TIM CAVANAUGH: Kollege Kockup: Something Is Not Right In Higher Ed.

Student loan defaults are up. Graduate performance in the job market is down. Bankrupt states are unable to keep public university employees in the style to which they’ve grown accustomed. Harvard’s endowment got wiped out by future White House economic advisor Larry Summers.

Yet for-profit colleges are booming, and their students are pulling down ever greater sums in federal grants and guaranteed loans.

Read the whole thing, but note this: “The higher education bubble is even more inflated than it was a year ago. . . . The pain of deflating this bubble is being felt most acutely in the California public university system, where an impossible mandate (to provide a free, quality college education to everybody) can no longer be sustained, but where the consumers have been so completely shielded from actual costs for so long that the only real solution is for the system to collapse. But the whole country is headed in that direction.” Uh oh.