Nothing surprising in a recent NY Times article that says, "At private nonprofit colleges and universities, tuition rose 4.5 percent to an average of $27,293, or $36,993 with room and board."  Costs rising 300% or more faster than inflation results largely from the fact that government unquestioningly agrees to give or lend students as much as it takes.

Colleges and universities have a blank check to spend, and no incentive to become more productive (provide more education for less cost).  In fact, the trend is to provide less education at more cost.  Semesters are shortened, grades are inflated, more adjunct professors are used, courses are dumbed down.

 To see how shoddily colleges treat their customers, let's see how the $9,700 for room and board breaks down.

Here's the math:

$15 a day for food x 30 days  x 9 months minus 35 vacation days, total 235 days.  @$15 per day = $3,525 for food  (Surely college food can be mass produced for $5 a meal)

$6,175 left for a room.  $6,175 divided by 9 months = $686 a month to rent a single room, probably with a shared bath and a roommate.

        If the room is shared with a roommate, the college is raking in $1,372 per room (about $45 a night, comparable to a basic motel but without the bathroom, free soap and shampoo, garbage service, high speed Internet, maid service, parking, and free continental breakfast).

     Remember students who room off campus and feed themselves also get all the campus amenities and Internet, so the $6,175 is just the room.  That seems to be the best our best academic minds, including universities that provide MBA degrees, can do.

      If that doesn't seem like a rip off, let's try text books.  Professors often force students to buy text books written by themselves or their friends at $50 to $100 a book when such books can now be produced by on-demand publishers for $5-$10 a copy.  The cost would be even less if the books were published as e books for reading and annotating on an e book reader or computer.

     These are often the same professors and universities that accuse  the commercial world and capitalism in general of greedy profiteering.  The same students who pay for the text books (or whose parents pay), are taught that a market system is predatory.  

   Is the game here that students who are exploited won't know it because they are too busy protesting the exploitation of others?

   Perhaps, but equally likely is that since parents, not students, pay the incentive to protest is also missing.  If parents don't pay, students can borrow the money.  Talk about subprime and predatory lending.