Between 1995 and 2006, tuition and fees at public four-year institutions rose 51 percent after inflation, according to Christopher Clausen writing in the Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2006, “The New Ivory Tower” (not available online). Clausen also notes that the National Assessment of Adult Literacy recently found that only 31 percent of college-educated Americans qualified as “prose literate”–able fully to comprehend a newspaper story, for example. This is down from 40 percent a decade ago.