"A report released last week by Public Agenda and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education revealed what I would call disturbing news, except all it did was tell us what we already think about college costs. According to its results, 55 percent of Americans believe a college education is necessary to succeed in the work world, and 60 percent believe “colleges today are like most businesses and care mainly about the bottom line.” Most of us agree contemporary institutions of higher education care more about money than education (60 vs. 32 percent in this poll), but if a diploma is a commodity, then it’s the worst kind: a mandatory purchase.
Any economics graduate student or smarter-than-average fifth grader can tell you the more inelastic consumer demand for a product is (e.g. young people feel they need to get college degrees to be successful in life), the more the price can increase without a drop-off in buyers. We’ve not only seen steady tuition and fee growth nationally, but The Chronicle of Higher Education reported last month that university and college administrator salaries also increased 10 percent between 2007 and 2009. At this university, there is money to build a glorified shopping mall on East Campus, but tuition has to increase 3 percent."
