There’s was an article in today’s paper about the fact that the University of Massachusetts is going to begin offering a three-year degree as an option for cost-conscious students who want to get a bachelor’s degree but only want to live with their parents until they are 27 instead of 32.  I’m not sure if I agree with the shift, because it offends the American notion of a four-year school and inarguably cuts down on the ability for most students to recover from a disastrous first semester when they stayed up watching Scarface and not doing their lab reports, but I think the move is a signal that UMASS and all other institutions are starting to figure out that college is too fing expensive, and that people are starting to catch on.

Colleges have been wildly successful at raising prices for decades while wages have remained flat.   How is this possible, you ask?  Mostly, its because most people, except for people with 5 kids, can see the light at the end fo the paying-for-college tunnel soon after they begin writing checks.  When I was a sophomore my parents received a letter from my college stating that it was going to raise tuition 8% the following year.  The letter explained that the reason for the increase was not that the cost of professors or dorms or anything else had gone up, but rather that our rival school, another similarly adequate school across town, had raised prices 8%.  The letter explained that cost of attendance was an important statistic in the determination of the stature of the school and suggested that the maintenance of such stature would translate into extra income  upon graduation and beyond, which would somehow make up for the thousands of extra dollars our parents and grandparents were paying right then. 

While one expects colleges to be generally out of touch, politicians have shown that on this issue, they can and will set the standard for cluelessness.  For example, President Obama and his congressional colleagues love to talk about how the problem faced by today’s students is mostly that the purchasing power of the Pell grant has dropped from where it was in the 1970’s when your grant paid for tuition, books fees, record albums and pot.  The first problem with this conclusion is that nobody who has ever heard of a Pell Grant can qualify for a Pell Grant, which means, as usual, the children of middle class Americans get buried in debt or don’t go to college, and the industrious children of poor Americans can only afford tuition with their Pell Grants, and must work at restaurant to afford record albums and pot.

The other genius solution offered by politicians is to fix the problem of exploding tuition costs by expanding the availability of low interest loans available to the ever-growing population of student-debtors.  Politicians realize that this sounds a lot like the time they drastically expanded credit to home buyers who couldn’t afford to pay it back but one assumes they've decided this situation is different because you can’t foreclose on a college education.  The problem with this logic is that the other thing you can't do with a college college education is eat it, or live it in, or install granite counter tops, and sell it for some ridiculously inflated price, even if it's in Detroit.  Therefore, enabling endless increases in tuition has most of the potential downsides of a housing boom with none of its benefits.  The one upside is that when the Chinese come to collect on all of the government’s bad debts, most of it will be owed by unemployed and very-educated would-be workers who will still be young enough to make the trip to China to run plastic presses to make things to sell at Wal-Mart, which can be bought by the Pell-Grant recipients who won’t have to go to China because they don’t owe any money, but who still can’t afford anything because they don’t have jobs.

The real crime here is that colleges have taken their annual increases and put them into endowments which they use to obtain rankings in US News and World Report which is basically a garbage magazine that nobody reads or relies on for anything other than ridiculous rankings, or used them to build bigger and better cafeterias and swimming pools and technology centers which colleges use to help convince parents that their children’s attendance is worth postponing their own retirement by six years.

Of course, there’ll always be the rich pricks who complain that college is too expensive even though they managed to spend $30,000 per year sending their daughter to Maple Country Day Academy Where Everyone’s Kid is Above Average or the Yuppie Boarding School for Future Cocaine Addicts.  These people usually spend thousands on fencing lessons for their little princess so she can use her scarce talent to gain admission and financial assistance to some school with a big endowment.  Generally, these people are more annoying than Lance Armstrong, but on this issue, I’m willing to cut them a break.  I’ll cut them a break because nobody should have to pay $50,000 a year to go to college, and it certainly isn’t their fault nobody can get a job, even their soft children with over-inflated senses of accomplishment from bogus athletic success.  Besides, if your kid is going to be living with you till she’s 32 she might as well be handy with a sword.