SC Colleges Get Bad Report Card

If you feel like South Carolina college tuition is getting more and more expensive, you're not alone:

Tuition is rising faster than household income in South Carolina, says the study of eight colleges and universities by the S.C. Policy Council, a public policy research and education foundation that advocates for more limited government. The study, which did not include Winthrop University, The Citadel and many other state institutions, also says:

The colleges and universities do a poor job of retaining and graduating students. The amount they spend on administrative costs is rising faster than the amount they spend on instruction. Instruction too often is tilted away from general education coursework toward "narrow or trendy subject matters. Governance of higher education does not encourage efficiency nor does it offer help in measuring and improving academic quality.

This isn't just a South Carolina problem. All across the country, tuition costs are going up. When you have a student loan system that makes is so easy for students to access huge sums of money to pay the tuition and a culture that demands everyone go to college, I can see why colleges and universities continue to raise prices - there's no pressure on them to keep prices low.

The demand for a college education is very high, and it is easy (perhaps too easy) to get the money. This model isn't sustainable. Prices (tuition costs) keep going up, and up, and up... and people are willing to buy more and more (because it can't be a bad investment, right?) just like the housing market. I think we all remember how that turned out.