The Next "Bubble" Crisis: College

An opinion brief on the website "The Week" called "Is Education the Next Bubble?" looks at people who want to give advice to those seeking higher education. It was interesting to me to see the Founder of Pay Pal, the payment website famous by EBay, encouraging young people to not bother investing in an overpriced education. As I agree with this statement, we must be real and say that at this point, all education can be considered overpriced. Seeing our educational system here in NH, our tuition will only rise if our state government votes to cut our state university budget. A commenter on this article said that he is seeking to cut costs of getting an education, but even community college is becoming more and more an investment.

Another interesting aspect of this conversation is the old idea of college being an investment that will definitely have a return. The reason so many people these days are reluctant to pay high amounts for education is the fact that jobs are not available after graduation anymore to give back these said returns. I wasn't very impressed to see one quote from the article: "Grad school has become a socially acceptable way to drink beer, read, and go into massive debt in your 20s" said a writer for The Atlantic. As someone who wishes to soon begin to apply for grad school and save money in order to pursue that goal, I am not excited for an atmosphere such as that described.

I believe it is somewhat accurate to label this as a bubble crisis, as we are so fond as to put that label on anything that gives our wallets heartache. I think that the only way our society will relieve the pressures of high priced higher education is if the government stops cutting money out of budgets that are for education. This seems like such a simple idea, yet no one seems to be acting on this principle.

http://theweek.com/article/index/214400/is-education-the-next-bubble