Letter to the Editor: Federal Education Money Wasted on Diploma Mills

Re: “Will the college bubble burst from public subsidies?“, July 20

Michael Barone is right to decry the existence of a college bubble that’s worse in some ways than the recent housing bubble. States spend hundreds of millions of dollars operating colleges that are useless diploma mills that manage to graduate almost no one — like Chicago State, which had a 13 percent six-year graduation rate.

Seventeen million people who went to college because of rising college-attendance rates in recent years wound up in unskilled jobs, including 5,057 janitors who have advanced degrees. Tuition has risen faster than home prices did during the real estate bubble, and spending on administrators has risen as much as 600 percent at some colleges.

Federal education spending is grossly wasteful; $130,000 in federal stimulus money was recently spent on a book for teachers and school officials that bashed colorblindness and demonized white people.