Wednesday, June 16, 2010

The bubble of higher education

A former student, now unemployed, writes: "... since 1987, higher education expenses have gone up 450 percent, while personal income in this country has gone up 87 percent, making tuition IMPOSSIBLE to afford without special financing. But, during this time, you were thriving because people could come up with the cash in two ways:
1. Get a home equity loan and use the inflated value of their house to pay for their kid to get drunk and/or raped at your school and then lose the house when the market crashed.
2. Get a federal loan.

... Oh yes, federal loans. I've got $40,000 of those, which are in "forbearance" right now because I'm unemployed, meaning that the feds are paying the interest for a while, which is convenient for me, but not for our government which is now owned by China....
Really, that's about all you did for us – gave us a lecture hall, gave us an arrogant bastard to listen to, and gave us a room full of computers we could use sometimes, and you gave us a degree that employers look at and say "This guy knows how to write reports. Amusing." And I will be paying for this privilege until I am 51 years old..."
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Comment: Just imagine the waste of money and time attending classes held by Robert Reich (Harvard) or Paul Krugman (Princeton) and a host of other so-called "academic" economists. Being myself an economist, though of a different kind, with the roots of my education in continental Europe, I  am simply horrified of what has been going on over the past decades in US education, at least in economics and business, in the areas that I am familiar with, yet I am told it is not much different in other disciplines, maybe even worse.

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