I’m Romanian, I’ve just finished high school, I’m currently taking the Bacalaureat, and I’ve already been admitted to an American university (USC). I knew from the start that I wanted to study abroad, and I’ve always been fascinated by California, especially Los Angeles, so the U.S. was my first choice. That said, I also looked into universities in the UK, the Netherlands, Canada, and Ireland, and their tuition fees are significantly lower.
I haven’t seen this mentioned yet.
At one point college was reasonably priced. It wasn’t cheap, but aside from the most prestigious schools, you could work a part time job while attending college and pay for your classes. I don’t know the specifics of how and when, but at some point the government decided that college was VERY important for young adults, so they started a program that would guarantee funds and loans to help the poor kids pay for college.
Sounds like a great idea on paper, but the colleges soon realized that potential students were no longer choosing schools based on affordability because they could easily get loans to go to any school they wanted.
Remember, these are teenagers we’re talking about. They are a demographic that isn’t known for making prudent decisions.
So they started registering for schools with bigger campuses, modern facilities and better dining options.
The schools all needed to set themselves apart from the others and focused a LOT of resources into their First Impressions, meaning if they couldn’t wow a student at their first visit to campus, they could kiss that tuition goodbye.
Constantly improving your campus isn’t cheap, and neither are admissions events. They need to raise prices to cover those costs, and now a college education costs 20-30 TIMES as much as it did 50 years ago.
Universities got more expensive as state support generally declined. Features expanded as you said to draw students as universities had to compete more to get students. Plus you have these lists that rank each university. That drives students to demand more and requires more funds from universities to compete over listing items.
There’s a big crunch on higher ed right now. We’re hitting a population plateau and there aren’t going to be enough students to use most of these upgraded facilities.
Texas, and probably other states, are openly attacking and censoring higher education as well. The provost for a place I was at carried around spreadsheets of costs since overall the university was always losing money. They are in for a tough time if populations get smaller as you say.