The NY Times reports that private colleges are raising tuitions because of "dwindling endowments" caused by a "sagging economy." But check out this sentence in the article:

"The sometimes striking tuition increases, just now being reported, come after seven years of moderate tuition increases at generally twice the rate of inflation."

In other words, while colleges saw their endowments jump double-digits on the back of a surging stock market, they continued to raise tuition at the "moderate" clip of twice the inflation rate. Now that their endowments are back to levels of three to four years ago, they are using that as an excuse to raise tuition even higher. One wonders just what else Harvard, for example, with an $18.3 billion dollar endowment, undergraduate tuition in excess of $22,000/year, over $14 million in additional yearly tuition aid from outside sources, and millions from state, federal, and corporate sources, needs so desperately that it must yet again hike tuition.

This is all especially interesting given an economic study by the National Bureau of Economic Research which calls into question the value of elite private college education. The authors compared the incomes of graduates from elite colleges with those of students who were accepted by an elite college but chose to attend a "lesser" school. The graduates of the latter schools actually have higher incomes, on average, than graduates of elite schools. One reason graduates of elite colleges do so much better than other college students, it turns out, is not the superiority of their schools, but the simple fact that elite colleges choose the cream of the crop to begin with -- students with the drive, background, contacts, and high school preparation that would serve them well in the job market regardless of their alma mater.

This raises a further question -- how much of future success is driven not by college education, but by grade and high school education? The graduates of elite colleges, after all, are much more likely to have attended private schools managed by people other than the slovenly, slack-jawed bureaucrats who increasingly man the government schools. Think about it. Most good parents sock away what they can in hopes of paying for at least part of their child's college education. Yet most of these same people leave their child captive to people who think that four years of "education" classes yields the knowledge necessary to train children, when in reality it leaves them ill-qualified for anything other than janitorial work. So perhaps parents will do their children more good in the long run by spending money on their education now, in the form of a good private school.

Congress could help a lot in that regard by creating a tax deduction for education expenses. Local governments could also help, by giving private- and home-school parents a full refund of the portion of their property taxes used to fund government schools. The odds of both are virtually zero, of course, so long as we allow the thuggish teacher's unions to dictate education policy, and repeatedly extort more money from us under the threat of not teaching our children.

Think I'd be a good candidate for PTA president?