Higher education in the US has reached a breakpoint, where underlying and conflicting trends force an abrupt and often unexpected change in how a market works. The conflicting trends for education are that families’ and governments’ ability to pay for rising college costs has fallen at a time when individuals, states and our nation need higher education more than ever. Typically, when products become more expensive, consumers buy less. But the demand for college education continues to grow as wages for lesser degrees largely erode.  So, what will give? When I was an MIT economics doctoral student, we learned that services like education, healthcare and government would increasingly represent a higher share of GDP because they would never achieve the efficiencies observed in manufacturing and agriculture.  One teacher even referred to this expected outcome as the “Europeanization of the US economy.” But today’s…