I mean holy shit. It reads like an Onion article. Ugh. and then proceed to increase student fees and give themselves a raise. I'm just saying, buy me dinner before you decide you wanna FUCK ME, Boulder. Oh wait! YOU'D MAKE ME PAY FOR DINNER TOO."...increase by 2.9 percent, which is the lowest increase since the 2.54 increase in 2006."
"We really do want to keep tuition costs at a minimum"
Why are colleges raising costs? The answer is convoluted, but the baseline principle is simple: Someone figured out the could make money doing it. It's depressing as hell, but it's nothing new. It's why coaches get paid more than professors, and have seen exponentially higher pay raises than their book-learnin' brethren. Sports are how many colleges make money. Education should never be a "for profit" endeavour, unless the "profit" is the growth of the economy under more, better educated adults.
I think it's more depressing, but less deliberate than that. We decided we should run colleges like business, and put managers and executives in administrative positions. They're doing what they've been trained to do, which is to make their organization successful as measured by the amount of money they pull in and whatever bullshit metrics they can come up with. So they do raise tuition because they can make money doing it. I don't think it's greed. That's just what they think it means for a university to be successful, because that's what they think it means for any organization to be successful. Likewise using impact and number of papers published in order to evaluate faculty, because you need metrics in order to manage, and it's irrelevant that it forces them to flood the field with work that's either obvious or just uninteresting. As much as I can't stand managerial types, I don't think any of them are personally at fault. It just follows directly from deciding that's who should be running our universities.
You're right, assigning blame isn't exactly fair. at least, assigning blame to the people who are just doing what they were taught.
If the explanation for rising tuition is "greed," then my honest question is why tuition does not rise faster than it does. Why are the profiteers declining additional profit, especially when many schools have more applicants than capacity? I have no idea how significant this is, but I was surprised to learn that most nursing schools in the U.S. are required to have one instructor for every ten or twelve students. That is probably good for instruction quality, but it firmly limits how much a school can pay an instructor, with the result that many qualified instructors can earn more outside the university, leading to a critical shortage of space in nursing school.
I could understand if they were just matching the inflation rate, but the United States has negative inflation right now. Fucking student loans...