It's well past high time people recognized the difference between and investment and a quick buck.

How about economists and central bankers?

-- Storm brings only richness with it

From the Los Angeles Times

Report gives California passing grade in college affordability; rest of nation fails, But the state's C grade is misleading, say the study's authors: It's skewed by the bargain-basement prices of two-year campuses.
By Gale Holland

December 3, 2008

An independent research report gave failing grades to every state but California on keeping college affordable -- and the problem will get worse as the full weight of recession bears down on American families, researchers at the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education said in a report to be released today.

California's "C" grade was somewhat misleading, however, as it reflected bargain-basement sticker prices at the state's two-year colleges. The researchers found the cost of attending a University of California or Cal State University campus to be relatively steep, and also said the state's high cost of living ate up much of the community college pricing advantage.

Only two states, New York and Tennessee, have made it cheaper in recent years to fund higher education, the report found. But their improvement was so slight, they joined the other 47 states in scoring an F for affordability.

"The one virtue of the [California] system is that the entry point is a lot lower in terms of the community colleges," said Will Doyle, assistant professor of higher education at Vanderbilt University and a consultant on the report.

The study, which comes out every two years, grades the 50 states from A to F on how well their higher education institutions are performing in areas including accessibility, completion rates and learning. The affordability grade is based on how much of the average family's income goes to college costs.

In California, the cost of attending a public four-year college climbed from 21% of average family income in 1999-2000 to 28% in 2007-08. At two-year colleges, the increase was from 20% to 25%.

Low-income families have taken the brunt of the price escalation. Nationwide, those in the lowest fifth of income brackets have gone from spending 39% of their income on public college costs in 1999-2000 to 55% in 2007-08. Families in the highest bracket have seen their share climb from 7% to 9% in the same period.

Financial aid can only go so far in redressing inequities, said Patrick M. Callan, president of the center based in San Jose. Many colleges are using financial aid to recruit star students rather than to help poor families, and tuition inflation is far outpacing income, the report said.

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December 1, 2008
Global Classrooms
By TAMAR LEWIN

ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — Isobel Oliphant felt she was making an offbeat choice when she graduated from Fox Lane High School in Bedford, N.Y., and enrolled at the ancient university in this quiet coastal town of stone ruins and verdant golf courses.

“I thought I was being original,” said Ms. Oliphant, now in her third year at the University of St. Andrews. “But my high school class president came here, too. And when I got here, it was all ‘Hi, I’m from Massachusetts,’ ‘Hi, I’m from New York.’ ”

St. Andrews has 1,230 Americans among its 7,200 students this year, compared with fewer than 200 a decade ago.

The large American enrollment is no accident. St. Andrews has 10 recruiters making the rounds of American high schools, visiting hundreds of private schools and a smattering of public ones.

With higher education fast becoming a global commodity, universities worldwide — many of them in Canada and England — are competing for the same pool of affluent, well-qualified students, and more American students are heading overseas not just for a semester abroad, but for their full degree program.

Ryan Ross of Annapolis, Md., applied only to St. Andrews; McGill University in Montreal; and Trinity College in Dublin. “I knew I wanted a different experience,” said Mr. Ross, now a freshman studying international relations at St. Andrews.

The international flow has benefits, and tradeoffs, for both sides.

For American students, a university like St. Andrews offers international experience and prestige, at a cost well below the tuition at a top private university in the United States. But it provides a narrower, more specialized course of studies, less individual attention from professors — and not much of an alumni network to smooth entry into the workplace when graduates return to the United States. For overseas universities, international students help diversify campuses in locations as remote as coastal Fife, home of St. Andrews.

Just as important, foreigners are cash cows. While students from Scotland and England and across the European Union pay little or no tuition at St. Andrews, Americans pay about what they would as out-of-state students at leading American public universities.

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It took the wealthy decades to get their ideal setup, from income to education to what-have-you. You expect them to give it up now, when they are so close to their goal?

to college; a liberal arts exposure is seriously lacking in the curriculum of most degrees. This is what's dumbing down Americans; we are so damn provincial and it really hurts our world view (most don't have one). The actual education gained by the majority of American students is seriously deficient beyond their major field of study. It does not produce well rounded citizens. I was an associate editor of a news letter for an international corporation and the articles submitted to me by highly degreed engineers were abysmal. "Education" in America has been industrialized. In actuality, universities no longer offer educations; they offer gateways to jobs and careers, not life.

the people are the last in line, if they're in the line at all.

No inc. in your name, no help for you.

I did inhale.

If college tuition costs have risen 439 percent, adjusted for inflation, over the past twenty-five years, where did all the money go?

