[rdw]

Can someone explain to me how any schools are in danger of going out of business? Their expenses aren't going up, they're not paying professors more, they're not leveraging themselves into debt. What are the huge cost increases they're bearing that force them to raise tuition? The one institute I'm familiar with appears to have hired an absolute shitload of useless administrators, but that is an expense of choice that could be trimmed at any time.

[BeetleB]

This submission is likely an outlier amongst outliers. It's a crazy expensive private university. So I have no answer for you.

For public universities, the claim is that historically, tuition never covered expenses, and the difference was taken care of by the state and federal government. State support has dropped significantly in the last 40 years, and hence the significant increase in tuition.

About a decade ago I know one nearby public university would be open with their expenses and showed that their expenses per capita/student hadn't changed in decades (adjusted for inflation), and that it wasn't bloat that was causing tuition to go up.

[lumost]

Any large organization with no competition ceases to understand what makes the money eventually. University administrators have been selling life experiences, liberal arts, sports, and research experiences to students for the last 2-3 decades. If you asked them which staff are necessary to keep students joining the school, they would likely have a vastly different answer than the one most people have.