Calabresi: Academic Tuition And Student Loan Relief

Steven Calabresi (Northwestern), Academic Tuition and Student Loan Relief:

As a law professor for the last 34 years, I have a special window into understanding the forces that are driving historically unprecedented tuition increases in academia. I believe that one of the main drivers of tuition increases is not faculty salaries, which have been stagnant, but instead increases in the size of university bureaucracies. These increases in my view are often harmful to the academic mission. They also impose an insurmountable burden on the American people.

Faculty members are powerless in addressing this problem because tuition is set by University administrators and not by a vote of the faculty. I think alumni and faculty are often unaware of how unaffordable tuition has become. They are also unable to do anything about it. There thus exists a huge problem with record high college tuitions and with essentially no market forces constraining it.

I have, quite reluctantly, come to the conclusion that the unaffordability of college to 99% of the American people must be addressed in the same way as was done in the 1880's for monopoly railroad rates when the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) was created. I regrettably see no way of addressing the roots of this problem except by creating a new federal regulatory commission with the power to regulate any college tuition increase above the national rate of inflation. ...

Putting federal taxpayers on the hook for paying for increases in university bureaucracies will only cause the problem to get worse. Universities and colleges would respond to such a federal subsidy by doubling the size of university bureaucracies, which would aggravate the underlying problem. Such a reaction would be more of a threat to academic freedom than would be the creation of an ICC-like federal regulatory commission.

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