Some observations:

As enrollment grew, fewer fewer professors got tenure, and after paying for, earning, and receiving PhDs, these professors ended up in temporary, dead-end jobs paying substantially little and no hope for job security or advancement. A cost savings to the Universities.

More undergraduate classes were taught by grad students, a cost savings to the Universities.

State universities provide labs, staff, and equipment to hotshot researchers in science, engineering, and biomedical fields, and any patents derived from such research rightly ought to belong to the funding institutions. Yet these are always taken out in the names of the hotshot researchers, who go on to start their own companies. In effect, a corrupt system subsidizes a corporate-educational class with public money.

Salaries for university presidents have reflected the rise in salaries for corporate CEOs, and their performance was evaluated solely on their ability to do fundraising, rather than on administrative abilities. For what reason was this necessary?

At least some state colleges and universities I know went on huge construction sprees as they built stadiums, dorms, and classrooms for new MBAs. Were these public-private work/graft programs placed on the backs of students, rather than something that should have been the responsibility of the state?

What portion of incoming freshmen actually received baccalaureate degrees? I know it's something dismal like 15 - 25 percent. Why? Poor preparation? A weeding-out process? General financial distress caused by surging tuition costs?

Where did all the money go?

United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and the US. Rates at U.S. public universities were almost 1/3 higher than fees for Bachelor’s degrees in Canada, while U.S. private university fees were more than double.

From the right-hand bar: New visa regulations help students stay and work in Canada!

There are some excellent Universities for study with a wide variety of diplomas, as well as studies for advanced degrees.

The expense of college keeps out folks who would waste 4 years of everybody's time getting a worthless degree like sociology, anthropology, or poetry.

Those are hobbies, not trades.

Engineers can do math. They know that the cost of education is nothing compared to what you can earn with a good college degree. Take out a loan, work hard, get a job, then pay back the loan. I paid back my entire student loan just 2 years after I left college, without any pain at all. If you can't do the same, then you should rethink your major... or find a cheaper college.

America's college system is fine.

What is broken is our primary education system, and our system of recruiting people into USEFUL fields... like science, engineering, and entrepreneurship.

College separates the wheat from the chaff... unfortunately, we need more wheat.

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http://bexhuff.com
Of COURSE you can trust the US Government! Just ask the Indians.

One simple reason NOT to go to any college that depends mostly on students fees for its own survival is that the college will bend over backwards to make sure they have high ratings from the students. Which means that the professors will bend over backwards to get high ratings from the students. Which inevitably lowers the quality of what is taught. You end up with pathetic classes that entertain and teach little. Most students from the so called "entitled generation" really don't get that achievement is always associated with pain. I'm not just referring to unknown private colleges...

I attribute much of the increased cost of education to equating it to job training and turning it into a commodity to be exploited.
Doing this was also a good way to punish all those hippies making too much noise at universities in the 1960's. If the little fuckers are humping a crushing load of debt, they won't mouth off so much. Seems to have worked.
Think Ronald Reagan getting rid of free tuition in California. It hurts the country to have low education levels, but the right wing oligarchs don't care about that. They see education as only necessary for the elites and they don't have a problem with $40,000. tuition.

Is it sound public policy to structure education, the economy, or society in general around a belief that everyone is capable of attaining a college education, and then heavily penalizing those who aren't?

I think we should re-think how we do things, and concentrate on education, an economy, and a society where a college education is great, certainly mandatory for certain professions, optional for others. A college degree has become a passport for the middle class and a proxy for "worthwhile citizen" -- get one and doors open, don't get one and they are usually locked.

I fail to see why a college education is necessary for someone working as a sales representative, or working the counter at the local department store. It seems like a very inefficient use of effort.

No education. No healthcare, No safety net. Most powerful military in the world.

When you start the discussion with "Why America Is Losing Its Competitive Edge", you skew the discussion towards education as training to make money (or to work for other people who will make money off your work). It's hard to quantify the value of knowing how your government works, but I do wish more people in the U.S. did. And how other governments work. And that there were some people who lived more than five years before you were born who brought quite a lot of thought and intelligence to political and social issues even if they didn't know quantum mechanics.

Trade training can intensify provincialism as much as humanities education can be wasted. However, historically a more educated populace, defined as formal schooling, seems to correlate with a more prosperous country.

showed that the majority of white, no-college voters went with the McCain ticket, the actual size of the majority varying according to regional breakout - some states it was nearly 90%. These voters are normally what psephologists term "working-class" or "blue-collar", and their proportion of the total electorate has been shrinking over time. However, they are very reliable Republican votes, and would it be too cynical to suggest that restricted access to higher education for these voters' offspring would be in the Republican's interest?