If you're wondering exactly how bad the current generation of college students has it when it comes to the cost of higher education, times have never been worse, and there doesn't appear to be any downtrend in the works. As stated by Bloomberg.com in 2012, "… college tuition and fees have surged 1,120 percent since records began in 1978" and further that this is: “…four times faster than the increase in the consumer price index.” In an era in which, hi-tech tools have never been more prominent, powerful and prevalent, and to which the internet has seemingly brought the information world to every student's computer with ease, it just seems unfathomable that college educational costs have soared to stratospheric heights, yet it has done so.
While there probably are many reasons, some valid and some not, why college tuition costs have risen to levels far exceeding the consumer price index, certainly one of the most pertinent is the fact that public universities are in part, subsidized by State taxes, and when those taxes are either reduced, or diverted from those public universities, than the students attending such a university must pay the difference. Although this is true, that doesn't fully explain why private university tuition has also risen at nearly the same rate, which implies that within the administration of universities, public as well as private that someone or some institution are directly or indirectly benefiting from these higher tuition rates. In addition, the numbers would imply that the pricing of tuition has less to do with the actual costs associated with running a given university and more to do with running what is in effect, is a higher educational cartel.
Then there are our public schools for children K-12 which are "free" in the sense that no bill is invoiced to a given family, but those real costs to the taxpayer have also soared over the years, so that as reported by statista.com, in 1980 the per capita expenditure for a given student was $2272 whereas in 2013 it was $11503, so that even taking into account inflation and adjusting the 1980 expenditure per student into 2013 dollars that expenditure would only rise to $6423, so today's expenditure per student is still 79% higher in inflation adjusted dollars than it was back in 1980, which again seems perplexing, especially considering all the other products that have gotten better, more efficient, cheaper, and more reliable in the interim.
Once again, this rise in expenditures for K-12 costs per student, is not something to which we can state that it was been worth it because, regrettably, our students today as witnessed by their test scores are scoring worse than they were back in 1980, so that we have the dual problem of students learning less while the cost of their education has soared. This implies quite strongly that it is the administration costs that have gone up at a pace far exceeding inflation and no doubt, shows the power of the teacher's union, to negotiate contracts that are beneficial for the teachers as well as their pensions, at the expense of the taxpayers and to the discredit of public servants negotiating such deals who seem incapable of good stewardship of the taxpayer's money.
While America is rightly recognized for having some of the best and highest ranking universities in the world, that doesn't mean a whole lot to the vast majority of students that would be far better served with more affordable tuition expenses and competent universities that focus on educating college students for entry into the real world. As for our K-12 public schools, the taxpayers and parents are caught paying a premium for an education that far too frequently is far less than should be expected from the country that prides itself on claiming to represent the best and brightest of the free world.