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Room and Board is a significant factor. See figure CP-9. Through the entire period, RB exceeds $10k/yr, as compared to ~$3k/yr for tuition. That's 3x the cost! I would not say that I cherry-picked from my source; the argument expressly is that *published* tuition numbers are meaningless, because few students pay them. The correct number to use is tuition net of Grant Aid, which is also listed in figure CP-9, and hits my $2,500/yr. The $1.63 trillion debt level does make sense when most students do use loan money to pay their room and board, and do so for 4 or more years. Obviously, some families do save money to cover college costs, so most students aren't taking out 20k+ worth of loans each here, but the driver is not the expenses of the colleges. Indeed, if you look at Figures SA-1 and CP-11A, you can see that when college affordability became newsworthy, as loan amounts went up by over 75% is exactly when states were slashing support for students, during the Great Recession, between 2006-2010. Since then, states have been restoring funding, and loans are down. Many state college tuition rates have been flat or flat in real dollars for the last decade. As an example, the UC system had completely flat tuition rates for 4 straight years, and now guarantees each student that they will not be subject to tuition increases during their undergraduate education, and will pay a flat rate. |