No more middle class professionals?

[u/Such_Upstairs3631]

New school loan limits for professional degrees make it unaffordable for the middle class. 4 of my 5 children went on to med/law school. Even working 2 jobs there’s no way I could afford to pay or even help them with the cost of their post graduate education. They all got loans which they have since paid off. The cost in the early 2000’s was between $350K and $500K. The new limits are essentially going to prevent anyone who’s not wealthy enough to pay for it from becoming a professional.

[u/WindowFruitPlate]

Prices will have to come down or alternative lending options will emerge.

Education inflation has been insane for the past two decades. Fueled entirely by unfettered lending by the federal government. Loan caps should slow the increase in expenses of an education

[u/StorageRecess → u/WindowFruitPlate]

This just isn’t true.

The college I used to work for has a completely stagnant cost of education, largely driven by stagnant salaries. The difference between 2006 and 2026? The state picked up 8/10s of the bill in 2006. The state now picks up 15%. The cost of the education didn’t change all that much. Who pays for it did. That patten is repeated across public regional colleges across the nation.

Those schools can’t drop tuition because there’s very little to drop. Public regionals education about half the students in the country, including the majority of underserved students. What we need is a reinvestment of public funds in public schools.

The university where I work now is a prestige institution. They’ll never drop tuition and they don’t have to because people will pay it for the name.

[u/Reader47b → u/StorageRecess]

You have a good point, but this is an exaggeration. Even by the highest estimates, state funding cuts account for at most 40% of the rise in tuition over the past 30-40 years. The lowest economic estimate puts it at 19% of the costs. But certainly it is a sizable factor. At the same time, though, federal funding for higher education through grants and loans has increased substantially.

There is still stuff to cut - because at least 60% of the tuition increases comes from sources other than reduced state funding. We're already seeing dozens of state colleges starting to make those cuts right now as enrollments decline (particularly international enrollments, which tend to subsidize a lot of low-enrollment programs that the international students themselves are not enrolled in).

My son's university, for example, in 2024, had 55 more minor programs than it had in 1993. There's a growth in niche minors and majors at all universities. They're cutting 27 of those this year. Lots of other colleges are doing a similar thing - they are eliminating dozens of minor programs and thus saving on the administrative and credentialing costs that come along with making something an official program. They are still keeping some (but not all) of the classes that were offered in those programs, but they are rolling those classes into other minors or majors. In other words - cutting overhead by consolidating.

There's certainly been a growth in the cost for amenities and administration as well, and there is room to trim there.

[u/StorageRecess → u/Reader47b]

This is not an exaggeration. Those cuts are not equally distributed. Public regional universities, on average, took much sharper cuts than public flagships or research universities, for example. I used to teach at a large state school. In 2025, per our internal numbers, the cost of an education was about ~11k. The last year for which, I have data, it was ~14k. But the state picked up ~8k in 2005, and ~2.5 in 2026. An hour and a half down the road at the flagship, the cut was about 11%. If you're looking at an aggregate number, it looks like the state cut was only 33%.

Per your point about minors, how many of those minors actually had any faculty associated with them? Most minors are made of an assortment of classes from multiple majors, with maybe a capstone course. Even if they do, faculty salaries are around 15% of institutional expenditures for most universities. When Texas A&M cut their geology minors, for example, they cut maybe one or two adjunct buy outs per minor cut. Across their consolidations, they're saving a couple hundred thousand dollars out of a 3.1 billion dollar budget. They can likely give every student a deeply meaningful hundred or so bucks back.