Conservatives have long argued that the primary driver of higher education inflation is federal subsidies, most prominently subsidized federal loans. Now that President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act is taking effect, this hypothesis is being proved as schools lower net tuition costs to meet the new law’s subsidy limits.

Unlike many other goods and services, which have seen prices modified over the last decades, higher education tuition has risen faster than inflation. President Ronald Reagan’s education secretary, Bill Bennett, was one of the first Republicans to make the case that government efforts to make college tuition more affordable through subsidized loans actually had the opposite effect, as schools raised tuition to match students’ increased capacity to borrow.