My first exposure to the notion of a bubble in higher education came when I read George Leef’s “The Overselling of Higher Education” in the Spring 2006 Academic Questions.1 At the time, Leef, along with Richard Vedder in Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much (AEI Press, 2004), were among the few sounding the alarm that higher education was on a path to unsustainability. Yet, like the proverbial frog in the boiling water that realizes too late he is being cooked to death, I didn’t realize that the stove was just heating up.
Fast forward to 2011. It has become fashionable to take a swing at the college piñata. The last year alone has produced such books as Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus’s Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We
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