Australia effectively has price controls on both health and tertiary education. It isn’t perfect but it is hardly terrible.
I know the US pharmaceutical industry hates it - the Australian government uses its monopsony power to limit drug prices and hence drug company profits - and is forever lobbying the US government to use trade negotiations to pressure to undermine it (but hasn’t yet succeeded)
Universities can charge as much as they want - but if they want students to have full eligibility for government student loans and government tuition subsidies, there is a maximum they can charge. Students want that full eligibility, so for the majority of places they stick to the maximum
Reality is that there are so many other factors that it’s probably better to have some sort of price control as a form of regulation, instead of only focusing on supply/demand levers.
I’m not an economist so I’m happy to be proven wrong, but the stance of “x,y and z policies need to be implemented so supply/demand is changed to mitigate these issues”, but the reality is that politicians and the business landscape doesn’t incentivize such changes. For example, colleges aren’t incentivized to keep the cost low, housing construction isn’t incentivized because NIMBYs control what can be built where, etc.
So when someone says “well the economists don’t agree on that”, it really rubs me the wrong way.
They're probably upset the same way that climate scientists get upset when people dispute climate change; that is, it's a widely-studied phenomenon by economists of all political persuasions with lots of evidence to back it up.
A price ceiling causes a shortage, like cars lining up at gas stations during the 70s oil crisis or the 10+ years of wait time in Stockholm apartments. A price floor causes a surplus, like unemployed workers at the minimum wage.
In such cases, when there does exist a consensus, it's probably correct.
Mainstream economists have thought very different things at different times. The current mainstream orthodoxy is largely free market fundamentalists that took over in the 80's. There are heterodox economists that disagree with this view. Practically, there are also many examples of price and rent controls and de-commodification "working" throughout modern history and currently on other countries.
You argued that econlib cherry-picked economists to generate a biased result, which you then followed up by acknowledging that "mainstream" economists do not support price controls, which is exactly what the survey showed.
There is, in fact, a broad consensus among economists that price controls are generally counterproductive. Thanks for playing.
To illustrate this, consider the following hypothetical survey.
Survey:
"Is murdering babies wrong"?
End Survey
Essentially everyone will respond with a strong yes.
By your logic, if I don't include a dissenting opinion, the poll is necessarily biased.
Of course that's not correct.
The purpose of a poll is to understand the opinions of a population by understanding the opinions of a randomly selected sample of the population. If the population has strong opinions on a given topic, the survey will return lopsided results. That does not make the survey biased.
If however you seek out people with opinions to the contrary for the sake of including unpopular opinions, THAT DOES bias the survey, because the survey sample is then no longer randomly selected.
The primary reason price ceilings are criticized by "both sides" is because the shifting Overton window has resulted in both the Republican and Democratic parties having quite neoliberal views. In an international context the two sides of the aisle can be described as "right" and "far-right".
Prices will collapse to what people are willing to pay in real time, or save up for.
(And the disparate impact rule is politically and legally unpopular with the same faction that currently dominates the Supreme Court and whose members on the Court have shown an unusual willingness to discard precedent, so its quite likely it won’t be a limit on discriminatiom under those statutes much longer, either.)
And I said your argument for that is nonsense, since the government does lots that has racially disparate impacts.
“Disparate impact” prohibited by the rule isn't just unequal impact, its unequal impact without sufficient justification (what qualifies for that differs between the employment and housing contexts where the rule is applied.)
There needs to be a middle ground where we support poor but promising students in a way that doesn't inflate prices. I don't know what that solution is.
I hear this a lot, but I don't understand the argument to be honest. If someone is poor today, then they can take an exorbitant amount of debt that they can't discharge in order to attend university.
In a world where loans are dischargeable in bankruptcy and the federal government limits subsidizes loans, we'd expect prices to fall somewhat and rates to rise somewhat. It seems like we would still expect the poor student to be able to take on a large amount of debt to attend university, though, no?
Additionally, discharging student loans in bankruptcy should absolutely not be a way to get off scot-free, it's meant as an escape valve. If your options are the terrible downsides of declaring bankruptcy and the terrible downsides of a life in extreme debt, neither option is great, but having the choice is useful.
