Peter Wood, Executive Director of the National Association of Scholars, has written a masterful essay on a bill that was just signed, the College Cost Reduction and Access Act. In it, he touches on several important points, including the tendency for increased federal student aid funding to prompt tuition increases and the mania we have developed for getting college credentials.
He also laments that there is almost no political constituency for reining in the steeply rising cost of government subsidies to higher education. On that, I’m afraid he’s right. Few officials dare to say anything in favor of cutting government spending on education at any level out of fear of being hit with a barrage of attack ads accusing them of being anti-education. Since being pro-education is now more important to most politicians than being pro-motherhood or pro-apple pie, we can look forward to many years of being squeezed as taxpayers to feed the insatiable spending appetite of college and university administrators.
