There's an excellent article from money magazine today about the radically escalating cost of college and how people are not really getting a return on investment. Unlike other goods where the more you raise the price, the less demand you get, it's the opposite with colleges. Like sheep marching into a slaughterhouse, the more colleges raise tuition, the more people want to pile in. Not unlike the way more people piled into dotcom stocks and real estate as the prices go up thinking that if everyone else is paying more, than it must be worth something. The joke is on the student though. When you look into the future, students that went to a cheaper state university don't make significantly less than students that went to an expensive private uni. I think like health or the pharmaceutical industry, college pretends to be an institution that works for the public good, but under the surface, it's all about big business. The student will graduate loaded down with more debt than he or she can handle making less than the same job would've paid 10 years ago, when adjusted for inflation. Yet the cost of getting and education to do that job has grown MUCH greater than the rate of inflation. I think college is obviously necessary for many fields like science, medicine, law, engineering etc. But let's face it, I'd say the majority of people I know that went to college end up doing jobs not even related to their degree. For them college was nothing but a transfer of wealth from them to the university, no different than any other consumer item.
http://money.cnn.com/2008/08/20/pf/colle...2008082107
http://money.cnn.com/2008/08/20/pf/colle...2008082107