Posted on 09/09/2010 4:22:13 AM PDT by mattstat
An anecdote: The place I am teaching has increased its tuition over 300% in something less than a decade. This is, as the chart shows, typical. Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a. the Instapundit) quoted from a Money magazine story which said, “After adjusting for financial aid, the amount families pay for college has skyrocketed 439 percent since 1982…Normal supply and demand can’t begin to explain cost increases of this magnitude. [ellipsis original]”
If you have any sense of the value of money, you should be agog. Over 400 percent since 1982! Over 300 percent in just the last ten years! (Look at the “kink” in the brown line in 2001.) Again, this cannot last. But why is this trend here and when will it end?
Reason number one: too many kids are going to college. This is usually expressed as “a greater percentage of high school graduates are attending college”, the tone suggesting that this is a good thing. This means that more professors must be provided to teach the influx. And more buildings must be created in which to teach and house them.
And, best of all, more administrators must be hired to strengthen and enlarge the educational bureaucracy. Why, at the place in which I am visiting, there are no fewer than four separate offices devoted to “diversity.” This is natural: the larger a bureaucracy becomes, the larger is seem to need to be.
At least the kids are benefiting, right? Wrong...
(Excerpt) Read more at wmbriggs.com ...
As the economy de-industrializes (in other words, collapses), people see bureaucrats of all types as the only ones with any real security. Since credentials are the key to bureaucratic employment, the price of credentials skyrockets.
7-10% of the population, AT MOST, are capable of baccalaureate work. Less than 50% (probably less than 30%) are capable of 11th and 12th grade work. The majority of children should leave school after 8th grade, any money spent on their education after that is money wasted.
Those are the facts. "Education" is indeed a bubble, a massive one, and it's certain to collapse.
When and how? Those are the questions.
Job security and pensions. Nothing else matters, and it'll never end as long as they can get away with it.
It may not be evident right now, but homeschooling is the wave of the future. It'll be the only way parents can protect their kids from the massive moral decline. If you think the government schools are bad now (homo sex for kindergartners?), imagine how bad they'll be ten years from now.
Another reason is the kids expect every building to look like a 5 star hotel and the colleges are selling themselves to the devil in upgrades and advertising.
The schools, however will continue to be indoctrination centers for all kids with this government money. Also, the government will be able to legally brown shirt those with outstanding loans.
Does that include the cost of textbooks? That’s another part of the college ripoff.
Not from just the moral decline, but homeschooling will hopefully return us to a nation of independent thinkers and doers.
The establishment wrinkles its nose at the self-educated and those who “bought themselves a job”. Entrepreneurs are lauded, but by *entrepreneur*, they mean well-financed start-ups that require massive loans so they can eventually become IPOs open only to the connected and therefore, make some profit for the Establishment, at least initially.
The best things we can teach the young are to have many strings to their bows in the form of needed skills and the flexibility to shift their economic and emotional weight as circumstances change.
While people are teaching their children the knowledge needed to survive and thrive in our society, I also hope that they begin to incorporate prime sources instead of the PC-ridden tomes that pass for today’s textbooks.
Subsidies have protected the education industry from the realities of supply and demand. As the price has gone up, the subsidies have allowed the marginal consumer to remain in the market, so there has been no downward pressure on prices. As the price continues to rise, the subsidies have also risen, to maintain more and more marginal consumers in an education market they could never afford to be in on their own.
But this can only go on so long. Eventually the Gravy Train reaches the last station on the line. And when it does, it will all fall apart very quickly.
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