What will it really take to control the cost of college tuition?

Last updated on: August 25, 2013 at 9:09 pm by Jane the Actuary

What will it really take to control the cost of college tuition? 2013-08-25T21:09:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Will Obama’s approach of differentiating financial aid based on how a college fares in a government-devised ranking make any difference? Unlikely.

Will MOOCs and other innovations revolutionize higher education? Not in isolation.

The fundamental reason why tuition has been galloping forward is the same reason that medical costs have been. No, not the third-party payer problem. The fact that the product seems indispensable.

If you’ve been told by your doctor that you need a triple-bypass operation, are you going to hunt for alternatives? Probably not. Your only question is going to be, “when can you schedule me?” Because paying the coinsurance is a secondary concern to, well, living.

And if you’ve been told that college is your ticket to a successful career, and the better the college’s ranking, the better your chances of future employment, and if all around you, you see recent grads from not-so-prestigious colleges struggling to get out of the unpaid-intern trap, then the choice is clear, regardless of the tuition dollars.

This means that the only way out of the trap is for the job market to improve to a point where students can take chances, can gain skills in some other route than a 4-year college education at the most prestigious college they can gain admission to, and still feel that they have a future ahead of them, on the one hand, and for employers looking to hire at the entry level to find that the job market is tight enough that expanding their search outside university job placement offices gives them a better choice of candidates who may be willing to work at a lower salary or with fewer demands.

(I had once thought that colleges would be forced to drop their tuition rates upon struggling to fill their classes, until an article in the Trib described the skyrocketing popularity of ordinary colleges with Chinese and Korean students, who were willing to pay full tuition rates and fill the slots that would have been filled by local students in years past.)

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