Apparently this is the kind of bold policy idea Chris Christie
thinks could revive his limp presidential hopes:
I just paid the bills, I’ve got two in college. Between Princeton and Notre Dame this year it’s $122,000 for the two of them. Secondly, here’s what I’ve suggested out there that we need to do on this, Joe, is we’ve got to make these guys accountable. Have you ever seen a more opaque bill than the college bill? It’s three lines. Tuition, room and board, other fees, $62,000. If you got a bill like that at a restaurant, if you went to a restaurant and had $150 and it just said food, $150, you’d send the bill back to the waiter and say tell me what I’m charged. But instead we, who pay college costs, those three lines, we write it. They should have to detail what they’re spending their money on and secondly, they should be able to unbundle it. We should be able to pay for the things we want to pay for. The reason these costs go up so much is there’s no market test on college tuition.
Yeah, let's let people pay for only the parts of a college education they want. The diploma, for instance. How much would it cost to forget about the education and just get the diploma? And who should get to choose what parts of an education are worth paying for—the teenager entering college, or the parents who don't want their kid wasting time on
art and
music and
literature when they could be taking the fastest route to a high-paying investment banking job? And no word from Christie on how his plan would account for the fact that, at schools like Princeton, tuition doesn't cover a student's full costs—the university's endowment contributes even to those paying full tuition.
No one is saying there aren't problems with college costs. From 1976 to 2005, the ranks of senior college administrators grew enormously. In the case of public colleges and universities, tuition has risen because state governments are not investing in higher education. Between 1990-91 and 2010-11, the amount of funding states provided per capita and per student declined significantly. Those are issues that should be addressed. But people like Chris Christie aren't taking aim at those. They're whining about all that frivolous education kids are getting, suggesting that it would be better for people to get bits and pieces of an education, enough for them to take on the job they think they want at 18 or 22—never mind if it would equip them to change their mind or their career later on. And the value of a general, broad-based education? Forget about it.
What's particularly gross is that while Christie puts this in terms of his own kids, ideas like this wouldn't hit Princeton students whose parents can write those tuition checks. The elite will, overwhelmingly, continue to ensure that their kids get an elite education. But paying for and getting just part of an education, that's the kind of thing that gets pushed hard on lower-income kids.