The Higher Education Bubble

Lynne O'Shaughnessy of US News thinks so. An Sara Lenz at the Deseret News reports on the US News article. I have been saying this for quite some time. Yes, I think that the education market is very analagous to the housing market and it will burst. I think education is being oversold to millions of young Americans as the quality of education increasingly becomes diluted and an irrational investment for many of these. Are there other benefits of education? Sure. Shai Reshef of the Huffington Post argues below:

"Higher education includes benefits that go beyond the financial opportunities it may provide down the road, such as individual benefits attained in relation to self-improvement, friendships, empowerment, global awareness, access to diversity, exposure to different ways of thinking or topics of interest and more."

I agree that there are other non-monetary benefits to education. But these mean very little if after four or six years of deferring training in the labor force, one still struggles to pay for the rent or the groceries let alone the debt that they have incurred. Due to the Internet, there are low-cost education and networking opportunities that our parents would never dreamed of 40 years ago. However, the fact that more and more studies show that students are studying less than ever demonstrates that many students are not investing in education for its intrinsic value (although they may be buying more beer than ever before in those extra hours). The value of a college degree has decreased significantly as the costs have continued to soar. Sounds like a subprime to me. Having worked in higher education for almost five years full time, I can see that this is happening.