This is the NY Times quote of the day:

"What's the deal here? Why do costs outstrip inflation? A college education is one of the most expensive and important things you'll ever buy, and, yes, it's still a good value, blah, blah, blah, but you can find out more about a lot of other products."
MARGARET SPELLINGS, secretary of education, on tuition increases.

Yeah. Other products, as in, say, gasoline??

So this is the viewpoint of the secretary of education, who apparently can't do the math required to figure out where the money that's been yanked from higher-ed budgets by economically challenged states is coming from . . .

All of this resonates at the moment because I'm up early, unable to sleep, because of an argument I had with Emma right before bed last night. She wants to get a job. I kept telling her, "Your job is to get good grades." She pulled out all the stops, basically, but I stuck to that line. She's frustrated because she doesn't get as much money for gas, food, and sundries as she'd like. (She inherited the Mitsubishi, which now needs shocks - expensive shocks - and which, basically, we've decided to stop fixing . . . personally, I see no need for a sixteen-year-old to have her own car, but that opinion is not unilaterally shared, to say the least.)

Of course, if we're an empire in decline, basically turning into a service economy, then it makes sense that she would value the minimum-wage job in the present rather than the well-paying (and possibly outsourced to India) job in the future . . . And when the Secretary of Education essentially says that a college education isn't good value, well, then, there you have it . . .

Grr. It's hard to be a parent sometimes . . .