Congress & Ohio Should Pass Legislation Mandating Higher Ed to Match Price Increases With Grant and Scholarship Increases

We need to rein in colleges and universities so they stop the endless cost increases driven by administrative bloat that end up on the backs of already overburdened twenty-year-olds.

Most students attending a college or university already face costs forcing them to take out student loans to fund their education. You’ve all heard how higher education institutions have become grossly bloated over the last twenty years, as they’ve added lots of costly administrators. The most recent administrative bloat focused on the addition of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity personnel whose job, essentially, is to actively discriminate against certain students in order to provide benefits to other students. All told, higher education costs have far outpaced inflation year-after-year.

Additionally, many colleges and universities have adopted policies that force students to incur higher costs, such has requiring students to live in their facilities for several years and purchasing their gold-plated meal plans. The end result is the highest priced colleges and universities are approaching the $90,000 per year mark, with even mediocre private schools surpassing $60,000 per year and public schools hitting $26,000 per year. Given that many students take five or six years to finish their degrees, the total costs is reaching $450,000, $300,000, and $130,000, respectively, with the vast majority of those costs covered by student loans. Those student loans will carry monthly payments that make it virtually impossible for graduates to buy a home in the years after graduating.

Lastly, many colleges and universities are jacking up prices for student at the same time those schools sit on enormous endowments that could fund a large share of those costs.

As a firm proponent of the free market, I am typically leery to promote government intervention when it comes to transactions between buyers and sellers. That said, higher education has become so entangled with federal student loans and state taxpayer subsidies that those institutions have lost the right to simply do as they please without recourse. Policymakers and others have argued that these schools should have to pay taxes on their endowments, property taxes on their land, and sales taxes on their fees. Such actions might work, but also might simply result in those schools raising costs on students to cover the taxes.

One idea I’d like to see adopted is for Congress and Ohio to require colleges and universities to raise scholarships and grants by the same percentage as tuition, room, and board are raised in order to be eligible for federal student loans and state funding. Think about it for a minute. When a teenager makes the decision to attend a school, part of what drives that decision is the financial package offered by the school. If the school then increases costs, but not the financial package to the student, over the course of that student's time at the school, what was a driver for going to that particular school could be greatly diminished while forcing the student to incur greater debt. How is that fair?

Let me give you an example. A student applies to college at a private school with a business school ranked in the top 30 knowing that he will receive a healthy amount of merit scholarship funds due to his top high school credentials. He intentionally forgoes applying to elite schools he likely would get accepted to because those elite schools don’t offer merit funds. Upon acceptance, the $80,000 per year school offers him $25,000 in scholarships, reducing his total costs to $55,000 per year. He accepts and heads off to college knowing that his four-year costs will hit $220,000, which he is willing to incur as a top business school finance major. By his third year, however, the school has increased the annual costs of attending by 8% to $87,000 per year, but made no change to his scholarships. Thus, he will now have to pay $7,000 more per year due to the declining buying power of his scholarships.

Why should colleges and universities get to raise costs on their now captive audience (transferring and losing credit at a less expensive school makes no sense) without having to also increase the scholarship and grant funding those students get so they don’t lose ground during their time there? In the real world, companies have to cut costs to keep competitive, but with federal student loans and state taxpayer funding, colleges and universities live in an ivory tower in which cost NEVER get reduced, with students left holding the more expensive and, often times based on liberal arts majors, empty bags. Given their endowments, they should have to dig into their own wealth to ensure scholarships and grants keep pace with their cost increases.

At some point, we need to rein in colleges and universities so they stop the endless cost increases driven by administrative bloat that end up on the backs of already overburdened twenty-year-olds. 

P.S. In a tweet that reached over 31,000 views, in response to a WSJ post saying “The Jan. 6 attack sparked a new wave of political violence and threats against elected officials. 'The country is a tinderbox.’,” I wrote:

Love how media memory holes 2016-2020 left-wing violence that was far more widespread, destructive, costly & murderous than 1/6 including attacks on Republicans like Rand Paul & Trump White House—this omission won’t work in 2024, as Main Street America knows what happened. See picture below & my The Federalist piece “Report Reveals Shocking Double Standards For Bringing U.S. Rioters To Justice”

I’m not, of course, excusing the 1/6ers who engaged in violence or destroyed property, but the vast majority of those hunted down, prosecuted, and jailed by the Biden FBI/DOJ did little more than trespass, which was far, far less than what the left-wing rioters did from 2016 to 2020 all across America, including to government buildings like courthouses, police stations, and, yes, The White House.