The Cost of Higher Education

Richard Vedder, writing in the WSJ, has an excellent article explaining why the costs of higher education are rising so quickly. Vedder is an excellent economist and his arguments make sense. He concludes, echoing a point that I have been making over and over,

The cost of higher education cannot rise faster than incomes indefinitely. Change is coming: it is just a question of when, and in what form.

Of course, I would take the argument a step further and say that not only are the costs rising at an exhorbitant rate, but the benefits are declining in many areas. The modern university is an artefact of the Progressive era and reflects the values of that time and place. Those values, which reflected the corporate standards of an emerging industrial culture, are no longer applicable in today's information society.

The handwriting is already on the wall in the form of new approaches to education, Vedder notes:

New forms of competition (e.g., for-profit institutions, online schooling, more use of community colleges, new approaches to certifying skills) are emerging. State legislatures have sharply reduced their share of funding for public universities, forcing some schools to slash costs, reduce bureaucracies, increase teaching loads, get rid of costly underutilized graduate programs and more. Some schools are talking of using buildings more than eight or nine months a year, or are cutting down on the use of expensive tenured faculty. Colorado is shifting funds away from institutions and into student hands in the form of vouchers, reasoning that the student-customer, not the producer, should be sovereign as in nearly every other transaction.

A hard rain is gonna fall, and soon.

Read the whole thing here.