Malcolm Kline says that politicians' efforts to steer even more money into the black hole of college education is misguided:

In a recent conference call on the plan, both lawmakers rebuffed three attempts to get them on record explaining why college and university administrators have nothing to do with the exploding cost of higher education. It’s a valid question: Economist Richard Vedder finds that the ratio of college administrators to students is at least three-to-one. That gives collegians more bureaucrats per capita than they have biological parents.

And what of the service that American colleges and universities deliver? “Over half of students graduating from four-year colleges in the U. S. lack the literacy to deal with such ‘real life’ tasks as understanding newspaper editorials, comparing credit card offers, or summarizing the results of a survey,” reads a quote from David Schaefer in the latest issue of The American Enterprise. “Nor do they have the math skills needed to balance their checkbooks, according to a new study by the Pew Charitable Trusts.”

How in the world does he arrive at a figure of 3:1 for administrators to students? For the UC system, for instance, there's 121,000 staff and faculty with 208,000 students. I really don't think the UC system is somehow exceptionally lean.

Bring back VocEd! Bring back 4H and FFA and FBLA and all those other high school tracks for people who weren't going to college but could use skills like drafting and basic electronics and gelding and whatnot.

Not all roads lead to university, especially when No Child Gets Ahead. I am terrified of the work force I'm going to have to manage ten to fifteen years from now.

When I was a student, I once had a long talk with the head of the UCI physics department. He told me that he considered the true purpose of the UC system was as a jobs program for bureaucrats, designed to make sure that a large set of voters, and their families would be highly movtivated to vote a particular way. The "education" thing was just the excuse.

I was shocked by this at the time, but later in life, I found it interesting how many other institutions also seemed to be modeled on the same assumptions. The defense industry and the welfare industry being just two very good examples.

I'm associated with the scholarship program of a large, urban university. I don't think very much of many of the 3.5+ average, high school applicants. I'm distressed. What is there to say about letting lesser applicants into college? It's a way for colleges to make money. They'd be out of business if they only taught the capable ones.

Why assume the government *wants* college grads to understand credit card offers? I'm sure the fine folks at MBNA funding our congress don't want that. And certainly not the folks (not MBNA) behind the small business credit card offer I keep getting which, in very fine print, allows the company to change the rate at any time for any reason.