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 grab 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 are only the most visible signs of deeper troubles that threaten to destabilize American advanced schooling in the coming years. Let's take a closer look.

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

In line with 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 they earned 40 years back.

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 FACULTY 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 each year in tuition and fees.

So tuition costs are rising at a rate that far outpaces the growth in income of the typical American household. While income is continuing to grow by a factor of 5.5 within 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 a private college has increased by way of a factor of more than 13.

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

Crisis: American Colleges Will Close

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

Top-tier, well-funded institutions will weather the crisis. But a growing 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.

T here 's another reason that colleges are in trouble. With having less jobs awaiting graduates, it is difficult to convince many American families that it's well worth paying $30,000, $40,000 or even more per year to earn a degree.

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

The times of the English major, the philosophy major, and the general studies major could be numbered, as more students seek training for jobs that they can actually find after graduation. They're training as medical technicians, computer programmers and air conditioning technicians. Yet just as students are looking for practical training, the resources of that training are harder to find, for some reasons.

First, community colleges are no longer offering just as much practical training because they once did. To attract more students, 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. A number of them are being investigated right now by Congress because of shady recruiting practices and abuse of government programs for funding higher education. It seems likely that a number of for-profit schools will shut their doors.

The result? American students will see it harder to find schools that offer the practical training they need to secure jobs.

And everybody knows what can happen whenever a country's workers are under-trained, in comparison to workers in other countries. The result is going to be further damage to the American economy and business.

EXACTLY WHAT WILL Save American Higher Education?

The trends outlined above are grim. Yet the situation is definately not hopeless. Many positive trends are at work that point to the chance that American higher education is not going away, but merely changing.

* America still gets the strongest educational infrastructure on the planet. We simply have more universites and colleges than any other country. Many of these institutions are already 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, there's ample incentive for colleges to build up new learning choices for them.

* The timeline of education has changed. More Americans are time for college at all stages of life. The result is a larger pool of Americans that are interested in advanced schooling.

* Distance learning is getting into the forefront of American advanced schooling. 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 as little as $2,000.

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

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