In this piece published in today’s Wall Street Journal, Robert Iosue and Frank Mussano discuss the high and steadily increasing cost of college. I think their analysis of the cause of steady cost increases is pretty accurate — “easy access to government loan money has given colleges license to boost tuition with no motivation to keep costs down.” The faculty teach less and the number of administrators who teach not at all has grown and grown. But almost all college presidents prefer to raise money (through tuition and other means) to battling with all the campus “stakeholder” groups to minimize costs and maximize productivity, which is to say, student gains in skill and knowledge.

Iosue, who served as the president of York College for 15 years, knows whereof he speaks. As he explained in this Pope Center piece recently, he did manage to keep tuition increases low while at the same time improving the academic climate and reputation.

The remedy he and Mussano offer — a federal audit of colleges, seems to me one that is not apt to accomplish much other than to keep some Education Department bureaucrats busy. The underlying sickness is caused by that gusher of governmental funding into an overwhelmingly non-profit system. High costs and poor learning outcomes are symptoms and I just can’t see how even the best audit could make more than a tiny difference in either cost or results.