[djmcmath]

I've heard some talk that this isn't isolated to California -- other colleges are also paying their "executives" enormous salaries with expensive benefits as well. My opinion is that it's heinous for the top of the pay scale to be that absurdly out of line with the people who are doing the work. It seems like the actual professors should be making the real money, with the administration getting a pittance -- it's the professors who are doing research, teaching students, and actually bringing in students, right?

Some others are suggesting that college prices are showing signs of a bubble, e.g. rising substantially faster than median incomes. If there's a supply of "imaginary money" in the form of student loans, that's definitely part of the problem, and fits with the pattern of other historic bubbles.

The question is: how will this fail? Students will have so much debt, they'll start defaulting on previously-assumed-safe loans? Colleges will start seeing a serious decline in admissions because students can't afford the education, and will reign in their own excesses? A college will go BK because it can't pay it's own staff any more, and there's a panic?

Dan