What bothers me is that nobody seems to challenge the assumption that higher asset prices are an unmitigated GOOD thing. Just like any other good or service, higher prices are good if your are selling and bad if you are buying. If stocks cost more today, buyers are paying more today to secure the right to future dividends. Yes sometimes the prices of stocks goes up because buyers estimates of future earnings have gone up. But like houses, broad moves in the market these days seem to have more to do with the interest rate on the money used to buy them than on reasonable estimates of future returns.
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Agreed. There’s a lot of manipulation by companies and corporate investors, too. The hardest thing to figure out is when to get out before things collapse.
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Has anyone questioned the cost of college?
Has anyone heard of a college that has lowered tuition & fees?
Why can’t centers of higher education keep their costs under control?
Has anyone at a college or university cautioned a student about the debt burden of obtaining their degree?
Do students have realistic expectations of the income potential of their degree so the debt can be serviced at a reasonable rate and time?
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Of course people have been talking about all of this. But that doesn’t mean that colleges and universities are making decisions about fees and tuition in a vacuum, either. Are they partly to blame for the student debt situation, with growing overhead for increasingly centralization and bureaucratization? Yes. Are they the architects of the shift to privatized loans over state backed loans and grant programs? No.
Funding is pulled by the states for public education across the board, colleges and universities need to get funding from somewhere, and too often that’s from its students.
The vast majority of my students work at least one full time job (sometimes MORE than one) to make ends meet while they’re getting an increasingly necessary degree for just keeping ones head above water, much less “do better than their parents.” Jobs that pay a decent wage (for the most part, of course, there are exceptions) demand a college degree from their employees of some kind.
Colleges and universities are part of the problem, but not the primary reason that students are in greater debt than ever before.
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Being an ex-college student, I’m sure today’s college students do work hard to pay for their education. It’s not easy. Lots of sacrifices and going without that can really really suck. I’ve been there… 
As for state funding, the answer is at the ballot box.
My point is college and universities have no incentives to control costs if students keep knocking on their doors with more money that is given, saved, or loaned. Also, students need to hold these school accountable for the level of education provided. It’s immoral for a center of higher education [private or public] to place a student into a lifetime of debt that cannot be reasonably serviced.
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The problem is that decisions to seriously curtail grants are not being made at the state level, but at the federal level within the bureaucracy of the department of education itself. The shift to privatized loans has been a slow process across several administrations of both parties. The underlying logic is that of neo-liberalism, which contends that government is the problem and can’t be a solution (despite these federal loan and grant programs working just fine for decades of Americans). States have also cut funding often in what they say is out of necessity after the 2008 market crash. Note that private institutions with endowments also took a major hit during this time, too. But they’ve had an easier time bouncing back, as they have some more autonomy in some ways.
And what is the alternative, right now? Sure, they can push for change in the long term, but not getting a college education right now has long term consequences, including not being able to afford college. The alternatives for most working class or lower middle class people are work through school while taking out private loans to pay for school or not going to school at all, meaning that they are less likely to get jobs that raise their standard of living above that of their parents. In some cases that’s compounded by boomers who lost their shirts in their 401Ks during market crashes and are looking at a retirement of cat food and living in multi-family homes with their kids and grandkids.
Again, not always easy when you’re working one or two full time jobs and taking a full course load.
We agree on this, but I think you’re down playing the difficulties and complexities that have given rise to the current situation and the students ability to control it (and in some cases, even the universities ability to do so). I don’t know when you got your degree or your family situation, but if it was more than 10 to 15 years ago, and if your family was white and middle class, it’s a whole different world now for working ones way through an education. It was much cheaper even a few short years ago. It’s quickly becoming a luxury only those with money and connections are going to be able to afford. You’re right that voting is a part of the solution, but it’s not the only part of the solution. Having people actually understand what’s happened also matters here.
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There are major factors in the US economic picture that fit that description much better than student debt.
There’s nothing “defacto” about it.
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No one knows, but perhaps they’ll hire a bunch more administrators and build new state-of-the-art buildings to study that question. Of course, they might need to raise tuition to pay for that. 
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