Taxation U. The real college-cost story has been ignored.

Amidst all the woeful tales of college students over-burdened with tuition and college loans, the real college-cost story — that it's taxpayers who are truly suffering — has been ignored.

Here's reality. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, more than half of public university revenue — $79 billion — was extracted directly from federal, state, and local taxpayers, while only 18.5 percent came from student fees and tuition. The bill for private schools was smaller, but still mammoth: 16.4 percent of private college revenue — $12 billion — came directly from taxpayers, with tuition and fees providing 43 percent.

Of course, tuition, too, is covered largely by taxpayers. According to a new report from the College Board, a national, non-profit schools association, "Almost 60 percent of undergraduates receive some form of financial aid to help them pay for college. While a significant amount of this aid is in the form of loans, frequently subsidized by the federal government, over $40 billion of grant aid was distributed to college students by federal and state governments and by colleges and universities" last year.

Schools and students, naturally, say they need these huge subsidies. However, an October New York Times article, "Jacuzzi U.? A Battle of Perks to Lure Students," suggests this is hardly the case:

[Campus recreation director] Kathy Anzivino believes there must be some pinnacle of amenities that universities simply cannot surpass, some outer limit so far beyond the hot tubs, waterfalls and pool slides she offers at the University of Houston that even the most pampered students will never demand it and the most recruitment-crazed colleges will never consent to put it on their grounds.

Yet David Rood, a spokesman for the National Association of College Auxiliary Services, says the "base minimum is a thing of the past. There is a lot of one-upsmanship going on. Whatever the students want is pretty much what they're getting."

· A Penn State student center featuring "two ballrooms, three art galleries, a movie theater with surround sound and a 200-gallon tropical ecosystem with newts and salamanders ... and a 550-gallon salt-water aquarium with a coral reef."

· "[A] 657,000-square-foot complex featuring kayaks and canoes, indoor batting cages and ropes courses, massages and a climbing wall big enough for 50 students to scale simultaneously" being built at Ohio State.

· University of Southern Mississippi's planned "full-fledged water park, complete with water slides, a meandering river and something called a wet deck — a flat, moving sheet of water so that students can lie back and stay cool while sunbathing."

Taxpayers, fortunately, don't cover all the costs of these Carnival Cruise-like attractions. They're financed largely by student fees of a few hundred dollars a year paid over several decades, fees students accepted when pushing for these projects. Of course, "future classes of students and the parents who support them will have no say at all" — the college-cost problem in a nutshell.

People simply don't care how much something costs if they're not paying. Many students — while crying poverty — gladly support on-campus amusement parks for which others must pay. Nationally, as long as taxpayers cover most college costs, students will demand endless frills, ignoring institutions that don't furnish them.

Unfortunately, congressional proposals to contain costs won't help. The Affordability in Higher Education Act, sponsored by Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (R., Calif.), would impose price controls, threatening revocation of federal funds for schools that raise tuition and fees too fast. This would actually produce the opposite of taxpayer relief: State politicians, lest their colleges lose federal money, would transfer a greater burden to taxpayers, keeping their schools' "sticker prices" low. Tuition-reliant private schools, in contrast, would have to seek aid increases, and might abandon projects that would have allowed them to compete with their heavily subsidized public cousins.

As bad as McKeon's bill is, the alternatives are worse. The College Opportunity for All Act, sponsored by Rep. George Miller (D., Calif.), would raise federal Pell grant maximums from $4,050 per-student this year to $11,600 in 2011, and make it easier for students to borrow money. A similar measure from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D., Mass.) would make borrowing for college cheaper. Even less of the cost of college would be borne by its consumers — inflation would continue to grow.

Higher education devours every dollar it can sink its teeth into, but its victims aren't students. They actually feed the beast, demanding more and more goodies for their colleges. No, the victims are the nation's taxpayers, and it's time the word got out.

Tuitions outpace inflation because of the willingness of the national government to pay them. The colleges behave like any other economic entity. They charge what the market will bear. If that market is a bottomless wallet, the tuitions charged will reflect that fact, regardless of whether the school actually teaches anything much worth knowing.

People simply don't care how much something costs if they're not paying

This is the reason why socialism is so attractive to so many people. And the average schmuck's ignorance of basic economics prevents them from realizing that they are paying, through a zillion taxes.

It is, in large part, the ultra-left wing education unions. Tenured professors teach, maybe, one course a year while writing artcles, attending conferences (all to enhance personal reputations and resumes) and doing outside consulting. Public universities have little need for having reseach to reflect positively, they are trade schools with a locked in client base.

Add in the illegal criminals and aiens who get free education, and you have the reasons these costs are so hugh. So long as the feds keep raising Pell Grants and other student support, the schools will raise their spending. It is exactly what vouchers will do to other levels of education. The taxpayers take it in the shorts and the middle class is priced out of the market, exactly what the neocommunists wanted to happen in the first place.

The answer is to have public shools hire folks capable of teaching full time what the taxpayers of a state need/want.

Times have surely changed, and expectations on campus have changed. The cost of a college education at even the best private colleges and universities (tuition, room and board, books and some spending money) was less than $5,000 per year in the mid-1960s, more typically between $3,000-$4,000. Most state colleges and universities charged no tuition, or nominal tuition to state residents. In 1965, at the nations flagship public university, the University of California, Berkeley, total fees to the university for a Californian were around $600 per year. Room and board could be had for some $1,500. Out of state tuition was only around $1,500 if memory serves.

But, in fairness, most families didn't make more than $20,000 a year in those days, and you could by a house for $20-30,000. An expensive car, such as a Mercedes, cost $5,000, and even a Rolls Royce was $15,000.

I'm not sure the faculties are the problem, but I am sure having public research universities is not the problem. The number of real public research universities is very small compared to the number of public colleges which focus on undergraduates. Add to that the junior or community colleges which are explicitly trade schools, although now more for white collar trades such as teaching and accounting than for the manual trades, and probably 90% of public higher education is undergraduate and vocationally oriented.

I would rather have at least a few premier public research universities operating at the highest levels than leave all research to the private universities.

In my experience with senior tenured faculty at the University of California, all of them taught far more than your 'one course a year' and probably 2/3 of them were at least as interested in (serious) undergraduate education as they were with grad students and even their own research.

I would adjust the $5,000 to closer to $50,000 today, but who's quibbling. It's a lot. I have a daughter who is a college freshman, and, believe me, it is expensive. She's at a relatively small, private, religously-affiliated, liberal arts college that the Fiske Guide rates as a "Best Buy", but the total is still over $30,000 a year when you figure in books, music lessons, a little pocket money (which she earned working last summer) and travel.

When I applied to college in the mid-1960s, my middle-class parents wouldn't even let me apply for scholarships: since they felt they could afford, with a lot of scrimping, to pay for college, the didn't want me taking money away from someone who couldn't have gone to college without the scholarship aid.

How times change: I see kids in our very wealthy suburb (average house worth about $1.3 million, average income probably well over $200k per year) fighting for merit scholarships and athletic scholarships, even when their parents have net worths in excess of $25 million.

My tuition at Penn State in 1970 was $333 a term, room and board was approx. the same. And we had a student center with tables so we could sit around and study. We didn't have a campus theater with surround sound -- we sat on the floor in a big room somewhere and they put up a screen and projecter. It worked for us.

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