“If you could fog a mirror, you could get into the University of Florida.” That’s how a longtime Floridian described the admissions’ process of old. How things have changed. As a recent Wall Street Journal article indicated, competition to get into Florida’s flagship state university is so fierce today that students have been reduced to taking online classes while still participating in campus life.
The anecdote rates thought in response to a new article about affordability and prices in The Dispatch by the excellent Aaron Brown, a frequent contributor to RealClearMarkets. Here’s how Reason Foundation great Nick Gillespie described Brown’s article on X: “Why is a flat-screen TV affordable and a college education not?...Because Congress has spent 60 years trying to make college affordable and has spent zero years trying to make TVs affordable.” The bet here is that Gillespie could be persuaded to rethink his Tweet, and that Brown, author of the spectacular new book Wrong Number, could in particular be persuaded to rethink his tie of federal students loans to rising college tuition.
No, this is not a piece defending federal student loans. It’s instead an observation that even libertarians are occasionally captured by their own confirmation biases, while also cherry-picking data.
Brown writes that “The federal government has been “addressing” student-loan affordability since the Higher Education Act of 1965. Pell Grants in 1972. Expanded loan eligibility in 1978 and 1992. Income-based repayment in 1994 and again in 2009. Public Service Loan Forgiveness in 2007,” etc.
He then asks what happened as a result. Brown writes that “Tuition rose at roughly twice the rate of general inflation for the entire period during which the federal government was ‘making college more affordable,’” and that “Schools raised tuition because students could borrow more.” What you’ve read is accepted wisdom among libertarians, but it’s surprising coming from Brown.
To see why, consider K-12 private school tuition in California, where Reason is located. There are no federal loans for the kids who for instance attend Harvard Westlake, Buckley, Crossroads, or Polytechnic. Can we assume tuition didn’t skyrocket for those schools over the decades?
Hopefully the question answers itself. And the answer is bullish. It’s a sign of how well-to-do Californians have become, along with people across the U.S. as soaring private school tuition nationwide indicates. Gillespie’s comparison of TV costs to college tuition is inapt. While there’s no limit to flat screen production, there are limited seats not just at K-12 private schools, but at U.S. universities that have prosperous people from an increasingly liberalized world vying for them.
Which means wise abolishment of federal student loans won’t bring college tuition down. Not with enormous global wealth chasing so relatively few Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton seats.
Brown then writes that, “In 2025 Congress set a new $100,000 lifetime cap on federal borrowing for graduate students, taking effect July 1, 2026. Within weeks, UC Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business cut its Flex MBA tuition by $30,000—landing at exactly $99,000—and announced the new price with marketing copy reading, without apparent irony.” Brown might agree the latter is evidence of cherry-picking. Really, who has heard of UCI’s Paul Merage School of Business? To fully grasp the implications of Congress’s “$100,000 lifetime cap,” a crucial question from Brown would have been if there had been tuition adjustments at Harvard, Stanford and Wharton. Though Brown would already know the answer.
Government is an ass. But not every rising price is an effect of government. If anything, rising college tuition signals a brilliant retreat of government globally.
