[OC] Durchschnittliche Kosten der US -amerikanischen Studiengebühren gegen jährliche Inflation

I’m confused by the average cost being $1,000. Is that per credit or something obscure?

what caused the steep rise right around the turn of the century? I know the original rise had a bit to do with a law that made the debt impossible to discharge in bankruptcy.

Right around the time the federal government got into the loan business cost started to rise a lot more

The average cost of college tuition now is under $12K? Just wondering. Can you do this with the cost of room and board, also?

Has the quality improved? Surely there is more to this story that a few numbers.

Great reason to go into a trade. 

I did my master’s thesis on this subject and the issue can be squarely laid on the deregulation and neoliberalization of higher education that happened in the 70s. Instead of direct federal funding for universities, states were left to fend for themselves, though at the time the Pell Grant was established to help low-income students. At that time, the Pell Grant would cover the entirety of a student’s ttuition, so the problem was minimized.

However, Congress predictably failed to link the Pell Grant to inflation or COL increases, leading to the relative pittance it provides today. Simultaneously, state spending per student plummeted across almost every state, partially due to political reasons but also because higher education is only of the only „flexible“ budget items in most states (It is not really viable, practically or politically, to reduce K-12 education, state-based healthcare, infrastructure, or emergency services). Additionally, professional staff within universities increased – something both good and bad, as it includes critical support services such as learning, counseling, Title IX offices, and the like, as well as unnecessary elements like increased branding and marketing. Finally, because neoliberal policies and principles began to corporatize universities, this led to inflated compensation for c-suite level leadership in many universities.

Taken together, these elements created a massive budget shortfall that can only be made up through tuition, lacking funding from other sources. Private universities are sometimes able to avoid this through financialization of their endowments and research, but overall, this is how we get to the modern university and its costs.

this could just be a real tuition cost in 1978 dollars graph

That’s what happens when schools become 4 star resorts instead of schools

As someone who teaches in college, your professors‘ salaries are not increasing at this rate. We would be ecstatic if it even matched the inflation rate.