It’s hard to say which is more remarkable about Kayla Heard, that she is graduating from Washington State University at age 16 or that she earned her degree without ever entering a classroom.

 
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Teenage college graduates are rare (shades of “Doogie Howser, M.D.”) but online degrees are increasingly common and gaining respect among employers, even when the graduate never had to set his or her actual feet on campus.

The home-schooled Union, Wash., girl is not the first teen to graduate from college. But her attendance by personal computer in the bedroom space she calls her “nerd cave” is significant in light of another story in the news: soaring college costs and student loan debt.

Heard’s achievement was made possible by online learning, an innovation that illustrates how much more innovative colleges and universities have been at making money than finding ways to save it.

Over the past 25 years, college tuition and fees have risen three times as fast as individual family income, according to the College Board, and tuition has increased over the past decade at a rate of 5.6 percent per year beyond the rate of general inflation.

That’s not all the fault of the colleges, of course, especially public institutions whose budgets are being cut by state governments and other hard-pressed funding sources.

But other hard-pressed funding sources like parents and students are asking a question that used to be unthinkable: Is college worth the cost?

No question that we Americans still love college diplomas, polls show. We only hate the soaring price. The average college graduate leaves school with $24,000 in debt, a figure that begins to weigh on the diploma’s potential value in many minds and wallets.

It may sound grandiose to say that the future of the American dream is at stake, but it is. Americans like to think our kids will earn a better standard of living than we have. Instead, it is becoming harder for the next generation merely to hold on to what we had. Student loan debt is a drag on individual lives and overall economic growth. It means young people take longer to marry, buy a home, have children and, in general, grow up.

What can be done? The growth of online courses nationwide — even at Harvard — illustrates how much we need to rethink education in the new century. We can begin by making the future of education funding part of the political debates on the state and federal level. But colleges and universities also need to investigate and report why tuition and fees have risen at a higher rate than general inflation — and family incomes — over the past 25 years, even during recessions. Particularly troublesome are the for-profit colleges, whose students are more likely than those at non-profits to default on student loans. The Obama administration is pushing a new regulation where for-profit colleges would lose access to federal student aid if they fail to meet benchmarks for loan repayments.

For-profit schools say the rules put an unfair burden on them. That’s worth debating. But so is the obligation that institutions have to help students get a good return on their time, effort and money, whether it is spent online or in an old-school classroom.

Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company.