EduBusiness:

Like the health care business, which has little to do with actual health care and more to do with re-allocating your money into other people's hands, the education business is more about liberating your money from your paycheck to someone else's bank account. Tamar Lewin takes a look at the Fafsa (Free Application for Federal Student Aid—people actually pay other people to fill out the form) and the difficulties people have filling out the six-page form so that they can apply for grants and loans to go to college. (See today's New York Times.)

What Lewin doesn't address is the fact that just a generation ago people didn't need to fill out forms like this just to get a loan to go to college. Most people didn't need a loan at all, their concern with the cost of attending college generally had to do with the income they lost during the handful of years that they actually attended. So what happened? Why does a college education cost so much money?

Consider this: Lewin points out that there is a concerted effort in Washington these days to reduce the size of the Fafsa form and make it both less intimidating to complete and requiring less time. But no one is talking about reducing the cost of higher education. Or at least putting a lid on it.

Neither the institutions themselves, nor the banks who profit so handsomely from the loans, have any incentive to keep costs low. I submit that as long as we are concerned about whether there will be a national playoff for the number one ranking of a college football team that we are not likely to find an answer to this situation.