At public schools, state funding cuts are part of it. States have been cutting funding for schools (directly or in proportion to expenses/inflation) for decades. At the same time many more students are going to college than they used to. These things combined increase funding share that needs to be made up by tuition significantly.

>At the same time many more students are going to college than they used to.

In terms of cost this statement doesn't make sense to me. There are plenty of economies of scale in education. One professor can educate an undergrad class of 100 people for barely more than what it costs to educate 10 people. While the effort for checking exams multiplies directly with the number of people, many of the costs are lowered the more students you have.

The marginal costs per student almost go to zero if you have enough students.

That's just not true. Many costs scale with the number of students. Dorms, food, academic buildings, administrative workers, faculty (no you can't teach every class in batches of 500 like Econ 101, even then there is an army of graders), software licenses, land underneath the buildings, utilities and infrastructure, roads and parking, IT infrastructure and people to run it, grounds maintenance, student healthcare, etc. You can't just keep packing an arbitrary number of students into the same classroom.

An arbitrary number and not all costs misses the point that some costs scale roughly proportionally while others scale less than proportionally. Meaning tuition per student should definitely not increase with more students, there's actually more possibility for savings due to scale.

You're missing my initial point that with constant dollars from the state, more students means the state's money gets stretched thinner over the student body, so each student has to pay a larger percentage of the cost of their enrollment.

An interesting hypothesis is that this is caused by everything else becoming much cheaper (because e.g. automatization), while teaching remains similarly hard as it was 100 years ago.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/10/book-review-the-prices...

Short answer: Because they can.

Longer answer, according to the universities: Because modern students demand more than just classes, they also want social services (on-site counseling, bias incident response teams, etc).

Longer answer, according to a cynic: Because universities are more or less guaranteed the money from the federal government, they've grown to spend the money on inflated administration. As costs go up the government allows students to borrow more and more to cover the costs, and universities find ways to jack up their prices to match the money on the table. While the government loaning poor students money to better themselves with an education is a great thing in theory, I think it's what directly lead to the current situation. I don't want to turn this into a long post against capitalism, but I think that the unfettered capitalistic worldview we have here in the US is the root problem.

A project will grow to fill the timeline, and departments will grow to fill the budget

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. -Oscar Wilde (And Civ IV)

> I think that the unfettered capitalistic worldview we have here in the US is the root problem.

It seemed to me like the government subsidizing the market in stark contrast to unfettered capitalistic principles is the root of the issue.

Perdue’s income sharing plan mentioned in the article seemed really interesting off the cuff.

I think it would have been really beneficial had I been required to create a pitch deck to get financing for my education.

ISAs are definitely interesting, it's nice to see a system that incentives the school to deliver value to its students.

>It seemed to me like the government subsidizing the market in stark contrast to unfettered capitalistic principles is the root of the issue.

My opinion was apparently unpopular, but I'm not claiming that the government is the cause of the problem. Instead I'm claiming that the government's noble effort is subverted by the fact that the schools care about maximizing immediate profits more than altruistic goals like building healthy strong societies. The cause of skyrocketing costs is, in my opinion, the simple fact that the schools seek to maximize their revenue and since there's no government-sponsored damping (as that would go against capitalist principles) we get a feedback loop as the government tries to educate its populace.

It’s too controversial to raise the idea that both super-expensive sectors (education and healthcare) are both heavily regulated and funded through government. Most act like it’s a mad-max capitalist free-for-all already when in fact it’s quite the opposite.