(Guest post by Greg Forster)
One of those little one-sentence news items on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal reads:
College tuition and fees climbed again this year, but the burden was tempered by an increase in financial aid.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but shouldn’t that read:
The real price of a college education remained constant, but concealed government subsidies to colleges kept growing.
If you add up the revenue colleges derive directly from government through grants and contracts, the indirect revenue from government cartelization of labor pools such as teachers, nurses and social workers, and concealed subsidies through student loan programs, I wonder how big the total financial dependence of our higher education institutions on socialism in its various forms really is.
Over 50%, do you think?
It doesn’t actually matter; the tipping point beyond which an institution becomes de facto subservient to socialism is well below the halfway mark. The ideological reasons colleges indoctrinate students with collectivism and use their social prestige to promote it in the nation at large have been widely analyzed. The institutional reasons seem to me to require further publicization.
