Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles Vest

Vest is doing the administrator’s favorite rhetorical two-step: absolve the institution of blame while quietly insisting the institution deserves more money. The opening concession, “it is not fair,” sounds like a defense of students against political scapegoating. But it’s also a preemptive strike against the most legible villain in any tuition story: Washington. By rejecting the claim that federal policy “caused” tuition spikes, he positions himself as the sober adult in a room full of overheated narratives.

Then comes the real payload: “Every economic argument imaginable would indicate that we should raise tuition at a faster rate than we do.” That sentence flips the moral valence. The problem isn’t that tuition is high; it’s that tuition isn’t as high as “the economics” would justify. The phrase “every economic argument imaginable” is doing heavy work: it invokes an entire priesthood of cost curves, Baumol’s cost disease, competition for faculty, amenities, and prestige without naming any of the political choices embedded in them. Economics becomes an alibi, not an analysis.

Context matters: Vest, as an elite university president in the era of rapid expansion in research budgets, administrative growth, and the prestige arms race, is speaking from inside a system that treats sticker price as both revenue mechanism and status signal. The subtext is a warning to policymakers and donors: don’t expect federal restraint to save families, and don’t expect universities to self-police. If anything, he suggests, market logic demands more extraction.

What makes it effective is its calibrated candor. Vest doesn’t deny the pain; he reframes it as inevitability, and inevitability as responsibility.