Dr. Richard Vedder
National Review summarizes a recent talk by Dr. Richard Vedder at the Martin Center in an article headlined “Our Higher Education Problem: Serious but Not Hopeless.”
Vedder is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics at Ohio University.
First, there’s the cost issue. While prices of other services have been falling, the cost of going to college has been rising much faster than the rate of inflation. Vedder points out that when he was an undergraduate in the early 1960s, a year at Northwestern cost just $795. That’s equal to about $7,000 in today’s dollars — but Northwestern now charges students over $56,000 per year. Why the huge increase? Vedder argues that it’s overwhelmingly due to the federal student aid program, one of the worst legacies of LBJ’s “Great Society.”
Student aid dollars have done much more to enable colleges to expand their staffs and budgets than to help students afford to attend, Vedder says….
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