EDIT: The rest of my comment below is (as pointed out below by gruez) incorrect. The article did say 'in 2021 dollars' in reference to one set of numbers, and it's reasonable to assume they meant that to apply to all the other numbers in the same paragraph.
It's still surprises me that The Economist would use CPI-adjusted figures, but fail to mention the adjustment. Using CPI-adjusted figures is common, but it's not the default, which is why people often add 'in real terms' or some other qualifier.
Are we reading the same article?
>A report from the College Board, a non-profit, shows that whereas published tuition and fees for private non-profit colleges increased from $29,000 in 2006-07 to $38,000 in 2021-22 (in 2021 dollars), the net price actually decreased from $17,000 to $15,000.
"in 2021 dollars" clearly implies CPI adjustment.
The figures that surprised me were the ones at the end of that sentence (the 'drop' from $17k to $15k). I reread that part, didn't see anything about constant dollars for those numbers, and then went looking for the source data.
And if you look at any graph of college costs vs wages over the past 40 years or so, they have simply skyrocketed.
Absolutely, no debate there. The particular surprising claim in question though was about whether they have declined in the past couple of years, relative to a peak in late 2010s. And there, measured either in CPI adjusted costs, or relative to real median wages, they have.
But of course, the drops are small, and it's only been about 1-2 years. I'm not sure this really indicates a sustained trend, or just the fact that college cost increases have (for once) lagged inflation over those 1-2 years.
"inflation" is by definition CPI. Therefore the claim that using another metric to "include the impacts of inflation" is tautologically false. The word you want is "affordability".
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-does-the-government-m...
There is also PPI for producer prices, and the GDP deflator used for GDP.
If the US government and law already is using a number of different metrics to account for inflation impacts for different purposes, it absolutely makes sense to debate which particular measure is best for this area.
But there's not one single true number, different groups of people are affected by different measures (e.g. the use of CPI-W for social security payments is thoughtfully meant to be more representative of costs incurred by the typical social security recipient than is CPI-U)
Fair point, but in the context the previous comment, "wages" is basically never considered a serious contender for measuring inflation in economics.
Like, you're using big words to indicate that under no situation is this true, when the reality is that "inflation" is not by definition CPI. CPI is one measure of inflation.
But it just caught my eye that this seems, extra wrong. It's hard to read something extra wrong on the internet, and yet it feels like you've succeeded.
People are wrong on all of the time, but to call something tautologically false when it's trivially true, is peak wrongness.
The thing to compare tuition to is teacher pay. At today's tuition rates, 10 or less students would pay their professors salary. Average class sizes are much larger, so it's obvious the money is going somewhere else. Done. Forget CPI, the schools are pricing based on perceived value, not cost, and an unlimited supply of government backed loans.
Clearly, the value proposition for a university is not the education it provides. Even if you wanted the atmosphere of being on campus all day, the rent-a-room strategy would give you that for far less with smaller classes. Obviously it would be hard to be taken seriously if you did this, so the issue is that you must pass through the university system to receive credentials, and for many fields these credentials are non-optional.
Even spending $100k/yr on a PhD evaluating students full-time, and spending an entire 1 week per student to rigorously personally evaluate them 1:1, you could charge $2000 total to attempt an evaluation for credentials, allowing non-traditional students to self-study for free. If we want to make education and accreditation more attainable for everyone, we need to separate granting of credentials from studying. Study requirements are redundant with a rigorous exam, and particularly for fields where exams are already in place for credentials (law, accounting, capital-E Engineering, etc.), study requirements should be barred.
[0] https://registrar.arizona.edu/support-services/classroom-ser...
[1] https://www.azcentral.com/pages/interactives/news/local/ariz...
[2] https://www.arizona.edu/admissions/first-year/cost
[3] https://financialaid.arizona.edu/types-of-aid/scholarships/i...
All attempts to track prices over time have some flaw. But not adjusting for inflation in a chart that goes back ~20 years could also be perceived as misleading.
Moreover, we are starting to see growth in real median wages again. They are already above Q4 2019: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q. So I think it is fair to say in some sense that the real price of attendance has started to go down (albeit not that much).