[Daily Caller] America’s colleges and universities have finally stopped their practice of annually gouging students with price increases for tuition, fees and room and board -- to the accumulated tune of a growth rate of 400 percent in the last three decades.Labor Department statistics collected by The Wall Street Journal show that aggregate tuition increases in 2017 rose 1.9 percent in 2017. This figure accords with the overall rate of U.S. inflation.
From 1990 to 2016, college tuition costs had increased at an average rate of 6 percent annually, which was more than twice the overall inflation rate for the same period.
This year’s steep decline in college cost increases has many causes.
One cause of the decline is the decision by Congress to stop raising the maximum amount of federally-subsidized student loans which college students can borrow to finance their educations. Congress has not increased this maximum amount since 2008, the Journal notes.