100 Colleges Now Charging Over $50,000 Per Year In Combined Tuition, Fees, & Housing

Absurd. Absurd.

Instapundit also notes that 30 college presidents made over one million per year.

He's been on this a lot -- the education bubble. As we'eve subsidized and subsidized education, that money has not gone to new value; instead, it's just permitted college administrators to give themselves and their faculty huge raises.

When in the past was being a professor considered a lucrative career? Never. Until now. Teaching in college was always a desirable job -- status, good hours, plenty of time off, terrific lifestyle, and, of course, having sex with students. With this pile of inducements, we never needed a huge salary to draw people to the academy; the academy's like Hollywood in that thousands and thousands of people are willing to work for minimum wage just to have some kind of shot at making it big in academics. ("Big" meaning a tenure track position.)

So why have we inflated salaries beyond all measure?

This regime is awful in so many ways -- expensive for the taxpayer, hugely expensive for families, and hugely expensive too for students, who begin their careers until a pile of ruinous debt. Debt which they took on believing they needed to, and also because too few people think about actually paying off big loans when they're taking them.

This is the sort of situation that should bother liberals -- tricking people, essentially, into taking out huge loans to buy something of dubious marginal value (that is, why not go to state school?) in order to personally enrich a small elite with a vested interest in charging ever higher and higher prices.

But of course it doesn't; their response is just to guarantee more and bigger loans, apparently not getting that it is exactly that flood of money that has inflated the cost of higher education in the first place.

And, of course, this is because they are so reliant on the academic-media complex for support.

The bubble needs to be burst as soon as possible. Cap the amount of guaranteed student loans at $7000 per year and watch how quickly tuition stops escalating. (Actually I guess $10,000 per year -- $7000 at this point is too low, given how crazy this has gotten.)

posted by Ace at 11:19 AM

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