[fiprofessor]

Point taken, but it's very common to adjust by CPI (or some other price index) when comparing prices over time.

All attempts to track prices over time have some flaw. But not adjusting for inflation in a chart that goes back ~20 years could also be perceived as misleading.

Moreover, we are starting to see growth in real median wages again. They are already above Q4 2019: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q. So I think it is fair to say in some sense that the real price of attendance has started to go down (albeit not that much).

[phkahler]

>> All attempts to track prices over time have some flaw.

The thing to compare tuition to is teacher pay. At today's tuition rates, 10 or less students would pay their professors salary. Average class sizes are much larger, so it's obvious the money is going somewhere else. Done. Forget CPI, the schools are pricing based on perceived value, not cost, and an unlimited supply of government backed loans.

[ndriscoll]

This seems to be the most obvious point to me: at my alma mater, you could literally rent a classroom at the university for $90/4 hours[0], or $7200 for 16 weeks at 20 hours/week. Then we have assistant/associate professors in the college of engineering who have been working at the university for 10+ years making $45k or less[1] for a full time position. One of them could rent a room, charge 10 students $6.7k each, and come away with $60k. They'd make significantly more than they are now, the students would receive better/more direct instruction, and the students would be paying ~half list price ($6700 vs $13200 for in-state students)[2]. Even with merit scholarships, if you had a 3.7 high school GPA, that saves you $5000[3], so you're on the hook for $8k, and 10 kids renting a room with an assistant professor would still be cheaper. The numbers are even more absurd for out-of-state students.

Clearly, the value proposition for a university is not the education it provides. Even if you wanted the atmosphere of being on campus all day, the rent-a-room strategy would give you that for far less with smaller classes. Obviously it would be hard to be taken seriously if you did this, so the issue is that you must pass through the university system to receive credentials, and for many fields these credentials are non-optional.

Even spending $100k/yr on a PhD evaluating students full-time, and spending an entire 1 week per student to rigorously personally evaluate them 1:1, you could charge $2000 total to attempt an evaluation for credentials, allowing non-traditional students to self-study for free. If we want to make education and accreditation more attainable for everyone, we need to separate granting of credentials from studying. Study requirements are redundant with a rigorous exam, and particularly for fields where exams are already in place for credentials (law, accounting, capital-E Engineering, etc.), study requirements should be barred.

[0] https://registrar.arizona.edu/support-services/classroom-ser...

[1] https://www.azcentral.com/pages/interactives/news/local/ariz...

[2] https://www.arizona.edu/admissions/first-year/cost

[3] https://financialaid.arizona.edu/types-of-aid/scholarships/i...

[hn_throwaway_99]

Measuring college costs against median household wages (vs. CPI) is a much fairer way to include impacts of inflation. First off, college tuition is part of the CPI, so it's not really mathematically accurate to then discount it based on CPI increases: "College is a lot more expensive, but don't worry, everything is a lot more expensive!"

And if you look at any graph of college costs vs wages over the past 40 years or so, they have simply skyrocketed.

[fiprofessor]

> And if you look at any graph of college costs vs wages over the past 40 years or so, they have simply skyrocketed.

Absolutely, no debate there. The particular surprising claim in question though was about whether they have declined in the past couple of years, relative to a peak in late 2010s. And there, measured either in CPI adjusted costs, or relative to real median wages, they have.

But of course, the drops are small, and it's only been about 1-2 years. I'm not sure this really indicates a sustained trend, or just the fact that college cost increases have (for once) lagged inflation over those 1-2 years.

[gruez]

>Measuring college costs against median household wages (vs. CPI) is a much fairer way to include impacts of inflation

"inflation" is by definition CPI. Therefore the claim that using another metric to "include the impacts of inflation" is tautologically false. The word you want is "affordability".

[jmalicki]

No it's not. There are many different US government measured indexes of consumer price inflation. The linked article discussed CPI-W (used by law to adjust social security payments), CPI-U, chained CPI-U (used to adjust tax rates), and PCE (used by the Fed for interest rate targeting).

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-does-the-government-m...

There is also PPI for producer prices, and the GDP deflator used for GDP.

If the US government and law already is using a number of different metrics to account for inflation impacts for different purposes, it absolutely makes sense to debate which particular measure is best for this area.

But there's not one single true number, different groups of people are affected by different measures (e.g. the use of CPI-W for social security payments is thoughtfully meant to be more representative of costs incurred by the typical social security recipient than is CPI-U)

[gruez]

>If the US government and law already is using a number of different metrics to account for inflation impacts for different purposes, it absolutely makes sense to debate which particular measure is best for this area.

Fair point, but in the context the previous comment, "wages" is basically never considered a serious contender for measuring inflation in economics.

[AndyNemmity]

Tautologically false, has to be one of the oddest things I've ever seen to be so wrong about.

Like, you're using big words to indicate that under no situation is this true, when the reality is that "inflation" is not by definition CPI. CPI is one measure of inflation.

But it just caught my eye that this seems, extra wrong. It's hard to read something extra wrong on the internet, and yet it feels like you've succeeded.

People are wrong on all of the time, but to call something tautologically false when it's trivially true, is peak wrongness.

[rahimnathwani]

You're correct on all counts.

EDIT: The rest of my comment below is (as pointed out below by gruez) incorrect. The article did say 'in 2021 dollars' in reference to one set of numbers, and it's reasonable to assume they meant that to apply to all the other numbers in the same paragraph.

It's still surprises me that The Economist would use CPI-adjusted figures, but fail to mention the adjustment. Using CPI-adjusted figures is common, but it's not the default, which is why people often add 'in real terms' or some other qualifier.

[gruez]

>It's still surprises me that The Economist would use CPI-adjusted figures, but fail to mention the adjustment

Are we reading the same article?

>A report from the College Board, a non-profit, shows that whereas published tuition and fees for private non-profit colleges increased from $29,000 in 2006-07 to $38,000 in 2021-22 (in 2021 dollars), the net price actually decreased from $17,000 to $15,000.

"in 2021 dollars" clearly implies CPI adjustment.

[rahimnathwani]

Oops. I missed that.

The figures that surprised me were the ones at the end of that sentence (the 'drop' from $17k to $15k). I reread that part, didn't see anything about constant dollars for those numbers, and then went looking for the source data.