"Academic inflation makes medical inflation look modest by comparison"

The greedy Marxists who outnumber conservatives on college faculties by three to one figured out long ago how to avoid the draft, subvert the values of America's children and future teachers of the young, and get rich doing it all at the same time.

It's been a veritable trinity of scams milked by the coward and follower classes: military conscription deferments for MA and PhD students, the tenure system which has permanently installed radicals nationwide, and now the most important, federally-backed student loans.

The Economist in September 2010 (link) noted the incredible disparity in the rates of college cost and income increases:

College fees have for decades risen faster than Americans’ ability to pay them. Median household income has grown by a factor of 6.5 in the past 40 years, but the cost of attending a state college has increased by a factor of 15 for in-state students and 24 for out-of-state students. The cost of attending a private college has increased by a factor of more than 13 (a year in the Ivy League will set you back $38,000, excluding bed and board). Academic inflation makes medical inflation look modest by comparison.

More recently Virginia Postrel thinks the reason costs have escalated is the federal student loan program itself, a veritable gravy train which guarantees rising costs for everything academic (link):


Any serious policy reform has to start by considering a heretical idea: Federal subsidies intended to make college more affordable may have encouraged rapidly rising tuitions. ...

If you offer people a subsidy to pursue some activity requiring an input that’s in more-or-less fixed supply, the price of that input goes up. Much of the value of the subsidy will go not to the intended recipients but to whoever owns the input. ...

[T]he number of slots at traditional colleges and universities is relatively fixed. A boost in student aid that increases demand is therefore likely to be reflected in prices rather than expanded enrollments. Over time, enrollments should rise, as they have in fact done. But many private schools in particular keep the size of their student bodies fairly stable to maintain their prestige or institutional character.