HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Galloping To Insolvency.

The spiraling rise of component costs in higher education are helping to inflate the higher-education bubble. One of the reasons those costs are out of control is that colleges and universities see no merit in keeping track of some of the larger ones. You cannot exercise fiscal discipline if you have no idea what you’re spending. Higher education has at least two major cost drivers that it hides from rational oversight: diversity and sustainability. . . .

Of course, diversity and sustainability have real costs, even if they aren’t properly counted or disclosed, and such ideas can and should be subject to critical scrutiny. I’ve been doing my part in developing critiques of both movements. The dysfunctions in higher education’s financial model seem likely to make these matters more urgent. The “common good,” as my correspondent phrases it, isn’t achieved by pretending that we can ignore costs and bypass reason. Ostriches may achieve a certain moral clarity but we would do better from a higher vantage point.

When I see a school bragging about its “sustainability” efforts, I take that as an indicator that it’s on an unsustainable financial path. And I wrote at some length about university administrations’ efforts to expand diversity bureaucracies even as they cut teaching faculty.