The higher education bubble, again

  Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit has repeatedly referred to the higher education bubble that is about to burst. What a student pays for college and what he/she receives for those debts have diminishing returns, considering the overpriced lack of content courses offered by many colleges. When you can get a degree in, say, Barbie, we might have a problem. 
  Heck, let's talk a lot about Barbie on college campus time. In fact, let's waste all our money on discussions about pop culture. Some of the courses offered by colleges are not to be believed (although what's so bad about learning Tolkien's elvish, I'm not so sure.)
  Bowyer writes of this over at Forbes. Here he lists the disadvantages and the fact that it now takes many students 6 years to get a degree:

Over the past year I've invited some of the fiercest critics of higher education finance onto the radio to discuss the problems with college. Numerous authors have minutely detailed the dangers to college consumers: the price tag is too high; the lending is too lax; the product is too low-quality; the socialization process is too coarsening; the parents are kept too much in the dark; the earning advantages are too aggressively touted; the alternatives are too cheap. 

A perspective on obtaining a PhD over at The Economist:

For most of history even a first degree at a university was the privilege of a rich few, and many academic staff did not hold doctorates. But as higher education expanded after the second world war, so did the expectation that lecturers would hold advanced degrees. American universities geared up first: by 1970 America was producing just under a third of the world’s university students and half of its science and technology PhDs (at that time it had only 6% of the global population). Since then America’s annual output of PhDs has doubled, to 64,000.

  Indeed, who needs such a professor but an institution of higher learning?
  Or perhaps lower learning. 
 There's more than one disadvantage to the higher education bubble, according to the National Association of Scholars. The sad truth is that students' lack of preparation from secondary school has led to a plethora of extraneous services offered in college, including tutoring for people who really shouldn't be there.
  Let's not even talk about salaries and maintaining pension requirements of people who retire at 50 or take a year or two off on sabbatical, although sabbaticals have been put on hold in many colleges to cut costs, "angering" faculty who complain their "research" and "teaching" will suffer. Mustn't inconvenience our betters, doncha know.
  Average pay for college professors:

• Harvard: $191,500 

• Columbia University: $188,600

• University of Chicago: $184,100

• Stanford: $181,400

• Princeton: $181,000

  Here's a rundown of faculty salaries; note the significant increases since last year.
  Here's a good description by a professor on what it's like to bear such a burden and how to avoid actually confronting a student for plagiarism, if, of course, you care that your students have plagiarized. Such a trial, after all.
  And who knows what's going to happen with student loans now that the government has taken them over. Will the government be in charge of who gets what money and determine what majors they will enter? Will low achieving minority students be directed into medical degrees?