Comment On Shopping Around (Score 4, Insightful) 1032
The price of a college education -- let's just say 4-year bachelor's degree -- isn't the problem. Rather, it is a symptom of both the ability to get a large student loan, and desire for a traditional, 4-year degree.
As an analog, consider the housing market: The value of a house is what someone is willing to pay for it, and what someone is willing to pay for it is a factor of their assumption about its future value and their ability to fund the purchase with money they don't already have.
No, not all homes are equal, nor are school tuition rates. There are a relatively small number of multi-million dollar mansions, but apartments and inexpensive homes are plentiful.
The article is more like someone complaining that a Ferrari is expensive and refusing to consider the thousands of other lower-cost options.
Too many people look at costs of a single school. There are a huge number of schools, Wikipedia saying 4,726 in the US. The median cost of schooling across all schools is $5,832 per year, which is quite reasonable. Half of them cost $5,853 per yer or less. Yet the mean is $23,874 per year. Assuming you are comfortable with statistics, those two numbers mean the bulk of schools are inexpensive, and a small number of hugely expensive schools cause the average cost to skew quite high. As a parallel, it is like a middle-class neighborhood with a small number of billionaires who moved in; those few high-value individuals will dramatically shift the average wealth in a neighborhood to so the "average wealth" means everyone is a millionaire even though nearly everyone is middle class. The median cost of higher education is reasonable. Just be smart and pick a school you can afford.
Locally, my kids can go to one of several good junior colleges nearby which all cost about $1500 per semester, then move on to one of the several state universities that cost around $3500-$4000 per semester. So about $25,000 total for the four years of education. I note that for my region at least, Wikipedia lists 11 inexpensive 2-year colleges and seven state universities, all within commuting distance. Or my kids can go to one of the local private for-profit schools the whole time. One popular private school charges just shy of $20,000 per semester. That is, one semester of the expensive (but heavily marketed and popular) for-profit private school is the same rate as a full four year degree elsewhere.
I look at the author of the article, Lee Siegel, that Wikipedia says attended Columbia University. That school is a private ivy-league school currently and charges $51,008 per year. We could get two students all the way through their bachelors degrees with the funding for a single year at that school. And he went there for probably seven years. So he probably was committed to roughly $350,000 in costs when he could have chosen a similar education at one tenth the cost or less.
So really, this is is not so much a complaint about the cost of schooling generally. He is complaining that everyone should have a Ferrari they cannot afford, even though for most people one tenth or less the cost, getting a Prius or Accord or Corolla is both affordable and adequate.