http://www.inflationdata.com/inflation/images/charts/Education/Education_inflation_chart.htm Both private and public schools are being run like corporate businesses. They hire MBAs who don't give a damn whether you are a jelly bean or a student as long as you pay. Every breathing moment school administrators spend, they spend thinking about how to maximize their own salaries and the salaries of their executive staff.
Just like health care, housing, energy, etc, education is viewed as a commodity now - it's the one of many things neo-libs/neo-cons hybrid monster (aka centrist) can agree on. Run schools like private corporations and the purity and goodness of the "free" market (with a little help from your taxes) will magically solve all problems.
They cut costs by letting a bunch of assholes on Texas Board of Education determine what you should learn about Jesus and slavery and dickheads like Jefferson Davis. They fire the public teachers, strangle the unions, hire new teachers at a fraction of the cost, punish them with fewer benefits and then inflate the salaries of the administrators. That is EXACTLY the pattern in health care and it is the pattern in education as well.
What makes this perfect for the rich sons of bitches in Washington and the new uber rich CEOs who run the universities (and their creepy MBA mother fuckers who exploit students) is that we have the government telling you that you are shit unless you have a college degree. And students see these MBA/CEO mother fuckers pulling down 6.3 million a year and fucking every one over in the process and that is the new role model. But I digress...
Now that the mother fucker college administrators and their $1,000,000 salaries have you convinced that you have to pay $50,000 /year to guarantee success, you take out a bunch of loans. Then, when you graduate - these same mother fucker college administrators (often on boards of large corporations and accepting grants from large corporations to pay them their mother fucking salaries) you find all the jobs have been shipped to unregulated and unskilled labor markets in India and China and you are standing in line at home depot with PhDs in mechanical engineering so you can have the pleasure of selling a $1200 porcelain bidet to the same mother fucker MBA who took your $50,000 a year and then helped some F500 corporation outsource your job to India and China.
It's all magic in the neo-con/neo-lib/centrist universe where the rich are rich because they pulled themselves up by your bootstraps. Who doesn't love magic?
Our education system is undergoing the same corrupt and dereliction of duty as our health care system. Until we pull out the guillotines these mother fuckers will steal every last penny we have.
Here is the democratic and republican joint model for education as it stands today.
1 - pay huge property taxes so your child can get exposed to microsoft and intel products in kindergarten
2- grow up as a robot slave to standardized testing. Drill after drill after drill based on practice tests.
3- work your ass off summers, after school trying to earn money for college
4- take out a $150K loan to pay for college, your parents are laid off, times are hard.
5- learn software or hardware engineering so you can work for microsoft and intel and earn big bucks like Bill Gates
6- continue to struggle, study, work while in college
7- graduate only to find a huge number of jobs being outsourced by Microsoft and intel to china and india.
8 - apply for a job at best buy selling intel and microsoft products to kindergartens.
9 - move back in with your mom and dad, thanks to health care reform, you could latch on to your parents health insurance policy if they had one.
10 - struggle quietly in despair without realizing that neo-libs and neo-con oligarchy is destroying the country and the planet and we are entering the new gilded age of robber barons and indentured servitude. They don't teach things like that in history anymore because Texas decided it is an anti-capitalist message.