One big reason why going to college is so expensive is that schools have to spend a great deal of money on compliance with a host of federal and state regulations. Rarely do those regulations accomplish much and the costs dwarf whatever benefits there might be.

In today’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Nick Cooper writes about his experience as the main compliance officer for Norwich University in Vermont. “I’m part of the administrative bloat that universities have taken on to ensure we’re dotting all the ‘I’s’ and crossing all the ‘T’s’ of state and federal regulations,” he writes.

He devotes most of his piece to the varied state regulations requiring a school that offers online college courses, as Norwich does, to obtain government approval first. (Talk about the Nanny State!) In some states that is easily done at very little cost, and Cooper points to Wyoming as exemplary in that regard. Others, however, are far more difficult. In Arkansas, Cooper had to be present at meetings of the Board of Education. He had to make four trips to Little Rock, but at no meeting was even a single question asked about the Norwich offerings. “All of that was a pure waste of my time and the school’s money,” he writes.

Economists talk about the dead-weight costs of many government regulations, and we get a textbook example of that here. Resources must be squandered merely to avoid trouble with bureaucrats whose jobs themselves don’t involve the creation of any value, educational or otherwise. As I have often said, only a country as wealthy as the U.S. could possibly afford a higher education system that is so costly and ineffectual as ours.