The cost can be justified only if teacher and pupil are of top intellectual caliber.

From These Ruins Are Inhabited by Muriel Beade. In 1957, George Beadle was a visiting professor at Oxford University. On winning a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1958, he and Muriel spent additional time exploring England. This is an account of that time when an older, more traditional England was disappearing.

Modern undergraduates come to the university ready to concentrate in one narrow field of scholarship. The liberal-arts bias that encourages American college students to sample widely of varied course offerings does not exist at Oxford; the program there is more similar to that of the graduate schools at American universities. Oxford has fourteen areas of specialty, of which the most demanding and the most honored is Ancient Philosophy and History, a course known simply as "Greats."

Whereas the American student "majors" in a subject, the Oxford undergraduate "reads" it. Literally. His work is directed from his college by one or two tutors who are experts in his chosen field. For three or four years, in weekly private session, he presents an essay based on his reading, hears his mentor discuss and criticize it, may be forced to defend it, is finally sent on his way with a new reading assignment and a new essay topic. That's all there is to the academic side of an Oxford education: Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other. It's the best possible method of teaching, and also the most expensive. The cost can be justified only if teacher and pupil are of top intellectual caliber.

That final sentence is suggestive.

It is common to ascribe the rise in cost of a university education to the explosion of administrative costs, costs in trun enabled through the explosion of student borrowing. And I think that description is largely right.

But there is another element suggested by Muriel Beadle's comment.

Not only has the cost of university education exploded, but so has the availability. In 1957, perhaps only 5 or 10% of the American population had a university degree and we were among the most educated countries in the world. Everywhere else, the comparable number would have been 1-3%.

Today, the number is closer to 30% of the population with a university degree. The mathematical certainty is that the more people receiving degrees, the more diluted the average talent base of those with a university degree. The necessary corollary is the more expensive it is to educate those with lesser abilities.

American university education has always been more industrial than the tutor system in England, particularly at the undergraduate level, larger lecture halls, less of individual time between the professor and the student. With the explosion of numbers and the necessary reduction in student talent, the more expensive it becomes to educate them.

It forces you away from the expensive tutorial system and towards the much more efficient system of large lecture halls, graduate student teaching assistants, more virtual education, and more student to student tutorials.

To get a similar experience of learning from the masters today as was experienced by the average Oxbridge undergraduate in 1950, you would have, as Beadle indicates, to go all the way for a PhD.