education

Dr. Vedder's book and insights reaffirm the issue facing both our system of higher education and our state and local governments - how to pay for the growth of our post secondary education system and prepare students to become productive and qualified workers.

With less than 20% of college costs being covered by tutition, on average, in the U.S. and graduation rates at 4 year colleges (over a 6 year period) in the 50% range and at 2 year colleges (over a 3 year period) below 30%, it is hard to see how the public can continue to subsidize a system that fails to acknowledge its obligation to educate students, not build organizations and infrastructures that are uneconomic.

Unfortunately these issues were clearly oulined in 1998 in "Straight Talk About College Costs And Prices", Report Of The National Commission On the Cost Of Higher Education, January 21, 1998, (...)

Where the Commission said:

"This Commission, therefore, finds itself in the discomfiting position of acknowledging that the nation's academic institutions, justly renowned for their ability to analyze practically every other major economic activity in the United States, have not devoted similar analytic attention to their own internal financial structures. Blessed, until recently, with sufficient resources that allowed questions about costs or internal cross-subsidies to be avoided, academic institutions now find themselves confronting hard questions about whether their spending patterns match their priorities and about how to communicate the choices they have made to the public"

Over the next several years this topic that will start to show how little our politicans understand about one our country's most prized assets and also highlight the fact that our university professors and administrators care much more about their own quality of life that that of their proported customer, the students.