American Higher Education: Beset with Problems, but Solutions Exist
Editor’s note: This is an abridged transcript of a speech Richard Vedder gave at a Martin Center luncheon on January 30, 2020. I will concentrate today on the economics of…
Articles by Richard K. Vedder
New Research Shows Federal Student Aid Is Worse than We Thought
For years I have railed against the dysfunctional federal student loan program. The availability of cheap federal student loans has enabled universities to increase tuition fees aggressively, helping fund an…
‘Free College:’ A Better Approach
Two facts about colleges stand out. First, they are largely (some argue almost entirely) a “private” good; that is to say, the benefits from college attendance accrue mainly to the…
Answering the Perennial Question: Why Does College Cost So Much?
Last month, Amanda Ripley, writing for The Atlantic, asked a good question: why does higher education in the United States cost significantly more than in every other OECD nation except…
Mitch Daniels Has the Right Stuff for Purdue
Higher education does not produce many flashy, innovating entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Peter Thiel, or Elon Musk. The non-profit, highly subsidized, and low-incentive culture that universities operate in…
Master’s Degrees in Janitorial Science?
There has been mounting evidence that the financial payoff from the traditional bachelor’s degree is declining, particularly for men. For example, Census Bureau data suggest that, from 2005 to 2016,…
Is Underemployment of Recent College Grads a Serious Problem?
For decades, the American higher education establishment was able to sell the idea that promoting college was sound policy because it seemed that nearly all graduates found good, high-paying jobs.…
Are College Presidents Paid Too Much?
In a typical week, I get four or five inquiries from media relating to some higher education issue. Five years ago, perhaps five or ten percent of those inquiries related…
Seven Ways the Department of Education Has Made Higher Ed Worse
The Department of Education has had, so far as I can see, no positive impact on higher education and has either caused or ignored numerous negative effects. Thus it is a tragedy that the skeptics about creating it did not prevail back in 1979.
Universities in Islamic nations make the same mistakes we do—but worse
Universities are great inventions, and they have a role everywhere, in areas rich and poor, Christian, Islamic, and even atheist. But the Law of Diminishing Returns applies: universities in small doses can disseminate and advance knowledge in welfare-inducing ways, but if expanded too fast, they produce dismal results at the margin. In the Middle East/North African region, this problem is aggravated by over-centralization.