October 6, 2008 2:43PM # Colleges’ Other Big Dance By [Neal McCluskey](https://www.cato.org/people/neal-mccluskey) --- SHARE Colleges and politicians love the Big Dance, but not the one you’re thinking of. No, I’m talking about the constant, nationwide tap dance around the mere possibility that super-abundant student aid might fuel rampant tuition inflation. Case in point, a [lengthy article ](http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2008/10/05/up_up_and_away/?page=1)in the *Boston Globe* this weekend that flitted and twirled around higher-education costs but completely ignored the possibility that [ballooning aid might abet mega-inflation](https://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=7039). The closest the *Globe* came to tackling that very real possibility was this bit buried deep in the article: > It must be said that parents are not entirely blameless. For their money, they demand amenities like state-of-the-art gyms and dormitories in a dog-chasing-its-tail spiral. The real problem, of course, is that much of the money parents are waving around to demand the best isn’t theirs at all: it belongs to taxpayers, a little tidbit that got nary a nod in the *Globe*. In the 2003-04 school year (the latest with [available data](http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_324.asp?referrer=list)), 48 percent of undergraduates received some sort of federal aid, including grants, loans, work study, or some combination thereof. Overall, inflation-adjusted aid coming through Washington rose [77 percent ](http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/about/news_info/trends/trends_aid_07.pdf)over just the last ten years, from $48.7 billion to $86.3 billion. Add to that $7.8 billion in state grants in the 2006-07 school year, $26.3 billion in grants from institutions, and $10.2 billion in private/​employer grants, and two things are abundantly clear: there are tankers full of aid dollars out there, and they have to be playing at least some role—and probably a huge one—in driving up college costs. So when will the media stop taking the higher education/​politician party line that aid is the key to college access and has no impact on prices? I’m not sure, but I have a bad feeling that lots of the *enjoyable* [big dances](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-84943128594505667&ei=vFnqSNp7i-6sAuCnmL8K&q=one+shining+moment&hl=en) will have passed before it starts to happen. ##### Related Tags [Education](https://www.cato.org/education), [Center for Educational Freedom](https://www.cato.org/center-educational-freedom) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).