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Comment by PeterisP | Hacker News Reader

Without some coercion, the only one thing can "rein in tuition" is demand - it would happen if significant numbers of college age people would say "the offered product is too expensive for what it gives me, I'm not going to buy".

That's not happening, college enrollment is not dropping like a rock, and the students (or their parents) are willing to suffer the cost increase. So it's their choice - with a dash of tragedy of commons, as it's probably really not worth for a tiny minority to 'defect' from college as a social concept unless a large critical mass does that.

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Colleges are not a monopoly. All that is needed is for students to say "The marginal cost of switch from college A to college B is to expensive for what it gives me, so I am going to stick with college A". At this point, we have free market dynamics to offer the most attractive cost/benifit ratio. The problem that the article identifies is that college is simply expensive, and has been subsidized by the state. As the state reduces its subsidy, the portion of tuition that the students see nessasarily increases.

There is also a slight market distortion in that the state only subsidizes a portion of the market (public schools for in state students).

I mean, there are other substantial factors that make this not an ideal free market:

- The time to set up certain kinds of facilities, eg, good physics labs or mechanical engineering labs, can be on the order of several years to a decade.

- There is a limited ability to scale up, as it relies on its own out put to keep functional (eg, professors and TAs).

- Non-responsive hiring managers whose cultural sense was normalized before many of these changes impacted colleges (eg, >20 years ago) haven't adjusted their hiring practices, and place an artificially high reward on college degrees.

Umm, we're also not seeing actions consistent with "The marginal cost of switch from college A to college B is to expensive for what it gives me, so I am going to stick with college A".

That marginal cost is often 'hidden' by student loans, and if I recall correctly, USA analysis shows that students making that decisions is even rarer than the decision "I believe that I can't afford college, so I won't even check how much it would cost for me" (which was a quite popular attitude for minority students).

> the only one thing can "rein in tuition" is demand

Or increased supply.

There is a lot of supply, and a surfeit of postgraduate degrees in many fields where associate professor is a great job means the quality isn't bad.

An increase in supply would have to come from some innovation that enables really ramping up supply and competing against high quality traditional college education.

Don't look for demand to get slack, either. Lots of foreign demand at every level is out there and it isn't going to stop growing soon.

There is a lot of supply... and if there were more it would drive down prices.

As a tiny minority who 'defected' (at least from the consumer side of academia), it was probably closer to the offered product is increasingly outdated/inefficient, no matter what the price, to exploring things in general.

I think that for the tiny minorities, finding ways to exploit the dynamics of any social concept, will enable one to obtain value from the grey areas of such concepts that most people aren't willing to operate in.

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