Opinion

Why college costs so much

It’s graduation season across America, a time when our politicos come out to bore us with their commencement orations. If only that’s all they did. Unfortunately, they’re also doing their darnedest to ensure that the cost of a college degree is rising much faster than the ability to pay for it.

Former Education Secretary William Bennett sums up a big part of the problem in a new book titled “Is College Worth It?” In it, he and his co-author note that since 1990 the cost of attending a four-year college has risen at four times the rate of inflation. Over that same period, federally supported student loans have skyrocketed, to the point where student-loan debt now exceeds credit-card debt.

These loans, of course, are designed to help young people afford college. Richard Vedder, an economist at Ohio State who runs the Center for College Affordability & Productivity, notes that tuition costs are much like health-care costs — both are rising because third parties pay the bills. In a speech last year at Hillsdale College in Michigan, he noted that all the federal aid and loans flooding the college markets give colleges and universities no incentive to cut costs.

Vedder’s choice of venue for his speech was no accident. Hillsdale is a small liberal-arts college that refuses all federal dollars, including loans for its students, out of principle. You’d think that as a result of losing out on all these federal dollars, Hillsdale would be more expensive than other private schools. But the opposite is true. Hillsdale’s tuition is $21,400 — a bargain for private schools. It offers a quality liberal-arts education, and its students graduate owing far less than their peers elsewhere.

Hillsdale is not alone. Other schools — Grove City College in Pennsylvania comes to mind — also reject federal dollars because they don’t like the strings that come attached. Whatever their reason, the result is that these schools have to work harder to keep costs down and attract students by emphasizing value for money.

In short, the Occupy movement had a point about student loans and the growing costs of a college degree. It just wasn’t the point they were making. Too bad they didn’t direct their protests at one of the major culprits behind rapidly rising tuition prices: Uncle Sam.

So the next time you hear your senator or congressman promising more federal aid to help make college more affordable for the middle class, you’d do well to tell him: No thanks. We can’t afford it.