CURMUDGUCATION: Selling Is Not Doing

CURMUDGUCATION: Selling Is Not Doing:

Selling Is Not Doing

In yesterday's New York Times, Suzanne Mettler provided one more explanation of why school choice doesn't-- and won't-- work.

Mettler is looking at how college has become the "great unleveler," an education system that reinforces a caste system instead of breaking down walls. That's in no small part because the percentage of household income required to send a child to college has skyrocketed for the lower classes since 1971 (for the bottom fifth, it now takes 114% of annual household income to send a child to college),

"But wait," you say (particularly if you haven't tried to finance someone's college education lately), "Don't we have a system that makes grants, or at least loans, available to folks who need financial help for college?" The first part of the answer is "Not so much as we used to," and that part of the discussion is best served by Mettler's article.

The second part of the answer is, "Yes, we do, some, and how that plays out tells us about how vouchers really work."

As a graph in Mettler's article vividly illustrates, for profit colleges represent a voucher-fied,