A great interview with Anya Kamenetz outlines some of the ways that higher education is rapidly changing drawing on the concepts in her book, DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education.

I recommend reading the whole interview but one of my main concerns is the cost of higher ed. While the US higher education is among the best in the world, it is also highly immoral because it typically saddles you with crushing lifelong debt.

How did college tuition costs get so out of control?

On a broad policy historical level, what we have now is an erosion from the high-water mark of the early 1970s. There was a short period of time — from the postwar era with the GI Bill to the early ’70s — [in which] there seemed to be unlimited rounds of investment from the federal government and the state into mass higher education. It was seen as good economic policy, from a national defense and security perspective, and with the Civil Rights Act, there were more and more people — women, minorities — who wanted access to opportunity. College seemed like a way to allow them to prove themselves instead of unleashing them on the job market.

Then the economy turned upside down. There was a political backlash against college students, fueled in large part by the campus unrest in the ’60s, and it was no longer so popular to support students. So states started withdrawing their support, and colleges started practicing cost shifting. States came down on colleges as being fat and happy and full of liberal professors, and colleges put the cost burden on families, and families took on more student loans. As a result, you get this credit bubble effect, similar to what happened recently with mortgages: There’s so much debt available, and so much free money for colleges, that parents and families become less sensitive to price increases, and there’s no political outcry at the state level.

[read the full interview @ Salon]