[mklg1266]

Part of the issue is that the whole incentive structure in education is set up such that there is no relationship between tuition and either the cost or value of a degree; universities survive/succeed on brand/rank, not value provided. This is a reason that throwing more money into the Pell grant program, for example, will basically not help maintain college affordability, because schools have strong incentive to increase tuition annually, ahead of inflation. I'm trying to remember which article I read that described this problem (it might have been in the NYT), but as far as I remember it, basically: schools pick tuition by looking at what other schools charge and figuring out roughly what they can get away with. Schools have a strong disincentive to lower tuition, because their success depends almost entirely on their brand, their brand depends on their rank, and part of the US News ranking scheme looks at $$ (spent, nominally, but that's considered to be related to the amount taken in) per student, so charging less lowers school rank. They therefore charge exactly what A) everyone else is charging and B) what they think they can convince people to pay them, and people are willing to pay a lot of money for the prestige associated with a particular brand. The actual sticker price of a school therefore explicitly does not consider the actual cost of running a school or the value that the degree will offer.