"Is it any wonder that the value of a college education is now being questioned more than it used to be? Perhaps a basic education in personal finance would help more people make informed decisions about college and how to handle the financing of that endeavor."

"ACTA has argued--quite convincingly and interestingly--that our accreditation system is badly broken, and has laid out a plan for repairing it. Among the recommendations: break the link between accreditation and federal financial aid. See ACTA's 2007 report, Why Accreditation Doesn't Work and What Policymakers Can Do About it."

"Which means that financially speaking, the spectacularly high dropout rate boils down to a spectacularly bad investment. Though there’s no specific data, one can imagine the countless millions that are wasted financing educations that never come to fruition. We could try to predict which students would be part of the 46% who don’t finish, then encourage those students not to go to college. But to do this would mean a lot of students who might graduate never get to give it a shot. That wouldn’t be fair. So what we can do instead is identify the 5% or 10% of students who are the least likely to graduate, and not send them to college."

Musings on the economics of community colleges, and higher education in general