May 30, 2013

Chomsky on student debt

From a wide-ranging interview with Noam Chomsky:

[O]ne of the main problems for students today — a huge problem — is sky-rocketing tuitions.  Why do we have tuitions that are completely out-of-line with other countries, even with our own history?  In the 1950s the United States was a much poorer country than it is today, and yet higher education was … pretty much free, or low fees or no fees for huge numbers of people.  There hasn’t been an economic change that’s made it necessary, now, to have very high tuitions, far more than when we were a poor country.

Read Chomsky’s breakdown of the rich-country-indebted-student paradox here.