Row? Holding classes only at the Yellowstone Club in Big Sky, Montana (membership initiation fee $300,000), with students arriving by helicopter? Or did climate change cause the ivy at the Ivy Leagues to run wild and grow so fast that it smothered all the professors in the nation? I can find no supply-demand equation that explains the expense of college, so I can’t blame recent college graduates who are carrying a Yellowstone Club membership worth of student debt for being skeptical about old-fashioned ideas concerning supply and demand. At the same time that kids have experienced brutal inflation on campus, all sorts of other things that used to cost them dearly have become strangely, disturbingly, cheap. There once was a considerable cost in money, time, effort, and getting the car keys to a night of hanging out with friends, an evening of entertainment at the Cineplex or Drive-In, or an LP, cassette, or CD of the latest music. And a wooing meant a restaurant, a club, a dance, or at least a drive to a Lovers’ Lane. Now all these are as free as electrons in the ether. Surely the laws of economics have been canceled. So has “The Job” – you know, that thing you used to get when you were young and keep until you retired. Not that there was anything so wonderful about it. You were Dagwood, colliding with the mailman as you rushed out late for work where you’d get yelled at by Mr. Dithers all day and look like a fool in your silly haircut, wearing a bow tie, and having only one big button in the middle of your shirtfront.
as a wave of farewell and sometimes does so automatically. Where it comes from (if analysis of consumer spending and personal finance is anything to go by) is anyone’s guess. Meanwhile, prices no longer seem to be determined by supply and demand. We’ve never had a greater supply of knowledge. Everything that humankind has ever discovered, learned, or thought is at our fingertips. In fact, we don’t even need the plural... One finger is enough to swipe on a smartphone. Prices no longer seem to be determined by supply and demand. We’ve never had a greater supply of knowledge. Everything that humankind has ever discovered, learned, or thought is at our fingertips. In fact, we don’t even need the plural... One finger is enough to swipe on a smartphone. So why have kids experienced a tremendous inflation in knowledge’s price? What’s with the cost of higher education? Why, given such an ample supply of tutorials, do colleges demand such exorbitant tuitions? What are they doing at these colleges? Still writing all the textbooks out on parchment scrolls with goose quill pens? Having the caps and gowns made by bespoke tailors on Savile
10
July 2021
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online