The soaring costs of college

This is a second blog dealing with higher education--its failure to do its job and its soaring costs. I got the information from Jack Kelly's article entitled "The Big College Scam." Notice his word choice--it's a scam.

Last time I focused on Kelly's attack leveled at the failure of higher education. Students don't learn. The president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni said,"Students who say that college has not prepared them for the real world are largely right. The fundamental problem here is not debt, but a broken educational system that no longer insists on excellence."

For this blog, let's take a closer look at the sharply rising costs of higher education. Kelly claims that the cost of college soared and its value diminished once the federal government started to "help." The supposed purpose of federal guarantees for student loans was to make college more affordable. In fact, according to Kelly, they did the opposite by fueling the massive tuition hikes. Colleges spent the extra money to expand their bureaucracies, increase the compensation of faculty and staff, and improve physical facilities. Some of this sounds fine, but I've seen the costs even at the community college level. When the school adds a new dean, for instance, the costs soar since that person doesn't function alone. He or she needs an entire staff, adding enormously to the costs of running the school.

Kelly has some discouraging statistics on the costs associated with higher education. We spend about $10,600 per pupil in public schools, 377 percent more, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than we spent in 1961. Yet among students who go to college, 75 percent require some remedial work. And, according to a study by the American Enterprise Institution and the Heritage Foundation, teachers are paid $120 billion over market value. That's painful to hear considering that I'm a teacher.

So students who succeed in college often come out with massive debt. Add to this the problem that their skills were not improved while in school, and you have a real problem. Kelly notes that roughly 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates since 1992 work in low-skill jobs. In 2008, 318,000 waiters and waitresses had college degrees, as did 365,000 cashiers and 18,000 parking lot attendants.

Unfortunately, very few are honest with students considering college. They often refuse to say that college isn't for everyone ... or that rigorous exit requirements at any level do not exist. It goes back to my comments in the previous blog. Higher education is often "sold" as a commodity to students with the implied message that they will get the diploma, no matter what their skill levels or their study habits.

So how is our current President doing with this problem? It looks like he will keep the current system going a little longer. He recently proposed a student loan forgiveness program, with taxpayers eating the difference. It would save students about $8 a month, but it won't slow down college costs or make the schools better places to learn.