Most of you have been watching politicians shuck and jive in predictable ways to try and manage the even more predictable liquidity crisis that has terrorized our financial markets.  As a supporter of Senator Barack Obama, I am hopeful that this will serve as the final signal to America that a Harvard graduate with extensive Economics training might be a better choice than a mediocre student who claims to know nothing about the economy.  I won’t even mention Sarah Palin, who now makes George Bush the runner-up in the “Unfit to Manage a Burger King” contest.  I am not big on Obama-mania, but I tend to be big on common sense.  It is also telling that many Americans would sacrifice our nation’s future in order to avoid the discomfort of seeing a Black man in the White House.   OK, let me shut up before I say what I REALLY think.

{popin}My younger brother let me listen a few tracks of an album by popular hip-hop artist, Kanye West one day when I was in his car. On the few tracks I listened to, Kanye was basically poking fun of the fact that a growing number of college graduates emerge with nothing more than a retail job at the mall and have not become more marketable. But they could still be proud because, after all, they still have their degree.

Does West have a point? Is it really worth the effort of going through four years of college? Will college graduates be able to reasonably justify the costs of higher education, and if so when? And if it isn’t worth it, at what point in tuition level does it become worth it? Statistics show that tuition rates have risen by 439% since 1982, far surpassing the inflation rate. Even with all the recent uproar about fuel prices, it still is not even half of the increase in tuition. In addition to this, federal grants have consistently been decreasing while students and parents of students continue to take on huge amounts of debt to either land that raise or higher-paying job.