That being said, it isn’t clear that those that go without a post-secondary education are necessarily less able to afford one today than they were in 1991.

1. The net tuition (not the sticker price, which only the rich really pay) is moderately higher, adjusted for inflation -> https://twitter.com/CPopeHC/status/1301975027147997189

2. And while private tuition has always been expensive, the majority of Americans attend public universities (myself included) -> https://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enroll...

3. And while there has been a modest increase in the inflation-adjusted price, the ROI of college degrees has increased more than the price. The net result is that the median number of years to recoup the cost of a bachelors degree, adjusted for inflation, has gone down since the 1980’s, from about 22 years to about 10 years -> https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2014/09/the-va...

What exactly does "net tuition" exclude? Financial aid comes in many forms - grants, loans (multiple kinds), work study. Excluding some of these might be fair. Excluding others would be chicanery.

> the majority of Americans attend public universities (myself included

Also, the majority of students attend big universities. Want to guess how tuition has increased at Texas A&M or Ohio State vs. a legion of tiny schools that barely achieve accreditation? How many of the sources you found on Twitter are improperly taking an average across schools instead of across students?

The source explains it better than I can:

The amount that students and their families have to pay for enrollment, “net price,” is generally much less than the published price (“sticker price”), for two primary reasons. First, students often receive grant aid from federal and state government programs. The Pell grant program allocates up to $6,345 per year to students enrolled fulltime in postsecondary education. Students from the poorest families receive that full amount, and the award size declines as family income and wealth increase.

Second, private colleges and universities sometimes give discounts to students based on their perceived ability to pay. This practice has the benefit of allowing students to enroll who otherwise would not be able to afford to do so. But it can also be viewed more pessimistically as price discrimination, which is generally perceived as a predatory behavior when exercised by for-profit companies. Essentially, colleges charge students the highest price that they would individually be willing to pay, up to the sticker price, in order to maximize revenue.

> Want to guess how tuition has increased at Texas A&M or Ohio State vs. a legion of tiny schools that barely achieve accreditation?

The source includes that information as well:

> students at public four-year colleges have seen their net costs go up significantly because of increases in tuition that were not offset to the same extent by aid and scholarships. The average annual net cost at a four-year public college has grown by almost 81% beyond inflation over the past decade, to $3,870.

On its own, that looks really bad, but once you account for the change in ROI, the net outcome looks a little different. The upfront cost is higher today, but the long run benefit is even higher.

That doesn't completely answer the question. It addresses discounts and grants, but there's more to it than that.

> On its own, that looks really bad

Yes, it does, and that's still no accounting for differences in size. Even state schools vary widely. Eastern Michigan University is not University of Michigan by a long shot.

> once you account for the change in ROI

That matters little to someone trying to figure out how they're going to afford a house while they're still paying off student loans. It mostly kicks in much later, and money later is not the same as money earlier. If you really want to consider that increased ROI, you also have to consider how it's offset by lost opportunities for saving and compounding interest because people are buried when they first get out of school.

Also, if college is no less affordable, why are they so buried? Graduating with more student-loan debt than income was practically unthinkable when I went to school. It's commonplace now. Why? This whole empathy-lacking "it's no harder than it used to be" argument just doesn't pass the smell test.

Discounts are huge. "Discounts" is just another way of saying that the university charges different prices based on how rich you are, and the sticker price is basically a fiction. It's essentially total price discrimination, except we only learn the true prices after we reveal our income level. It's certainly a problem worth solving.

> Yes, it does, and that's still no accounting for differences in size. Even state schools vary widely. Eastern Michigan University is not University of Michigan by a long shot.

You'd be surprised, the difference isn't as wide as you think it is. The Wall Street Journal put together a tool to let you compare the median debt + earnings per college and degree -> https://www.wsj.com/articles/which-college-graduates-make-th...

Eastern Michigan University + Engineering

Median debt: $12,643

Median earnings: $48,900

University of Michigan + Mechanical Engineering

Median debt: $17,525

Median earnings: $74,200

In both instances, earnings exceed debt. Also keep in mind, those numbers are total debt, not tuition. You can play around with the tool and select different universities and different majors. It's behind a paywall, but if you don't have access, I can pull the numbers for whichever university you'd like to compare.

