College Tuition, Student Loans, and Unemployment : The New Yorker - 0 views
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The protesters at Occupy Wall Street may not have put forth an explicit set of demands yet, but there is one thing that they all agree on: student debt is too damn high. Since the late nineteen-seventies, annual costs at four-year colleges have risen three times as fast as inflation, and, with savings rates dropping and state aid to colleges being cut, students have been forced to take on ever more debt in order to pay for school.
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f course, a college-education bubble wouldn’t look exactly like a typical asset bubble, because you can’t flip a college degree the way you can flip a stock, or even a home.
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This isn’t to say that eighteen-year-olds are perfectly rational economic actors. Most obviously, many of them borrow a lot of money and then don’t finish college, ending up debt-laden and without a degree.
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The college-bubble argument makes the solution to rising costs seem simple: if people just wake up, the bubble will pop, and reasonable prices will return. It’s much tougher to admit that there is no easy way out. Maybe we need to be willing to spend more and more of our incomes and taxpayer dollars on school, or maybe we need to be willing to pay educators and administrators significantly less, or maybe we need to find ways to make colleges more productive places, which would mean radically changing our idea of what going to college is all about. Until America figures out its priorities, college kids are going to have to keep running just to stand still. ♦
