I wouldn't say it's totally insubstantial. The economy is growing at some of the fastest rates we've seen since the beginning of the 21st Century. At the same time, delinquency rates are continuing to rise. If young people are still falling behind when times are "good" what happens to them during the next recession?

Here are more depressing statistics:

https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/funding-d...

tl;dr: States have been cutting back on funding public education even as it's gotten much more expensive every year.

This. States slashed higher education spending during the recession, and it's not coming back. At the same time, federal grant money got tighter.

Student tuition is literally the only dial left that can be moved.

Have you considered that universities might be able to operate more cost efficiently? Purdue University has manged to freeze tuition for the past 5 years for example.

https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2016/Q2/purdue-plan...

To add to your point. Schools have massive expenditures on things that have nothing to do with learning _and_ do not bring in money. Its one thing to spend money on something like basketball if you are UCONN and you routinely bring in enough revenue to cover the costs or even post a profit.[1] Its another thing to keep spending millions on your football team that does not bring in that much money[1] These are just one example in a school system. There's similar waste everywhere, like redoing the landscaping every few months so prospective students always see a fantastic looking campus, or the massive increase in administrative staff. The schools don't try to be more efficient because they don't have to be. They don't have legally set budgets and everyone can get students loans since they cannot be discharged so they can just dial up tuition.

Our whole financial system is built around accurately accessing the risk that an investment will be paid back and charging an interest rate commensurate to that, but its thrown out the window once you can try and convince the least experienced adults in the country to sign on the dotted line.

Until banks stop getting paid whether or not they made a good bet on someone's college expenses, or the schools are given a limit on what they can spend, its not going to change. My fear is that this won't happen in any way but a massive amount of defaults that cause the whole system to collapse unexpectedly and cause add on pain to the rest of the economy

[1]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-financial-impact-of-champio...

I know the university I'm at has been holding the line in my college as long as it could, and its finances are screaming. And it's done a great deal of trimming along the way.

Purdue also has a $2.443 billion endowment. The university I'm discussing is a public university with maybe a sixth of that after a major capital campaign.

But what actually happened? It's state allotment got slashed in half, capital improvements are no longer covered, and the per-capita payment per student has stalled while we've admitted more students.

There are at a minimum two dials they can turn, the other being lowering costs. Less palatial dorms, cheaper food, cheaper coaches, lower faculty salaries to name a few. They could do these things, it's just that higher prices is easier to get past their faculty committees.

1. You'd be surprised at how vocal faculty committees can be about opposing raising tuition. Either because they care about their students and their futures, or more mercenarily, because it means supporting graduate students eats up more of their grant funding when tuition goes up.

2. We've already lowered faculty salaries - why do you think so much is done now by adjuncts that are pretty universally regarded as underpaid?

3. Student amenities have been shown not actually to be all that significant a contributor to rising costs, especially compared to the slashed state and federal budgets to support universities.

Many universities have already done a great deal to lower costs - putting aside needed infrastructure investments, not replacing both staff and faculty when they retire, the aforementioned reliance on adjuncts, and in some cases cutting or merging whole departments.

And more: http://www.nber.org/papers/w23843

> Small business lending by the four largest banks fell sharply relative to others in 2008 and remained depressed through 2014. We explore the dynamic adjustment process following this credit supply shock. In counties where the largest banks had a high market share, the aggregate flow of small business credit fell, interest rates rose, fewer businesses expanded, unemployment rose, and wages fell from 2006 to 2010. While the flow of credit recovered after 2010 as other lenders slowly filled the void, interest rates remain elevated. Although unemployment returns to normal by 2014, the effect on wages persists in these areas.