Higher education is getting cheaper

 [[{“value”:”That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: There are a lot of numbers, but here is the comparison I find most impressive: Adjusting for grants, rather than taking sticker prices at face value, the inflation-adjusted tuition cost for an in-state freshman at a four-year public university is $2,480 for this
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That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

There are a lot of numbers, but here is the comparison I find most impressive: Adjusting for grants, rather than taking sticker prices at face value, the inflation-adjusted tuition cost for an in-state freshman at a four-year public university is $2,480 for this school year. That is a 40% decline from a decade ago…

As might be expected, the trajectory for student debt is down as well. About half of last year’s graduates had no student debt. In 2013, only 40% did. That famous saying from economics — if something cannot go on forever, it will stop — is basically true. Due to changes in the formula, aid for Pell Grants is up, which helps to limit both student debt and the expenses of college.

Is quality going down?  Probably a bit, but with a caveat:

,,,various adjustments kick in to limit the scope of the potential damage. Rather than cutting classes in computer science, a university might decide (as mine did) not to field a football team. Or a school might rely less on full-time professors and more on adjuncts. That is often a negative, but again schools can and do adjust, for instance by paying their adjuncts more and putting more effort into finding and keeping the good ones. A school might also reduce courses that attract few students and put more emphasis on subject areas with high enrollments.

Granted, none of this is ideal. But such adjustments can keep much of the damage at manageable levels. Many schools also are easing off their DEI bureaucracies.

And students will make adjustments of their own. If their classes give them less than what they want, they may turn more to the internet — to online education or, these days, AI. To argue that a large-language model is not as good as a professor is to miss the point. These innovations only have to make up some of the marginal deteriorations of quality.

With apologies to Peter Thiel, I believe U.S. higher education is going to muddle through.

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