Saturday, December 27, 2008

A Bad Investment?

I posted sometime ago about the looming bubble in higher education, and how many small, libera-arts colleges could find themselves bankrupt in the near future. Time will tell, of course, and it depends on whether the federal government is going to plow billions of dollars in saving higher education. But here is an article I found on this issue.

Government figures show that of students who entered four-year colleges in 1997, just 54% had earned a degree six years later. A professor wrote about this issue in The Atlantic earlier this year, arguing that it’s immoral to tell all students they can go to college, then crush their dreams by failing half of them. But the problem has deeper effects than hurt feelings: the 54% graduation rate means that around 46% of all money used to finance college tuition results in no degree. Which means that financially speaking, the spectacularly high dropout rate boils down to a spectacularly bad investment.

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