What happens if the graduate moves out of Oregon? Who enforces collection?
Frankly I think this idea is silly. The primary reason that the cost of education is out of control is that so many people are not using their own money to pay for it. In trying to make education affordable to everyone, we've achieved just the opposite. Universities are bloated, top-heavy with highly paid administrators and staff who actually do very little work, and they can afford it because they can just increase tuition by near double-digit percentages every few years and get no market pushback.
I very much agree with you. As much as I appreciate the idea of everyone going to college, I think the idea of making loans easy for anyone to go to college has been a huge disservice to a lot of people. Students don't view the money as "real", they simply view it as a free pass to go to the "best" (i.e. most expensive) college. Universities know that students can get loans to cover their costs, so they raise the costs as fast as they can. Also deserving some blame are parents who don't spend enough time really working with their kids to remind them that a $50k/yr loan, WITH INTEREST, is going to be insanely hard to pay back.
But ultimately universities are going to raise tuition as high as they can because they know that students can get loans very, very easily.
So how do you explain wait lists? If your theories about how tuition is set were correct, wouldn't we expect universities to set the price high enough to eliminate wait lists?
Comments
What happens if the graduate moves out of Oregon? Who enforces collection?
Frankly I think this idea is silly. The primary reason that the cost of education is out of control is that so many people are not using their own money to pay for it. In trying to make education affordable to everyone, we've achieved just the opposite. Universities are bloated, top-heavy with highly paid administrators and staff who actually do very little work, and they can afford it because they can just increase tuition by near double-digit percentages every few years and get no market pushback.
I very much agree with you. As much as I appreciate the idea of everyone going to college, I think the idea of making loans easy for anyone to go to college has been a huge disservice to a lot of people. Students don't view the money as "real", they simply view it as a free pass to go to the "best" (i.e. most expensive) college. Universities know that students can get loans to cover their costs, so they raise the costs as fast as they can. Also deserving some blame are parents who don't spend enough time really working with their kids to remind them that a $50k/yr loan, WITH INTEREST, is going to be insanely hard to pay back.
But ultimately universities are going to raise tuition as high as they can because they know that students can get loans very, very easily.
So how do you explain wait lists? If your theories about how tuition is set were correct, wouldn't we expect universities to set the price high enough to eliminate wait lists?
Wait lists are great for marketing; they increase a school's "prestige" in the eyes of potential students.
A university doesn't want fewer applicants because that would mean a higher acceptance rate, which is bad.