Since the late 1970s, when some type of a college education essentially became a requirement for a solid, sustainable, middle-class job, the cost of that education has skyrocketed.

The annual price tag for a college credential has risen about three times as fast as inflation, and there is no sign that it’s slowing down. In the last decade alone, tuition rates at public colleges and universities, which enroll about 80 percent of American students, rose by an average of 5.6 percentage points above inflation every year.

Despite those vast price increases, students continued to line up for admission to one of the nation’s colleges. To pay the bills, students and their families borrowed—a lot.

Some $110-billion in student loans was borrowed last year. That’s more than half the amount that was borrowed between the passage of the first Higher Education Act, in 1965, and the end…

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Student loans are not going away despite calls by Occupy protesters in recent weeks to have the federal government finance public colleges entirely and write off all student debt.

So rather than debate the impossible, we should instead discuss better ways of financing a college degree.

The higher-ed establishment in Washington spends most of its time trying to protect the status quo on student-aid programs, all the while arguing for more money to help pay higher tuition prices. But if we’re headed for an age of at least some austerity in the federal government, then the higher-ed associations are going to need a new playbook.

They won’t lack for ideas. Overhauling the student-aid system won’t be easy, but many agree that we should be getting better results on access and outcomes for the money being spent.

Where to start? Here are just a few proposals I have read in…

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The debate over whether the purpose of college is to train students for jobs or to provide them with a broad education erupted again in the comments section of a Chronicle article last week. Rather than rehash that argument in this blog, I want to touch on the main thrust of last week’s piece: what employers think of today’s college graduates.

In the past few months, at conferences, at dinners, and on airplanes, I’ve had the chance to sit next to a handful of recruiters who work for companies large and small, from Zappos to United Technologies. Employer unhappiness with college graduates is nothing new, of course. As the president of the University of Washington, Michael K. Young, told me recently, “employers have never been happy with the graduates colleges are producing.”

Still, with three million unfilled jobs in a bad economy, it stands to reason that some employers are…

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A college president stopped by my office recently for a visit. That’s not unusual. A handful come to The Chronicle every month for discussions with reporters and editors. What was unusual about this visit was the president’s age: This leader was under 50.

College presidents have been getting older over the past two decades; the average age of those in the top job rose from 52 to 60 between 1986 and 2006, according to the most recent survey on the college presidency by the American Council on Education. (Those findings are now a bit dated. But the next version of the survey, scheduled for release in the spring, is expected to show a similar trend of aging presidents.)

Almost half of presidents in 2006 were older than 60, compared with 14 percent of presidents in 1986. Only about 8 percent of presidents were 50 or younger, compared with about 42 percent in 1986. For the sake of…

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As college costs have skyrocketed, students and their parents have come to view the college experience more and more as a financial transaction. They are the customer, and the college is the business. That consumer mentality—which I have argued is not as bad as many in higher ed make it out to be—has nonetheless led to high expectations about the quality of everything on campuses from dining options to dorm rooms.

Nowhere are the stakes of this consumer culture higher than in the classroom. Much has been written about how grade inflation is a consequence of the student-as-customer approach. This is one place where faculty members and administrators need to take a hard line and protect the grading process from the consumer incursion. Otherwise, they won’t need to worry about their future customers because they will have destroyed the reputation of their primary product.

But…

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It used to be that Americans had too much debt. Now they don’t have enough. The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that “household thrift” is a key reason the economic recovery has been so weak.

But student-loan debt seems to be immune from this newfound penny-pinching. Students and their families are still taking on record amounts of debt to pay for a college education. Despite some debate over the exact amount of outstanding student-loan debt right now, the number has already surpassed credit-card debt and is expected to cross the $1-trillion mark for the first time this year, says Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid, a Web site offering student-aid advice and tools.

The growing burden of those payments in a tough economy is becoming a hot political issue, especially in recent weeks with the Occupy Wall Street movement. That’s one reason President Obama…

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If there was any question that the current model for the vast majority of colleges is not sustainable for much longer, two pieces of news this past week should give the remaining skeptics yet more evidence.

First was the news from a survey of economists that Americans’ incomes, which have dropped some 7 percent since 2000, aren’t expected to even recover those losses until 2021. What’s more, a third of the respondents to the survey said today’s college grads would fare worse than their parents’ generation.

Then earlier this week we saw news reports of a previously published study on household debt by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which predicted that the total amount of student-loan debt would hit $1-trillion before the end of the year.

Fewer than 100 colleges and universities are probably immune from these various external pressures descending on higher ed. Those…

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There seem to be a few unspoken rules among the ruling class in higher ed. Among them: Don’t say a purpose of a college education is to get a job, and don’t refer to students or employers as consumers of a college education.

I broke both rules in a recent post about how the American higher-ed system is in love with itself, and as a result, doesn’t believe that it needs to undergo some fundamental changes. And boy did I hear from readers. The post generated more than 90 comments and a response on The Huffington Post by Brian Rosenberg, president of Macalester College.

Obviously, there’s no shortage of opinions on the subject. So I want to return to the debate, particularly given some new ammunition supplied over the past week by the governor of Florida and a coalition of unemployed law-school graduates.

We often talk about the goal of college as learning a specific skill …

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Even if college students in the future are likely to take more of their classes online, few of us think that the vast majority of bricks-and-mortar campuses will disappear, at least not overnight.

Like in real estate, location matters in higher ed. But unlike many homeowners, colleges looking for a better neighborhood can’t simply hang a “For Sale” sign and move to a more desirable place.

That’s problematic for colleges in struggling small towns and declining manufacturing cities. It’s sometimes difficult for them to attract prospective students and faculty members, or keep entrepreneurial young alumni around to build new businesses. And as the economies of those towns deteriorate further, local officials have few employers to turn to for help. Often colleges are asked to take on demands well beyond their mission.

In response, some colleges have taken on the role of the…

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American academics often like to talk about how the higher-education system in the United States is the best in the world. I’m not quite sure how this status is determined—especially given our declining position in the OECD rankings—but we seem to have adopted the belief that the problems in the U.S. education system reside in elementary and secondary schools, not on college campuses.

Perhaps it’s just a sign of the times in which we live. Modesty, it seems, is out of style. In a thought-provoking talk at the Washington Ideas Forum this week, the New York Times columnist David Brooks maintained that we live in an era of “expanded conception of self.” That attitude, he believes, results in the trends we have witnessed in recent years toward increased consumption, polarization, and risk.

“We have moved from a culture of self-effacement to one of self-expansion,”…

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