Raising the percentage of Americans who have college degrees is a major component of the Obama administration's education goals. It's a policy that can swing many billions of dollars towards the higher education industry—an industry that is growing every more conscious of the fact that its financial foundation is not solid. "Promoting higher education" sounds like a good cause, in the abstract. But it may be a huge waste of money.

New research indicates that paying a lot of money for college is bullshit.

Get a load of this one, the big joke of the day: students entering our nation's four-year colleges actually expect to graduate, from those colleges, in four years. I know. What?? Somebody give these kids some education!

Cedarville University is a Baptist college in Ohio with 3,000 students. The campus is currently engulfed in a minor uproar over the way it's enforcing its ideological beliefs. Let's take this opportunity to gape and marvel at what some people who run educational institutions actually believe to be true.

In case any unimportant "regular" college students were operating under the delusion that your university's boilerplate about how "Academics Come First" was actually a meaningful statement of values, it is now possible to quantify financially just how much more important athletes are than you, the unathletic plebeian.

In what will surely go down as one of the most profoundly satisfying academic studies of the year, sociology professor Laura Hamilton has found that the more money parents pay for their kids' college educations, the worse their kids' grades are. Naturally.

A new Pew report out today confirms that, yes, having a college degree does have some benefit: young people with college degrees did much better during the recent recession than their peers without college degrees. (One would hope!) Expect your local college to immediately begin leafletting the town with this report, as a marketing effort.

Consider the predicament of today's aspiring member of the white collar leisure class: all of the old ways of doing things seem to be falling apart. Law school, once the fallback of choice for lightly-motivated college educated upper middle class twentysomethings who weren't ready to face The Real World after graduation, is no longer a safe bet at all. Well, how about business school? No, no, no.

A new study of racial segregation in American colleges (covering only black and white students) shows that progress has been made in the past 40 years (one should hope so), but also that higher learning is far from integrated. Is that a problem? Depends on your perspective.

Law school enrollment has been plunging over the past two years, and with good reason. As law school deans desperately seek to assure future customers that everything is okay, one real live indebted recent law school graduate is standing up to remind his potential successors: theirs is a path towards doom.

Will 2013 be the year when the student debt bubble pops, raining havoc down upon us all in the form of economic destruction? Eh, who knows. What we do know is that college prices, which have been shooting skyward for many years as institutions reaped every last dollar they could from the public's hope and ignorance, are now slowly—ever so slowly—calming down.

Mighty timely New York Times story this morning about colleges, institutions created to set bright young people on a course of lifetime penury. What with all the attention paid to the fact that students are drowning in debt due to student loans, we often overlook the financial situations of the schools themselves. How are they doing?

"The definition of a college president is someone who lives in a big house and begs for money," goes an old line that college presidents like to say to appear self-deprecating. Fortunately, college presidents are very well compensated for their efforts.

The bad news is student debt is soaring. The good news is, more crappy jobs than ever now require a college degree. So.

Lawrence Mitchell is the dean of Case Western Reserve University's law school, ranked #67 by US News, not that a doctor of jurisprudence like Lawrence Mitchell would concern himself with pedestrian matters such as his law school's low, low ranking. No—Lawrence Mitchell is concerned with more elevated matters, such as the wanton meanness of mean people who say mean things about law school. Have persons no respect?

Earlier this year, Appalachian State University sociology professor Jammie Price was suspended for showing her (college, adult) class a documentary about porn, containing porn. She also had the temerity to suggest, in class, that college athletes get special privileges. I know; I know. You will be happy to learn that she appealed, and that a faculty committee largely vindicated her, saying in its report that her actions, for the most part, fell under academic freedom, and that she should not be punished.

Many theories have already been bandied about for why Barack Obama secured his reelection last night: fundamental demographic changes in the voting base, ossified Republican proposals, the creaky inability of Mitt Romney to appear convincingly humanoid. But only one member of the pundit class has been incisive enough to peer more deeply into the true rotten, beating heart of Obama's victory: our national system of liberal zombification centers. (Colleges.)

It's been evident for more than a year now that "for profit colleges"—which is to say, "shitty colleges which exist only to make money and which run a lot of advertisements and which you would never ever recommend to a true friend"—are on the decline, after years of virtually minting money. Enrollment is down across the board. Last week, the University of Phoenix announced it's shutting down half of its physical locations. Could this be... real progress?

The University of Phoenix is shutting down 115 of its bloodsucking fake college locations in the U.S., about half of the total number of centers of flimflammery. This may be seen as part of the larger trend of the decline of so-called "for profit colleges," which is a good thing, in the sense that these schools are best not at education, but at sucking money out of desperate people who can scarcely afford it.

This Boston Globe story on a Hong Kong family that decided to hire the "admissions consultant" firm IvyAdmit—led by a former Harvard professor—to get their kids into Harvard must be read to be believed. There is a lawsuit now, of course. Briefly: