Why college costs are rising

[timelets]

Labor markets in U.S. cities today are vastly more educated and skill-intensive than they were
five decades ago. Yet, urban non-college workers perform substantially less skilled work than
decades earlier, and the once robust non-college urban wage premium has largely flat-lined.
....

The urban workforce is disproportionately college-educated and foreign-born, and it has become more so over time.

[T]he second differentiating feature of urban labor markets alluded to above: the rise in immigrant intensity.. In 2015, the rural-urban gap in the foreign-born share of college adults was approximately 35 percentage points, roughly twice as large as in 1970. Similarly, the rural-urban gap in the foreign-born share of non-college adults was approximately 25 percentage points in 2015, again roughly double the gap in 1970. Foreign born workers in turn have a bimodal education distribution: they are disproportionately likely to either have completed post-baccalaureate education or to lack a high school diploma.

https://economics.mit.edu/files/16724

Also see the developments in online marketplaces, which make non-college services work standardized and replaceable. https://a16z.com/2019/01/08/marketplace-startups-then-now/

and here https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-26/japan-has-a-new-guest-worker-program-just-don-t-call-it-an-immigration-policy

Comments

Not so fast

[malobukov]

Top universities are by definition outliers. If immigrants with diplomas from shithole countries can compete for high paying jobs, surely Americans with diplomas from run of the mill US universities should be able to do it, too.

Re: Not so fast

[timelets]

They should be and they are, but it's very expensive because top programs set price and quality expectations. Getting a run-of-the-mill diploma is even more expensive because it doesn't provide necessary job skills/connections to be sufficiently competitive and, which is even worse, wastes time.

In any case, it's a long conversation and I can be completely wrong about everything.