[sirsar]

Higher education is merely one face of Cost Disease; we've seen similar trends in medical care, transportation (especially US subways), primary education...

Slate Star Codex [1] has a good overview, but doesn't provide a solution (instead only providing some good evidence that rejects some hypotheses).

As far as I can tell, the single biggest driver of Cost Disease is labor, but not salary: it takes more people to deliver the same services. This in turn is driven by market failure:

- The signaling component of higher education is zero-sum, and infinite loans and foreign capital mean not enough few consumers make college decisions based on cost

- US states have shown insufficient teeth in enforcing caps on construction budgets; overruns are expected meaning the bidding process cannot actually cause cost savings. And the days of private light rail companies competing against each other are long, long gone.

- Primary education's cost growth has been concentrated in areas that are not teaching - administration and bureaucracy. There is, of course, no meaningful cost competition at all in primary education.

All of these carry the caveat that we used to be able to get these things for cheaper, and e.g. primary education was never traded on a free market. So what happened? Was it inevitable, and merely took time?

If anyone has other ideas, please let me know. I would love to vote against cost disease and call any politician who will listen, but I don't fully understand the problem, let alone have a solution to offer.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...