When the news is examined today, a major topic of concern is the rising cost of

college. There are two other factors at play in explaining the fiscal stress on many

American families trying to afford college than just sticker prices.

Back in the days of President Kennedy, college was very much for the elite. Over the

subsequent decades, access to higher education became increasingly affordable

with a hidden cost, the insidious line of credit and interest that needed to be repaid

would come to haunt many a Millennial’s career. Yet the need to allow applicants to

attend college was taken seriously through the provision of loans, with all the strings

attached to the reputations of servicers failing to process payments properly.

Credit was always forthcoming, yet there are other ways to support students.

External funding was consistently cut over 30 years, to the extent that there are now

public universities with less than half of funding coming from state appropriations.

The cutbacks made during economic recessions were never compensated for during

the subsequent decade, whilst the drop in fertility caused a glut of students to

manifest about twenty years after the mortgage crisis.

Inflation is another irony of price hikes in higher education. Colleges have always

been a hotbed of anti-war protesting since the Vietnam War. Yet the addiction of

certain policymakers to wage expensive ‘Special Military Operations’ abroad causes

increases in the general price level, that is felt by everyone, including college

administrations. Therefore the choice of those same certain policymakers to mock

college students for their activism is little more than victim-blaming.

Finally, there is the matter of administration. Colleges are not the most fiscally-

flexible institutions, given that practices like tenure are essential to ensuring

completion of research and protecting academic freedom. Therefore, to adopt

practices like ‘flexible’ labor which can be adjusted at will by department heads is not

an adequate solution. Dickinson itself, whilst able to pull together an impressive pot of funding through the Dickinson Promise initiative, has still raised the sticker price of tuition just to maintain existing funding levels relative to inflation.

The American student debt pile is a multi-faceted issue too complex to be tackled in

a single piece. Yet the problem remains that either the debt isn’t repaid, or it holds

back the entrepreneurial risk-taking of two generations. It is too simple to

remind every policymaker that only mortgages are a greater part of household debt.

Jobs are increasingly hard to find, especially at the entry-level, disrupting the

formerly commonplace practice of firms relying on internal-labor markets. As a result,

a college degree is more important than ever to access the middle class using

personal work, rather than simple inheritance. Whilst it remains an easy task for policymakers to bash colleges over increases in costs, those same policymakers were the root cause of the problem.