College is really expensive. It seems like there’s hardly a day that goes by when another article or study isn’t published about how expensive college is, and how crushing the debt taken out to pay for it is for graduates. Not only is college expensive, it’s much more expensive than it used to be. A number of  presidential candidates have spoken about to the need to make it easier to attend college. Hilary Clinton, for example, recently unveiled a plan that would lower interest rates on student loans. I’m sure her plan would help a lot of people, but it seems to me that it’s treating the symptom rather than the disease.

The problem with access to college in this country isn’t really that it’s too hard to borrow money, it’s that college costs far too much.

There are a lot of reasons that college has gotten more expensive over the last couple of years, and particularly in the case of public institutions, some of them are outside their control. While state level public funding for higher education has actually increased over the last several decades, in both real and nominal terms, far more people are enrolled in college than ever before, and funding has shrunk on a per student basis. Colleges have had to make up the difference, usually by charging higher tuition. This has been especially pronounced over the last decade, because of cuts that were made during financial crisis. But tuition at private institutions has also grown much faster than inflation over the past several decades, so declines in public funding clearly don’t tell the whole story.

Even when you factor in the merit and need based scholarships a college gives out, the cost of tuition has still risen much faster than inflation.

So where has the money been going? The answer is controversial. Some people blame the cost increases on higher numbers of and pay for administrators. Others blame schools for building expensive facilities It’s much easier to say where it hasn’t gone, which is direct instructional costs. While it’s difficult to determine how much a school spends on labs or classrooms, it doesn’t seem like professors are being paid substantially more. Salary growth of full time faculty has generally met or exceeded inflation over the last three decades, but it hasn’t grown nearly as quickly as tuition has. Professors remain relatively poorly compensated, especially when compared to the value their work adds to society. Colleges have also made increasing use of untenured adjunct professors who have no doubt pushed down the cost of actually teaching students.

Regardless of the reason that costs have increased, I think the solution is the same. The federal government should require schools that take federal money to spend a proportion of their budgets on direct instruction or research. It might not stop the increase in tuition, but at least we’d be spending it on something worthwhile.