Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much

Abstract

American universities are facing a crisis of growing magnitude. Sharply rising tuition fees have led to a rising chorus of complaints - and serious questions about the future of higher education in this country. Are tuition increases that rapidly outpace the rate of inflation pushing higher education out of reach for more and more people? Is this cost explosion a recent phenomenon? What are we getting in return for these higher tuition fees? In Going Broke by Degree, economist Richard Kent Vedder explains why costs are rising so fast and what can be done about it. He compares the underlying causes for the higher education's cost problem to that of the health care crisis. Third parties, especially governments, pay a large share of the bills for university education. The ordinary constraints on raising prices in a competitive, for-profit market environment are weak in the higher education market. The adverse consequences of inefficiency are largely absent. As a result of the higher education market distortion, administrative staffs have become bloated. Faculties and staff have seen their compensation rising sharply in modern times.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 91 citations exist upstream.