optimize the dumb-rich to smart ratio so that there's a lot of subsidy available for anyone who actually needs to be there, but consequent GPA inflation demands that we make the education somewhat meaningless, so you're really on your own to set goals, and any good ones are way higher. Check the boxes, take the free lunch, and then treat the overall coddling like a charade that must be ignored. Then again, isn't self direction always that way?
* Eliminate the entire federal student loan program. Just gone. No more loans.
* Make it so that private loans for tuition and related expenses can be trivially discharged. Like just fill out a form and it's auto-approved. You can just decide to not pay your student loans with no repercussions whatsoever. There's probably a better way to accomplish this legally but make it so that they're toxic to private lenders.
Once the money officially dries up and less than 1% of families could pay out of pocket for current tuition rates then we watch as jobs stop requiring degrees, apprenticeships become popular, and schools belt-tighten to focus on student ROI. Watch magically as GE requirements evaporate and we find out they weren't ever necessary in the first place. Watch as high schools get pressured to teach actually useful things instead of being grade school the sequel.
My grandpa paid his way to a PhD as a line cook. Got no financial support from family who were only slightly above dirt poor.
Like I don't want to be completely reductive but a good chunk of university classes are 30-100 people paying for a single dude and a room with chairs to lecture for 5 hours a week. This doesn't have to be ruinously expensive.
According to this page https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/why-harvard/affordabi..., Harvard covers your costs if you have <$100k family income. So in ways it's better than covering tuition with part time work.
Having been the "single dude", the issue is not that they are paying lecturers too much for this service, doubly so for adjuncts.
This is exactly why I'm saying that university can be made orders of magnitude less expensive is because the primary educational value you get which comes from professors lecturers, and TA's is not expensive at all. Everything else is negotiable and an opportunity to make cuts.
That can still be easily done.
In California, most families earning under $100k get their tuition costs to UCs covered. CSUs are probably even easier.
Then, PhDs largely get paid for by undergrad tuition and research grants, it's pretty unusual for PhDs to pay their own way.
I mean it can work so long as the government can bully the university into keeping a lid on the per student costs but large public universities have massive amounts of political capital to sell the cost increases to the government.
In a typical state school, where's most of the fat accumulating? What could be cut significantly without affecting the quality of education?
Some areas:
- more and more administrative staff and "middle management". The assistant to the assistant vice chancellor for elm trees.
- Building and running very expensive science research operations. These may well be worthwhile efforts, but conflating them with undergraduate educations is a problem.
- more and more student amenities. Fancy dorms, student centers, rec centers, etc
- competitive athletics
A big part of this, is that they need to attract students, ideally ones who can pay or borrow. And students are putting a lot of weight on the research programs (they impact public ratings), fancy dorms, rec centers, football teams, etc. And they are spending loan money, and don't seem to fully grasp the economics. But even if they did, the highest rated schools are the ones spending all this money, and thus charging more, it's a cycle. And this propagates down to mid- and lower tier schools.
And then people in the leadership ranks of these schools are in part evaluated on how the ranking of their school changes. So if you can go from spot 150 to 140 by raising fees to build stuff you don't really need to teach (but improve your ranking), that is good for you.
(I know this from being personally involved in this at more then one company)
Also some of the universities are older than the government by hundreds of years and private, the government can’t just “own” them.
I met a Polish student a number of years ago who was attending a U.S. Ivy League institution. She said people made fun of her back home for "buying her degree". That has stuck with me ever since.