A REPORT FROM inside the Higher Education Bubble. “Perhaps most troubling to me, as an adjunct history instructor at a community college, is the situation faced by college students who are like the housing speculators of 2005 and 2006.”

UPDATE: A reader emails:

I’ve been following your Higher Education Bubble posts with some interest. I happen to work for a Midwest based company that specializes in outsourcing plant maintenance. It’s a growth industry because so many of current manufacturing maintenance employees are in the late 50’s, and there is a great dearth of qualified folks to replace them. We recruit heavily from the military because it’s one of the last best places that produce motivated, experienced, and qualified technicians. That kid with a French Lit. degree flipping burgers would have done better to have gone to tech school, community college or the Big Green Machine and learned how to maintain electrical or hydraulic equipment. They’d be earning 40-50K within a year or two and they most certainly wouldn’t have a problem finding a job.

I’m not overly worried… the Market will provide. I just know that when my son comes of age, unless he’s going into IT or engineering, it’s the local community college or the military for his education.

Not a bad idea.