[Roberton3]

Personally I am more concerned with the unsustainable cost of higher education. A standard private school was 8k per year in the 80s when I was in college, and is now 40k. While it is great that those elite students can get their tuition covered, I think it does not bode well for our country to have the cost of education so extreme.

That's a misleading comparison, because it's just looking at the list price, not including financial aid, which has been greatly expanded at the elite private schools.  The price that a poor or middle-class kid would pay hasn't gone up much at all, and in some cases has gone down.  (I was a Harvard undergrad in the early 90's, and a Harvard undergrad today with the same inflation-adjusted income that my family had then would pay significantly less than my family and I paid -- even though tuition has roughly doubled over that time, the increase in financial aid for a middle-class family like mine has been even bigger.)

At state schools, of course, the picture is different: the tuition increases have been brobdingnagian, and while financial aid has increased, it hasn't kept up.  But that's largely because of the brobdingnagian cuts in state government support for higher education (which had been trending downward even before the recession), not because of extravagant spending.

That said, I agree that the increasing cost of education is a problem.  But it's much less of a problem than people claim.  And it certainly doesn't warrant the kinds of quality-destroying cuts that have occurred at a lot of schools (including Oregon, where the previous president got fired because he wasn't willing to go along with gutting the academic quality of the school).

[Roberton3]

Personally I am more concerned with the unsustainable cost of higher education. A standard private school was 8k per year in the 80s when I was in college, and is now 40k. While it is great that those elite students can get their tuition covered, I think it does not bode well for our country to have the cost of education so extreme.

That's a misleading comparison, because it's just looking at the list price, not including financial aid, which has been greatly expanded at the elite private schools.  The price that a poor or middle-class kid would pay hasn't gone up much at all, and in some cases has gone down.  (I was a Harvard undergrad in the early 90's, and a Harvard undergrad today with the same inflation-adjusted income that my family had then would pay significantly less than my family and I paid -- even though tuition has roughly doubled over that time, the increase in financial aid for a middle-class family like mine has been even bigger.)

At state schools, of course, the picture is different: the tuition increases have been brobdingnagian, and while financial aid has increased, it hasn't kept up.  But that's largely because of the brobdingnagian cuts in state government support for higher education (which had been trending downward even before the recession), not because of extravagant spending.

That said, I agree that the increasing cost of education is a problem.  But it's much less of a problem than people claim.  And it certainly doesn't warrant the kinds of quality-destroying cuts that have occurred at a lot of schools (including Oregon, where the previous president got fired because he wasn't willing to go along with gutting the academic quality of the school).