DO I HEAR AN ECHO? Name-brand colleges not worth extra debt.

Summer jobs underwrote most of my undergraduate years at a state university. After college, I worked for a year to earn enough to pay for a master’s degree at an Ivy League university.

The columnist is a mom having sticker shock.

Tuition and room and board at two of the schools exceeded $50,000. Both reject more students than they accept, so they have no reason to fret much that their prices are driving off applicants. In fact, the most selective universities are typically the priciest.

Excess demand, forsooth.

As long as parents take out second mortgages and raid retirement funds to afford college, critics say, schools have no motivation to change. Plus, parents can point to evidence that their investment in a brand-name campus pays off for their child.

There's that self-selection bias at work again.

A study released this summer by PayScale Inc., which compiles compensation data, found that the median starting salary for Ivy League graduates is 32 percent higher than that of liberal-arts college graduates. PayScale says the median starting salary for a University of Georgia graduate is $44,100, compared to $66,400 for a Harvard grad. However, the study doesn’t address whether that pay differential is the result of a better education, or simply because the Ivies can attract higher-achieving students in the first place.

To me, the question is whether the additional prestige of a high-priced college degree justifies the additional debt that often comes with it, especially in this dicey economy. We’ve all heard stories about the bright college grad who moves back home with an anthropology degree, $40,000 in loans and a waitress job.

Left unsaid is whether that self-selection is also a flight to quality. Perhaps one's employment prospects with a name-brand anthropology degree are sufficiently better than the same prospects with a state-football-school anthropology degree that enrolling at the Ivies is the actuarially favorable bet.

The state universities have the opportunity to cash in on that excess demand. Hive off anything that hints at dumbing the programs down.

(Atlanta Journal-Constitution article via Minding the Campus.)

PAYING FOR HIGH SCHOOL, TWICE.

A commenter asks me to square my assertions about where higher education's excess capacity is with the recession-induced increases in community college enrollments. A Brookings Institution position paper that purports to make the case for greater support for community colleges (which need not be the same thing as greater support for College Lite) states my case for me.

Faced with high tuition costs, a weak economy, and increased competition for admission to four-year colleges, students today are more likely than at any other point in history to attend one of the nation’s 1,100 community colleges. Annually, community college enrollment is increasing at more than twice the rate of that at four-year colleges, by 2.3 million students in the first half of this decade alone.

Presumably those students had the option of attending community colleges during more prosperous times. It's the recession, not some new enthusiasm for access-assessment-remediation-retention, that's shifting the demand. I therefore repeat this suggestion.

Hive off anything that hints at dumbing the programs down.

The Brookings essay puts it slightly differently.

The rise of these institutions reflects their important roles in training workers, especially first-generation college students, for well-paying, high-demand jobs and in providing students a bridge to even higher levels of education.

That's what the high schools used to do, but I want to hold that thought for now. (I've never fully grasped that first-generation notion anyway. There are plenty of first-generation collegians in the flagships and the mid-majors.)