Have you checked out what it will cost to send your kid to college?  It is out of sight today and by tomorrow only millionaires will be able to afford a higher education for their children.  If you buy into the conversation about education being the savior of our nation, then how will the average person go about getting a university degree without having to give up their first born male?  How can your child get a better education without being in debt for the first 20 years of their adult life?  Are there any descent ideas on this problem?

Well, first of all, there are a couple of good ideas to help everyone get a higher education….and these are?

From an article in the Economist magazine…..

…..cost-cutting strategies were as follows. First, separate the funding of teaching and research. Research is a public good, he reasoned, but there is no reason why undergraduates should pay for it. Second, increase the student-teacher ratio. Business and law schools achieve good results with big classes. Why not other colleges? Mr Fried thinks that universities will be able to mix some small classes with big ones even if they have fewer teachers. Third, eliminate or consolidate programmes that attract few students. Fourth, puncture administrative bloat. The cost of administration per student soared by 61% in real terms between 1993 and 2007. Private research universities spend $7,000 a year per student on “administrative support”: not only deans and department heads but also psychologists, counsellors, human-resources implementation managers and so on. That is more than the entire cost of educating a student under Mr Fried’s scheme.

there are other ideas……..Shai Reshef, an educational entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist, is pioneering an even more radical idea. His University of the People offers free higher education (not counting the few hundred dollars it costs to process applications and mark exams), pitching itself to poor people in America and the rest of the world. The university does this by exploiting three resources: the goodwill of academic volunteers who want to help the poor, the availability of free “courseware” on the internet and the power of social networking. Some 2,000 academic volunteers have designed the courses and given the university some credibility. Tutors direct the students, who so far number 1,000 or so and hail from around the world, to the online courses. They also help to organise them into study groups, and then supervise from afar, dropping in on discussions and marking tests.

Sometimes when academics grouse that there is “never enough money”, they are justified—big science costs big bucks. But higher education is nevertheless marred by inefficiencies and skewed incentives. Students pay to be taught, but their professors are rewarded almost entirely for research. Mr Fried’s calculations suggest that one can slash costs without sacrificing much that students value. Mr Reshef’s experiment may fail, but there is no doubt that universities need more experimenters. The cost of tuition cannot forever rise faster than students’ ability to pay. Industries that cease to offer value for money sooner or later get shaken up. American universities are ripe for shaking.

There are always answers to the problems and education is NO different….the problem is NO one wants to assert themselves into the conversation for fear of reprisals….this is why we have the media making up slogans and doing features but offering NO doable answers to the problem…..anyone can point out the problem but finding solutions that do not favor one part of society over another is NOT that easy…..and next there needs to be the will to make education better……

In today’s country….there is NO will!

Without that will….there is NO future!