If a really smart poor person wants to become a really smart rich person by pursuing a degree in film studies, it's reasonable (in my opinion) for a bank to say "borrowers whose only education is a bachelors in film studies tend to have trouble paying back loans, so we won't lend you very much".
If that very smart poor person is pursuing a degree in accounting or engineering, though, most banks can do the actuarial work to determine that the likelihood of payment is pretty good.
This all seems totally fine and fair to me. And if the really smart person does have trouble paying back their loan, bankruptcy can be the absolute last option they resort to, just as it is with most other loans.
And also if they did do that, we get back to other problem which is that schools will only offer programs that lead to high paychecks making them just job training and not places of overall learning.
Also, you may be right that schools start to prioritize programs that allow borrowers to earn enough to repay their debt. Why is this a bad thing? I would absolutely argue that a poor student would be better off being unable to obtain loans for a degree with poor returns then they would be taking on mountains of debt that they can never discharge.
For the rich, those talented enough to earn scholarships, and those willing to accommodate loan companies' stringent conditions on risky borrowing, degrees with poor monetary returns will absolutely stick around as they always have.
We haven't absolved them per se. At first they tried to get the data and make smart decisions, but there just wasn't enough data for them to make good decisions, so they denied everyone. That's why the government got into the business of backing the loans in the first place -- it was the only way to get the loan companies to make the loans.
> For the rich, those talented enough to earn scholarships, and those willing to accommodate loan companies' stringent conditions on risky borrowing, degrees with poor monetary returns will absolutely stick around as they always have.
There wouldn't be enough students to support that, because amongst those people, many would still choose the lucrative majors.
> Also, you may be right that schools start to prioritize programs that allow borrowers to earn enough to repay their debt. Why is this a bad thing?
Now we have a philosophical debate. Do we want to live in a society where no one studies philosophy, poetry, art, music, creative writing, and so on? Ironically, someone who studied philosophy would probably be more suited to answering this question than I am.
In my view, current government policy is actively enabling people to dig themselves into holes of debt which they'll never be able to get out from.
It's great that people are choosing to study art, music, and philosophy. I personally have a degree in music, and it's one of the great joys of my life! Whether the government should loan me an absurd amount of money strictly for those pursuits, though, is a different question. There's great value in history, but I think most people would hardly endorse a government policy of loaning anyone a few hundred thousand dollars in living expenses to go to their public library and read about the Civil War for a few years.
Also, it's completely feasibly to encourage a broad range of studies while also conferring a degree in an employable field. This is the model of liberal arts schools: you study art, music, philosophy, literature, etc. but you can leave the school with a degree in an employable field.
As far as I understand it, your belief is that without the government lending people money with minimal constraints, fields that are less employable would go away almost entirely. I don't agree that this would be the case, but if that's where you're coming from I think that's a reasonable enough disagreement that we can land on.
After Rounds of laughter. “If I failed to pay, the government will pay you back.”
Bank. “Here’s 10 million dollars. Let us know if you’d like more. “
Banks and other lenders do basic sue diligence all the time. It’s government that screws this up.
What you're saying here is that only rich people get to go for degrees which don't have a guaranteed return on investment. Is that the kind of society you want to live in? Where only the rich can study philosophy, or history?
Alternatively, university could be paid for like K-12 is and everyone could have a chance to go, or go into a trade school. You'll have a much more educated, diverse society and kids don't need to worry about bankruptcy and crushing loans.
After that, it becomes more prescriptive around roles of operation, and that's murkier. For example, I'd be happy to see hard caps on $ of operational budget spent on admin. I'd also be happy if sports was budgeted for separately and that student athletes were separately admitted to both their sport(s) and for academic study. There are many things states could do that would impact how schools are managed, regardless of the federal government's rules for student loan lending.
Also, prices should fall a lot, making school a lot more affordable.
Proper thing is for the government to stop issuing the loans, and instead do need-based grants plus establish cost and quality controls for institutions that wish to be grant eligible, while prioritizing federal institutional funding other than direct student aid for institutions that, whether througj grant eligibility or their own pricing and in-house aid programs, or both, meet set financial accessibility standards.