Thread by @fawfulfan

So how DID it become so expensive to go to college in America?

How did a degree go from being a few-thousand dollar commitment you could pay off with a part-time job on days you didn't have class, to something you need to take out tens of thousands of dollars for?

Well...

It turns out there is not one single problem or bad guy behind this. Higher education and the economy and culture around it have changed in a LOT of ways in the last 50 years, that each individually contributed to making it more expensive to go to college.

First, the U.S. shifted from a manufacturing economy to an information economy, and that meant a lot more of the good-paying jobs required a degree, as we built up more and more sophisticated physical capital. Fewer jobs were available for miners, factory workers, mechanics...

...and more were available for programmers, writers, engineers. And millions more people than before needed a college degree to work in this new economy. And when demand for degrees goes up, tuition is inevitably going to go up too.

This led to a bunch of states cutting taxes that used to go to subsidize tuition.

Fiscal conservatives saw student bodies growing and feared the cost. Social conservatives saw more people of color going to schools and started attacking the whole idea of college as a dog whistle.

With those subsidies shrinking, you can guess what's going to happen, public colleges were forced to raise tuition even more to make up the shortfall, increasing the expense even further.

The federal government saw all this happening and started creating its own system of backing student loans.

The problem is that, because of lobbying by the universities and by private debt servicers, the federal government never created any kind of mechanism in the federal...

...student loan program to control costs, to force the schools getting the money to keep their tuition affordable. So many schools, even private ones at this point, kept raising their tuition higher and higher with the expectation student loans would grow to cover it all.

As all this was happening, the one market force that should have been pushing back against rising tuition was the new generation of students rejecting tuition that was too high and gravitating toward schools that kept their tuition affordable. Unfortunately, their parents...

...did not teach them to do this. There was a generational divide; parents had grown up with either affordable college or hadn't gone to college at all, so leaned on kids to go to the most prestigious schools and not the ones that would give the most value for the money.

So where do we go from here?

Well, first, we need federal reforms to student loans that penalize schools for not keeping their tuition affordable. Schools should lose eligibility, and students, if they continue hiking rates, especially if they're sitting on massive endowments.

Second, we need a broad push to remove degree requirements from jobs that don't need them. This is a rare policy loved by both parties. Govs. Josh Shapiro and Glenn Youngkin have pushed to do this for jobs in state government; private businesses need pressure to do this too.

And third, we simply need a more educated and aware public that actually considers the value of schools for the tuition and makes decisions about where to apply based on it. High schools should give financial literacy classes to rising seniors ahead of college applications.

Even if we do all that, we probably won't ever go back to tuition being as cheap as it was in the 70s.

But we could make it so that the vast majority of students can pay their loans off in a few years, rather than a few decades.

(Oh, and we should ABSOLUTELY make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy, cap interest, and establish some other borrower rights. That won't make college more affordable, but it will give a way out for students who fail to earn a degree or to profit off the one they do earn.)