Where is the outrage? Does anyone care what a college education costs?

Thirty college presidents earn more than $1,000,000 a year in total compensation, the highest being $1,700,000.

College costs are becoming more and more unaffordable. On average college tuition costs increase 8% per year, more than double general inflation and not much less than health care inflation.

So where is the outrage?

The answer is simple, we give an unwarranted pass to the cost and inefficiencies in education on the assumption more money spent on education is always good. We don’t challenge the spending habits of colleges, the teaching arrangements of professors or much else (except perhaps the football teams losing record – do you know what a football head coach makes at a big name school?).

Instead of challenging the system – and this goes for the secondary level as well – we seek government subsidies, and government backed loans to help make a college education “affordable.”

If this all sounds familiar, it should because we do the same thing with health care. We complain about premiums and subsidize them to make them affordable, yet we say little about the cost of a specific procedure or the income of physicians or the inefficiency of delivering health care through hundreds of thousand independent offices of small businessmen and women. We don’t want to debate the duplication of many services or the misaligned incentives that add to costs but not the quality of health care.

In short we are brained washed, we are duped, we ain’t to bright (see, I went to a state school for nine years at night). We are conditioned to believe that high costs means high quality and it ain’t necessarily so. The ultimate goal should be to measure the true ROI in both education and health care.

Having the best educated and trained society in the world is the key to the future of the United States, the jobs of the future demand it.  Many of the jobs lost in the last several years are gone forever.  The key to helping low-income people is not pushing them into homes they cannot afford, but preparing them for better paying jobs so they have the tools to become part of the middle class.  The key to preparing them is not to subsidize unaffordable college costs, but to make those costs affrodable…what a concept!

Related Articles

• 100 Colleges Now Charging Over $50,000 Per Year In Combined Tuition, Fees, & Housing (minx.cc)
• Obama’s Changes to Student Loans – As Part of the Health Care Package (distance-education.org)