Andrew Kelly of Minding the Campus writes of a talk he recently gave on higher education reform.

A Conservative Path to Higher Ed Reform

This is an edited transcript of comments delivered by Mr. Kelly at the 2015 Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Symposium on “The Future of Higher Education” June 3 in Washington D.C.The event was co-sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center and National Affairs. You can read the full transcript of the symposium here.

Three trends are complicating reform of higher education.

First, tuition has been trouncing family incomes and has grown faster than just about every other good or service in the economy as well.

Second, the wages recent college graduates earn have been flat or declining for quite a while. This is important because it means that people are paying more for a degree that in absolute terms is actually not worth as much as it used to be. It is worse for people who have some college and no degree. They earn even less. They look a lot like high school graduates these days.

The problem is we have a lot of dropouts, as anybody who has looked at graduation rates can attest. So if you started at a two-year public, just 40% of students finish with some kind of credential — associate’s degree, bachelor’s degree, certificate – within six years. This is for the 2008 cohort, the most recent data available. It is from the National Student Clearinghouse.