“Universities are digging deeper into a pool of less qualified high school students who would never have been admitted to college in the past, while the costs of a college degree are increasing at a considerable rate.”
At the U of Washington they are skipping over in-state Valedictorians to go after lesser kids from out-of-state. Higher tuition from them. Makes me mad to think of my tax dollars going to the UW, but my straight A kid may not get in.
Don’t be so mad. The out-of-state students return a profit for the university, allowing in-state students to attend more cheaply. My concern would be the effect of lower-quality students on the academic reputation of the school.
State funded schools have to get a lesson from the parents and taxpayers. They do not exist to make the school bureaucrats wealthy with gold plated retirement packages. The reason these bureaucrats bring in out of state students and foreign students is for the money, only. State funded schools are to provide for children of the state’s citizenry, it is described in many of the charters that created the schools in the first place.
So as long as citizen abdicate their duty to keep the government bureaucrats reigned in, you will see the continuing theft from the state’s tax monies to fund educating everyone but the people they are supposed to serve. They will continue to add to the tax and tuition burden of the state’s citizens, until education at these establishments is out of reach for everyone but the wealthiest foreigners.
UC Berkeley prime example for where California state education is headed.