According to the Washington Examiner …
Higher education is in a bubble, one soon to burst with considerable consequences for students, faculty, employers, and society at large.
The past decades’ history of tuition growing much faster than the rate of inflation, with students and parents making up the difference via easy credit, is something that can’t go on forever. It won’t.
For the past several decades, colleges and universities have built endowments, played moneyball-style faculty hiring games, and constructed grand new buildings, while jacking up tuitions to pay for things (and, in the case of state schools, to make up for gradually diminishing public support).
That has been made possible by an ocean of money borrowed by students — often with the encouragement and assistance of the universities.
Right now, people are still borrowing heavily to pay the steadily increasing tuitions levied by higher education.
But that borrowing is based on the expectation that students will earn enough to pay off their loans with a portion of the extra income their educations generate.
Once people doubt that, the bubble will burst.
Post-bubble, students are likely to be far more concerned about getting actual value for their educational dollars.
Faced with straitened circumstances, colleges and universities will have to look at cutting costs.
Excerpted from Washington Examiner: Further thoughts on the higher education bubble, August 8, 2010
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Sunday_Reflections/Glenn-Harlan-Reynolds-Further-thoughts-on-the-college-tuition-bubble-100216064.html#ixzz0w6axRS7x
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