> That matters little to someone trying to figure out how they're going to afford a house while they're still paying off student loans.

No, the implication is that the salary for college graduates is almost always above the median wage. The calculus is whether the wage increase is higher or lower than the monthly cost to pay off the degree. If it's lower, then the degree is not worth it.

> Also, if college is no less affordable, why are they so buried? Graduating with more student-loan debt than income was practically unthinkable when I went to school. It's commonplace now. Why?

Because it's one thing to say that student loan debt is commonplace, and another thing entirely to suggest that unpayable student-loan debt is commonplace. Consider that almost 100% of homeowners have mortgages (and hence are in debt), but most of them pay them off, and end up with an asset at the end of it. College degrees are (for the most part) exactly like that. The median student loan debt is $17,000 (https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2020/02/03/student...) — but paying that off is like paying off a car loan for a Toyota Corolla, only college degrees aren't a depreciating asset (depending on the major).

> This whole empathy-lacking "it's no harder than it used to be" argument just doesn't pass the smell test.

I wouldn't ascribe intent, but data like this is important to understand what the reality is for the majority of people. While there absolutely exists adverse situations where someone is riddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt with no employable skill to help pay that off, it doesn't represent the majority of college graduates. The news also has a bias for reporting on the most exceptional cases, you never really hear about the successes. Importantly, this doesn't mean that we shouldn't help those that are struggling. It just means that we don't need to upend the entire system to do so.

Also, did you "forget" about people without degrees again? They live in the same places, they're also affected by the high cost living, but the ROI of a college degree doesn't help them at all. It's a red herring. As with so much in this discussion, it obscures reality instead of illuminating it.

Maybe I didn’t make myself clear: the data pulled from the WSJ tool is per student. It’s what the middle individual (per university) expects to owe vs earn. The size of the university doesn’t matter in the context of that data.

> Also, did you “forget” about people with degrees again?

No I didn’t, but people without college degrees earn the median wage and do not have to worry about paying off student loans, which was the earlier contention.

People with college degrees earn above the median wage, at which point the median numbers here don’t really apply to them.

You have to pick your grievance: either you earn the median wage OR you have to worry about paying student loans, but not both. The (wage - expenses) amount is, on average, positive in either case.

The ROI number represents the true value of college, because it not only incorporates the price, it incorporates the net expected returns. Not including the latter obscures more than it illuminates. Simply comparing the price now vs the price in year X is not apples-to-apples, because you were essentially buying a different thing in the 1980’s that was worth less than the unique thing you’re buying today. They just happen to both be named “college degree”.

You're missing the point again. This isn't about the original data. It's about how you combine data from multiple schools to calculate an overall average. If that process doesn't include enrollment, you get the wrong answer.

>> Also, did you “forget” about people with degrees again?

>No I didn’t,

> [four paragraphs about degrees, ignoring non-degreed people again]

I'm not allowed to make the comment that deserves.

To recap this conversation, I cited net tuition data that calculates per student tuition, and pegs public 4 year in-state tuition average at ~$11,000 per student.

You responded by suggesting that university sizes vary, and therefore that data is incomplete (though you still haven’t explained exactly how). You then cited EMU vs UM.

I pulled up the actual per-student data at EMU vs UM, and showed that the data across both 1) corroborates the net tuition calculation, and 2) don’t wildly vary from each other. Again, these are per student calculations. The spot-check samples agree with the aggregate calculation.

> [four paragraphs about degrees, ignoring non-degreed people again]

I didn’t ignore non-degreed people. When analyzing people that don’t have degrees, we have to try to understand what the root cause is: whether it’s because they don’t want to attend, because they couldn’t get admission, or because they couldn’t afford it. I’m simply making the argument that reason #3 is no more likely today than it was 40 years ago. I gave you maybe 4 paragraphs arguing why that is the case (degree confers higher salary that more than pays for the up-front cost + everyone has access to student loans + median loan amount is roughly == price of an entry level car)

In the context of a conversation about the costs of college, I’m also pointing out that (by definition), non-degreed people don’t have to worry about those costs. Non-degreed people are also overwhelmingly the people that earn the median wage, and if you’ve paid attention this entire thread, the numbers for median wage earners are positive — even if not as positive as their degree-holding counterparts.