Cutting colleges costs and expenses is easy.
Immediately cease and desist all taxpayer funded college loans. Immediately cease and desist all taxpayer funded grants and subsidies to colleges and universities. Immediately cease and desist all taxpayer funds towards salaries and expenses for our colleges and universities.
Shut down public universities. Let the private schools prevail.
Not only will academic standards skyrocket, but costs will plummet.
Easy.
Here’s another solution: tie any student loans/grants to the market value of the degree or certification being sought. Under that plan, students majoring in engineering, IT, accounting, nursing—careers with a future—would pay little/no interest on their loans.
At the other end, students pursuing a worthless degree in women’s/gender/minority studies, art history, journalism, etc., would pay an interest rate equal to that of a subprime auto loan. That would force many students and families to rethink little Johnny or Susie’s academic plans, and pursue something with a future, or pay 25% interest (or higher) on $50-100K worth of student debt. This dose of reality would also compel “scholars” in the field to produce research that is actually useful and lends credence to the degree. If they don’t (and students decide not pay confiscatory rates for a worthless diploma), these worthless fields of study will quickly die off, saving more money in academia.
One more thing regarding Purdue: Mitch Daniels has another card up his sleeve, if the academics raise too much of a fuss. When for-profit Kaplan University (once the profit center of the Washington Post) went under, Daniels bought what was left for $1. He has since rebranded Kaplan as Purdue Global and maintained its focus in on-line education. If the ivory tower folks rebel, Daniels can simply shift much of the instruction to the virtual classroom and hire more adjuncts.
I saw the same battle play out at a college I worked at a few years ago. The president was a raging lib, but he was also a realist. He led the push into on-line ed as the only way to save a slowly dying liberal arts school. When the tenured profs protested, he showed them the numbers: on-line was attracting far more students—and generating more revenue—than the campus ever could, and it was funding new construction and program expansion. He also drove home his point by freezing faculty hires on campus and hiring full-time on-line faculty. At that point, most of the on-campus profs decided to shut up and color.