I haven’t seen this mentioned yet.

At one point college was reasonably priced. It wasn’t cheap, but aside from the most prestigious schools, you could work a part time job while attending college and pay for your classes. I don’t know the specifics of how and when, but at some point the government decided that college was VERY important for young adults, so they started a program that would guarantee funds and loans to help the poor kids pay for college.

Sounds like a great idea on paper, but the colleges soon realized that potential students were no longer choosing schools based on affordability because they could easily get loans to go to any school they wanted.

Remember, these are teenagers we’re talking about. They are a demographic that isn’t known for making prudent decisions.

So they started registering for schools with bigger campuses, modern facilities and better dining options.

The schools all needed to set themselves apart from the others and focused a LOT of resources into their First Impressions, meaning if they couldn’t wow a student at their first visit to campus, they could kiss that tuition goodbye.

Constantly improving your campus isn’t cheap, and neither are admissions events. They need to raise prices to cover those costs, and now a college education costs 20-30 TIMES as much as it did 50 years ago.