Felix Salmon points out that "the only thing which has been rising faster than college tuition costs is the wage premium college graduates receive over those without a degree." The problem he thinks McArdle misses:
There’s a real problem here, surrounding the way in which, at the margin, universities have very little incentive to control costs. … But McArdle doesn’t spend much time wondering about how to change universities’ spending behavior: instead, she concentrates on students’ borrowing behavior. And of the two, it seems to me that the borrowing is more rational than the spending.
Walter Russell Mead looks at the flip-side of the equation:
[I]t’s clear that the huge presence of the federal government in both health care and education helps to drive price increases. On the one hand, Uncle Sam is a kind of payer of last resort. If it weren’t for student loan programs and financial aid, for example, colleges would have to charge only what students and their parents could actually pay out of their own resources and any private loans they could get.
Daniel Luzer adds that though "to college doesn’t guarantee a good job and financial stability … not going to college at all virtually guarantees poor job prospects and financial instability":
[T]his is the problem with thinking of college like an “investment.” There are no other investments that work like this. College is now a necessary but insufficient condition for securing professional employment. So depending on the price of one’s college, college can be a pretty risky investment. Not going to college, in contrast, isn’t a risky investment; it’s pretty much a surefire way to ensure a lifetime of bad jobs and frequent unemployment.
The Dish 