A Sign of Higher Education’s “Blowoff Rally”?

12/21/09 Baltimore, Maryland – We’ve found a unique indicator of what could be a bursting bubble in higher education – yet another sector of the economy where government meddling has driven up costs across the decades.

Short story: Mamas, don’t let your babies don’t grow up to be language or literature professors.

The Modern Language Association forecasts that new faculty positions for teachers of Dreiser and deconstructionism are down 37% from 2008… and the 2008 figure was down 26% from 2007.

“Students thinking of going to graduate school in English should understand that right now their chance of landing a job that provides them a livable wage is 50-60%,” the MLA’s Rosemary Feal tells The New York Times. “What I often hear from grad students is, ‘I had no clue it was this bad.’” Especially if their concentration is 20th-century American literature, where a single opening gets up to 400 applicants.

We don’t say this just to snicker at the job prospects of humanities students. (Indeed, we have a soft spot, having majored in philosophy.) Again, we suspect this is an early sign of a bursting bubble in higher education – where costs rose at an even higher clip than housing for much of the last 25 years. Like all good bubbles, it must come to an end. The 32% tuition increase at the University of California system could be the sign of higher education’s final “blowoff rally.”

(Oh, and now they’re talking about a 1% tuition tax to help reduce the state’s budget deficit. You can’t make this stuff up.)

Addison Wiggin

Addison Wiggin is the editorial director of The Daily Reckoning, and executive publisher of Agora Financial, an independent financial research firm based in Baltimore, Maryland. His second editions of international best-sellers Financial Reckoning Day Fallout and The New Empire of Debt, which he co-authored with Bill Bonner, were updated in 2009. His third book, The Demise of the Dollar… and Why it’s Even Better for Your Investments was updated in 2008, the same year he wrote I.O.U.S.A. Read more about Wiggin’s best-selling books here.   

Wiggin is the executive producer and co-writer of I.O.U.S.A. an acclaimed documentary nominated for the Grand Jury prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and the 2009 Critics Choice Award and shortlisted for a 2009 Academy Award. Wiggin is a three-time New York Times best-selling author whose work has been recognized by The New York Times Magazine, The Economist, Worth, The New York Times, The Washington Post as well as major network news programs.

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