Educational recession

Tuition is up further than folks were expecting and financial aid awards have risen accordingly.

Schools, especially public institutions, rely heavily on government aid to stay open. Governmental support of education is a must for these institutions, so it makes sense that in an economic downturn the prices that are directed towards students and families will rise.

Private schools are expected to suffer as well. Nothing makes an alumnus feel less generous than getting a request for donations when the economy is in the toilet. The drop in endowments is going to hurt.

The best detail about these findings by College Board, though, is that they are based on outdated information. Remember that the economic downturn, all-encompassing though it may seem, is only about a month into its current phase.

Meaning things are going to get worse.

What we will most likely see in the business of education is a denial of the concept of supply and demand. Working under the assumption that the updated data collected after the beginning of the economic crunch will be very bad, college enrollment is probably going to fall. Maybe it'll drift down like a feather and maybe it'll sink like a stone.

And yet as supply increases, prices will as well. It costs money to run a school. And in spite of the spate of easy-to-reach financial aid, college will become prohibitively expensive to many families.

Here is the point where we need to take stock of the nature of higher education. A college degree is a privilege, not a right, and yet many in this country treat it as the de facto continuation of high school, and learn very little.

An educational recession will unfairly take the ability to attend college away from many who deserve it, but it will also cut out the vast majority of the dead weight in our educational institutions. And perhaps, in the most rosy of fantasies, the next administration will streamline the application and aid process, so that the people who go to college really need to be there.

For the rest of you, good Lord, there are other ways to make money.