WANT TO MAKE COLLEGE AFFORDABLE? STOP SUBSIDIZING IT:

Is More College Intelligent? (THOMAS BRAY, December 6, 2006, NY Sun)

The federal government already spends about $71 billion a year on higher education, up from about zero 50 years ago. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, points out that since September 11, 2001, defense spending has risen 47%, while higher education spending has risen 133%. And most kids already are going to college: According to a study issued recently by the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh, N.C., 70% of high school graduates already receive some form of higher education, up from one in 10 after World War II.

We won't be able to raise national income "by dipping further into the noncollege population and enticing more of that group to spend time and money in pursuit of a degree," concludes the author of the study, George Leef, formerly a business law and economics professor at Northwood University in Midland, Mich.

The remaining non-college population for the most part has made the entirely rational decision to go directly into the workforce. Mr. Leef cites a 2000 study by Jeff Madrick, an economist and former staffer for Senator Kennedy, no conservative, which estimated that about 1.3 million high school graduates were "college ready." Yet colleges, hungry for ever-more revenue, admitted nearly 1.4 million applicants.

Hundreds of thousands of these kids would be better off if they learned a trade.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 6, 2006 7:33 AM