What mechanisms are there then. What is stopping the massive increase in tuition? There is a nearly inelastic demand for higher education now because we as a society have decided you can't have a good life without it, there is no risk on student loans because they cannot be discharged via bankruptcy, the government is subsidizing tuition rates by injecting more money with government loans, and when we start getting to the extreme ends of costs where even the highly inelastic demand is starting to bend we give out more subsidies!

This is helping no one but the academic industry and I say industry because it's the schools and their administrators benefiting, not professors. Students aren't getting a benefit, they are just running in place. As early as 2011 I was working in a call center paying 11/hr that only took employees with bachelor's. It's the new high school degree. Masters are next on the list as institutions decide they need to have "the best" and higher degrees are the only way to prove that. There are less jobs in academia as universities push for more and more adjunct professor who get paid peanuts and have no chance at tenure, and the salary is driven down by the tons of students going through school who can't find a job to pay off their loans in industry and spill over to academia to try and make a living.

Student loan debt is larger than any other debt now and there are zero market mechanisms to make sure the risks of it reflect reality. We need to let the air out of the bubble early and in a sustained manner or eventually there will not be enough resources to keep pretending that sending a bunch of kids to the same building for 4 years to learn zero skills that will help them pay off the massive cost of college, and the whole charade will collapse quickly and with disastrous effects.

I think that everyone should go to college because a higher education leads to better citizens, but we cannot artificially inflate the demand to infinite without constraining the price

You raise some excellent points - many of which need to be addressed. But this doesn't do that. It's the "We must do something, this is something, therefor we must do this thing" fallacy.

The function of these waivers is entirely to offset the fact that graduate students working on their research projects need to be enrolled for a number of reasons, but it doesn't actually make sense for them to pay the same tuition as students who are taking up classroom space, instructor time, supplies, etc. So their tuition is waved.

It's entirely a book-keeping exercise. One that the student largely never sees - except now we're proposing to tax them for it.

The problems are not related to each other save for the fact that they both involve the word "tuition".

As for mechanisms?

The first thing I'd address is state level funding of universities. Many public universities have seen their state support vanish, especially after 2008, and during the recovery, that money didn't come back. At the same time, grant success rates have (at best) remained both low and flat over the past decade or so, making it hard to make up that money on the research end of things.

When you take away state support and federal support, literally the only revenue dial left available is tuition increases.

I'd also be all for a merging of practical and liberal arts education such that you can learn practical, profession-oriented skills but also read Chaucer. We have those universities - they're land grant institutions - but I'd like to see an emphasis in that increased.

We also need to address the pipeline from graduate school to jobs outside academia - in my own lab I treat students intending to pursue careers outside academia the same as I do those who want to continue on, and I'm pretty unapologetic about job prospects. I think it's my moral obligation to do so, but it will put me at a competitive disadvantage to larger labs. Addressing that starts at the Chair/Dean level.

You know what solves none of these? Taking a few thousand dollars from doctoral students for an administrative process.

I would agree that this is possibly and even highly probably not the place to start, but if taking a few thousand dollars from graduate students stops them from going to graduate school right now when they can not afford it, I think that is a good affect. If we believe in the market at all, there are far too many graduate students or they would be commanding a higher price that covered the cost of their "production" for lack of a better word.

Additionally I understand that the funding didn't come back, but tuition is not the only dial. I have seen what seems like every school increase their administrators overhead, continue to fund unprofitable sports programs, and add luxury amenities to their campus to entice students away from other universities. Schools could cut back, but they don't. They have an unlimited trough of money and no reason to ever cut back.

At this point they are acting as corporations and not institutes of higher learning. If they are acting like a corporation then we should treat them like one and stop dumping money into unprofitable ventures. I will point out that we have other industries that are getting money dumped into them that don't need it that should lose the government funding first, like half the industries on this list[1]

There are better fights to be had, but decreasing demand for education that is unprofitable to obtain seems like a good step

[1]https://blogs-images.forbes.com/timworstall/files/2017/01/jo...

It's a good effect in the same way that a startup struggling getting rid of the coffee machine is a good effect - it's technically trimming costs, but in a way that's a drop in the bucket, and doesn't even begin to address the underlying issues.

As for "Schools could cut back, but they don't" that will come as a surprise to my frozen salary, and every department in my university being expected to cut their budget for the next three years.

While still being expected to admit the same if not more students, support the programs to help keep them enrolled, and compete for more grant funding.

Based on what I've read you are a professor, correct? Your salary being frozen isn't what I am talking about. When I went to college we had a 12% raise in tuition one year, and then spent several hundred thousand on a party for the new Dean we got next year. Those are the type of costs I am talking about

Edit: sports teams as well. Our basketball team was bringing in more money than they spent so that's fine for the university. However they also spent millions on our football team who lost money year after year. Why are universities in a position where they can increase tuition by 12% in a single year and then still dump money into a losing sports team for the prestige factor? The universities do not seem to be price concious at all except when it comes to professor compensation

They're extremely price conscious in a number of ways.

Do you have a citation for the several hundred thousand dollar party?

Sports teams are...difficult. I dislike how much money goes to them, but they're a complex thing to value, as both student recruitment and alumni donations are entangled with the athletic program.

My understanding is that it's not really bookkeeping. The tuition is still paid, just by the federal government (or grant provider) to the university instead of by the student. The students can't afford to pay taxes on this, so presumably universities will have to increase stipends to cover the difference. Effectively, the government is increasing taxes on its own grants---which is a (politically) clever, backhand way of cutting research budgets.

I would note that it's also possible to get a tuition waiver from being funded by a non-external source, or from technically an external source that's functionally the same (A CA state agency paying a PhD student at UCSF, for example).