Comments about ‘George F. Will: Higher ed's bubble is getting ready to burst’

Higher eductation is loaded with overpaid administrators, whose salaries are often ten times those of the typical faculty member. To make matters worse these administrators claim the custom work of faculty to be marketed on line from which faculty receive not a dime. This house of cards deserves to be toppled.

"...Reynolds says this bubble exists for the same reasons the housing bubble did. The government decided that too few people owned homes/went to college, so government money was poured into subsidized and sometimes subprime mortgages/student loans, with the predictable result that housing prices/college tuitions soared and many borrowers went bust." Yes, but the speculative bubble happened at the top levels as well as the bottom. For this reason the speculative bubbles in housing and education were in largel part classic bubbles which we have seen over and over again. But kids are right in refusing to pay the obscene tuition rates of today to make multi-millionaires of college administrators.

Colleges and universities have become businesses; profit is paramount. They offer courses of study that attract students (and tuition $) but have little future potential for its victims (students). Higher education gladly promotes student loans, yet those very students learn nothing that translates to future value. Administrators are business people, experts at extracting money from hapless students. Higher education does not often lead to productive employment. The almighty dollar ($) should be the school symbol and mascot.

I agree there are abuses in higher education. For 2007-2008, the most recent year I could find, Glenn Harlan Reynolds' salary at the University of Tennessee Law School was $149,613.00. But he is most famous for being the blogger Instapundit. I hope he turns over the royalties from his book to the University.

It sounds like UCSD has made some stupid faculty decisions and is rightly criticized. But those researchers Mr. Will mentions went to work for Rice, another university. Apparently not all universities have misplaced priorities.

It is amazing how these commentators both sides of the coin. When the recession hit and people lost their jobs, people like hannity, Will, Beck, and Lowry said too bad, you need to retrain yourself in a different field. Industries die or are outsourced and that is a part of life they say.

Well most decent jobs require a degree or years of training. If you lost your job and can not find a job how can you pay for a college education. You can't and the only real option is loans or scholarships.

Sometimes I think hannity, will, beck and others live in a fantasy world.

Re: "Higher ed's bubble is getting ready to burst"

"Higher" Ed has been on a one-way road to destruction since the '60s, when hippie radicals graduated and realized they needed a scam to isolate them from reality and the requirement to work for a living. They quickly proved the old axiom about "them as can't," ending up in charge of the asylum.

Once in charge, though they continued to advocate Marxism, they quickly learned to practice crony capitalism, using their taxpayer-funded influence to increase demand for their "services," while decreasing supply. They even created a serf caste of instructors, TAs, and post-docs to do anything approaching work.

It has gotten worse, lately, as word-of-mouth spread academe's dirty little secret -- money for nothin' and chicks for free -- but "higher" education, as an institution, died decades ago, when we took our eye off the ball, allowing socialists to pass themselves off as intellectuals.

That long laundry list of ridiculous faculty positions and student support offices at UCSD is a joke. I guess they are hiring a lot of the sociology and psychology Masters and PhDs who couldn't get a job doing anything meaningful or necessary.

"Hapless students," my eye! Some students are obviously caring little what their degree is in and don't spend anytime researching the need for their future skills. I don't feel sorry for them if they can't find a job.

Shaun,
Good defensive move: shoot the messenger.

I wouldn't say that higher education is becoming a business. Their operating revenue is about one-third tuition/fees, one-third donations, and one-third taxes. In order to justify their own existence, faculty are then pushed hard to land grants; but I've seen first-hand that the value of most of these research grants is much less than what the school spends to do the research. I wonder what proportion of the donations and taxes higher education receives actually goes towards a student's education, and what proportion is going to fund the researcher-wannabees with underfunded research.

George F. Will. You gotta' love his opinion pieces. They are not filled with much in the way of facts, but he slathers on the opinion like a fat and happy obese plutocrat slathers on the condemnation of the poor!

This is the same George F. Will who - now let me see if I can get this straight - reported that, because of his relationship with Conrad Black and Ronald Reagan, and his theft of Jimmy Carter's briefing book, he was able to secretly facilitate a partnership between Cuba and China to drill for oil less than 60 miles off the coast of Florida, which resulted in restoring Global Sea Ice levels to 1979 levels, and demonstrated the obvious errors of same sex marriage.

Is that about right, Mr. Will?

I look forward to hearing your comedy routine when you speak again at BYU.

Student loans were a good idea. But the problem is that instead of helping the students, it only enabled the university's shift the supply demand curve higher. I.e. when universities raised their prices, students didn't drop out because it was too expensive, they just got bigger loans with a vague idea that they would repay them. Instead of going to the students, the money went to the universities. But the students still have to pay off the loans.

Instead of being bastions of liberal views, the universties morphed into predatory corporations who get their money by ex-students slaving to pay off loans.

As is always the case, when the government gets involved, costs rise. If you eliminated student loans, within 2-3 years, tuition would be half what it is now. The problem on student loans is not the interest rate (which Congress is fighting over now), it's the principal amount that is so ridiculously high. We scream about the cost of healthcare, but college education has grown in cost even more than healthcare. let the market work properly and we'll be much better off.

@Still Blue: if you cut American's kids access to college funds, which is what the loans represent, you'd end America's access to medical care. There will be no magic wand to take over the function of access to money that allows a college education of any kind. No new doctors or pharmacists of any kind. Think of that the next time you see someone with glasses or see an ambulance or car wreck or have a relative expecting a baby.

Retraining or retooling yourself in womens studies and philosophy is not going to put food on the table.