What will it take?

Rethinking the private, independent education financial model is a challenge, mainly because someone, somewhere has to pay.  There are classes to teach, technologies to acquire, materials to buy, and facilities to maintain.  All of these cost money.

In other industries, costs drop because (1) technology reduces the need for human labor, (2) cheaper sourcing of raw materials (sometimes including labor), (3) shifting overhead onto other organizations that can operate at lower cost, or (4) the real cost of innovation--R & D--is essentially amortized in the first units produced.  Not so in education.  Technology, though we have surely purchased plenty, has not reduced the need for labor; to the contrary, it has increased the staffing required for technological support and instruction.  Schools are still heavy in bricks and mortar, with physical plants that, if anything, have spiraled upward in both cost of construction and cost of maintenance.  Shifting to cheaper sources for materials and labor has not yet entered the field. [In some instances in higher education, lower cost markets like India have at times sourced teaching in the United States and Britain via technology--a reversal of the usual approach.]  And the product we sell, education, really does not have much R&D to amortize.

When are we going to see a flattening or even unwinding of inflation in education?  When we figure out how to use two or three of the above to reconfigure what it costs to provide our product.  That's actually the easy part--many educators probably have ideas about what might work.  The real problem will be figuring out who gets to go first, because ours is not a field where out-in-front innovators tend to get rewarded.  Quite the contrary.