Increased college grant and loan levels lead to higher tuition

BOCA RATON, Florida - The nation’s college students are abuzz with the federal government’s new, higher grant and loan levels which are part of the Obama economic stimulus program. But one industry expert, Joseph Schmoke, founder of University Consultants LLC, says that these higher grant and loan levels just mean that colleges will raise tuition…again.

One of the biggest secrets in higher education is that tuition and fees go up when government lending and grant levels increase. “If loan limits were $6,000 last year, for example, colleges and universities priced their programs accordingly,” said Schmoke. “If limits rise to $10,000 guess what the schools have planned,” Schmoke asked. He answered his own question by stating that we would see tuition and fee increases not so coincidentally equal to higher cash levels available from the government’s new programs.

Schmoke is amazed that the public has not caught on to what he calls a big government financed ponzi scheme. “I can see how legislators have been hoodwinked by the massive education sector and its lobbyists,” he said, “but it continues to surprise me that the parents, employers and students who foot the bill, or borrow the money, to pay for a college education haven’t caught on.”

In a November 2008 report about college affordability, written by NASULGC, a public university association, the theme was “let’s tell the public that a college education is a good investment.” “That’s how they’ve decided to explain the high, and ever increasing cost of college,” said Schmoke.

Two extraordinary things are happening, Schmoke says, which will open the public’s eyes to the sorry excuses for their high prices offered by traditional educators. The first is the unique sponsored tuition program offered through Andrew Jackson University which eliminates tuition altogether. The second, he says, is the advertising campaign by Kaplan University which cuts to the heart of the matter regarding traditional universities. “They have failed us,” states one Kaplan ad.

Schmoke quoted business guru and academic Peter Drucker, who in Forbes magazine said that traditional universities, with their expensive buildings and campuses, are hopelessly out of date. Drucker predicted that universities as we know them won’t exist in twenty years because of the Internet, which he said is as big a factor of change today as the printing press was in the middle ages. Schmoke thinks that Drucker was right on the money. Apparently the folks at Kaplan think so too.

Contact Information

Joseph Schmoke

Founder & Managing Member

University Consultants LLC

Contact via E-mail