Private colleges keep jacking up tuition. They're also broke. Both things are happening at the same time.
This is like watching a guy charge more for lemonade while his stand catches fire. Except the lemonade costs forty grand a year and comes with a gender studies degree that qualifies you to manage a Panera.
The schools claim they need the money. For what? Another rock climbing wall? A fourth diversity dean? Maybe a wellness center where students can cry about microaggressions in a room that cost more to build than your house?
Here's the business model: charge students a fortune, watch half of them default on loans they'll die with, then go begging to alumni who actually got jobs despite the education. It's a Ponzi scheme but with worse food and mandatory freshman seminars.
The sticker price keeps climbing because these institutions figured out decades ago that students will pay anything if you call it an investment in their future. Doesn't matter if that future involves living with three roommates at age thirty-five. The brochure had a fountain.
Financial distress means they spent money they didn't have on things nobody needed. Probably a new building named after a donor who made his fortune shorting the housing market. Or a stadium for a football team that goes 2-9 every season but hey, the coach makes three million.
The colleges burning through cash the fastest are the ones you've never heard of. Not Harvard. Harvard could light money on fire for entertainment and still have enough left over to buy Rhode Island. We're talking about Regional Directional State University of Wherever, the kind of place that sends you four emails a day because you visited their website once in 2019.
They'll keep raising prices until the last parent finally breaks and says no, which based on current trends should happen sometime around never.
Turns out you can charge more while offering less if your customers are teenagers who think debt isn't real.
Photo by David Valentine on Unsplash
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