Recently, stories around the theme of a higher-education bubble have been plentiful — for example this one in Money magazine. And in the Wall Street Journal, Anthony Paletta of Minding the Campus writes about the downsizing at high-profile universities that’s occurring because endowments have shrunk.

During the fat years of artificially low interest rates, the housing industry ballooned, and now that the federal government’s “stimulus package” for housing has run its course, we find that the country overbuilt and must now suffer a painful contraction. The same is true of higher education. During the boom years, endowments grew apace and universities went on a spending spree. Now we see that it was, to use the current academic fad, unsustainable.