Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much.

• Author: McCluskey, Neal
• Position: Book Review

Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much Richard K. Vedder Washington: American Enterprise Institute Press, 2004, 259 pp.

Across higher education, the alarm has been sounding: "The market is coming! The market is coming!" In just the last two years, numerous books have been published examining the effects, real and potential, of market forces on academia, including former Harvard University President Derek Bok's Universities in the Marketplace and University of California--Berkeley professor David Kirp's Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line.

In many cases, while the authors acknowledge that some good could come from increasing market threes, they ultimately fear the sort of outcome described in Correcting Course: How We Can Restore the Ideals of Public Higher Education in a Market-Driven Era, a report from the Brown University-based Futures Project, which examines the interaction of academia and market forces:

Colleges and universities are under growing pressure to cut costs, measure and report on performance, and compete ever more strenuously for students, grants, funding, and prestige. In order to survive in this changing environment, many institutions have been forced to risk their long-standing dedication to core functions--from providing students of all kinds with real opportunities for social and economic mobility, to conducting high-quality research and offering valuable services that advance the well-being of individuals, communities, states, and the nation. Ohio University economic historian Richard K. Vedder's Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much, offers a much different perspective. Vedder posits that a free market in higher education is not something to be feared, but is in fact the key to fixing much of what is faulty in America's ivory tower.

As the book's title implies, the author primarily addresses the most well-known of academia's chronic problems, skyrocketing tuition. In the process, though, he deals with a slew of academia's maladies, including, but hardly limited to, professors' falling productivity; increasingly bloated college staffs; and the rise of "celebrity" professors who cost a lot, but teach very little. He also debunks many of the assertions on which higher education's leaders stake their claim for ever-greater public funding, most notably the promise that pushing more kids through college will improve a state's economic growth.

Vedder begins by dealing with the most immediate...