Great column out today by Michael Barone.  He nailed it when he pinpointed the main culprit behind the skyrocketing cost of college education:

Between 1975 and 2008, the number of faculty rose by 3 percent, to 12,019 positions. During those same years, the number of administrators rose 221 percent, to 12,183. That’s right: There are more administrators than teachers at Cal State now.

These people get paid to “liaise” and “facilitate” and produce reports on diversity. How that benefits Cal State students or California taxpayers is unclear.

It is often said that American colleges and universities are the best in the world. That’s undoubtedly true in the hard sciences.

But in the humanities and to a lesser extent in the social sciences, there’s a lot of garbage. Is a degree in religious and women’s studies worth $100,000 in student loan debt? Probably not.

Just like the housing market, college prices are being bid up and up and up, in many cases out of proportion to the actual value of the product.  Like the housing market,  you can trace this hyperinflation to a number of factors:

• the notion that having it is a fundamental right for everyone,
• the influx of public money to pay for people to attend college, with no regard to whether the degree sought is of any value or not,
• the increased reliance on debt-financed dollars to pay costs for (a) necessities that previosuly were paid for out of family resources, and (b) luxuries that were previously done without.
• the tendency of universities to find heretofore unknown “needs” for all this money, including departments and VPs of Diversity who do nothing to make the campus more diverse—at most colleges, diversity means the full range of political expression, from the far left to the extreme far left—LGBT indoctrination programs, etc.

Individuals have no choice to pay the inflated prices, because they must operate in a market that is dominated by government- and debt-financed dollars that have bid up the prices way out of proportion to the market.

Click here to see the rest of Barone’s article.