Wonks Conclude That Amenities & Administration Are Not To Blame for Cost of College

Why does tuition keep spiking, then?

I thought we had settled the question of why the cost of college accelerated at such a rapid and alarming rate. It’s because, instead of keeps overhead low and tuition affordable, colleges invest in upscale food and HGTV-worthy dorms. No, wait, it’s because colleges these days hire too many highly paid administrators and overpay their presidents. Or is it because of trigger warnings? It’s gotta be trigger warnings, right? Otherwise why would anyone even care?

Nope, says FiveThirtyEight wonk Doug Webber. The correct answer is D: None of the above. College costs as much as it does because of politics — specifically, because of the priorities of politicians at the state level.

The rapid increase in the cost of college in recent decades — and the associated explosion in student debt, which now totals nearly $1.3 trillion nationally — is all too familiar to many Americans. But few understand what has caused the tuition boom, particularly at the public institutions that enroll roughly two-thirds of all students at four-year colleges. Many commenters, particularly in the popular press, focus on ballooning administrative budgets and extravagant student amenities. Those elements have played a role, to be sure, but by far the single biggest driver of rising tuitions for public colleges has been declining state funding for higher education.

State funding has gone down, way down, and that’s by far the change that’s most responsible for the tuition burden students are left staggering under for decades. The rest of it: food, dorms, admin? That accounts for only ~25% of the increase.

All of those trends add to the cost of college, but not by that much. At most, about a quarter of the increase in college tuition since 2000 can be attributed to rising faculty salaries, improved amenities and administrative bloat. By comparison, the decline in state support accounts for about three-quarters of the rising cost of college.

Webber makes a convincing case that “state budget cuts dwarf administrative bloat as a cause for rising tuitions.” In many states, the increase in tuition per student seems tracks almost exactly with the amount, in per student spending, slashed from that state’s budget. Between 2000 and 2014, Colorado, for example, reduced the amount it gave to its UC system for each undergrad by $7,800 and tuition for each undergrad went up $7,700. The amount had to come from somewhere; since it wasn’t coming from state coffers, it had to come instead from students’ pockets. As he puts it, “With huge budget cuts, big tuition increases were inevitable.” Schools had to make up the shortfall somewhere.

Webber does note that private schools, which educate about a third of US undergrads, also charged vastly in 2014 than they did in 2000, even though they’re not subject to the whims of public funding. In those cases, we can blame admin and amenities: “the spending categories described above — student services and faculty and administrative salaries — together explain most of the tuition increase over the past two decades.” But, he underlines, “at least among public institutions, the dominant factor has been a steady decrease in support for higher education on the part of state legislatures.”

And what happened between 2000 and 2014? Webber doesn’t mention it, but states overwhelmingly put Republicans in charge of their legislatures.

The Other GOP Wave: State Legislatures | RealClearPolitics

So, if you’re pissed at how much you had to take out in loans even to go to school in state, yell at your parents, because this is their fault. Odds are that either they didn’t vote, or they voted in legislators who scythed the funds available for your education.

Related:

Trump: Student Loans Should Be Off-Limits To Liberal Arts Majors

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