> Makes sense when you have student loans backed by the federal government.

Everyone says that, but I've not seen much actual evidence.

I tried to find evidence, by looking for tuitions of various major universities over time and seeing if there was any clear difference in the tuition growth rates before Federal loans and after.

I know the data is available. Most schools list tuition in their catalog, and have their old catalogs in their library, but it wasn't turning up in. Google searches.

I was only able to find historical data for Stanford, giving tuition by decade, and one big state school whose name I don't remember. Here's a graph of log10(Stanford_tution) over time [1]. I don't have a copy of the graph for the other school but recall it was similar. It looks like it has been growing about the same for a century.

I also remember comparing tuition rate increases to inflation, and found that tuition has grown pretty consistently at roughly 2x inflation both before and after Federal backed loans.

[1] https://imgur.com/fXnjDNn