Tuition could decrease because of the growing sense that college is not 'worth it'.

> A poll published in 2022 asked parents if they would rather their child attended a four-year college or a three-year apprenticeship that would train them for a job and pay them while they learned. Nearly half of parents whose child had graduated from college chose the apprenticeship. [1]

> Nearly half of parents say they would prefer not to send their children to a four-year college after high school, even if there were no obstacles, financial or otherwise. Two-thirds of high-school students think they will be just fine without a college degree. [1]

When there is a large change in the demand for a product, the price often drops.

1: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/why-americans-have-los...

#2 and #3 both have simple answers - "Nothing," and "Eliminate the free money buffet of federally guaranteed loans that can't be discharged by anything short of death."

"Eliminate 80% of administrators" would also help with #3 but there's no incentive to do that, especially without the more direct answer to #3 happening first.

That’s just attacking the bottom of the ladder. Taking a resource away from the common people is not a nice policy to pursue. The schools are the ones raising prices. What exactly about teaching a bunch of kids in one room at a time has gotten (checks notes) 300%??? more expensive in the last 20 years?

The workforce is not even doing that good, the competition for few permanent positions is fierce and the compensation outside of management is low compared to other industries.

IMO there is no hope. We have a culture that values college degrees, no matter how useless, as some kind of high moral good.

To take away student loans then is a form of evil.

First, you would have to ban discrimination against people without college degrees.

You can't discriminate against people without college degrees and then complain college degrees are expensive lol.

> - What forces would actually cause colleges to lower their tuition?

Decoupling education from certification would work. Most people are willing to pay so much for college because they need certification; they're forced to pay for the education, whether or not they actually learn anything.

The Federal government could mandate that any school that's eligible for funds has to make the certification open to anyone, and also make sure that the certifications themselves around coupled together (you don't need a certification in Art History to get certified in Biochemistry). If people can pass the Harvard certification for, say, Harvard Astrophysics, then they get a Harvard Astrophysics degree the same as someone who took classes at Harvard and passed the certification.

It's known that bundling items together is usually a good way to force people to buy things they don't want. People talk about this all the time when it comes to cable bundles. But our higher education system is based on bundling a lot of things together, so when people are trying to acquire what they need, they're forced to pay for many things they don't.

The resulting certifications would be worth approximately the same amount as the existing online-only degrees. Basically ticking the box for "college educated", but be passed over on any further scrutiny than that.

Because the selling point of prestigious schools is the filtering and networking.

I'm not opposed to any attempt to remove the need for these full college degrees as a hiring requirement, but this also ignores that the point of many colleges is the network. You are paying to be part of a club.

I don't think you're wrong, but I think that food and accommodations would be better places to start the unbundling with.

A lot of US schools require you to live on campus and pay for campus food, which is a perfect example of bundling if there ever was one. As a European, the fact this is legal seems absurd and ridiculous to me.

>The Federal government could

But will it? No. Back to the drawing board.

> - Why would college tuition decrease?

in theory, because of a few factors

1) more kids doing online, or community college, degrees

2) more people opting to go into the trades, as AI eats knowledge workers and the cost-benefit doesn't make sense; or else skipping and going straight to certifications for things like IT

3) legal or structural changes impacting how many international and out-of-state students are allowed. many public universities operate at a loss for locals, but subsidize those costs with higher fees for out of state and international students.

4) the gub'mnt finally gets around to rejecting or capping a lot of student loan applications

Been seeing a lot of chat about #1 and #2, but until the last two get changed I don't think anything will drastically improve

> - Why would college tuition decrease?

The only answer I can think of is strong and swift government regulation, and there's no appetite for that, so...I dunno man.

Just in general I would like to say that flipping the question like this is a great way to look at all aspects of a problem. Similarly "why would the price of housing decrease?" etc

Because not everything in life should be driven by optimizing profit?

This is a normative claim, which therefore cannot answer questions about what is, or what could be.

Parent comment is probably not arguing in favor of overpriced college, just saying the situation won’t resolve naturally

I'm saying it may resolve naturally, if any of the overpriced university decides that over charging for education is not in line with their ethics.

Sounds pretty short-sighted. Capitalism is not a system we can simply opt out of, and regardless one university is just one university.

> What's actually stopping the elite schools from doubling their tuition in a single year?

If a school doubled tuition, it would be less competitive and fewer of the best students would choose to apply and enroll there. That would make that school less elite.

> What forces would actually cause colleges to lower their tuition?

Increased supply and/or lowered demand.

Harvard could triple its tuition and the same people are going to apply to Harvard.

