The Philanthropy Network Blog

Myriad academic studies and citizen speculation have been devoted to the rising cost of college tuition, which is a blame shifting, blame assigning exercise of the 1st magnitude, and which unfortunately ignores the asymptotic demand curve for the product (in that demand should decrease for education as the price goes up, but the opposite seems to happen - people need more training, not less, for a 21st century career and are willing to pay (handsomely, I might add) for the privilege of operating in the modern world). And frankly, the cost of Harvard ($54,496) has always been about the same as a top of the line Buick (which I found to be the Buick Enclave at $53,775), and I have never heard a person complain about the rising cost of a Buick. But the cost of education is less of a concern to me than the problem of giving anybody with talent and drive level access to the product. University fundraisers and agencies dedicated to the advancement of one ethnicity or another have been sub...

If you follow Dallas Maverick's owner Marc Cuban's blog, you probably know that he is something of a near futurist, but he's rarely off the mark analytically, and his latest entry on The Coming Meltdown in Higher Education is precision laser guided ( Check out the article here . Easy credit in the student loan markets has artificially subsidized the four-year degree granting market for three decades, and for many students college has become a four-year reality detour before embarking on the real work of real life. Student loan indebtedness exceeds consumer debt, and with an exceedingly competitive global marketplace where the best career options require more technical and intensive training and work ethic, those who are left behind (or who fail to prepare) will face a mountain too steep to climb. And fundamentally, the underwriting assumptions of student loans are similar to those of subprime mortgages, and the collapse of the market will put student borrowers onto unstabl...