You make it sound like tuition wasn’t already increasing at unsustainable rates before GWB. Or that people are just now foolishly pursuing degrees without factoring in ROI.
That's because tuition costs were not increasing at unsustainable levels before GWB (and technically the big debt explosion almost entirely happened during the Obama terms). University costs were extremely reasonable in the US prior to the year 2000. They were hilariously cheap compared to today.
As so nicely represented by the explosion in student debt:
> University costs were extremely reasonable in the US prior to the year 2000.
Remember that I knew a few people who managed to both work and go to school at the same time and pay the tuition with the salary. So they took longer to graduate (5-6 years) but graduated debt free. It was a state school in mid West not a fancy private school or anything like that.
I will say that the slope of the curve gets a bit steeper after 2000, so perhaps you’re on to something to a degree, but to say that college costs weren’t increasing at unsustainable rates prior to Bush is laughable. And with everything, perspective is key. I started school in 2000, and what you consider reasonable my dad balked at (because it was roughly 3-4x what he paid 25 years prior).
> As so nicely represented by the explosion in student debt:
There is more to this than just the raw tuition value to consider: far more people are attending college than in years past (far more than should really be doing so, honestly). A graph that normalizes against student population would be much more interesting (otherwise your graph doesn’t tell what portion of the increase is due to tuition explosion versus student population explosion).
A long time ago, college costs actually were not increasing at all. Based on the graphs I'm seeing in a couple of sources, there actually was a period from roughly 1965 to 1985 where college costs in the US were more or less at a sustained level.
From the 1940s to 1960s, college costs were rising some, and from 1985 to 2003 costs also increased some. But the rate of increase after 2003 definitely is higher.
Both sources are blaming things other than student loans for rising costs. I will say the second link is intriguing, in that it postulates that state education budget cuts play a responsibility in rising costs. This might go hand in hand with the student loan balloon: basically, the cost of college is shifting heavily to the individual student, but in a very poor manner if the end goal is an attempt at meritocracy via education. I agree that demand might play a role too (the first link sort of implies this).
It would be interesting to compare tuition cost history in the United States to other countries, which as far as I know do not follow our funding model. (For some reasons this was not easy to quickly Google.)
