Noam Scheiber

And to meet all that demand, we start to see a whole bunch of new players open their doors or expand their ranks.

So we see for-profit colleges really start to enter the scene, and we have a huge increase in the number of people who are attending for-profit universities.

And another thing that we see is what are known as non-competitive public universities.

So that's like not the University of Texas at Austin, which is obviously a very prestigious public university.

Or even the University of Texas at Dallas, which is a pretty competitive state university, but something like the University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley, which admits almost everyone who applies to the university.

And what we've seen is that

If you go to the University of Texas at Austin, you tend to do very well.

If you go to the University of Texas at Dallas, often it works out pretty well.

But for someone who graduates from an essentially open admission public university, it's a much more complicated picture.

And it's not at all clear that the cost is worth the benefit to you at a university like that.

That's exactly right.

I mean, in some ways, in the 1980s and 1990s, a college degree really was a can't lose asset.

We find that the value of these degrees were increasing pretty much in lockstep.

Obviously, if you went to Harvard and studied engineering, you might do better than someone who went to their state university.

and studied art history, but in general, this was an appreciating asset.

But by the 2000 and 2010s, we see a much more mixed picture, which in some cases makes sense for people, but in a lot of other cases doesn't make that much sense for people.

...is that Congress is making it easier for people to borrow to go to college.

So Congress raises the limit on student debt in the early 90s, and then it raises it again a few times in the kind of 2007-2009 period.

And this coincides with a really rapid increase in the debt that people are taking on to go to college.

We see it roughly double between the early 90s and 2020.