The price of college in particular is commented on in the article - prestige matters and prestige is zero sum, so supply is constrained and demand is highly inelastic. Add on to that vastly increased purchasing power made possible by subsidized student loans that can't be discharged in bankruptcy and you have a recipe for out of control prices. Limited supply of a highly inelastic good combined with massive demand way above what people normally could pay yields prices going to the moon.
There's not an easy fix for this. If you have the government pay for college then the race to get into college gets all the money that would have been spent on tuition. On top of that, it's not inherently clear what amount private universities should be paid or if they should be allowed to charge on top of what public money pays for. I went to a public school and I'd trade my crappy experience (caused by budget shortfalls and bureaucratic overhead characteristic of government-run institutions) for a more expensive private school any day of the week. You really don't want overfilled classes, extreme competition for research positions (even basic things like being an experiment monkey are competitive), and a system that in general only pays attention to you if you have above a 3.8.
If you kill government subsidized loans you fix the market for less prestigious schools, but the top 20 or so are still going to have substantial pricing power. Private market loans and ISAs still have the potential to jack up purchasing power.
> bureaucratic overhead characteristic of government-run institutions
Whenever I read something like that, I wonder if the speaker ever worked in private industry. IME, government gets all their bad organizational ideas from us.
Yes, but private industry companies can go bankrupt if they're too incompetent. Governments can too of course, but they typically take a lot longer to do so.
There's not an easy fix for this. If you have the government pay for college then the race to get into college gets all the money that would have been spent on tuition. On top of that, it's not inherently clear what amount private universities should be paid or if they should be allowed to charge on top of what public money pays for. I went to a public school and I'd trade my crappy experience (caused by budget shortfalls and bureaucratic overhead characteristic of government-run institutions) for a more expensive private school any day of the week. You really don't want overfilled classes, extreme competition for research positions (even basic things like being an experiment monkey are competitive), and a system that in general only pays attention to you if you have above a 3.8.
If you kill government subsidized loans you fix the market for less prestigious schools, but the top 20 or so are still going to have substantial pricing power. Private market loans and ISAs still have the potential to jack up purchasing power.