Skyrocketing tuition: Is punishing expensive colleges the answer?

A better solution is APPRENTICESHIPS that pay wages instead of pile up debts, and lead (if successful) to good jobs. Good jobs should include a sabbatical (like military retirement) around age 40, when people can go to college for a REAL education, not just an overpriced license to work.

Here is the ENDOWMENTS of:
Harvard $32 BILLION
Yale $15.2 BILLION
Columbia $5.1 BILLION
Brown $1.8 BILLION
Princeton $11.2 BILLION

That a lot of tuition!

News flash: it doesn't take a college degree to hire people, run a restaraunt, manage a store, etc. Fire degree creep and the cost of education will be forced to correct itself. We don't need more psychology majors flipping burgers, either.

Education, particularly undergraduate education, is not a major priority at most Universities. One of the reasons that “research” is prioritized far higher than education is that most faculty research is subsidized by “grants” from the government, via agencies such as the NIH and NSF, and increasingly, from private industry. These grants not only pay the salaries of faculty, graduate students and technical staff who receive them, but also come with “overhead” (often approaching – or even exceeding – 100% of the “direct costs” of the grants itself) that goes directly to the institution. Universities are entirely addicted to and dependent on these overhead costs to sustain their operations, and to the grants themselves to subsidize their faculties (for a faculty member with a grant, the University does not pay his salary – the grant does). This is why external grant support is the major criteria by which faculty are judged at Universities (more important even than publications, although the two are related since publications often lead to grants and vice-versa). Undergraduate education is a mere afterthought – often looked upon as a distraction from the real work of “research” (and acquiring grant support) and a burden to be shirked as much as possible by the faculty. With grant support from an increasingly strapped government drying up, there is only one other source of revenue for the Universities. That is why tuition is going up everywhere, but don’t expect more educational bang for your buck!

Too much money, for too long, with no accountability to anyone except their peers, has given the College and University Administrators "God Complexes." No need to trim any of the fat. Just ask for and receive more money. They'll be amazed how much can be done for less when a budget means something!

Quit cramming colleges with students who don't belong there. Colleges are suffering from being coerced to accept students that don't have the academic rigor or commited interest to be there. A good job does not necessarily depend on a college education. Some people are far more suited to being in a trade and we should be promoting a diversity of post secondary education rather than punishing colleges for raising tuition to be able to recoup some of the remediation costs of accepting unqualified students who don't belong there in the first place.

The tuition problem is caused by wastful spending at the universities, no accountability, and ridiculously high administrator pay checks. They spend money on bronze macot statues and the like instead of for more classes. When schools pay $100,000+ on a statue, then you're asked to pay $300+ a unit and they cut classes you need, as a University student, I feel ripped off. Tuition and parking cost amount to piracy. Yes, piracy is the best word to describe those prices.

Hey OBAMA you need a "call for greater transparency"

Some people can afford a certain college and others can not... it has been that way for generations... now at least financial aid is available... my Dad was accepted to Med School years ago but could afford to go... he succeeded in another arena very well and was happy.

Most students can't afford any college tuitions, and when they get a degree, they still can't make enough to pay rent, car payment, car insurance, med insurance, student loans, etc. Insurance companies are eating a hole is everyone's wallet.

The death of industry and the general change to a financial based economy in the US has largely caused these problems. Not everyone is cut out for college, and the fact that anymore college is more or less a requirement for most good jobs makes it difficult. It devalues the college degree and causes all those who actually choose to go to college to start their life off in debt afterwards. It doesn't make for a very productive society. The reality is that college needs to be more exclusive, and better efforts need to be made to train new workers in more labor intensive jobs (as well as bring many of those jobs back into the country). America is becoming too top heavy, and it's affecting everyone.

They should really look at these schools to see if they are actually non-profits or if they are running it for a profit. The ones running themselves properly will have lower tuitions and should receive state/federal aid. The others should have their non-profit status revoked and receive no aid. That would get them all into the habit of controlling costs and offering an affordable education.

Here are some thoughts...
If you want to make college less expensive, start by...
1) Admitting students and hiring professors/staff that speak fluent English.
2) Don't allow or offer remedial courses - if students are not smart enough to pass the basics, they're likely not going to do well in anything else.
3) Eliminate forced electives. Do students really need a racquet ball or pottery class to earn an accounting degree?!?!?

Punishing expensive universities will work as well as punishing oil companies has reduced the cost of gas.

Leave obama alone, people make deceisions fo them selfs to get a degree.

The problem is that our government hands out loan money to students regardless of whether their chosen field provides a likely prospect of ever making enough to pay it back.

In other words, the student going to Harvard majoring in social administration can get the same student loan as the student majoring in pre-med. If our government wants to insert itself into student lending, they need to start acting like a bank and stop acting like a grandmother who can't say 'no'.

What's wrong with the government trying to spend its money as efficiently as possible when helping people finance a college education? The feds ought to try to get as many people educated as possible for a given number of dollars. If the government can't figure out which colleges have the best outcome per dollar spent, it's because the colleges don't want anyone to know.

Why don't we immediately implement a 22% pay cut on all professors at colleges who accept federal aid. That's what Obamacare proposed doing to doctors seeing Medicare patients. If Obama thinks slashing doctor pay is the way to 'control health care costs', why wouldn't slashing professor pay be similarly effective in controlling tuition costs?

Something tells me that will never happen though, since most doctors are Republican....and most professors are Democrats.

All students should walk away and stay home for a semester or two. When they return, college will be cheap.

Obama is such a loser. Everything he says shows he's only worried about making sure the poor get something. Statistics show that poor kids don't perform well whether they are in elementary school or college so work on rebuilding the family unit and we'll produce less poor and less poor producing kids.