The Sabotaging of the American Dream

In spite of some interesting rhetoric and some self selecting experiments, like those done by Peter Thiel, along with the outlier careers of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, college is essential for success in today's workplace.

Pew’s recent statistics show that for those with only a high school diploma, the unemployment rate is over 12%. For those with a four year degree, it is 4%. But how did we get to an environment that on the one hand makes college the central pillar of economic success, in a knowledge based economy, and yet because of costs, pushes it further and further out of the reach of middle and lower socioeconomic groups?

Was this an accident of public policy, or a deliberate attempt to perpetuate the elite? Suzanne Mettler thinks both are true. She details her work in Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream.

My conversation with Suzanne Mettler:

Why College costs don't ever go down

Why are College cost rising in light of the efficiencies of technology? Keven Carey in the Washington Monthly breaks it down. Money quote:

The nonprofit Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs recently found that tuition and fee revenue per student at public research universities increased by 34 percent, in inflation-adjusted dollars, from 2000 to 2005. At the same time, spending per student on instruction and academic support declined. This is nothing new—overcharging for introductory courses is standard operating procedure in higher education, and has been for a long time. Colleges routinely use the excess revenues generated by huge, inexpensive lecture hall classes to support other, money-losing activities. Freshmen have always been cash cows—technology just made them more so.