The College Fix

Mona Charen writes for National Review Online on some solutions to the higher education bubble:

As a successful and highly popular two-term governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels taught the Republican party valuable lessons in management, and he is now doing the same for academia as president of Purdue University.

For the third year in a row, Purdue has frozen tuition rates. President Daniels (I know, it has a nice ring to it, but let that go) explained how he did it.

As USA Today explained, “There was no secret sauce, just a little sensible pruning that would be ordinary in the business world but seems alien in much of academia, where a steady flow of federal aid guarantees a steady flow of students at seemingly any price.”

Purdue consolidated some of its administrative positions. It chose a higher-deductible health-care plan. It cut food-service costs by switching providers and hiring part-time students to do work formerly performed by full-time employees. It short, it acted as if it cared about consumer, i.e., student satisfaction.

Now if only more universities would follow suit.

Read the full article.

Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter

IMAGE: Jared Benedict/Flickr