Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Editorial: Should college in America be only for the rich? - WV Gazette

Advanced education is crucial for successful careers in the snowballing Information Age — but America’s colleges and universities, with ever-rising tuition, increasingly serve only the wealthy and affluent. That’s the view of a top Australian economist. Dr. John Quiggin wrote last month: America’s elite private universities serve only “around 100,000 students, about 1 percent of the eligible age cohort,” he wrote. At the other end of the spectrum, for-profit, online U.S. colleges are “little better than scams, aimed at extracting public grant money from poor students,” the economist said. Lower-income Americans are in danger of being squeezed out of college opportunity and the middle-class future it brings. The only higher education avenue available for too many working families is for youths to incur horrendous student loans that will haunt them for decades. http://www.wvgazette.com/article/20140713/ARTICLE/140719817/1103