Tuition at private US colleges rose 3.9% last year, the smallest rise in 40 years. Only -53.9% to go until equilibrium.

To briefly recap: America is currently in a student loan bubble, holding an unimaginably huge amount of student debt, as delinquency of loan payments swells, and even the well-off question whether they can afford college. It would seem, then, rather obvious that student loan debt is too big. Surprise: the people who control the higher education spigot—college admissions directors—disagree!

Does factual evidence show that we are living in a bold new "Age of Aquarius" in which young people throw off the strictures of their square parents' uptight generation and forge their own path, outside of the square uptight money-focused world where everything is always about money and shit? The answer is a resounding "yes, dad." For not only are The Youth giving up on law school—they're giving up on business school, as well.

Atlanta-based historically black college Morris Brown is close to being foreclosed upon and disappearing. Dang.

At Hampton University, a historically black college in Virginia, MBA students are banned from wearing cornrows or dreadlocks, thanks to an edict from Business School Dean Sid Credle.

It's well known by now that you can spend outrageous sums to get a college degree only to find yourself jobless, through no real fault of your own. But it's also well known that college degrees are a decent bet, statistically speaking. I guess what the latest report is saying is: We ain't promising you the moon, okay?

Since the recession and the cruel pulling-out of the rug from under the notional feet of thousands of fresh-faced law school graduates who'd imagined office-bound lives of leisure in their futures, it's become quite clear to everyone that law school is for suckers. Nobody knows this better than people who run law schools. So what to do? Put themselves out of a job? Haha! No, but seriously, they can offer you a great deal on law school right now.

Since the recession hit, law school degrees have become so toxic and worthless that they are actually worth less than nothing, because not only do they take all of your money and leave in crushing debt but you can't even get a job with them any more and if you could the job would be horrible. So—how to make a law degree even worse? That took the mindpower that only Yale can offer.

The funniest (meaning "most horrific and devastating") thing about student loans is that, thanks to some nifty lobbying, you cannot get rid of them in bankruptcy. They just stick around like one of the more bothersome STDs no matter how impoverished you become. But that might change, a bit! Which would be major news for you broke, educated people.

Congratulations are in order for the for-profit college industry, which won a major court ruling this week—a judge ruled that the Department of Education could not penalize these fake schools just because they routinely destroyed the financial future of their graduates. Here are the outrageous DoE rules, which were struck down as "arbitrary and capricious," via the WSJ:

Well well well, despite a lot of cheap jokes from certain precincts of the internet where unhappy people dwell, it turns out that people who graduate from college with degrees in easy, fake fields may, in fact, be the smart ones after all.

America is in the midst of a student loan bubble. College costs are increasing, student debt is increasing, job prospects are far from assured, and loan delinquency is on the rise. It's a big problem. The best idea for a solution that I've heard in a long time: let people buy into college students. Like little indentured servants, but not really!

Why are banks so enthusiastic about marketing their products to college students? Because college students, like most young people, don't know shit about shit. But unlike most kids, they have some money (even if they borrowed it). That means they are easy marks, and lucrative ones. A college student might think: "My school will protect my financial interests." See? I told you they were easy marks.

Shorter University is a little Baptist college in Georgia. Which is bad enough. But Shorter University is also a little Baptist college in Georgia run by hard-line Christian fundamentalists who are extremely concerned with the sex lives of all Shorter University employees, right down to the librarian.

Though we take a backseat to no one when it comes to mocking various academic fields on the basis of little but our own prejudices, this is ridiculous even by our low standards: famous political theorist Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) (pictured, smugly) led a successful battle this week to get the House of Representatives to zero out funding for the National Science Foundation's most useless field. Political science. Don't want nobody book-larnin' bout no politickin'. Inside Higher Ed reports:

Why do people go to grad school? It all depends. In "the humanities," people generally go to grad school because they like to smoke marijuana, or because they dislike the prospect of finding a "real job," or—and this one is key to the whole grad school house of cards—because they "want to teach." The elusive and illusive prospect of a career in academia helps many kids justify spending tens of thousands of dollars on a graduate degree that qualifies them for no other jobs. Strangely, people who major in fields that have actual applicability to the world outside of college campuses have other career goals.

It is fortunate that the legal profession is renowned for its graceful sense of humor about its own problems, because the "new generation" of lawyers will consist only of one cute dog, because everyone else knows that going to law school would be the worst possible decision that a young adult can make except for eating that third slice of Pizza Hut's new Cheesy Bites™ pizza simulacrum. Let's check in on the depressing mire of gloom that is the legal profession and its educational antecedents, shall we?

Could it be that all of the facile Republican rhetoric about college being for snobbish elites who don't want to connect with real, moral America is absolutely true? Yes. Well. In the sense that college makes you more racist. Though Republicans should support that! So much cognitive dissonance today.

Now look, before all of you undergrad business majors get all hot under your golf shirt collars and start angrily pounding on your cubicle walls and throwing around your fraternity-branded shot glasses: this is not from me, okay? This is from "The Wall Street Journal," a newspaper that you may have heard of at some point in one of your business classes. (If you haven't, that's okay.) It's not that business majors are bad. Not at all. You're just not as sharp as the other kids.

Last weekend, the Washington Post ran an op-ed insinuating that college professors might not "work hard enough," citing high average salaries and relatively low workloads for full-time professors. True? Untrue? It doesn't matter. (Except to academia [=boring].) When it comes to winning these public debates, all that matters are the "optics" of the thing. From Inside Higher Ed: