A few questions with Anya Kamenetz

Anya Kamenetz is the author of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, a new book that takes a look at the future of higher education. Her first book, Generation Debt, explored the rising burdens of loans for her own generation (Kamenetz is 29). That research led her to take a closer look at the ways higher education isn’t working for the students it serves and find out who is working to change that. She’ll be speaking at the Carter Library Auditorium on Mon., May 17 at 7 pm.

What’s so wrong with higher education as it is today?

It’s just like the Woody Allen joke: “This food is lousy, and the portions are too small.” Higher education is trapped in an unsustainable cost spiral (tuition has gone up more than any other good or service since 1978), it’s facing serious concerns about quality and relevance as dropout rates approach 50% in the US, and at the same time it’s struggling to meet unprecedented global demand: worldwide enrollment rose 50% in the last 10 years and is projected to more than double to 250 million by 2025.

You’ve drawn some comparisons between the rising costs of tuition and the housing bubble. It’s conventional wisdom to (at this point) to say that the housing bubble was caused in part by the unchecked greed of creditors and investors. Would you say that greed is motivating universities, as well?

There’s been huge greed on the part of the student loan industry, the real analogues to the mortgage lenders who drove up the cost of housing. Around the middle of this decade, Sallie Mae was the second most profitable company in the entire Fortune 500. Happily, student lenders have now been squeezed out of the federal student loan industry by the recent Obama reforms, although they can still make money through private, unsubsidized student loans. For-profit, publicly traded higher education companies like the University of Phoenix have been making similarly eye-popping profits, and while their tuition isn’t the highest in the business (private nonprofits like NYU take that honor) their students are among the most indebted.