Notes

The Big Squeeze - The Coming Crisis in American Higher Education
Most Americans know that a crisis is going on in American advanced schooling.

Tuition costs are surging, putting a college education out of reach for many Americans. College grads are defaulting on college loans. They cannot find jobs in the fields they trained for.

Those trends make the news headlines every day. Yet they're only probably the most visible signs of deeper troubles that threaten to destabilize American higher education in the coming years. Let's have a closer look.

Coming Crisis: Colleges Will Price themselves Further and additional Out of Reach

Based on the U.S. Census, the median income of U.S. households in 1970 was $8,390. By 1989, it has risen to $28,910. And by 2005, it had been $46,326. Those figures indicate that Americans today are earning about 5.5 the salaries that they earned 40 years ago.

How much have college costs grown? Based on the Congressional Budget Office, the common yearly tuition at a four-year public American university in 1970 was $480. The average tuition at a four-year private university or college was a lot higher, at $1,980.

Today, in accordance with data from The College Board, tuition and fees at four-year state universities currently average $7,020 per year for students who live in- state, and $11,528 for students who live out of state. And private four-year colleges charge the average or $26,273 per year in tuition and fees.

So tuition costs are rising for a price that far outpaces the growth in income of the normal American household. While income is continuing to grow by a factor of 5.5 in the last 40 years, the cost of attending a state college has increased by way of a factor of 15 for in-state students and by a factor around 24 for out-of-state students. And the expense of attending an exclusive college has increased by way of a factor of more than 13.

And colleges are organizing tuition increases for the coming years. It is the big squeeze. For most American families, the dream of sending a child to college is slipping even further out of reach.

Crisis: American Colleges Will Close

Endowments at American universites and colleges have dropped dramatically during the current economic depression. At the University of Delaware, the endowment shrank by 24.8%. Gettysburg College lost 25.3%, and the list continues on and on.

Top-tier, well-funded institutions will weather the crisis. But an increasing number of smaller American private universites and colleges are already finding it difficult to attract enough tuition-paying undergraduates to help keep their doors open. With increasing frequency, these schools are making their troubles known.

There's another reason that colleges come in trouble. With the lack of jobs awaiting graduates, it is difficult to convince many American families that it is well worth paying $30,000, $40,000 or more a year to earn a degree.

Crisis: American Students Will Be Struggling to Train for Available Jobs

The days of the English major, the philosophy major, and the general studies major may be numbered, as more students seek training for jobs they can actually find after graduation. They're training as medical technicians, computer programmers and air conditioning technicians. Yet in the same way students are seeking practical training, the sources of that training are harder to get, for a couple reasons.

First, community colleges are no more offering as much practical training because they once did. To attract website , many have modified their course offerings to are more like private institutions. While President Obama has pledged to invest heavily in community colleges and upgrade their training programs, the changes are long overdue.

Second, for-profit universites and colleges are in trouble. Many of them are being investigated at this time by Congress because of shady recruiting practices and abuse of government programs for funding higher education. It seems likely a amount of for-profit schools will shut their doors.

The effect? American students will find it harder to get schools that offer the practical training they have to secure jobs.

And everybody knows what can happen when a country's workers are under-trained, compared to workers far away. The result will likely be further harm to the American economy and business.

What Will Save American Higher Education?

The trends outlined above are grim. The situation is far from hopeless. Several positive trends are in work that point to the chance that American higher education is not going away, but simply changing.

* America still has the strongest educational infrastructure on the globe. We simply have more universites and colleges than any other country. Many of these institutions already are reinventing themselves by offering distance education options, three-year degree programs along with other incentives for modern learners.

* Americans' desire to have education remains strong. With so many of our citizens hungering for learning, t here is ample incentive for colleges to build up new learning choices for them.

* The timeline of education has changed. More Americans are returning to college at all stages of life. The result is a larger pool of Americans that are interested in higher education.

* Distance learning is moving into the forefront of American higher education. As Bill Gates predicted on August 9 in his talk at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, it really is already possible to deliver a college education on the internet for less than $2,000.

In the end, we predict that American ingenuity will not only survive these crises, but turn America into a new kind of community of learners.

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