What you're missing are the loans. College loans are cheap money, which change the equation so that price doesn't matter nearly as much. It's almost an identical situation as the housing bubble: people get cheap money to pay for college, with the expectation that a degree will make the loan easier to pay off in the future (just like houses never go down in value, right?).
The difference is, there's no defaulting on student loans. Even bankruptcy won't save you. And that means this bubble is going to be much harder to pop. In the meantime, colleges will keep raising tuition because there's enough cheap loans out there to sustain it, and the banks will keep making cheap loans because it's a bet they can't lose.
The difference is, there's no defaulting on student loans. Even bankruptcy won't save you. And that means this bubble is going to be much harder to pop. In the meantime, colleges will keep raising tuition because there's enough cheap loans out there to sustain it, and the banks will keep making cheap loans because it's a bet they can't lose.