[trylist]

That's backwards. College is expensive because demand is extremely high. Subsidies increase that demand by making college affordable for most, but the suggestion that the subsidies themselves are the problem is plain wrong. We wanted an educated workforce, we've got one. We can say we don't want one, but to blame our efforts to educate people as the problem with education is not productive. We either educate people or we don't. We increased demand on purpose (and we should have!). Of course prices are going to go up! Normally supply would expand to keep up, but something is rotten in education. Teachers get paid a pittance, there were several high profile accreditation frauds, and the natural inclination towards prestige as worth more than the actual diploma combine to seriously limit our ability to expand and mitigate prices.

[robotrout]

As the supply of available money increases, there is no incentive not to increase tuition. Any system that is flooded with money experiences price inflation.

Because students are not able to discharge their debt in bankruptcy, they constitute a riskless loan opportunity to the lenders, who throw money at them.

A sad side-effect of this as that the price inflation that this causes is forcing more and more students who might have otherwise been able to finance their tuition without loans, into needing loans also, thus dooming more and more of the next generation into huge debts that will effect their ability to buy houses, start families, and save for retirement.