This would be true for those whose contribution would be capped based on parental earnings/assets, since their effective price would not increase. And it would be true for extremely wealthy folks whose parents can spend $1M on college and not worry about it. But for the marginal applicants who would be paying full freight under the old price but can't easily toss out another $150k/yr on tuition, there would definitely be a drop in application rates.

They might apply, but certainly won't attend if they are admitted to Stanford, Yale, etc. The higher the price differential, the more likely people would be willing to take a 'prestige' hit and go to the lower cost school.

Anyone applying from a family making 400k a year (top 2%) would still be sensitive to an 80k vs 240k/year sticker price change.

Operation Varsity Blues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal) suggests there are plenty of individuals willing to pay plenty more. Some would even break the law and risk prison. If it were legal, probably many more would pay.

There are just the people who got caught!

Yeah, but the average quality of students would go down.

Plenty of people can still be fewer people

Hypothetically -- what if Stanford and Yale etc also triple their tuition at the same time?

Then some people would turn to schools 4-6.

Reduce the amount students can borrow for college, that’s it. If you give people ever increasing amounts of money to acquire something that society convinces them they need, the price will keep going up as the loan money available goes up.

It’s just being sucked into bullshit administration and infrastructure costs.

A university could be a few dozen professors, zero admin besides secretaries for the professors, and having the professors share whatever small organizational tasks are actually necessary.

Like think of how you would run a startup university. Do as little as possible outside of actual teaching and research, charge tuition to cover costs which would be much lower.

There’s not any competition though. So it’s not happening.

That sounds somewhat like the university of austin, or whatever it's called. They're launching this fall and trying to get accredited. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.

I studied at a "startup university" that had just a few dozen professors. The total number of employees was still more than 100, and it wasn't all "bullshit administration".

There were assistants to the professors (1 assistant per 3 professors), the bigger research groups had post docs and lab technicians, there was an IT team (3 people), there was one person responsible for the sign up formalities of the students, a director of the institute, his assistant, one HR person, 3 or 4 people in the cafeteria, cleaning staff, head of microscopy lab, some scientific support technicians, people feeding rats and mice in the life science facility, a few people in the machine shop, a librarian (library was digital only; still took a dedicated person who made sure everyone got access to the literature they need), and those are just the people I met and remember.

That university only offered PhD programs, so there were only few lectures. If you wanted to do undergraduate courses as well, you'd need a lot more people than that.

Universities just need a lot of staff.

I agree with the general thrust of your argument but it's oversimplifying the causes. A real university would not be able to run with just professors and secretaries, that's ludicrous. You need some administration to handle compliance, organization, finance, etc. You can both acknowledge the objective reality that a university is a complex organization that needs administration and that most universities today have 3-4x more administrators than they need.

And why couldn’t the professor or two who teach finance be responsible for the university’s finances?

Surely you're not implying that every person with a PhD in something is an excellent practitioner of that thing. Most aren't. They shouldn't be - their job is primarily research on that thing, and teaching that thing.

Not every finance professor can manage a multi-billion dollar budget, not every Political Science professor can manage a campaign or run for office, not every Comp Sci professor can maintain a university network, etc. Not to mention the fact that not every college will even have a professor for every discipline that you could theoretically use to replace an administrator.

> and research

Why research? Why not go further and cut that bit out and just leave teaching?

I'm not convinced that the best place to teach student is necessarily the best place to do research at, and I'm pretty sure that your competence at being a good researcher has very little to do with your competence at being a good teacher.

Because the purpose of a university isn’t teaching. And you really cap yourself at undergraduate education if all you want to do is teach. Not is the purpose of professors to be good teachers.

There are hundreds of colleges. That's competition. Why aren't any of them competing? Because there isn't actual profit in it. Except for the for-profit colleges that do exist, do compete, and occasionally get shut down because they turn out to be scams.

replies like this generate no value. tell us what happened in 1971, don't make lazy, vague references to it. please provide a source, or at least some idea of what your point is.

Presumably a reference to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system

> On 15 August 1971, the United States "temporarily" suspended the convertibility of the US dollar to gold, effectively bringing the Bretton Woods system to an end and rendering the dollar a fiat currency.

Every time someone mentions prices going up even slightly there's at least one person who is convinced it's because of Nixon, or the gold standard, or too much cryptocurrency, or not enough cryptocurrency, or something else vaguely related to those.

It's a reference to a website[1] which talks about the divorcing of the USD from the gold standard.

