<pedant>The predecessor of the Stafford Loan program was created in 1965, so it was like this for most of our parents.</pedant>

But, the cost of school has outpaced inflation for that period, making the situation worse. No question about that.

We'd probably all be better off if the government simply gave grants to students who meet some minimum threshold. Call it top 20% of class or thereabouts.

"cost of school" oh but wait, it's not the cost of tuition as in the people and materials actually involved in it. Just ask any professor.

It's the cost of the administration. The cost of facilities. The extortion racket that are mandatory latest editions textbooks.

Universities are becoming less about teaching people and more about capturing grants and "selling the experience"

Most of those administrators are there for a reason. Regulatory compliance takes manpower (which costs money). Perhaps we regulating the wrong things, or doing too much of it. But, regulations rarely appear for no reason at all.

Some states are making efforts to curb the costs of textbooks and materials. I'm currently working on software to help CA schools roll out their ZTC programs.[1]

1 - https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019...

> This comment is an example of how any amount of problems caused by government intervention can be framed as a need for more government intervention.

And your comment is an example of assuming that government regulation is at best a necessary evil and something to be avoided if at all possible. Most of western Europe has has regulated university fees for decades, and by all accounts this works pretty well. Public opinion in the UK (even from a lot of the political right) is that the current 9k/year cap is too high if anything.

> And your comment is an example of assuming that government regulation is at best a necessary evil and something to be avoided if at all possible.

The role of government regulation is a separate question, but we're really jumping the shark when we can't even acknowledge basic cause and effect.

It's not surprising that government policy making tons of student loan money available led to more students being willing to take out bigger loans. This is like Markets 101.

It's tough to take opponents seriously when basic, predictable side effects of favored policies are ignored just to recommend heavier-handed policies of the same kind.

> It's not surprising that government policy making tons of student loan money available led to more students being willing to take out bigger loans. This is like Markets 101.

Totally agree with you on this.

> It's tough to take opponents seriously when basic, predictable side effects of favored policies are ignored just to recommend heavier-handed policies of the same kind.

It seems likely to me that the side effect wasn't ignored. Probably there was somebody proposing the "heavy handed" version of the legislation (which actually makes sense because it mitigates the side effect), but somebody else was opposing it because they don't like regulation. Thus, this problematic legislation emerged as a compromise.

Opposition to regulation often seems to be based on the idea that in practice regulation causes more problems than it solves. My observation is that regulation (esp. in the US) often does have this problem, but only because there is such opposition to regulation that it is almost impossible to enact the stronger and more sensible regulation that would actually work.

In short, it is often ideological opposition to regulation that causes it to fail, rather than the case that regulation in general doesn't work.

So no true Scotsman? “Regulation never works well because it’s never the right kind of regulation.”

In what world do the regulated parties not oppose being regulated? If there’s no opposition to a regulation then it probably isn’t needed.

Sometimes it doesn't work just because it wasn't a good idea to regulate in that way. However there are countless examples of regulation that was crippled in the US, but that has a very successful (and generally stronger) counterpart in Europe.

Perhaps it's just that corporate interests have captured governments. But that too seems like a symptom of distrust in government leading to it being hamstrung and underfunded. I guess it's circular.

It sure wasn't like this for our parents. The UC system was close to free in the 60s. Portland State University's very first summer session was $50 for tuition and fees. Universities supported simply by taxes, not a byzantine system of public and private loans (still backed by the government, of course), like is common in other Western nations.

I'm 100% in on getting the government out of the lending business and back into the "higher ed is a public good" business. I'd rather they just return the actual sticker price to what it was a generation ago, and make it realistic for people to work student jobs to earn the cost of their tuition.

Government contribution made it possible to get my degree for free basically. We don't have a student loan bubble while still having a pretty high educational standard, even if that suffered in recent years.

We might not have the most tenured professors though, since those a drawn to centralize in institution with high prestige. But with the free flow of information today, this centralization of excellence becomes less important.

But anyway it probably isn't a problem with too much/too few government intervention and more of a problem of intervention being constructive or not. Bad intervention is probably worse than no intervention, I agree.

Perhaps, but some things are inherent to how markets work.

It's not surprising that by making a ton of student loan money available, that more students are more willing to spend more money, and thus prices rise.