From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is the Daily.

When President Biden canceled college debt last month, he left untouched the problem that

created that debt, the soaring price of college.

Today, my colleague Ron Lieber, on why that problem is so difficult to fix.

It's Wednesday, September 14.

So Ron, after we did an episode on President Biden's plan to forgive student debt for millions of

Americans, one of our producers raised a question at our morning meeting, which was,

why has the price of college risen so dramatically?

And it got everybody on the team theorizing.

But no one had a definitive answer.

And so we decided to call you.

You're a personal finance columnist for the New York Times, and you've written a book about this.

So tell me, why is college so expensive?

Well, there's a complicated answer to this, even though it seems like a pretty simple and

straightforward question, but I'll do my best here to try and boil it down.

So look, it's absolutely true that the list price, the retail price of college has gone up over time.

In the 1980s, if you went to a private four-year residential undergraduate education,

that's what we're talking about here, that was maybe $20,000.

That's kind of where it topped out.

And then it just sort of grew over time.

In the last couple of years, some of these private schools have topped $80,000.

And that's for a single year, right?

...