David French on College Debt

Because I don't have the time to dig into this topic today, but I know it's of urgent interest to The Nephews and a lot of other people in cyberspace...Universities have changed since I last attended one. They've received many gifts of computers and invested heavily in computerizing the educational process, in ways that help some students and harm others. Now they're sticking it to the students to pay for each year's newest computer "updates" and "upgrades," plus of course pay raises for the teachers. They're certainly not teaching students two or three times as much as they were in 1980, and they're a long way from being able to place every student in a job that will pay off those tuition loans. The value of an associate's, bachelor's, master's or even doctor's degree, for students, is less than it was for most of their teachers. Why, then, should it cost so much more?

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The exploding cost of going to college is understandably a hot-button topic this election year, as young people’s anger over the Faustian bargain of college debt helps to fuel Bernie Sanders’s outsider presidential run. But while the Sanders conversation has focused on whether the government should step in to help relieve that debt burden, there’s another question worth asking, too: Why should universities be charging as much as they are? That’s what makes this Atlantic profile of Purdue University president Mitch Daniels so interesting: the former Indiana governor has brought his famously parsimonious management style from the statehouse to his current role, and the result has been a blossoming college that hasn’t raised its tuition since 2013. As an added bonus, the piece is written by the ever-dependable Andy Ferguson. Read the whole thing here.
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That came from David French, who's launched his own'zine, The Dispatch, together with the brilliant Jonah Goldberg. The'zine's not exactly like getting Goldberg's books every day, just as posts at this blog are not exactly like the e-books I've been writing for paying clients or like the e-book of my own I'm working on when I find the time. But it is like getting an e-mail from French and/or Goldberg every day. If you'd like to do that, here's a link you can use to subscribe to their'zine...the actual URL is outrageously long and messy, such that when I pasted it here I didn't even see all of it on a single screen with Firefox, so it's hidden behind the word below:

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