The reason why many don’t take advantage of inexpensive options for post-secondary education is that many young Americans are woefully unprepared for and completely uninterested in further education.

A recent Chronicle Review article, The Labors of Leisure, sheds some light on this strange-sounding, perhaps oxymoronic field. And it leads me to conclude that it is based on a misunderstanding about what the future holds.

Nationally, tuitions have increased on average 440 percent in the past quarter century—faster than the increases seen in both the Consumer Price Index and health care costs over the same period.

Kate Walsh of the National Council on Teacher Quality . . . says, “We have very low expectations; we’ve made teaching the easiest job to get into in terms of preparation, and yet it’s one of the hardest jobs there is.”

. . . [B]y far the biggest problem in American higher education is massive subsidization, and at the federal level that primarily means subsidizing students.

University system administrators have a staff of fulltime researchers and are inside the system—they know the real story and use it to their advantage, only feeding the part-time board members information that supports the goals of the administration.

“UnKoch My Campus” reads a headline in yesterday’s edition of Inside Higher Ed. Students at Florida State are trying to start a nationwide movement to protest the use of philanthropic contributions by Charles and David Koch.

Universities are increasingly turning to private donors to fund their operations.