Higher Education's Faulty Economics: How We Got Here - Tom Lindsay, Forbes

But while the proposals differ, their differences are less important than what they share. What they all have in common is a fundamental misunderstanding of what’s driving the crisis that all sides seek to solve. They fail to understand that the factors composing the dilemma we face—tuition hyperinflation, burdensome student-loan debt, and poor student learning—are to some extent branches of the same tree, whose roots are found in the well-intentioned but what has proved to be catastrophically naïve assumption that virtually all high school graduates should go to college. Higher-education reformers look at this bleak picture and wonder why all the ostensible solutions to the higher-education crisis serve only to double-down on the misguided premise that produced the crisis in the first place. Until and unless we jettison our utopian expectations, increasing numbers of students will continue to pay more and more and learn less and less. http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomlindsay/2015/08/29/higher-educations-faulty-economics-how-we-got-here/