Insipidly correct, painfully self-conscious guardians of their own status, "higher" "education", as Richard Vedder's piece makes clear is, to a considerable degree, just another bureaucratic interest group looking to keep its bubble - built on the assumption of an unlimited market and endlessly rising value - going. Like New York's public sector workers who are guaranteed a Madoff-like eight percent return on their pensions come boom or bust, the typical institution start its annual budgeting with the assumption of a 7% tuition increase and goes on from there regardless of whether or not the people it credentials are actually educated.

In the wake of its transformation by the cataclysms of the late 1960s, the so-called humanities moved from reflecting on the great works of the western tradition to an academic parody of the class struggle. The upshot has been that the intellectual value of the credentials colleges bestow has moved inversely with the rise of tuition. What Mr Vedder has uncovered statistically is known, albeit inchoately, by much of the public, which having already implicitly downgraded the status of our colleges is coming to recognize that a college degree may not even carry earning power.

Academia has a ready response to all this. It will argue in its learned journals that the rise of cheaper means of credentialing such as on-line courses was all a part of the right-wing conspiracy, inspired, no doubt, by Sarah Palin.

* * * * * * * * * *