Gingrich calls for action on soaring cost of college
by Jim Brown
February 22, 2007
(OneNewsNow.com) - - Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich says Congress needs to take a "serious and aggressive" look at the artificial inflation of higher education costs. Speaking at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, he recently pointed out some of the reasons behind skyrocketing educational expenses at U.S. institutions of higher learning.Gingrich, a potential Republican U.S. presidential candidate, says colleges and universities typically cannot resist when given the opportunity to maximize their income and bureaucracy. "I'd love to see an investigation of how many additional bureaucrats per hundred students are there in the average college or university," he says, "because part of what's happened is, the more the feds have subsidized higher education, the more higher education has become a bloated, self-indulgent system."
During the recent joint news conference with Senator Chuck Schumer in Washington, Gingrich suggested that limiting federal subsidies for college tuition could have a profound effect on the higher education system. "If we guaranteed student loans up to the median cost of college and every college that was above the median suddenly had to face real market pressure, you would have a very significant challenge," he said.
"I think you also have to look at very expensive places like Harvard," Gingrich told the media. "The Harvard endowment is now so big," he asserted, "they could give away undergraduate education in perpetuity and never touch principal."
Such institutions "exist for themselves and are self-aggrandizing centers of authority," the political pundit said. He also referenced nearby George Washington University, expressing outrage over the fact that the school is raising its yearly tuition rate to $50,000 per student.
In addition to highlighting the rising trends in tuition and other direct educational expenses, Gingrich pointed out how college textbooks prices can also be subject to artificial inflation. "The difference in price between textbooks and regular books is entirely a function of monopoly behavior by oligopolies that manipulate the system," he noted.
Gingrich says education and healthcare are two zones where the prices keep rising while productivity shows no comparable increase. The possible 2008 presidential candidate is stressing the government's and the educational system's need to stem the tide of "artificial inflation" in higher education costs.
