Dear Mom & Dad: Please Send $$$$

Some questions have arisen about whether or not the public bailouts of financial firms and potentially the auto industry might be followed by others. Some of the possible hat-in-handers are now thought to include college presidents, because college is verra verra expensive these days. It's so expensive that the College Board suggests universities are pricing themselves out of the market.

So will President Stuffedshirt make a journey to Washington DC to ask for his and his fellow admins' share of the federal pie? Aside from the nearly 39 billion Uncle already doles out in federal financial aid, that is.

But why hit up Uncle for money when you can go after the favorite financial resource target of students everywhere, the 'rents? Colleges can almost always count on Mom and Dad putting out some more green for Junior at school if they ask for it instead of Junior asking. Because when colleges ask for it, it's called "tuition and fees," and when Junior asks for it, it's called "that %^*@& kid must think I'm made of money!" This way, Mom and Dad are the ones who go after Uncle for the money, rather than the big old mean college with a fat endowment and a score of ugly buildings. And since for some reason Uncle sees fit to keep increasing how much he hands out, then Prexy Stuffedshirt and Co. can keep bumping up the cost on their end.

As this opinion piece notes, increases in college costs have outpaced inflation for at least the last 16 years, six percent to about 2.5 to three percent. It also notes some of the reasons why -- a lavish lifestyle for students so they can do important things like form bands named Screaming Snotrockets, an even more lavish lifestyle for ol' Pres. Stuffedshirt (whose salary rose about six percent a year, a number we just ran across back in the annual college cost increase sentence), hiring a six-million dollar man, and so on.

Some of the money goes to buildings, of course. Despite what the appearance of most new university buildings would lead you to believe, these things don't just build themselves. Some of the rest goes to funding activities and such for the "first-year experience," which is the college's way of saying "sophomore year sucks and we helped."

Eventually, colleges may very well price themselves out of the market for all but the wealthiest students, some of whom don't care what kind of A you give them as long as you remember just whose mummy and daddy put a roof over your shabbily-dressed intellectual genius.

Can't wait to see what gets taught at those places then...