What's Wrong with College: They are changing the SATs again. The major change under consideration is adding an essay portion to the exam. This is good news for someone, probably many someones. The SATs themselves are being questioned with regard to their relevancy. That's bad news for the industry that creates them and for the folks who sell materials and services meant to prepare students to score highly on them. So they need to be changed.

Let's not panic folks. No one who graduates from high school is going to be denied a college education because of low SAT scores. The sole relative factor here is money. The cost of education continues to far outpace inflation, and it was already expensive to start with.

Decades ago when I graduated from high school, the financial concern facing young people was the loss of income over the four-year period during which one earned a bachelor's degree. No one thought much about tuition, fees and books, unless they were headed for an Ivy League school. Nowadays attending your neighboring state college will require a second mortgage on the old plantation.

In the good old days, the hard sell pitch came in the form of demonstrating to young people just how much more money they'd earn over the course of their lives with that college diploma in hand. Today the argument is about why it is okay to start off one's career with a debt load equivalent to that of having purchased a home.

New SAT old SAT, neither makes much difference to the real issues at hand.