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Comment by woodandsteel | Hacker News Reader

A large part of the rise in costs is due to the conservative political movement.

For one thing, conservatives are very hostile toward higher education because they consider it a hotbed of marxist atheism. In fact, one of the founding books of the conservative movement, <God and Man at Yale> by William F. Buckley, focused on exactly this point.

Secondly, conservatives believe in making government as small as possible, so they have been shrinking tax support for universities. And when universities respond by becoming big businesses in partnerships with profit-making corporations and neglecting teaching, the conservatives think this is just fine.

In the meantime, countries we are competing with like China continue to support public education as a way of beating us in free market competition. Conservatives never seem to make the connection.

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> they have been shrinking tax support for universities.

If your assertion is correct, then the rate of increase in traditionally conservative states - such as Utah, Texas, Kentucky - would be significantly higher than in liberal states such as California, New York, and Massachusetts.

Does the data support your assertion?

Didn't the "liberal" state of California elect one Governor Reagan on the campaign promise that he would crack down on hippies at Berkeley by cutting funding to the University of California system?

You mean when he was elected in 1966?

I thought we were talking more recently than 50 years ago..

The Chinese are beating us because we let them, to the benefit of consumerism, but at the expense of workers. Yes it let's people buy plastic cooking utencils for $2.50 and cheap computer tablets and phones for $70, but it also means unemployment is up, manufacturing is terrible and wages are stagnant since NAFTA was signed.

Unemployment is not up: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000

People continuously spew that unemployment is a problem, when it is pretty much at the optimal level on a national scale. (5% is actually BETTER than 4%).

Manufacturing is only terribly if you buy cheap products, increase what you pay and mfg quality will increase too.

Yes stagnant wages are bad, I agree.

You're telling us that if everyone suddenly had to pay their entire education out of pocket (because the "conservatives" presumably cut all tax benefits) that it would cause a rise in tuition costs?

Free/easy money causes the price of assets to rise, as our Fed is demonstrating. Why would it be the opposite with education?

By taxes, I meant tax money that the state uses to subsidize public universities.

The easy money of student loans is a federal program, not the state governments. And conservatives like it because then the big financial corporations that make student loans can make lots of money. And the more expensive education is, the more money they can make. So yes, conservatives think it is just great when higher education gets more expensive.

Let me explain this in a more organized manner. To start, conservatives have three basic values: democracy, the free market, and religion. The oppose marxism because it is totalitarian, socialist, and atheist.

The opposed the old universities because they believed they were marxist. They like it that the new universities have become more expensive because that keeps people out of universities, or when they are in they enroll in business-oriented programs rather than the humanities, which are rather anti-business. They like it that universities have abandoned education in favor of entrepreneurship. And they like the student loan program because it helps universities be like businesses, and makes lots of money for financial corporations. Do you really disagree this is what conservatives think and feel?

What is a 'financial corporation'? Is there a non-financial corporation that exists? How have universities abandoned education to favor entrepreneurship? How were universities previously not like businesses, and how do student loans - which have existed for quite some time - make them be 'be like businesses'? If the axes for conservatism are democracy, the free market and religion, where do people who only care about 1 or 2 of those items fall? Since college enrollment is rising significantly, how is it keeping people out of universities?

I am not sure exactly, but a plausible interaction would be:

Tax benefits cut forcing more students to seek financial loans for student expenses. Conservatives further protect lending institutions (and punish students) by making student debt one of the forms of debt not clearable by bankruptcy creating an artificial safety for lenders. Student loans are now a low risk lending market so lenders relax requirements for loans. Now students have greater access to financial loans of larger size so Universities are able to raise tuition without impacting operations/enrollment.

This is obviously a contrived line of reasoning, but the point is that there is a complex interaction occurring resulting in what I (personally) would consider market failure.

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