[1]https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

The funniest thing with this idea is that in practice nothing of economic significance really happened in 1971: the supply of dollar used on the international trade market[1] being each year more important than the amount of gold stored in Fort Knox had been a hot topic during most of the sixties already (and French president de Gaulle tried to fight against that as early as 1965!).

What happened in 1971 (the suspension of the official conversion between gold and dollar) is just the political acknowledgement that the fiction of a gold/dollar parity was untenable any longer, but economically speaking, the divorce occurred during the previous decade (and then ironically the charts on that website show you how little correlation there is between this phenomenon and the later economic consequences).

What really happened in that period was in 1973: Yom Kippur War and as a consequence OPEC shutting down the oil supply, derailing the industrial economies and the Welfare State. A crisis that was thereafter co-opted by neo-liberal movement, bringing the world back to the pre-war situation regarding inequalities and economic growth.

[1] the domestic supply of dollar had been much higher than the gold reserves for pretty much the entirety of the existence of the US dollar, because that's pretty much how banking works since the end of the middle ages!

It's just your typical "gold standard conspiracy" boogyman.

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE98G07F/

compared to "greedy capitalist" boogyman that goes completely unquestioned on a forum like this? it's a conspiracy theory by any definition used here generally

... Okay?

I didn't say it wasn't?

You'd think that college tuition would decrease in the US because university enrollment has actually been on a downward trend for over a decade. However, in the US university primarily serve as social signalling and an elite prestigious university is a very different type of product than a typical university (most of which are not particularly exclusive, admitting over 70% of applicants).

Presumably, competition prevents this. It would really depend on the applicants' other options. Between attending Vanderbilt at $200K per year and a moderately less prestigious state university for about an order of magnitude less a lot of students would pick the latter. The university could admit more students that are willing to pay the doubled tuition, but that'd probably result in lower graduate quality.

I'm not sure what could make elite universities lower their tuition save for legislation. As the Varsity Blues scandal demonstrated, families are willing to pay huge sums of money to get their kids into elite university. Besides laws, the only other answer I can think of is to reduce the prestige of elite universities. If an Ivy League, Stanford, or MIT diploma ceases to confer so much advantage in academia and the labor market then their ability to charge large sums would go down.

University enrollment is down way at the bottom end where schools are shutting down. So supply is dropping instead of prices, as economics expects.

This is a great question.

- Why would college tuition decrease?

1) College tuition would decrease if it led to increased profit for the college. This could happen for many reasons including the case that they can't find enough students willing to pay.

- What's actually stopping the elite schools from doubling their tuition in a single year?

2) Mostly the fear that it would reduce profits - for example through bad publicity, increased regulation, or an inability to find students willing to pay

-What forces would actually cause colleges to lower their tuition?

3) market forces - on the demand side a decrease in students willing to pay, or maybe on the supply side an increase in competition for students. Or maybe government/regulatory interventions. Or possibly even a reduction in the costs of providing education.

What does it mean for a school like Harvard to make a profit? Why do they want to do that?

Not sure this answers your question but Harvard does make a profit (technically an operating surplus as they are not a for profit) which they then reinvest. Although technically it might not seem like a profit motive I can see how a lot of this money might find it's way into the pockets of the administration of the university (although I'm no expert on this - presenting this as a personal view, not a fact)

Https://finance.harvard.edu/financial-overview

"The University ended fiscal year 2023 with an operating surplus of $186 million compared to $406 million in fiscal year 2022, on an operating revenue base that increased 5% or $262 million, to $6.1 billion. The reduced surplus was not unexpected and was driven primarily by expenses associated with renewed return to campus activity and strategic investments in our workforce, with increased compensation for faculty and staff, a decrease in vacancy rates, and overall growth in new workers across campus."

Sure, but that money isn’t going to shareholders is it? Why would the school’s management want to make that number bigger?

So that they can increase their own pay and benefits. Nonprofits still have to pay their staff and the amount of money some pay theirs can be rather... inflated.

The operating surplus is net of paying staff. If they increased their pay, wouldn’t it be lower?

The operating surplus says nothing about how they increased pay, except that they increased revenue more than they increased pay.

If you wanted to justify further pay increases this would be the best strategy - if you have an operating deficit you'll be under pressure to cut staff or pay.

Again I'm being very cynical here and I have no idea if this is actually happening. Just speculation.

The same reasons as any other business enterprise under capitalism.

But that’s the point: Harvard literally isn’t a “business enterprise under capitalism”. It’s a non-profit organization with no shareholders. Nobody has equity in Harvard.

>Harvard literally isn't a “business enterprise under capitalism”

It literally is. "Non-profit" is a particular way of doing accounting, categorizing funds, filing taxes, but the incentives and interests are no different.

