Federal Regulations are Not Making College More Expensive
A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to testify at a U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee hearing on innovations in higher education affordability. You can watch the video here. It was an interesting morning marred by a long discussion of an essentially bogus idea: that college keeps getting more expensive because of onerous federal regulations.
Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) was the first to raise this notion, and she returned to it several times. She said it was an opportunity for bipartisan agreement on the committee given that Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) had cited it frequently during past debates. The idea, in a nutshell, is that the federal government imposes various regulatory burdens on colleges, and that colleges have to spend money to comply with these regulations, leaving them with no choice but to pass the costs on to students in the form of higher prices, and this is why higher education has been increasing in price at double the inflation rate or worse for the past three decades and student loan debt is topping $1 trillion and the middle class can’t