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Interesting piece in Slate on

Wednesday, June 5th, 2002

Interesting piece in Slate on how elite universities are using tuition rate hikes as a means of wealth redistribution.

I don’t think the criticism goes far enough. The real reason tuition rates are soaring at several times the rate of inflation is due to the absurdly easy accessibility of federal education loans. A kid applying to college today can take out six figures in loans relatively responsibility-free. He’s not going to feel the pinch at least until graduation (and even then, he can put it off with grad school). Consequently, colleges today sort through a bounty of applicants each spring, and can set tuition rates wherever they please, free from the burdens of market forces. Not only do schools have no trouble filling classes at $35,000 per year, they’re getting four and five applicants for every slot.

At some point, our politicians decided that “everyone who wants one is entitled to a college education.” So they introduced the college crowd to Mr. Stafford and Mr. Perkins, two generous old men who provide seemingly unlimited amounts of money that, between keggers and riverboat formals, no one I knew ever really anticipated paying back.

This new access among the masses to “higher” education meant lots of new college graduates. Consequently, the white collar job market got a heck of a lot more competitive. Suddenly, it’s no longer a matter of “wanting” a college education, it’s a matter of needing one, just to get an office job. The glut of college graduates had a diminishing effect on the value of a bachelor’s degree, so the government made more loans available for more kids to move on to graduate, law and medical school. There’s now a glut of PhDs, MBAs and, to a lesser extent, MDs.

See how easy it is for one well-intentioned statement — “everyone who wants one is entitled to a college education” — to wreak havoc on markets, and have all kinds of disastrous and unintended consequences? Gen-Xers and younger now trudge through the job market with mountains of debt, undervalued degrees, and, thanks to grade inflation and outcome-based learning, not a whole heck of a lot of education to show for it (I, for one, have learned more in 18 months of working at a think tank than I learned in 4 years of undergrad and 1 year of law school).

Suddenly, the kids who took shop classes and trade apprenticeships in high school look like the really smart ones — probably starting their careers in union shops, pulling in $40,000 a year. Contrast that to the typical Capitol Hill staffer, who’s lucky to get $20,000 in Washington, D.C., the most expensive city in the country that isn’t New York.

Ain’t egalitarianism great?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 5th, 2002 at 3:30 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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