In Part 1 of my posts on “The High Cost of College Tuition,” I concluded that the increase in tuition at Yale Law School, which has more than tripled in “real,” i.e., inflation-adjusted, terms over the last 40 years, was ridiculous. (Actually, there may be other terms that are more appropriate, but I did not want to use them.) And Yale Law School is not unique or unusual, as this chart, which compares college tuition versus the Consumer Price Index from 1978 to 2011, shows.
In my mind there is no justification for this kind of increase – other than enough students (or their parents) will pay it, and colleges and universities will find a way to spend it once they get it. One of the reasons tuition has gotten so high is that there are a lot people out there who will spend absurd amounts of money to get their children into the “best” schools. I have often thought, somewhat facetiously (though perhaps not entirely), that the two areas where people will spend money without really looking at the price tag are medical care (you don’t negotiate in the emergency room**) and college tuition.**
More seriously, it has been suggested that one of the reasons for the large increases in both college costs and medical costs is the lack of productivity increases in medicine and education. In much of American manufacturing, productivity has dramatically increased over the last 40 years, which has limited increases. When people complain about the decline in manufacturing jobs in the United States, what they don’t realize is that we make the same amount of manufactured products (actually, more). It’s just that, because of the increases in productivity, it takes fewer people to make the same amount of “stuff.” We manufacture as much; we just don’t need as many people to do it. Because we don’t have such productivity increases in education or medicine, the argument goes, the cost has increased.
The problem with that argument is that, while there may not have been big per-worker productivity increases in medical care (I don’t know), medical care is much, much better than it was 40 years ago. New drugs, new equipment, new techniques, etc., have dramatically improved the quality, and results, of medical care over the last 40 years. But higher education? I don’t think so. In no way have the quality and results of higher education gone up over the last 40 years in any way comparable to the cost increases.
So what do we do? I am going to look at that in Part 3 of these posts.
-------
* Part 1 is this series of posts is here.
** Especially when, for a lot of people, somebody else is paying.
*** Obviously, some people do base their college decisions on cost, but enough of them don’t that those who do consider the cost don’t drive the market.
Comments