Why is college so expensive? Why is everybody in debt? Greedy Big Education?

«In 1976, state governments provided six out of every ten dollars of the cost of students attending public colleges.

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State legislatures began to drastically cut what they spent per student on their public colleges, even as the taxable income base in the state grew.

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The average public college tuition has nearly tripled since 1991, helping bring its counterpart, skyrocketing student debt, to the level of $1.5 trillion in 2020.

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The federal government for its part slowly shifted its financial aid from grants that didn’t have to be repaid (such as Pell Grants for low-income students, which used to cover four-fifths of college costs and now cover at most one-third) to federal loans,

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In 1978, a [California] ballot initiative known as Proposition 13 drastically limited property taxes by capping them at 1 percent of the property’s value at purchase, limiting increases and assessments, and requiring a supermajority to pass new taxes. Property tax revenue from corporate landowners and homeowners in the state dropped 60 percent the following year. The impact was felt most acutely in public K–12 schools;

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Between 1979 and 2019, tuition and fees at the four-year public colleges increased eight-fold.

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A decade later, voters in Colorado… passed a constitutional amendment severely limiting taxes. TABOR (Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights) has forced Coloradans to go without a long list of public services, including for two years children’s vaccines when the state couldn’t afford to purchase them—and the state has dropped to forty-seventh place in higher education investments.»

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