NPR.

This is the indicator for planet money. I'm Adrian Ma.

I'm Whalen Wong and today our colleague from planet money is joining us. Welcome Amanda Arentic.

Hello Amanda you're here because it's Friday which means it is time to do indicators in the week.

Today we're going to be talking about new solutions to ongoing problems. Problems like the cost of higher education and health care and an airline story of woe that hits close to home.

Oh I have so much to say about airlines. Our indicator solutions coming up after the break.

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All right to kick it off I'm going to start off with a problem that a lot of people are probably familiar with.

Especially after this week the Biden administration announcing some student loan forgiveness and the problem is the high cost of higher education.

So here's the indicator average tuition at a public four year university last year was around $10,000 and even after you adjust for inflation that is around a 90% increase over two decades ago.

You know I've been like diligently putting money in my kids college fund but I feel like by the time she actually goes to school the amount I have saved will only pay for half a textbook or something.

Yes and whatever you do don't send your kid to private college that is so much worse than public.

Yeah and for private college tuition average about $40,000 last year and to make matters worse it is really hard for students and parents that are plunking down tens of thousands of dollars to really know like how much will this investment pay off in the long run.

And in part of this is because college is what economists call an experience good it's a thing where you don't really know the value of it until you experience it.

But what if you could actually get around that by looking at other people's experiences.

Well that is actually the goal of a bipartisan bill that is currently percolating its way through Congress.

It has to house recently and is called the College Transparency Act. And so what we do is create this whole new data system which would allow the public to see how students from any given school do after they leave college.

So like how are they doing in the job market what are their earnings and how much student debt do they still have.

Well what I want to see is how much they're making depending on what they majored in. Is that in this?

Yeah exactly. I mean this bill would also include data on like what people's majors are and a whole lot of other kind of information about the various students backgrounds.

It also calls for federal agencies to share data with each other so that students can be matched with data from agencies like the Social Security Administration or the Labor Department.

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