College costs are decided by the market, and right now there is no shortage of those who can get their hands on loans, and there is not much limit to the size of loans they can get, so prices have to go up until supply and demand hit equilibrium.<p>So it absolutely <i>does</i> need to be expensive, because scarce resources such as an education have an inverse relationship between degree value and number of degree holders. Otherwise it will be soon enough that our advanced engineering degrees are worth much less than before. Software Engineering average salary doesn&#x27;t even keep up with inflation any more so in my opinion we are already seeing these effects.<p>Also I would argue a lot of the worthless degrees we see today are worthless due to both the volume of the holders of those degrees as well as the fact that they are premised on a field which doesn&#x27;t have much practical value but if they were scarce they would be worth much more in the job market.