But if one problem is that the rich get richer and the poor poorer, should we no wonder why our cost of tertiary education has increased in a multiple of inflation and much faster than the wages of the parents sending kids to college and the wages of the student who attend the colleges for a number of years?
Could this be case where we spend ourselves into oblivion and the remnants will be none other climbing rock walls, peanut and gluten free cafeterias, 24/7 entertainment hookups, and a bunch of manuscripts nobody outside a peer journal ever read?
We keep talking about the demise of our schools when the stories happen to be about the inability to raise sufficient revenues to cover the running wild expenses. Our “American” approach is to focus on reworking the sources of revenues as the reduction of expenses does not fit our progressive vocabulary.
The real story about US education is not found in Cambridge or Berkeley nor found in Syosset or any other high prized district that has attracted the people who could vote with their feet. The real stories are written in Detroit or Washington, DC where the performance of their ISD is evident. The stories are also written in places like El Paso where the local version of the UT system is following a model to accept everyone (or 99 percent) of applicants and graduate a tiny fraction of them in a correlation to the drying up of federal loans and grants.
Perhaps there is something to learn from a no-frill model of education that rewards austerity and performance. But then, our students would have a whole less amount of fun and freedom.