Ilya Somin makes the case against government subsidies for college tuition at the Volokh Conspiracy. His point is that the higher-than-inflation increases in the cost of college over the past forty years are justified by the even greater increases in expected returns on a college education. According to a 2002 Census Bureau study, a college graduate, on average, earns $1,000,000 more than a high school graduate over his/her lifetime.
The Cost of a College Education
February 27, 2008 by philo
I guess a laptop computer should cost about $15,000 instead of nearly $1000 then.
The laptop is at least determined by real market forces outside the college - and particularly by the recent past’s nano-breakthroughs requiring less and less materials in its making (chips and boards mostly). But I think there’s good merit to the argument that subsidies increase the unfounded expectations of bureacratic and labor-intensive institutions, by distorting its true supply/demand price determination - thus contributing to the inflation trend of tuition (and thereby making it ever more necessary to add subsidies to continue making it affordable to many students … in an upward spiral).