While my high school graduating class of 1955 went off to a variety of prestigious Ivy League colleges and universities, I chose the University of Miami in Florida. I spent four of the happiest years of my life there. The weather was sublime, the girls were pretty, and the Royal Palm trees lined the walk to the library. I eventually became the student governor of the College of Arts and Sciences, wrote for the university newspaper, and received an excellent education thanks to professors who really seemed to enjoy teaching.
I do not know what it cost my parents to send me there, but I do know that the cost of sending a young man or woman to college these days is daunting. For the many students who take loans it can leave them with so much debt that they will spend the next twenty years paying it off.
A recent Rasmussen poll revealed that “Voters don’t think much of the skills acquired by high school graduates attempting to go to college or enter the work force.” Imagine the problems faced by those who drop out of high school?
However, even the current recession has not impacted the decision to send a child to college. In a 2011 article in New York magazine by Daniel H. Smith, “The University Has No Clothes”, he noted that “Fifty years ago, 48 percent of recent high school graduates enrolled in a college or university. In 2009, that number was more than 70 percent.”
How much has the cost increased? “In the past 30 years,” wrote Smith, “college tuition and fees have increased, in constant 2010 dollars, from $9,500 a year to more than $27,000. Public college tuition has increased from $2,100 to $7,600. Fifteen years ago, the average student debt at graduation was around $12,700; in 2009, it was $24,000. Over the past quarter-century, the total cost of higher education has grown by 440 percent.”
Something is very wrong with this inflation of college costs and, in the winter 2013 edition of Cato’s Letter, a quarterly newsletter from the Cato Institute, Charles Murray, a noted scholar and author, warned of “The Coming Collapse of the BA Bubble.”