College is expensive. Students are in debt. Why? Wendover Productions analyzes what makes higher education so expensive in this country, and some of the reasons he cites you can assume: professors cost money and new facilities are expensive. But a surprising reason why college costs so damn much is that there are more people attending it than ever before.
You see, having more students go to college means that the federal and state funds used to help schools out are stretched thinner on a per-student level, which then means that it costs more money for each student out of pocket. For example, Wendover Productions says that in 1990, Ohio State was able to pay for 25 percent of its budget with government money. In 2012? Government money could only pay for seven percent of the budget, and a bigger burden was passed on to the students.