Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers. I'm your host Andrew Hee.

We're in the thick of graduation season and yet again nobody has awarded me an honorary doctorate or invited me to be a commencement

speaker.

And at this point, I'm honestly starting to wonder if I'll ever join a sorority. But it's got me thinking about

college which has me wondering how did degrees become so expensive? How did we get to the point where a

17-year-old hoping to get a four-year undergraduate degree is all but signing up for

a mortgage? From what I understand, in 1952, you could pretty much go to college

for free as long as you promised to wear a necktie and weren't convicted of communism.

So your whole bout of higher education cost roughly as much as a tie,

which was three shillings. Today, and this is real math by the way,

the average four-year public degree costs a little over $10,000 per year for

in-state tuition and approaches $16,000 for out-of-state tuition.

Meanwhile, those swanky private universities will run you around $37,000 a year.

If you're a liberal arts major, like me, you probably don't enjoy doing math very much,

so let me quickly compute that for you. The average

in-state undergraduate degree at this time is about $40,000 and the average private

degree is a sweet $148,000 in three shillings.

And that's just tuition, mind you.

That's not factoring the money you're spending on housing, food, polo, beer money, so much money all that combined.

Nor is the rising cost of college tuition an issue of mere inflation either.

Since the late 1980s to 2018, adjusted for inflation, the cost of an undergraduate degree has risen

by 213 percent at public schools and 129% at private schools.

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