25 January 2008

Senate Looking at Well Endowed Schools

Get your mind out of the gutter, this is about the Senate is looking at tuitions exploding as university endowments skyrocket.

It's a legitimate question. The US government spends billions sending students to increasingly expensive colleges and universities, but these same not for profit institutions are amassing increasingly large endowments as they hike costs for the students.

As Richard Vedder noted, there is a whole lot of excess going on in higher education.

The example that he gives is Whitman College at Princeton, a residence hall that, "cost $388,571 per room unit, nearly identical to what Donald Trump spent on his luxury resort Ocean Club Panama."

The explosion in college costs started during the Vietnam War, where the alternative to college was combat, and it has continued unabated for the next 40 years, helped along by collusion among the top schools in tuition and financial aid.

Simply expanding student loan and grand programs make this worse. Regulation is needed to ensure that the managers educational institutions don't take the money and build monuments to their own egos.

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