About the book
The usual explanations for rising college tuition point to dysfunction inside universities: prestige contests, lavish amenities and swollen administration. Robert B. Archibald and David H. Feldman offer a different account, placing higher education within the broader economic history of the US. College, they argue, is a personal service that depends on highly educated workers, so its costs have moved like those of many other industries, pushed above inflation over the past thirty years by broad economic forces, with economic growth itself the main driver. The authors still see a real affordability problem and trace how cost pressure, a shifting wage structure and tangled financial aid policy narrow access, urging policy fixes over blame.
Bill Gates listed it among the best books he read in 2013, crediting the authors for explaining how the American labor market shapes college costs instead of pointing fingers.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Bill Gates (CEO/Microsoft)
The title is a question that seems to get more attention every year. The authors are good about not pointing fingers but instead talking about how America’s labor market affects the cost of college. My view is that as long as there’s a scarcity of college graduates, a college degree will be quite valuable. So people will pay more to get one. And if they will pay more, then colleges and universities—whose labor is provided mostly by people who paid a lot for their own degrees—can ask for more. Until you get an excess supply of graduates, then you don’t really get any price competition.
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