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When I graduated in 2014 from a large state university (not my undergrad, mind) I was already wondering how much further it could go.
The campus had its historical parts that predated the civil war which maintained their classic look, but massive modern facilities were popping up on the periphery, and new 'luxury' apartments and home rentals were being added with dizzying rapidity. And while I attended classes in a classic/historical part of campus, they renovated the interior with furniture that cost upwards of $1500 a piece.
And of course my membership to the huge gym/recreational facility and campus life buildings and events and bus transit was all included too. I intentionally sought out bottom-of-the barrel accommodations, but every other aspect of the experience seemed designed to get you to blow out your budget on frivolities, even if you weren't actively partying.
The downtown area was a mix of dive-bar-esque independent establishments but well known chains were encroaching. There was a single lone strip club that was holding out on a side street. A quick google search shows that it is still there, though.
It was readily clear that the college was an anchor for the whole area in terms of funneling student loan funds into the school's coffers and tons of local businesses who were aggressively optimizing for getting naive students to spend more than they needed. The only constraint keeping the school from capturing all that money is that they couldn't build new facilities fast enough.
I think this has had the additional effect of giving college kids hugely elevated expectations as to what real life is like and how they can expect to live unless they snagged one of those FAANG tech jobs right out of school, at which point those expectations are probably accurate. Also they probably get used to having a billion subscriptions for things that simply don't require them and outsourcing all kinds of labor they could economically perform themselves.
And this helps explain why kids getting out of school get the 1-2 punch of realizing how all that consumption during college was financed by debt they now have to pay, AND realizing their standard of living will be slashed by like 40-50% unless they're willing to KEEP financing it on debt for a while.
Tuition will keep rising, as will debt, as long as college grads continue to earn a significant wage premium, which they still are. The gap stopped widening since 2021 or so, so that is some progress finally . There is so much aid , scholarship, discounts and other programs. Parents are happy to dump their kids off at a university whilst taking advantage of these many generous discounts. If college tuition were like any other big-ticket consumer good, maybe things would change.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F2VANdobQAAVTvl.jpg:large
heavily subsidized items in which there is a the greatest disconnect between the price and what is actually paid, have seen the most inflation
Yeah, and I suspect colleges can keep adding amenities indefinitely because even if various individual students never take advantage of a particular feature, those can be a major selling point when competing to get more students to attend. So yeah, go ahead and add a rock-climbing wall, a beer garden, a third swimming pool, not like that money is doing anything useful anyway.
There's literally nothing stopping a college from competing on price by offering a stripped down experience (or use the Spirit Airlines model of charging piecemeal for each amenity) so students can see what exactly they're paying for, but there's simply no incentive that I can see for doing so. Price-conscious students aren't the ones they want attending, anyway!
I think the biggest threat to their model right now is, ironically, AI, both because it enables rampant hard-to-detect cheating and because AI will probably be able to replace most instructors in the extremely near future.
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