Last week at this time, I was sitting through the opening session of the “Emerging Issues Forum” at North Carolina State University. The topic for the conference was “Transforming Higher Education: A Competitive Advantage for North Carolina.” What those of us in the audience heard over and over was that the US is in economic danger because we are “underperforming” in higher education (because some other countries now put a somewhat higher percentage of their young people into and through college) and that a college education is unaffordable for many (which meant that government should subsidize more rather than that colleges should spend less).
I thought the event missed the boat, as I contend here.