Education Costs Soar but Results Questioned

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) thugs have some good intentions, at least from the beginning, but for the most part they are misguided, misinformed or just plain ignorant of the real problem.

As most of us that pay any attention to this nonsense on TV will see that most of the OWS people are young, and supposedly students of one kind or the other, which begs the question, what are they doing here at this time of the year? When do they go to class?

This article points out just how much time and money is spent on getting a 'higher education' that can be deemed totally worthless in the open market, but feeds the coffers of the university and their endowments.

See this as a result of more government intervention resulting in higher tuition cost feeding higher maintenance costs for the students and parents. Little wonder then why so many students have time to travel all over the world and go into debt to get an "education". Their actual studies mean nothing and they know it.

Here's just another example of government destroying everything it touches. Of course, maybe there is some connection between government and higher education like there is with the financial institutions and corporations? Could be?

What We Spend on, and Get from, Higher Education
Source: Neal McCluskey, "How Much Ivory Does This Tower Need? What We Spend on, and Get from, Higher Education," Cato Institute, October 27, 2011.

It is commonly asserted, especially by people within higher education, that the American Ivory Tower is strapped for cash and tightfisted taxpayers are to blame. Taxpayer support for postsecondary education has long been in decline, this narrative goes, and has forced schools to continually raise tuition to make up for the losses, says Neal McCluskey, associate director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom.

However, tallying taxpayer-backed expenditures on higher education over the last quarter century, and separately tallying 15 years of taxpayer burdens after accounting for student loans being paid back, reveals that this narrative is inaccurate. No matter how you slice it, the burden of funding the Ivory Tower has grown ever heavier on the backs of taxpaying citizens. Whether one examines taxpayer dollars in total, per enrollee, per degree or per tax-paying citizen, real spending has gone up. Unfortunately, financial costs are only part of the story.

While the evidence is not conclusive, it appears that the additional spending and the additional students and degrees it has helped to fund do not ultimately constitute a net societal gain.
Instead, all the coerced, third party support has likely produced several damaging, unintended consequences: credential inflation, sky-high noncompletion rates, and rampant tuition inflation.

In other words, the money taken from taxpayers, in total and on an individual basis, to "invest" in higher education has been on the rise, and it appears to be hurting both taxpayers individually and society as a whole. We have taken money from people who would have used it more efficiently than has the system to which it was given.