For the next five years, the Higher Education Act of 1965 - which Congress finally reauthorized Friday - will sputter along as a relic of its once radical objective: to break down fiscal barriers in the nation's higher education institutions. In the meantime, those barriers are reviving and all our politicians are doing is acknowledging their existence.
Tuition costs are exploding. States are allocating less and less of their budgets to universities. The credit market is contracting and the economy is on a bleak downslide. Meanwhile, the college degree, once the epitome of achievement and security, is a mere requirement for a decent job - which is harder to come by these days.
In 2006, the national average for student loan debt upon graduation was $21,100, up eight percent from 2005 . Private loan sales to students, moreover, increased 325 percent in 2006 from 2001 . Sound familiar? New York's attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, in October called parallels between the student loan and mortgage industries "provocative ."
The current financial crisis for students calls for the Great Society ideals that created the Higher Education Act - not a comically myopic piece of legislation which, while better informing students about an increasingly dismal fiscal situation, does little to change it.