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If this is true generally about universities…

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Universities entice potential students with all sorts of easy loan packages, hip orientations, and perks like high-tech recreation centers and upscale dorms. On the backside of graduation, such bait-and-switch attention vanishes when it is time to help departing students find jobs.

College often turns into a six-year experience. The unemployment rate of college graduates is at near-record levels. Universities have either failed to convinced employers that English or history majors make ideal job candidates, or they have failed to ensure that such bedrock majors can, in fact, speak, write and reason well.

The collective debt of college students and graduates is more than $1 trillion. Such loans result from astronomical tuition costs that for decades have spiked more rapidly than the rate of inflation.

Today’s campuses have a higher administrator-to-student ratio than ever before. Those who actually teach are now a minority of university employees. Various expensive “centers” address student problems that once were considered either private matters or well beyond the limited resources of the campus.

Is it too late for solutions?

Thoughts?

Comments
Not just more rapidly than inflation, more rapidly even than medical costs. FYI, the government no longer backs student loans, it originates them. Loans which by law are nondischargeable in bankruptcy. After all, America needs some sort of slavery to thrive, and if the chattel slavery of kidnapped Africans is no longer acceptable then the debt slavery of the nation's youth to the bastions of political correctness will have to do.jstanley01
April 9, 2015
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Perhaps people should stop going to college for the sake of going to college. Vocational/ tech schools seem like a better place to learn about the real world...Joe
April 9, 2015
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I've heard said that the student loan debt is the "next bubble" to pop in the financial world. It is also one from which we won't be able to recover as well. I like Jim's approach stated above, regarding the removal of the various forms of government from the loan guaranteeing business. Personally I don't see much use for having the government involved in education at all. While I do support an educated public, I'm less so inclined to support public education. I'm also of the opinion, that not ever teenager is fit for university. Perhaps later, in their life, when they have discovered more fully what it is that they wish to do with their lives will they be "ready" for university. If the various universities are in the "business" of selling educational services and knowledge, perhaps the mass of unemployed graduates would indicate that their products are not so well received by the target demographics (would be employers).ciphertext
April 9, 2015
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Thoughts? 1) Get the government out of the student loan guarantee business because universities just raised their tuition as a result of students' increased ability to pay. Government backed student loans are welfare for universities paid for by indentured students. 2) Let student loans be discharged through bankruptcy. Then you won't be able to get a loan that you probably won't be able to pay back. 3) Reduce administrative overhead by eliminating bogus administrators in charge of bogus things like "diversity". 4) Public universities can offer on-line degree courses at much reduced tuition. 5) Eliminate tenure because academic freedom has been buried on the ash heap of history and most published research finings are false and retraction watch.Jim Smith
April 9, 2015
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