A new book on higher education

I find many things interesting, but as a college professor, I'm always intrigued by the world of education. There's a new book out by William J. Bennett called Is College Worth It? that I'd like to share with you.

You can tell from the title the book deals with college costs. There is growing evidence that colleges and universities cost far more than they should, with the result that students graduate with a tremendous debt burden. The author notes that just since 1990, the cost of attending a four-year college or university has gone up roughly 4 times the rate of inflation. And we' re not talking about just the major schools. I've seen the costs jump at the community college where I teach.

But most people wouldn't worry too much about that if the payoff was great. However, the average pay for college grads in America has fallen 5% in the past five years. Here's a startling statistic – almost half of all four-year college grads now work at jobs that don't require a college degree (think Starbucks).

So who does Bennett blame for the soaring costs? The federal government. College tuition soars because the federal government offers subsidies for students. Federal student loans have ballooned by 60% in the last five years alone. Colleges and universities, knowing that Washington is going to dangle more money in front of students, are encouraged to raise their tuitions and fees. Meanwhile, they ignore their own inefficiencies.

A side effect of this is a loss of real education. Schools want these loan-subsidize customers because they have federal money in their pockets, so they often lower academic standards to get them to their school. In addition, grade inflation takes over, and schools offer easier classes and trendy majors.

The result is students with a tremendous amount of debt and a lack of skills to get a job to pay these debts off. College used to be a tremendous help for those at the bottom of the economic scale, but now they're having a tougher time paying for school even with federal help. In addition, taxpayers get stuck for the cost of loans, which students have defaulted on.

Bennett offers some solutions. We should reform K-12 education to make it better for those who do not want to go to college, we need to have students picking more marketable majors, we should encourage ROTC program so the Army or Navy could pay for college, and we should be moving more higher-ed programs over to online courses.

Let's hope some of these changes take place. But American higher education is a fossilized dinosaur that does not want these things to happen. There's more money for them in the system that exists.