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Comment by telchar | Hacker News Reader

At public schools, state funding cuts are part of it. States have been cutting funding for schools (directly or in proportion to expenses/inflation) for decades. At the same time many more students are going to college than they used to. These things combined increase funding share that needs to be made up by tuition significantly.

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>At the same time many more students are going to college than they used to.

In terms of cost this statement doesn't make sense to me. There are plenty of economies of scale in education. One professor can educate an undergrad class of 100 people for barely more than what it costs to educate 10 people. While the effort for checking exams multiplies directly with the number of people, many of the costs are lowered the more students you have.

The marginal costs per student almost go to zero if you have enough students.

That's just not true. Many costs scale with the number of students. Dorms, food, academic buildings, administrative workers, faculty (no you can't teach every class in batches of 500 like Econ 101, even then there is an army of graders), software licenses, land underneath the buildings, utilities and infrastructure, roads and parking, IT infrastructure and people to run it, grounds maintenance, student healthcare, etc. You can't just keep packing an arbitrary number of students into the same classroom.

An arbitrary number and not all costs misses the point that some costs scale roughly proportionally while others scale less than proportionally. Meaning tuition per student should definitely not increase with more students, there's actually more possibility for savings due to scale.

You're missing my initial point that with constant dollars from the state, more students means the state's money gets stretched thinner over the student body, so each student has to pay a larger percentage of the cost of their enrollment.

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