A Radical Solution For America’s Worsening College Tuition Bubble

Over the last three decades, through good economic times and bad, one of the few constants in American life has been the relentless rise in the price of higher education. The numbers are stark: According to the non-profit College Board, public four-year universities raised tuition and fees by 8.3 percent this year, more than double the rate of inflation. This was typical: Over the last decade, public university tuition grew by an average of 5.6 percent above inflation every year. And the problem is also getting worse: In the 1990s, the annual real increase was 3.2 percent. In the 1980s, it was 4.5 percent.

Even as the economy has reorganized itself to make college degrees increasingly indispensable for the pursuit of a decent career, federal financial aid programs and family income haven?t been able to keep up with incredibly buoyant tuition bills. Students and families have been left with only one recourse: borrowing. The federal government is now lending college students over $100 billion per year, a 56 percent per-student increase, after adjusting for inflation, from just ten years ago. Most undergraduates borrow today, and leave college with an average of over $25,000 in debt. And as the many signs displayed by the Occupy movement attest, some young people owe much more than that. For a growing number of students, entering the lucrative college-educated realms of the economy is like being smuggled across the border?you can get to the promised land if you try hard enough, but you arrive in a state of indentured servitude to the shady operators who overcharged you for the trip.

Politicians are taking note of the rise in public outrage. Several weeks ago, at a student financial aid conference in (appropriately enough) Las Vegas, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan exhorted the nation?s colleges and universities to work with more urgency and creativity to ?contain the spiraling costs of college and reduce the burden of student debt.? The next week, President Obama held a private meeting with a small group of college presidents to discuss the issue. Vice President Biden followed a few days later, telling a group of parents that ?The incredible cost of college education is for the first time crushing hundreds of parents.? (He meant hundreds of thousands, presumably.)

But while the administration has done a great deal to mitigate rising college prices by increasing funding for Pell grants and making it easier for students to pay back loans, it has done little to restrain the growth of college prices themselves. The recent communications blitz has raised the profile of the issue, but solutions that might actually bend the higher education price curve remain in short supply. And that?s because tuition addiction is a function of basic structural elements of the higher education system that will require equally foundational changes to alter.

But the severity of the problem should not be a deterrent to finding a solution. The best thing federal policymakers can do is help colleges hit rock bottom as quickly as possible, before the opportunity for recovery is lost. That will mean creating a new policy structure allowing for new higher education providers?not all of them colleges?to help students learn.

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BACK-BREAKING TUITION increases are, in many ways, an inevitable consequence of the way our higher education system is currently designed. Imagine you?re in the business of selling apples that cost $1 on the open market. Then the government decides that more people should have the opportunity to buy apples and society would benefit from a net increase in apple consumption. So it decides to drop the price of apples to 60 cents. Sometimes it does this by giving you 40 cents for every apple you sell, on the condition that you start selling apples for 60 cents. Sometimes it gives people vouchers worth 40 cents that can only be used to purchase apples from approved vendors.

At first, the policy works splendidly. Apples are effectively less expensive so more people buy them and the nation is suffused with apple goodness. But then you, the apple vendor, look at the situation and say ?Hey, the market price of an apple is still $1. Wouldn?t it be great if I could charge $1 for apples, but still get 40 cents from the government for every apple I sell?? Raising the price all the way from 60 cents back to $1 in a single year would be too obvious and jeopardize political support for the apple subsidy program. So you start raising prices by three, four, or five percent above inflation annually. When annoyed public officials begin asking why, you explain that apple production is an expensive, labor-intensive business, and that all of the extra money is being used to produce the very best apples money can buy. Since apple quality is substantially a matter of taste, this is a hard claim to refute.

Meanwhile, you use some of your new profits to sponsor crowd-pleasing sports events on weekends, building public goodwill. Other profits are used to hire professional lobbyists to plead for both more subsidies and more freedom to set prices. You also convince the government to allow you and other incumbent apple sellers to form a private organization with the authority to decide whether new sellers can become ?approved apple vendors? for the purposes of receiving public subsidies. Unsurprisingly, few new sellers are approved.?

But eventually things start to break down. As time passes and price increases accumulate, the public starts to notice that while the taxes they pay to support apple subsidies are staying the same, the price of subsidized apples is creeping closer to the market price. This seems unreasonable. Meanwhile, when the economy turns sour, available tax receipts for apple subsidization decline. Instead of raising taxes to make up the difference, public officials drop the per-apple subsidy to 30 cents. This is bad for you, because it means you either have to spend less money on the exotic orchid greenhouse you?ve built next to the apple orchard?the reason, truth be told, you got into the apple business in the first place?or raise prices even further. Luckily, since you?ve kept new vendors out of the market and prices are still below the market rate, you can get away with raising prices, and so you do.

This is essentially the story of public higher education over the last thirty years. Diplomas are, of course, not apples. But they are more like apples than colleges like to pretend. In particular, highly-profitable lower division courses in common subjects like Economics, Calculus, and Psychology have similar curricula at most colleges and rely on many of the same nationally-marketed textbooks. They are often taught by people with no formal training in teaching. These courses are, in the education context, commodities.

It?s true that we also have many private non-profit and for-profit colleges and universities in this country. But they, too, are afflicted with the craving for increased tuition. In part, that?s because they benefit from many of the same subsidies. Non-profit colleges don?t pay taxes, even when they have billions of dollars in the bank. People can use their publicly-financed college vouchers?and, increasingly, claim lucrative tax credits?for private college tuition. Because nobody really knows which colleges provide the best education, consumers have been trained to think of colleges like a luxury good: The best are the most expensive, by definition.

Non-profit colleges also don?t have shareholders demanding that they maximize the difference between revenues and expenses. Instead, they?re run by administrators and faculty who are most interested in competing for status with other colleges, which is determined by the size, expense, and ornateness of the academic greenhouses in which basic research and scholarship are produced.

Source: http://c.moreover.com/click/here.pl?r5725453566&f=378

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