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How to make college cheaper 怎样才能让大学更便宜一些 DEREK BOK, a former president of Harvard, once observed that universities share onecharacteristic with compulsive gamblers and exiled royalty: there is never enough money tosatisfy their desires. This is a bit hard on compulsive gamblers and exiled royals. Americasuniversities have raised their fees five times as fast as inflation over the past 30 years.Student debt in America exceeds credit-card debt. Yet still the universities keep sendingbegging letters to alumni and philanthropists. 哈佛前校长德里克博克曾经注意到，大学与病态性赌徒和流亡皇族们有一个共同特征：永远没有足够的钱来满足他们的欲望。这对于病态性赌徒和流亡皇族们未免有些刻薄。在过去30年中，美国大学提高费用的速度是通货膨胀速度的5倍。在美国的学生债务超过信用卡债务。然而，大学依然向校友们和慈善家们发募捐信。 This insatiable appetite for money was bad enough during the boom years. It is trulyirritating now that middle-class incomes are stagnant and students are struggling to findgood jobs. Hence a flurry of new thinking about higher education. Are universities inevitablyexpensive? Vance Fried, of Oklahoma State University, recently conducted a fascinatingthought experiment, backed up by detailed calculations. Is it possible to provide a first-classundergraduate education for $6,700 a year rather than the $25,900 charged by public researchuniversities or the $51,500 charged by their private peers? He concluded that it is. | 