The incentives and interests are hugely different. A for-profit business is controlled by shareholders who directly own claims to its revenue. A non-profit is not. Harvard has no shareholders and the members of its primary governing board are not compensated.

Businesses tend to distribute their profits to shareholders, either through dividends or buybacks. Boards try to structure the way businesses are governed to align the interests of management with those of shareholders. But Harvard has no shareholders, so I’m not sure what you’re trying to suggest.

Actually on reflection perhaps I'm being too cynical here. The motivation of administration doesn't need to be lining their pockets. They may simply see increased revenue as a means to invest in staff and facilities which they can use to further the university's mission of research and education. There doesn't have to be any bad intent.

Certainly when I was a student, I got the impression that my university saw its purpose as supporting research and training new researchers. One reason to like scholarships is that being a researcher doesn’t actually pay well so saddling people with lots of debt by graduation might discourage them from becoming researchers, though I’m not sure how much the university thought of that. It did feel like the majority of undergraduates who were not going to become researchers were a bit of an afterthought. However people outside had different ideas about what the university was trying to do, and the university obviously hoped to solicit donations from those students who eventually left.

The gains come from (re)investing donations, not from tuition.

They won't call it a profit. What they will do is spend as much as they can on salaries (especially for the senior employees), increasing the size of the administration (more jobs for insiders), buildings, sports, etc.

Basically, people think non-profit means the organization works for the public or puts the public first. Unfortunately, what it often means is money goes to employees and insiders instead of shareholders. For colleges, it means the students (and the Federal Government which issued the student loads) comes last and the college's employees come first. Not great public policy.

This is why running things that aren't a business "like a business" is profoundly dangerous and destructive and anybody advocating it should be dismissed as ideologically driven.

but on the other hand, these private colleges do not ever claim to be run for the public (tho they are a non-profit, which carries with it the connotation of being run for the public good despite there not being any laws requiring it).

If college is expensive, students should choose not to go, or find a cheaper one. Choosing an expensive college, whether the outcomes are good for said student or not, is the choice of said student and therefore, subject to their rational utilitarian calculations. Choosing badly is always possible, just like any other life decisions.

That's individual consumer based which is still part of the problem.

We need to collectively choose to structure education for the benefit of society because we want people to be educated.

It's not about consumer choices or utility functions. That type of thinking has zero place here.

> We need to collectively choose to structure education for the benefit of society because we want people to be educated.

so it is done already with k-12 education. Not everybody agrees that tertiary education should be paid for by the state, but do agree that the state should help subsidize a bit.

This is the education loan system that is the collective decision.

And that 56 year old decision by Governer Reagan should be revisited.*

A majority of people get a college degree these days. It isn't some effete luxury of the literati in country club colleges. If someone is willing to do the hard work of educating themselves we should support it without burdening them with a lifetime of debt.

You want a doctorate and are willing to put in the years of effort? Good, we need more. It should be free. It's not like information is a scarce resource these days. Spending years of your life to defend a dissertation is a big enough sacrifice.

* see https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reaga... or https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/12/29/hi... . The same people who whine about h1-b workers also don't want to fund education to get more domestic ones. We need to stop pretending people with such incoherent policies deserve a seat at the table.

I can see the logic of administrators wanting to spend money on their own remuneration, but why should they care about building new buildings?

Well typically employees at a college typically treat the facilities like their private country club. Instead of getting the family membership at the bouldering gym, just build a bouldering wall and now you can go anytime.

This could just be a case of the profit motive aligning with the good for society as a whole.

New buildings can house new students and academics which is good and also helps bring in more money in future.

New buildings also preserve the status of the university as a top institution - there is some level of competition for students and talented academics and if Harvard fell behind other universities it would be harder to bring in grants. Of course this is a good thing for the university but it's also good for any administrator who wants to preserve their pay.

In big organizations (of any type, including companies, universities, hospitals, military), people's sense of importance is determined primarily by the number of people they manage, and/or the size of their budget.

People want to be more important.

> - Why would college tuition decrease?

The single change that would cause the largest downward pressure on college pricing would be removing federally subsidized student loans.

Socialism makes a lot more sense when you realize that all the rigging to make people feel good about capitalism results in the same structure simply because anything else would not be permitted.

>> - What's actually stopping the elite schools from doubling their tuition in a single year?

It is effectively double -- the rest of the "tuition" is legacy contribution. There is an entire standard contribution schedule based on how many years out of college you are. Many legacy parents pay hoping this gets their children into the school when the time comes.