Two publications addressing college costs caught my eye in the last 48 hours. Both undermine the notion that college prices have skyrocketed almost exclusively because state subsidies to schools have plummeted.
The first piece, however, is actually supposed to make the opposite point.
You might recall my previously taking exception to statements by Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, in which he asserted that there is no meaningful evidence that federal student aid drives tuition inflation, and that price increases are almost entirely a result of decreasing state appropriations to public colleges. Yesterday, Hartle and ACE’s Bryan Cook published a chart in a publication titled “Myth: Increases in Federal Student Aid Drive Increases in Tuition” that supposedly illustrates that it is indeed state budget cuts, not colleges’ ability to rake in money through aid, that explains tuition inflation.
Now, I wouldn’t say that aid “drives” prices, but I would say that aid fuels inflation by enabling schools to greatly increase tuition. I am also not aware of anyone arguing that an increase in aid leads to an immediate, one-for-one spurt in prices; instead, aid enables prices to rise over time. And it is not only federal assistance that enables prices to balloon—though Washington is the biggest aid source—but also state aid, scholarships, etc. And no one says that aid is the only factor involved in price increases; undoubtedly state subsidies matter for public colleges. So to a large extent the argument that federal aid doesn’t fully and immediately drive prices in public colleges attacks a strawman.
With all that in mind, what does ACE’s graph reveal about the declaration that state subsidy cuts are the real culprit behind rapidly rising college prices? It shows that there’s much more to the story. And I’m not even talking about the near-total inability of ACE’s preferred bogeyman to explain private college tuition.
I haven’t been able to track down the source of ACE’s data, so I can’t reproduce the graph here, nor can I do better than eyeball where each point lies. But by my viewing, there are only two academic years in which colleges’ per-capita tuition increase simply made up for state-subsidy losses: 2004-05 and 2010-11. Every other year tuition rose well in excess of subsidy losses, ranging from a 1 percentage point net gain in 1992–93 to 7 points in 2007-08.
So even by ACE numbers, our supposedly beleaguered public colleges actually look pretty greedy. And what likely enables that greed? The ability of students to cover price increases with aid.
But don’t just take my word, or ACE-supplied evidence, for this. Ask a professor: