Politics & Policy

To Improve Higher Education, Scale Back Federal Involvement

By Richard Vedder April 2, 2015

America’s colleges and universities are terribly inefficient and excessively expensive, foster relatively little learning and ability to think critically, and turn out too many graduates who end up underemployed. These ...

NR PLUS Magazine

Subsidized Decline

By Richard Vedder August 25, 2014

A political storm is brewing in Washington over the consequences of rising college costs, but few politicians are talking about the causes of the problem, particularly since a major perpetrator ...

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The School of Hard Knocks

By Richard Vedder October 10, 2013

Speaking in Buffalo on August 22, President Obama vowed that the rapid rise in higher-education costs had to stop, and that he would exercise tough love with colleges to help ...

Fact-Checking the Student-Loan Mess

By Richard Vedder July 18, 2013

The Washington Post’s “fact checker” took Senator Lamar Alexander to task on Wednesday for a claim he made a week ago, that “Democrats, when they passed the health-care law, took $50 billion ...

Politics & Policy

The Solution to Student-Loan Debt

By Richard Vedder & Andrew Gillen October 21, 2011

Headlines are proclaiming this week that student-loan debt is rapidly nearing a trillion dollars. Earlier this year, as financial expert Mark Kantrowitz has noted, another landmark was achieved: Student borrowing ...

Politics & Policy

Forgive Student Loans?

By Richard Vedder October 11, 2011

As the Wall Street protests grow and expand beyond New York, growing scrutiny of the nascent movement is warranted. What do these folks want? Alongside their ranting about the inequality ...

Politics & Policy

Where Have All the Jobs Gone?

By Richard Vedder & Lowell Gallaway September 8, 2011

President Obama promises to deliver us still another plan to reduce unemployment. He is right about one thing: Jobs are not being created in modern-day America in any serious quantity. ...

Over-educated and Over-indebted

By Richard Vedder March 30, 2010

President Obama’s signing of the education bill is triply disastrous. First, he violated basic tenets of representative democracy by tying otherwise politically unattainable education changes to the health-care bill. Second, the ...

NR PLUS Magazine

Costly Lessons

By Richard Vedder September 17, 2009

How traditional universities rip students off.

Politics & Policy

Let’s Not Be 3.4 Percenters

By Richard Vedder January 16, 2007

The new Democratic congressional majority is voting Wednesday to lower the interest rate of some subsidized student loans from 6.8 to 3.4 percent. On the face of it, this appears ...