as are anyone else who thinks their reason is the one reason. There are lots of things different today than in the past. Faculty salaries are higher, facilities are larger with more services offered, administration is bloated, loans are more available, etc. But there are lots of trends today that people really didn't consider in their comments. As a finance professor, I spend a lot of time dealing with all of these issues. So here are my thoughts.

1: Something that has been overlooked is the focus politicians have placed on expanding the percent of their population with college degrees. For example, Governor Herbert in Utah set the goal of 66% of Utah residents having a degree or professional certification by 2020, which was his last full year in office. Fortunately, COVID gave him a handy excuse for the failure of that ridiculous utopian goal. But consider the impact of this. One is what you mentioned, which is colleges offering bells and whistles to sell their school to potential students. But like most other manufacturing processes with high fixed costs, there are generally decreasing marginal costs as your units produced increases. But as your key inputs become more limited, there is an inflection point where marginal costs start to rise in order to produce an additional unit. When politicians expect universities to teach students who are less and less qualified to obtain a degree, the costs shoot through the roof. A few impacts that are easily observed include:

- More remedial education in order to prepare them for the general education classes that most of us considered the basics. This includes increased counseling to help them with the most basic of skills that most good students take for granted, such as filling out required forms, signing up for classes, applying for financial aid, attending class regularly, test taking strategies, countless academic tutors and psychological counseling for students to help them deal with the stress of education. While administrator salaries have shot up in the last few decades, support services have probably outpaced growth in that area.

- Less qualified students often have to repeat classes. This creates log-jams in GE classes that can only be solved by opening up additional sections (generally supported by adjuncts or lecturers) or by lowering the standards to pass the class. Either one creates similar problems in upper-division classes as they pass through the system. They finally pass their general ed. classes only to be confronted by classes in their major that has less support than the GE classes. These students then have a much higher rate of attrition, and leave the university with loan balances and no degree to show for their efforts.

- As this becomes the goal of the politicians, state funding becomes conditional on universities expanding the number of students they accept. At SUU, our prior president made the decision to not grow and focus on attracting better students to an environment with smaller class sizes. It was successful in improving the quality of our incoming students to the point we had the same index as USU. However, we saw the state dish out millions of dollars to UVU and Dixie that were both growing like crazy with open enrollment while SUU received next to nothing. When we got a new president, who was a former state legislator with no skill in fund raising, he unsurprisingly focused on lobbying for more dollars from the state. This meant SUU has gone from 8,000 students to 12,000+ over his tenure, and has lower admission requirements than when he arrived. It also means larger class sizes for the other students, more expensive housing (see recent articles in the Utah newspapers) and fewer jobs for students. SUU has held the line on undergraduate tuition increases the last several years, but you don't see billboard advertising that the professors know their students names anymore.

- Employers are well aware that many schools have had to lower their admission requirements in order to fill seats. They know that the average quality of students has declined, and as they have limited ability to accurately assess the quality of students, they are treating the degree as less important in their selection process. In my program, I tell my students that getting the degree is just the beginning. They need to learn SQL, learn some Python or Stata, or get industry certifications that can be used to differentiate themselves from applicants who only have a degree in finance. Students get frustrated that they have to do extra hoops compared to students from BYU or other top schools, but that is the downside to having an education fully funded by scholarships while being lumped into a group of students with a perceived high variance in quality.

- Because graduation rates are a metric that is closely tracked by the political class and state boards of regents, there is tremendous pressure to get students through to graduation. This can be accomplished by increased services (obviously expensive) or by lowering the standards within the classes (hidden expensive). Schools are spending more time focusing on DFW rates (drop, fail, withdraw) of professors and will follow up if they feel that those rates are increasing over time. I assure you that they will not blame the increase on less qualified students they have chosen to accept, but will generally ask the professor to find a solution; a.k.a. give alternative methods to demonstrate proficiency without exams. Unfortunately, this means easier paths for everyone, including those students who would have met higher standards were they enforced. This has certainly led to everyone, including those on the board today, to perceive degrees as less valuable than they have been in the past.

2: Many of the comments today focused on the cost of education compared to the past. However, that isn't really the key metric. Like any other investment, you choose to pay for an education based on the perceived benefit you receive from the investment. And colleges, particularly state colleges, are still a tremendous value in terms of future earnings if you view it that way. What people often overlook in this type of discussion is the variance of outcomes. If you graduate with a finance degree, there are tons of jobs and it is very likely you will be employed relatively quickly after your degree. But when students come to me asking about potential careers, I always tell them to try accounting first, where you have a near 100% guarantee of employment at a relatively good wage to start. If you can't stand accounting, then you can still do finance and benefit from the accounting classes. Finance has a slightly higher average salary after 10 years, but also a much higher variance than accounting. If universities started pricing credits based on the mean and variance of salary outcomes in a field, you would get more students gravitating towards those fields with better risk/reward profiles. Price discrimination is a powerful tool in resource allocation and would help use university funding more efficiently while also improving career outcomes for students while decreasing the number of distressed loans.

3: The fact that the return on investment has been deceased for students today due to higher student loan debt is balanced by the increased number of students who have gained access to that benefit through increased access to student loans. Doing a Ph.D. with 2-4 kids throughout the journey, there is no way I could have afforded that coming from my background without access to those loans. I am extremely grateful they were available for me as it opened up a job I love, and I am happy to pay them off in full. Could I have done something else without the Ph.D.? Of course, and probably made a ton more money as a consultant or CFO somewhere as my wife reminds me after paying the bills each month. But I teach a lot of first generation students at SUU and Florida State before, and I know what a difference having access to this money has made to the vast majority of students. Has there been abuses? Sure. But overall, student loans have contributed (perhaps inefficiently) to more economic mobility and helped prevent the creation of a permanent underclass. I think that is a great thing for everyone.

Sorry for the novel, and I agree that tuition shouldn't be subsidizing so many of these other activities. But then again, I am too lazy to hit our subsidized gym!