snowy

If you're going to a state school, the state decides how much they're going to give the institution in state funding, and the school decides from there how much they need to charge in tuition to make up the difference. In my state, the amount of funding we receive from the state has decreased, therefore tuition has gone up at my university. And your little blurb about the increase in rates is incredibly out of date with their statistics; 8 years have passed since then, and my university has seen a tuition increase just about every year, as well as a temporary overhaul of how tuition was charged. Why? Because we don't get enough money from the state--and we're supposed to, as a state-sponsored insititution--to keep tuition steady.

So Obama, by promoting financial aid and tax breaks, is coming up with a solution that attempts to address the problem at the federal level, even though it is a state level issue. I'm not sure there's much more he or another president could do to make college more affordable, by and large. The tertiary education system in this country is a behemoth, and it's a patchwork of public and private institutions the federal government has little to no control over, except when it comes to financial aid or providing tax breaks (we're going to ignore the issue of research grants, as they usually don't play into the tuition equation).

And your argument of increasing classroom capacity is irrelevant; many college classes are already 150 people or larger, depending on the institution. The movement is to actually do away with classrooms entirely, and have students start taking more and more classes online, as universities get to pay instructors who teach online classes less, they don't have to pay the capital cost for a classroom, and they get to teach more students than they could in a conventional classroom situation.

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If I am not better, at least I am different. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau