aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Monday, April 21, 2008

Credit Card University

Phil Tedesco at TPM Café does a nice job of summarizing this piece in the Business section of yesterday’s NYTimes on paying for college without home equity:

A number of families, for example, are dipping into their retirement savings to finance their children’s education. This story focuses on how expensive private schools are and cites empirical research that the prestige of an undergraduate degree does not impact a student’s future earnings. State universities look like bargains in this story, offering the same education for way less money. But we’re increasingly privatizing the costs of “public” universities. State universities, receiving ever less state funding, are increasingly turning their students over to financial-services companies, who are, of course, happy to oblige.

He goes on to tell of a Higher Education Watch report finding that aggregate funding for public colleges and universities fell by 7.8% and that a number of states have decreased their contributions by as much as 25%.

He critically catalogues the ways colleges and universities have gone about finding money to make up the shortfall and finds them “at least partially to blame.”

Yes, well, of course, they are. But someone’s got to pay now don’t they? And what we’ve got is no one willing!

So I was particularly gratified by Phil’s final sentence, which I will put in bold to give it the emphasis it deserves:

Nevertheless, colleges are put in an impossible situation--they need to keep their schools solvent and affordable, and the state is giving them ever less money. The real culprit, I think, are states residents who refuse to fund public education.