According to mic.com "In 2015, the average student borrower is graduating with about $35,000 worth of debt," and also, according to bloomberg.com: "The expense of higher education has risen more than 550 percent since 1985." Both of these above statements should be of massive concern to all Americans and logically when taking into account all of the hi-tech advances that have been made over the last thirty years, these statements should be seen as a source of real disappointment as well as a financial disgrace to those that are just trying to educate themselves to get ahead.
The fact of the matter is that there does not seem to be in effect, a policy in place that is determined to lower school costs and to make that an overriding mission. Instead, while colleges have changed over the years in some fundamental respects, such as by allowing more students to have more choices in regards to how they receive their education and the tools that they use to do so, the changes to date, are not nearly dramatic enough, nor have they often been of a monetary savings to those that have minimal financial assets to begin with.
Higher education has done a massive disservice to students by simply not taking the time to look at the problem from the right perspective, and that perspective for certain students, should not be to provide all the bells and whistles, all the brick mortars, all the fringe benefits, and all the massive, convoluted, and redundant bureaucracy, but instead should have as the overarching principle to provide a focused curriculum which makes its very purpose, first and foremost, to competently teach students the subjects that they need to know so as to provide them with a degree in their discipline of choice, which will enable them to get meaningful employment.
The biggest mistake that higher education makes is not scaling up their system so as to make the overall product more affordable to the students that wish to partake of it. For instance, a live lecture within a fixed physical building, which has limited seats, along with mandated physical books, at a fixed location and time, is the most expensive way to lecture students. Instead, an online lecture, previously recorded and edited, with additional information which answers the most common questions, along with adjunct professors or advanced students, providing additional online help, which would be essentially available for the most part to all students at any time of the day, through the internet and displayed on their laptop, is something which could be readily scaled up to handled a student body of considerably more people than can be contained within a physical classroom, yet the costs of this online setup, which is repeatable, is of far less expense.
Further to the point, the cost of physical books, have been and continue to be a very sore point with students, but this can easily be mitigated, by not having any physical books at all, but instead having all books available online, which eliminates the expense and the inconvenience of print runs, as well as making it far easier to revise these books and course materials in the future.
The thing is the way that college education is looked at for a significant amount of students, is fundamentally flawed, to which I suspect, most college campuses, seem to be somewhat oblivious to the actual costs associated with education. Instead, the way it should be, is to start with the premise that there is an absolute desire to create a curriculum for a bachelor's degree, to which the cost cannot exceed a certain fixed amount of money and then to plan such a course out in such a manner so as to achieve that noble goal.
If, in fact, that it is true, as Obama said, that America desires that we "…put a higher education within reach for anyone who wants it," than the only way this objective can be met is for price, convenience, and sensibility to be working together like a well-oiled machine. The more innovation, the more imagination, and the more determination that we make in order to provide real choice for our higher education needs, the better the outcome will be.