Pretty much everyone agrees that the increases in tuition (which have vastly outpaced consumer prices and family incomes) and the growth in student-loan debt (which now exceeds credit-card or auto-loan debt) are unsustainable. As economist Herb Stein famously said, something that can't go on forever, won't. So, how should we respond?

UT administrators announced Thursday they are considering making the entire campus tobacco-free.

The university already bans smoking in dorms, classrooms and other indoor areas. A new policy could expand the ban to include sidewalks and parking garages.

Officials are considering the change after a major grant donor, the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, decided earlier this month that all grant recipients would be required to maintain tobacco-free campuses.

UT has received about $30 million from the institute and hopes for an additional $88 million in research funding, Adrienne Howarth-Moore , UT's director of human resource services, said Thursday. To receive additional institute funds, UT must be tobacco-free by March 1.
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Howarth-Moore said the university does not want to alienate students who are also smokers if a tobacco-free policy is implemented.

"We do value diverse thoughts," she said. "And for those who have chosen to not be tobacco-free, we want to make sure they still feel valued in the community."

Illinois is facing a fiscal crisis. The expense of retirement benefits is overwhelming many areas of the state budget. Lawmakers have known of this situation for years, but thus far have not adopted a comprehensive solution.

The state faces an $85 billion unfunded liability to its pensions systems. It owes another $45 billion in healthcare benefits to future retirees. And the state borrowed an additional $17 billion in bonds that were issued to cover pension costs. The state has no means and no plan to pay for these liabilities. Costs must be trimmed.

If lawmakers do not reform pensions, dollars for core government services will be crowded out by rising retirement costs. When Illinois sends more dollars to teacher retirements than it does to the classroom, the state is choosing pensions over schools.

Columbia University is offering a new course on Occupy Wall Street next semester -- sending upperclassmen and grad students into the field for full course credit.

The class is taught by Dr. Hannah Appel, who boasts about her nights camped out in Zuccotti Park.

As many as 30 students will be expected to get involved in ongoing OWS projects outside the classroom, the syllabus says.

The class will be in the anthropology department and called "Occupy the Field: Global Finance, Inequality, Social Movement." It will be divided between seminars at the Morningside Heights campus and fieldwork.

[UC Berkeley's Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion Gibor Basri] commands a staff of 17, allegedly all required to make sure that fanatically left-wing UC Berkeley is sufficiently attuned to the values of "diversity" and "inclusion"; his 2009 base pay of $194,000 was nearly four times that of starting assistant professors.... UC Berkeley's diversity apparatus, which spreads far beyond the office of the VC for E and I, is utterly typical. For the last three decades, colleges have added more and more tuition-busting bureaucratic fat; since 2006, full-time administrators have outnumbered faculty nationally.
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If students think that they are paying too much for college -- and either they or taxpayers most surely are -- they should take up the matter with their college president and her retinue of deans, provosts, and vice chancellors, not to mention with the federal government, whose easy loans allow colleges to jack up their tuition even further. The problem lies not with the lenders but with the institutions whose undisciplined appetite for bureaucratic growth and for hiring trendy academic superstars, no matter the speciousness of their scholarship, makes such loans necessary.

The problem, as with investors in tech stocks and real estate, is that students are paying an over-valued price for an under-valued product. They're going deeply into debt to do so, and most of the time that's made possible by Uncle Sam.
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It remains to be seen how the higher-education catastrophe will play out, but one development is certain. If the government continues to bail out students who graduate with all but worthless degrees, a bust is coming.

The biggest consumer ripoff in America today -- and the next economic bubble to burst -- is higher education.

Tuition and fees at colleges and universities rose 439 percent between 1982 and 2007. Median family income rose just 147 percent during that period.

Median household income has fallen 6.7 percent since June 2009. The cost of attending the average public university rose 5.4 percent this year.

Student loan debt recently passed $1 trillion. It's now more than credit card debt. The average graduate of a four-year college owes $27,000.

College students don't get much for their money.
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"For decades our schools have abandoned the teaching of basic facts and foundational thinking skills, and replaced both with leftish received wisdom and stale mythologies, all the while they have anxiously monitored and puffed up students' self esteem," said classics Prof. Bruce Thornton of California State University Fresno.

'We're raising young people who are, by and large, historically illiterate," David McCullough tells me on a recent afternoon in a quiet meeting room at the Boston Public Library. Having lectured at more than 100 colleges and universities over the past 25 years, he says, "I know how much these young people -- even at the most esteemed institutions of higher learning -- don't know." Slowly, he shakes his head in dismay. "It's shocking."
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It's not their fault our children are ignorant, he says animatedly. "It's our fault," he says, pointing to his chest. "I mean the parents and grandparents of the oncoming generation. We have to talk about history, talk about the books we love, the biographies and histories." He continues, "We should all take our children to historic places. Go to Gettysburg. Go to the Capitol."

... many books,
Wise men have said, are wearisome; who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior,
(And what he brings what needs he elsewhere seek?)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself...

-- John Milton, Paradise Regained, Book iv., Line 321

College tuition in America is out of control, according to a new documentary, "College Conspiracy," which asserts that U.S. college education is the biggest scam in American history.

The National Inflation Association produced the film to "expose the facts and truth about tuition inflation to prospective college students," according to the group, which is making the documentary available to its members for free on its website.
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The overall inflation rate since 1986 has increased 107.05%. During the same time, tuition has increased a whopping 466.80%, according to Inflationdata.com.

Despite the rising cost, 70.1% of high school graduates continue on to college, a new record.

There is no denying that U.S. schools are ripe for reform. Per-pupil education spending has doubled in the last three decades, while test scores have remained stubbornly flat. American kids squat solidly in the middle of the pack in international testing, with 15-year-olds ranking about average in math and reading, slightly below average in science. Dropout rates in major cities are approaching 50 percent.

But schools have been this bad for a long time. Why the sudden surge of interest?
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In urban school districts, where schools have been disaster zones for at least a generation, despair is breeding robust cooperation. But areas of bipartisan reform agreement are smaller on Capitol Hill and in statehouses around the country. More radical school choice proposals, such as vouchers for private school tuition, are mostly off the table. Usually when the two parties join hands it's not to change the status quo but to protect it. When Republicans talk about fixing schools, they often mean simply giving kids and parents ways to bail out of the worst of the worst. When Democrats talk about reform, they tend to prefer spending more to patch things up and build on top of the existing system. Both sides wind up voting for increased spending in the short and long run.
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There may be an emerging bipartisan consensus that education policy needs a massive and urgent overhaul. But if the reformers are becoming an irresistible force, the education establishment remains one of the great immovable objects in American politics. Superman may be visible overhead, but the landscape is littered with Kryptonite.

On Wednesday, a potentially game-changing education reform bill emerged in the Illinois Senate.

The bill would make it easier to fire bad teachers, make it harder for teachers to earn tenure and force districts to lay off teachers in tough economic times based on their performance, not strictly on years of service.

And there's more.

The bill also would make it harder for teachers to strike and, in Chicago, it would let the school district lengthen the disgracefully short school day and year without consulting the teachers union, though the economic impact of increased work hours would have to be negotiated with the union.

In the slow-moving, cautious and resistant-to-change world of education, this is tantamount to turning the Titanic.

These reforms won't transform low-performing schools or solve the social problems that limit student achievement, but they are significant nonetheless. They will create -- finally -- a system in Illinois that rewards and advances our most talented teachers.