Why college became so expensive
by Joe Pinsker
The story of the rising cost of college in America is often told through numbers, with references to runaway tuition prices and the ever-growing pile of outstanding student debt.
The personal toll these trends have taken is hard to convey, but the anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom does so in her new book, Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost, which documents how the price of a college education has forced many middle-class families to rearrange their priorities, finances, and lives.
In Indebted, Zaloom, a professor at New York University, draws on some 160 interviews she did with families who are taking on debt to pay for college, mixing in history of education policy and analysis of the financial morass students and their loved ones must navigate—including a close reading of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, form and the concept of family it promotes.
I recently spoke with Zaloom about what this system of paying for college is doing to families—as well as what might make higher education less financially fraught. The conversation that follows has been edited and condensed.
Joe Pinsker: In the past few decades, what’s changed in how families pay for college?
Caitlin Zaloom: College used to be a lot cheaper for families, because there was more funding from the government. If you think about the biggest educational systems, like the University of California system or the City University of New York system, these universities were free or practically free for decades. That was in part because of a belief that higher education was essential for the national project of upward mobility, and for having an educated citizenry.
So middle-class families didn’t always have to pay for college with debt. The shift began in the 1980s, in terms of a changing political philosophy. President Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, said in 1981, “If people want to go to college bad enough, then there is opportunity and responsibility on their part to finance their way through the best way they can.” When those who argued that college is a private benefit framed it like that, it became logical to say that education should be paid for by the people that it benefits. And so in the 1990s, the vast expansion of loans for higher education began.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/why-college-became-so-expensive/ar-AAGKjy9?li=BBnbfcN
I attended night classes back in the 80's at my local community college. In 1981 the Republicans controlled both branches of the legislature and the governor's office. That year they doubled the cost of tuition at all public colleges and universities in Washington State.
My state has not elected a Republican governor since then.
= new reply since forum marked as read
of paying administrators yuuuge salaries, bonuses, and raises.
The title of this OP article should be "HOW college became so expensive" because she's not even discussing the WHY of it. Why are colleges so expensive? Bloated administrative costs are out of control, while salaries for the teaching professionals have been squeezed down to the nubbies. Adjunct professors can't even live on the tiny salaries being paid (no benefits of course), and full tenure isn't even possible on most campuses these days.
Meanwhile parents and families can barely afford to educate their kids, or they have to choose which lucky kid gets college while the others stay home. Education is out of reach for way too many families now.
