"The American public has sent a message, loud and clear: enough with never-ending tuition increases! ... This shows how truly concerned families are about costs. And they're right. Over the past 25 years, average college tuition and fees have risen nearly twice as fast as health care costs."

That's ACTA president Anne Neal, commenting on the latest Public Agenda report, Squeeze Play 2010: Continued Public Anxiety On Cost, Harsher Judgments On How Colleges Are Run. The accompanying article in Inside Higher Ed offers a good summary of the impasse between public perceptions of higher ed (essential but far too costly and, by implication, wasteful and inefficient) and higher ed's perception of higher ed (essential, but hampered by budget cuts and shortfalls).

Other intriguing comments:

Economist Rich Vedder observes that "Once colleges were revered as selfless institutions trying to educate our youth and serve the public good. Now, apparently, universities are viewed as being somewhat akin to used car dealers, trying to shake down their customers for as much money as possible. In the long run, that is going to hurt a sector dependent on third parties for support .... The bubble’s got to burst on this thing."

The American Council on Education's Terry Hartle says the survey shows that colleges and universities have a communication problem, rather than a spending problem: The results show that higher ed is not "doing enough to explain what we cost and what we're doing to maintain affordability."

And a commenter writes that higher ed "reminds me of the health care debate. Costs for health care are out of site, partially because insurance is paying for it, not the consumer. People tend to not pay attention to the cost of health care for that reason. If people were paying out of pocket prices would no doubt be lower. Financial aid works like insurance. If people were paying out of pocket for education instead of borrowing money to pay for it, prices would be lower. I think it is called a market system, you know, supply and demand. When a 3rd party is paying part of the cost, and not the consumer, people tend to not pay attention to the price. More aid means higher costs. When loan limits were increased, borrowing skyrocketed. Schools got all of that extra money, leaving the students to figure out how to pay it back down the road. Eventually, the bubble will burst. When no one can afford to buy your product, you have a big problem."

I tend to think the answer is in the middle. Colleges and universities, like all big bureaucracies, are wasteful and inefficient. Throwing more money at them--as many would like--is not going to make them more effective, but will instead make them even less motivated to spend a dollar wisely. They need to restructure, re-prioritize, focus on their missions, and cut the fat. The public in turn needs to recognize that a quality education is not something to be gotten on the cheap. It should and could be less expensive than it is--but doing it right does incur costs.

Just to take one example: One way colleges and universities have been cutting costs in recent years is by relying on temporary, part-time teachers to handle undergrad courses. According to some studies, upwards of 70 percent of college teachers in this country are non-tenure track, part-timers. Many are working for below minimum wage, when you factor in all the prep time and grading time involved in teaching; they have no benefits, no say in governance, and no academic freedom. They also have to take on a far heavier course load than tenure-track faculty do, just to make ends meet. This is cheaper for the school, but bad for students, who are being taught on the fly by people who have neither the time nor the security to focus on actually educating. It also doesn't translate into cost cutting for the students--your tuition rises regardless of who is teaching you. When confronted with this, schools often argue that they don't have the money to move away from cheap teaching piecework and toward more expensive but also more responsible full-time teaching positions.

Is the money really not there? Or is it there--but just somewhere else? One thinks of inflated administrative and executive salaries, of bureaucratic bloat, of millions going to subsidize athletics at the expense of academics, and so on.