What's Behind The Higher Ed Tuition Bubble

The common wisdom is that universities, bloated with tenured professors, are ripe for a market correction; "higher-education bubble" now has its own Wikipedia page. Yet a deeper dig into the numbers—itemized in a pair of studies by the College Board and the foundation-funded Delta Cost Project—shows that the bubble is actually a pair of unrelated phenomena: Call them the Great Harvard Chase and the State-Funding Plug Pull. The biggest single factor driving costs upward for both public and private schools, says Delta Cost Project director Jane Wellman, is the cost of employee health benefits, which, like in every other industry, are metastasizing out of control. Read more at:
http://www.villagevoice.com/2012-01-04/news/the-soaring-cost-of-college-has-multiple-causes-and-no-easy-solution/