Government-Funded = Free ... right?

The New York Times reports today that college tuition costs in the U.S. have outpaced inflation for the ninth straight year. As Times articles go, this one is pretty neutral on what should be done, but a few fallacies are implied. The first one, which is revealing because it's completely ignored, is the notion that the price basket offered by college tuition fees has not remained constant. In other words, they don't even suggest the possibility that tuition today is different than it was, say, 15 years ago.

If average car prices were rising faster than inflation (and I have no idea if they are), lots of people might note that the average car today is pretty sweet compared to a similarly-priced car 15 years ago. 15 years ago, cars with anti-lock brakes, air bags, CD players, power windows, etc., were fairly spiffy. Today, most of those features come standard, even on the cheapest vehicles, so manufacturers might be forgiven if the average price of their product has increased slightly.

Similarly, schools today offer vastly different educational experiences today than they did twenty, fifteen, or even nine years ago. The school I attend (purely anecdotal evidence here) has installed at least two really fancy, really expensive buildings in the last nine years. One of them is so nice inside that I'm certain it has drastically changed the way physical science majors study. The library now offers the equivalent of a full subscription to several hundred academic journals, many of which have been hugely beneficial to me at around 3:45 AM during finals. Our entire campus recently had wireless internet installed. Granted, some of these upgrades can come from alumni donations or other sources. But I doubt very much that schools have just been jacking up prices without altering the product they sell in any way. On top of the changes, I would be shocked if the professors here haven't been getting pay raises all the while.

Sadly, failure to acknowledge the possibility of a change in the market basket offered by today's colleges and universities is not the Times' most egregious omission. The article is basically about a study someone actually bothered to do, revealing the following:

"The changes in tuition at public institutions closely track changes in financing they receive from state governments and other public sources ... When state and local support for public colleges declined over the last seven years, tuition and fees rose more quickly, and as state support has grown of late, the pace of increases fell."

Let's make sure I have this right: when the government pays producers to make their product, those same producers can lower the number consumers see on the price tag? Unbelievable! Trouble is, someone's still paying for college tuitions every year for every student, regardless of the size of the checks households actually send. When the government does it, everyone in the whole country pays for college kids like me, from students and parents of students to total recluses living nowhere near civilization. When individuals pay, they do it because they really care whether they themselves, their children, their friends, or their relatives gets an education and graduates. I like the latter system much better.

I'm not saying governments shouldn't provide some help for qualified students without the means to pay for higher education. I'm just saying that free education doesn't exist, and neither do free discounts on education, no matter what we do to bury the costs amid other government asset seizures.