Echoing my recent exasperation regarding the mind-blowing increases of college tuition and fees over the past few years , the New York Times reports on a recent study that concludes pricing trends can’t continue along their current path for much longer without ending very badly.

Money quote…

Over all, the report found, published college tuition and fees increased 439 percent [emphasis mine] from 1982 to 2007, adjusted for inflation, while median family income rose 147 percent. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade, and students from lower-income families, on average, get smaller grants from the colleges they attend than students from more affluent families.

“If we go on this way for another 25 years, we won’t have an affordable system of higher education,” said Patrick M. Callan, president of the center, a nonpartisan organization that promotes access to higher education.

….

“The middle class has been financing it through debt,” he said. “The scenario has been that families that have a history of sending kids to college will do whatever if takes, even if that means a huge amount of debt.”

The report, “Measuring Up 2008,” is one of the few to compare net college costs – that is, a year’s tuition, fees, room and board, minus financial aid – against median family income. Those findings are stark. Last year, the net cost at a four-year public university amounted to 28 percent of the median family income, while a four-year private university cost 76 percent of the median family income.

This sounds like another case of unsustainable debt to me.  While a college grad with job prospects is a better bet than a subprime mortgage holder, that could change in a few years as jobs become more scarce and grads can’t find jobs quick enough to start to pay these loans back.  The increases cited above MUST become decreases in the recent future, otherwise tuition rates will be the next figure we see declining.