Yeah, I get that we are talking about who bears the burden of the costs, but isn't there another factor to the "costs?" He writes: Recently, we have seen the emergence of online education and distance learning creeping in to the mainstream academia. But it's only creeping. I would think that the market is ripe for a serious institution to fully embrace an extremely low cost version of their education model. A sort of Armani Exchange degree. Get a world class education for $5k a year. It's coming, perhaps it's already here, I have no idea. But my guess is it would already be here in full if the textbook manufacturers/publishers didn't have strong lobbies. If the professors weren't clinging to tenure and a justification for why in person lectures are valuable. Like the medical market, there is a lot of "waste" in thick margins, with little to no competition.If by “college costs,” you mean institutional costs, then that is calling for lower overall educational spending per student. That makes sense of course to the extent that there is institutional waste, i.e. spending that is not actually achieving some important educational goal.
The word "waste" in there is a very subjective one. People may think having tenured professors at $150k a year is "wasteful" at times, others may think having an educational infrastructure geared around "text+books+" that cost in excess of $200 a piece as wasteful. Some may think that having a professor give the same lecture every semester in person is wasteful. There will be others that find justifications for all of those things too.