By Rich Lowry

Amid all the uplifting cliches at their commencement ceremonies, graduating college students won’t hear a line applicable to some of them — you got ripped off.

Student debt just surpassed the country’s credit-card debt for the first time. It is projected to top $1 trillion this year, according to The New York Times, when it was less than $200 billion in 2000. For the class of 2011, the mean student debt burden is nearly $23,000, up 8 percent from a year ago.

There’s no doubt that graduating from college brings a significant economic advantage, but that doesn’t excuse the waste and self-satisfied lassitude of American higher education. Colleges appropriate tuition dollars from America’s students with an ever-accelerating voracity, yet don’t deliver any additional educational benefits — indeed, they do the opposite. Higher education is one of the sectors of American life that most desperately needs a thorough re-conception. Read More