Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

College in the US would be a lot cheaper if the government didn't inflate it. If you go back in time just a few decades, this is how it was: you paid for it, either in cash or with a PRIVATE loan, and people didn't see college as an automatic requirement. Then it was 1/10th as expensive.

...if you go back in time a few decades basically everything was about 1/10th as expensive.

e.g. "Adjusted for inflation, $1.00 in 1960 is equal to $10.43 in 2024" according to https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=1...

We could do this in the USA also, or perhaps even bother with online universities, except those are generally considered not very useful as degrees.

What timeframe are you looking at?

Back in 2011, registration fees at UC Berkeley were $7,230 per semester, with $813 allotted to health insurance (which could be waived if you provided proof of existing insurance from your family), so $6,417 ignoring health insurance. Meanwhile, last year, registration fees were an eye-popping $9,847 for new students, but cost of health insurance grew much faster to $1,929 ($7,918 ignoring health insurance). This is about a 23% increase, compared to CPI-measured inflation of about 35% between Sep 2011 and Sep 2023.

(The next biggest driver of the overall increase was the campus fee, which went from $253 to $820.)

Or, if you look at just tuition alone, that went from $5610 to $6261, or just barely above 10%.

https://registrar.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Fe...

https://registrar.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/fee_schedu...

If you look further back, in 1999, tuition was a mere $1543, but I posit that tuition at UCs has actually been fairly stable over the past decade.

I don't disagree, but they support my point that tuition has not changed meaningfully in the past decade (and then some), which is why I asked what timeframe you were looking at.

Inflation is perhaps not a good point of reference anyways, since in 2009, inflation per CPI was actually slightly negative. Cost of borrowing is not the same as cost of goods and services or cost of labor, for reasons such as the ones you point out (changes to banking regulations, increased risk aversion, etc).

Although, I'm a little surprised that cost of borrowing would have been much higher, seeing as that was the start of the zero interest-rate policy in the US. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate was hovering around 6-7% pre-crisis and 4-5% in the years immediately following it.

I've had to submit weekly sheets that were graded in almost all courses and these qualify for the final exam (in STEM). There were two exercise groups with competent ta to ask questions..

What's missing is some kind of Disneyland experience, student unions also exist to some degree but it's more low key.

Not saying that German university is better or worse - I'm convinced it has it's own problems that only will get worse if nothing is changing but it's not like it's subpar and you are alone with your book.

This isn't due to staff shortages, it's more of a difference in tradition/philosophy of teaching

- UC Merced was established in 2005, so I buy the argument on that point regarding investment in infrastructure.

- In 2009, the state's general funds accounted for $2.6 billion, compared to just under $3 billion in 2006. Student fees in that timeframe rose from $1.55 billion to $2 billion, tracking fairly closely with the corresponding shortfall in state funding. [0, 1] Yes, these numbers are also cherrypicked as a representative budget right before the GFC and shortly after, but they represent neither peak funding nor the overall sharpness of the budget cuts. So, I reject the claim that the tuition hikes in the aftermath of the GFC was due to increased borrowing costs for the UC system. I think a more mundane explanation is that the state had a budgetary shortfall due to less taxes being collected (income, property), and made cuts across the board; the UC system raised student fees to compensate.

https://thebottomline.as.ucsb.edu/2017/10/a-brief-history-of... provides an overview of how tuition at UCs evolved up through 2017, although it gets the state funding amounts off by 3 orders of magnitude (since the linked governor's budget is measured in thousands of dollars).

[0] UC's 2009 budget is outlined in slide 3 of https://www.ucop.edu/operating-budget/_files/documents/2010-...

[1] UC's 2006 budget is outlined in slide 9 of https://www.ucop.edu/operating-budget/_files/rbudget/200607-...

"The average annual cost of tuition at a public 4-year college is 40 times higher than tuition in 1963.

(...)

After adjusting for currency inflation, college tuition has increased 197.4% since 1963."

https://educationdata.org/college-tuition-inflation-rate

This here is where the money is... college degrees are a very effective dull-weeder for job applications. It filters out people of lower social classes (because they cannot afford college or effects of their social status like having to work jobs next to school to help their family make rent prevent them from getting good enough grades), it filters out people with unmanaged mental health issues, it filters out young parents (good luck managing to get a degree parallel to raising a child), it filters out people with disabilities... and all of that without violating a single anti-discrimination law.

These administrators exist due to the influx of government money. As long as there is available money, the administration has every incentive to grow, and does. It's really very much like the government itself.

IOW - It's not that a larger administration causes costs and prices to go up - it's that more money coming in leads to a larger administration.

It's very much like the cost-plus model in the defense department as well: If I'm allowed to make more money when my costs are higher, then I will ensure that my costs continue to go up.