why the cost of college has skyrocketed in the past 20-30 years.
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There is an important economics concept called purchasing price parity.
Essentially, the price of a good is influenced by the ability of the purchaser to purchase, not just by the cost to manufacture.
So, everything in the Phillipines is relatively cheap because most native Phillipinos are relatively poor. You take your 80,000 dollar US salary to a nation where thats quite a nice upper middle class salary, and you’ll live accordingly.
The same effect is observed in subsidized markets. When you make more money available to be spent on college, you don’t actually reduce the consumer burden, you just raise the absolute cost. The true value hasn’t changed, and the true value of the labor being performed to obtain the money hasn’t changed. If you inject money, the prices change to reestablished equilibrium.
It’s like if the first dollar everyone spent on chocolate bars at gas stations was covered by the state, then the price of chocolate bars would just go up a dollar, and nothing would change.
Nothing except that anyone who does t jump through the hoops to get their state chocolate credits, is now being fucked
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