Or better yet colleges that are forced to come back to reality and charge tuition that isn’t 3x higher than inflation for the past 40 years.
Some facts to put this in perspective:
1. The average tuition in the USA is $7500 at publics.
2. 86% of the college market is in the publics.
3. The rise in tuition is almost wholly related to the drop in subsidy. If you started with $1k tuition in 1990 and you're charging $13k now, the 1,000% increase is a result of the $8k drop in subsidy per student.
4. Instead though, we are slashing education subsidies, so be prepared to see pubic tuition rise above that $7.5k average level.
Something to think about though, and I'm not really in favor of this, BUT--if we did decide to go tuition free like many countries in the first world, the amount it would take would not be that much at all.
The proposals I've seen require a state to pick up half the tab if the fed. gov't picks up the other half. If you multiply the amount of full-time students at publics nationwide (9m x $3750 tuition), the total would be $33b. If you decided that students must keep some skin in the game and pay, say, $2k in tuition, the total tab costs $24b a year.
This is not a super amount of money. It is less than double of what we spend on the National Parks system each year. It's 1/3rd of what we spend per student on kindergarten.
Again--I'm not sure I'm even in favor of this given that a significant amount of students (1/4?) are not invested in Higher Ed. even though they attend. But this is one way to look at the funding of it.