Knowledge Ain’t Cheap

If you thought the present was bad, the Times today offers a truly grim picture of America's future. The toll to cross the bridge to the middle class -- i.e., a four-year college degree -- is getting so high kids may start turning around. College education, a new study from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education suggests, is increasingly a luxury only the affluent can afford. The cost of attending public –- forget about private -- universities or colleges has skyrocketed during the last 25 years, requiring more and more of this year's favorite word: debt. Prepare to drop your jaw: …published college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007, adjusted for inflation, while median family income rose 147 percent. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade, and students from lower-income families, on average, get smaller grants from the colleges they attend than students from more affluent families… Among the poorest families — those with incomes in the lowest 20 percent — the net cost of a year at a public university was 55 percent of median income, up from 39 percent in 1999-2000. At community colleges, long seen as a safety net, that cost was 49 percent of the poorest families’ median income last year, up from 40 percent in 1999-2000. The trend is inescapable: “If we go on this way for another 25 years, we won’t have an affordable system of higher education,” said Patrick M. Callan, president of the center, a nonpartisan organization that promotes access to higher education. University of Phoenix, anyone? Or at least a new GI Bill, based on community and not only military service…