The Statistics That Colleges Hate To Share

This article and the many comments on it are pretty interesting.  Here’s one that sticks out to me:

The cost of a college education has exploded since the Federal government began pumping huge sums of money into grants, scholarships and subsidized loans.  As with any such intervention on this scale the government has created disincentives, skewed incentives and inelastic pricing (or more accurately inflation).

The days of paying for college with a summer job are long over precisely because the government in its infinite wisdom decided that every student should attend a four year university, a right of attendance in fact.

The parallels with medicine are striking and the only reasonable solution is so simple it is beyond the grasp of Statists, stop subsidizing college tuition and in short order costs will plummet.

Directing all high school grads into four year universities with subsidies is a terrible misallocation of resources as evidenced by highly indebted grads who are stuck in low wage service sector jobs.  Debt slaves for life through no fault of their own.

When I was in (private) high school, it was clear that everyone was supposed to go to college.  Almost everyone in my school did.  And the clear implication was that going to college means getting a well-paying job afterwards.  The truth is, that’s far from guaranteed, and isn’t even necessarily very likely -- but no one tells you that.  And somehow, everyone conveniently fails to mention that you’ll likely be saddled with absurd amounts of debt for years if not decades, regardless of whether you get any job at all after college, let alone one that pays well.