A college tuition cap could be the bipartisan solution we've been seeking

This has been a tough few weeks in higher education — particularly for those of us who care about increasing diversity on college campuses. Yet, there has been a key piece missing in the analysis of the Supreme Court’s decisions on affirmative action and Biden’s loan cancellation plan: namely, that the cost of college is out of control.

Over the past 30 years, even accounting for inflation, the average cost of tuition and fees to attend college has more than doubled. Today the average undergraduate student who takes out loans graduates from college owing nearly $25,000.

It is this underlying force of college (un-)affordability that keeps many low-income students and students of color from attending college in the first place and then saddles millions of others with mountains of debt if they do. Fortunately, college affordability is also an issue that there may be an emerging bipartisan consensus to solve. 

That idea? Having the federal government step in and cap the amount that colleges can charge in tuition. While on the surface government price limits may seem anathema to America’s free market ethos, it is an idea with significant bipartisan support — among both the public and politicians — and has precedent in other areas of our government. 

According to a new Century Foundation/Lake Research Partners survey of 1,000 registered voters, 75 percent of voters support a proposal to cap tuition at colleges and universities that receive government funding, including 70 percent of Republicans and 81 percent of Democrats. Nearly two-thirds of voters believe that capping tuition would make college more affordable. Moreover, support for tuition caps remained overwhelmingly popular even when voters heard opposition arguments, for instance, that the caps would reduce the quality of education provided. 

These survey results mirror a trend in which Republican policymakers increasingly voice concern about the cost of college and appear open to the idea of tuition limits — as evidenced by bills from House Education and Workforce chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), efforts by GOP lawmakers in Wisconsin to tie tuition increases to inflation and proposals from conservative think tanks. As more and more Republicans view universities as enclaves of the liberal elite and “wokeism,” efforts to rein in colleges through greater government oversight and regulation have emerged as an appealing populist corrective on the right. 

The logic behind tuition caps is straightforward. Each year, the government invests billions of taxpayer dollars into colleges — both directly, through grants to schools, and indirectly, through loans and aid to students that enable them to attend and allow schools to inflate their tuition. The thinking is that in light of all this federal aid, there should be reasonable accountability measures to ensure that it’s not an open-ended spigot of money that schools can take advantage of. 

When the Department of Defense awards contracts to private companies, there are thousands of pages of conditions and regulations that those contractors must agree to. In federal health care programs like Medicare, the government sets maximum reimbursement rates on providers in order to hold down costs for taxpayers and consumers.

Why should higher education, a sector that already has considerable barriers to entry which give established institutions even more market power to set prices, be any different? Without meaningful limits on what colleges can charge students, schools have few incentives to control tuition. 

While there is less agreement on how such a tuition cap would operate in practice, there is no shortage of approaches. One idea would be to set a limit on tuition equal to the costs of providing instruction and student support services, plus a premium on top of those costs (for example, $5,000 per student). This could lead schools to reallocate some of their spending away from marketing and recruitment and toward instruction. Another approach would be to set a tuition cap based on an estimate of what students would actually pay in tuition and fees if there were no financial aid available. Both types of policies would make college more affordable and encourage more moderate-income students who might shy away from college because of the cost to consider going.

Skeptics are likely to dismiss tuition caps as a political non-starter, pointing to the influence that college and university administrators have over elected officials and the role that these institutions play in local districts. This is certainly a real obstacle: schools across the country will fight tuition caps vigorously. The higher education lobby is well-organized and powerful. Indeed, the sector’s near-uniform opposition to past Congressional efforts to index or limit college costs is the main reason that those attempts fell short, often quickly.

But the political climate has changed. In our recent survey, a shocking 84 percent of voters said that colleges and universities “have been profiting off students for decades.” Only one-third of respondents agreed that the value of a college degree is worth the cost. If the American public is increasingly losing faith in our institutions of higher education, and they view unaccountable administrators and nontransparent pricing as key drivers of that distrust, who is to say that colleges’ resistance to tuition caps can’t be overcome?

President Biden spent significant political capital in proposing his student debt forgiveness plan — and it was the right thing to do. But there’s a less controversial and far more effective way to make college affordable. 

Sometimes the simplest answer is the right one. Want to slow the rise in tuition costs? Put on the brakes. 

Robert Shireman is director of Higher Education at The Century Foundation and former deputy undersecretary of education in the Obama administration. Carolyn Fast is a senior fellow at the foundation.