When colleges boast of enrollment growth, be scared. Be really, really, scared!

Suppose hospitals boasted about the massive increases in the number of patients who had to be taken care over weeks within their facilities.  The public and the government would be alarmed that either there is something seriously wrong with the hospitals.  More so when heath care costs are soaring.

The increases in in-patient numbers would also make us worry about possible public health epidemics--the possibility that there was something significant that was making people really, really sick.

Fortunately, hospitals don't work that way.  Their goal is not to go into an overdrive and increase the hospitalization rates.  If at all, the complaint often is that hospitals are always too keen on sending patients packing quite early in the rehab stage.

Now, compare that behavior with the trend in another service industry where too costs have risen dramatically: higher education.

As the following chart from Carpe Diem shows, costs of college have outpaced even the much talked about health care costs.

Is all that college tuition worth the investments though?  Not at all. I have blogged enough about this (including this op-ed in the Oregonian.)

Isn't it an unfortunate irony then that the only goal of public colleges and universities seems to be to maximize enrollment!  To use that hospital analogy, more patients, with patients taking longer and longer to get better even while paying high costs, and when they leave the hospital many of them are worse off than when they entered it :(

Yet, again, I find that public universities, like here in Oregon, are only too thrilled about the unheard of and historic growth in the numbers of students.  Only one university seems less concerned about enrollment itself:

It also might be tougher to get in to Portland State University in the future but for different reasons. School officials there have shifted the emphasis from enrollment to retention and graduation, said PSU spokesman David Santen.

Which is how it ought to be--focus on quality patient care, so to say.

Back in 2009, David Leonhardt, who later won a Pulitzer for his succinct analytical writings in the NY Times, observed that a big problem with higher education was:

the focus on enrollment rather than completion, the fact that colleges are not held to account for their failures.

As far as colleges are concerned, it seems to be a variation of the old sarcastic comment, "the operation was successful, but the patient died."

The leaders of educational institutions don't seem to care; in fact, their worry is that there is not enough money coming from the federal government in order to subsidize students:

Current proposals in Congress to cut funding for Pell grants — the federal government’s primary program to help economically disadvantaged students go to college — are shortsighted and could have a devastating effect on students’ access to higher education and work force training, especially in today’s weak economy.

As noble as it might sound, cheap money handed out by the feds ends up benefiting the colleges and not the intended beneficiares--students.  Here is an explanation of how that happens:

[The] U.S. federal government is directly behind the bubble we observe to exist in the cost of U.S. higher education, with federal spending during years of recession effectively insulating U.S. colleges and universities from the nation's economic circumstances by subsidizing their operations.
These subsidies, delivered at times of recession, free U.S. higher education institutions to set the price of their tuition independently of their students' ability to pay based upon their or their family's current household income.
The only limiting factor for U.S. higher education institutions then would be the actual growth of U.S. federal spending. This would be why the average cost of college tuition in the United States would appear to have come to track the total level of federal government spending so closely.
As a result, the cost of college tuition has skyrocketed with respect to the typical family's household income. Consequently, when a student attends college today, they must increasingly rely upon subsidies from the federal government that fill the gap between what their institutions charge and what they must pay for out of their own pockets.

So, yes, the college tuition and fees keep increasing, and quite rapidly--an example, also about Oregon, in this news report:

Oregon's seven universities have proposed an average 7.5 percent tuition increase for full-time, resident undergraduate students next year, pushing the average annual cost of tuition and fees to $7,634. ...
The proposed increases, which the State Board of Higher Education is expected to approve Friday, range from 5.1 percent at Western Oregon University to 9 percent at PSU, the University of Oregon and the Oregon Institute of Technology. Proposed increases are 8.1 percent at Oregon State University and 6.8 percent at Southern Oregon and Eastern Oregon universities.

Where does all the additional money go?  I suppose we need all that extra money for rock-climbing walls, re-branding, ... who cares if students are screwed in the process, right?