A substantial majority of Americans believe that
a college degree isn’t worth the cost
, and with good reason. Coddled colleges cost way too much money and often provide pathetically poor
educations
.
Much of the fault for this lies in bad government policies that encourage massive borrowing and tuition hikes. The government should get tougher, not easier, on future college loan repayment. The amount of government aid per student should be capped so as to prevent tuition increases. And massive university endowments should be taxed in some way.
First, the costs. A new report shows that the average annual cost of attending Ivy League universities is
nearing $90,000
, whereas the average at private universities in general is nearly $52,000. For the Ivies, those costs outstrip the entire annual median household income by nearly $20,000. Even heavily subsidized in-state public college costs, at above $22,000,
have been soaring
.
To show the outlandish growth of costs, one should take inflation into account. In the school year 2000-2001, average in-state total costs (tuition, fees, board) was $8,418. Allowing for inflation adjustments, by school year 2020-2021, the
equivalent cost
would be about $13,326 – nearly $9,000 less than it actually is. Private college costs in 2021-2022, meanwhile, would be $13,000 lower if they had merely kept up with inflation since 2000. Worst, in terms of percentage increase above inflation, were the costs for out-of-state students to attend state universities, which from 2000 to 2020 rose by more than twice the inflation rate!
And that’s just since 2000. College costs far outstripped inflation in the 20 years before that as well.
The causes of these outlandish price hikes are numerous. Colleges have added administrative bureaucracy at an
alarming rate
, much of it federally subsidized. Colleges keep erecting more and
more buildings
, even as enrollment declines. (Why do fewer students need more buildings?) Even if national taxpayers fork over the money for these edifice complexes via congressionally directed pork-barrel grants (which happens all the time), the facilities-maintenance costs add substantially to university outlays.
And, finally, when student loans are plentiful and debts often forgiven, colleges can keep raising their prices because it’s “somebody else’s money” paying all the bills. The somebody else, of course, is the future generation of taxpayers, who will have to pay the piper whenever panic about the national debt finally overwhelms the system.
In other words, massive government subsidies encourage colleges to spend maniacally, without any downward pressure on costs.
Meanwhile, universities can keep building huge endowments without much incentive to use their nest eggs to keep tuition down. Harvard’s endowment of more than $49 billion amounts to more than $2 million per current student. Even state school systems have endowments — Texas A&M’s is $18.24 billion, nearly $150,000 per student. To encourage colleges to actually use the endowments for the benefit of students, it might make sense to tax the endowments or donations to endowments that already exceed a certain size.
Meanwhile, far too many colleges have become left-wing indoctrination factories while not teaching basic information. For years now,
major survey
after
major survey
has shown that even graduates of the most elite colleges are woefully ignorant of basic civics and
history
, among other failings.
When 56% of Americans believe college isn’t worth the cost, the 56% have good reason. We may not be a well-educated populace, but we have lots of common sense.
