Why Are Tuition Costs Rising?
Matt Yglesias makes some excellent points about the incentive structure facing universities. He argues that reinvestment too often goes toward increasing a college’s prestige rather than toward broadening the affordability of the institution. I think this is exactly right. And while I favor a very egalitarian approach to funding our public colleges – it should not cost $10,000 a year to attend state college no matter how you spin it – I do think we’re going to face staggeringly high tuition fees until we reevaluate who ought to be attending college in the first place.
College dropout rates are far too high, and I think one reason for this is that there are few good alternatives to an academic track in our public education system. We should tackle this at the secondary and college level by making vocational training at the high school level much more accessible to non-academic students, and by
