Notes

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

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

Those trends make the news headlines every day. Yet they're 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 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 was $46,326. read more indicate that Americans today are earning about 5.5 the salaries they earned 40 years ago.

How much have college costs grown? According to the Congressional Budget Office, the average yearly tuition at a four-year public American university in 1970 was $480. The common 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 each year for students who live in- state, and $11,528 for students who live out of state. And private four-year colleges charge an average or $26,273 per year in tuition and fees.

So tuition costs are rising at a level 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 circumstances college has increased by a factor of 15 for in-state students and by way of a factor around 24 for out-of-state students. And the cost of attending a private college has increased by a factor of more than 13.

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

Crisis: American Colleges Will Close

Endowments at American universites and colleges have dropped dramatically through the current economic downturn. 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 colleges and universities 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 are in trouble. With having less jobs awaiting graduates, it is difficult to convince many American families that it's really worth paying $30,000, $40,000 or more per year to earn a college degree.

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

The days of the English major, the philosophy major, and the general studies major could be numbered, as more students seek training for jobs they can actually find after graduation. They are training as medical technicians, computer programmers and air-con technicians. Yet in the same way students are trying to find practical training, the resources of that training are harder to get, for a few reasons.

First, community colleges are no more offering 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 get 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 due to shady recruiting practices and abuse of government programs for funding advanced schooling. It seems likely a number of for-profit schools will shut their doors.

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

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

What Will Save American ADVANCED SCHOOLING?

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

* America still gets the strongest educational infrastructure on the planet. We simply have significantly more colleges and universities 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 quite a few citizens hungering for learning, there's ample incentive for colleges to develop new learning options for them.

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

* Distance learning is moving 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 provide a college education online for less than $2,000.

In the end, 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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