Andrew Rosen, chairman and CEO of Kaplan, Inc., during the Pearson Learning Summit in Phoenix, Arizona, last April:
College today is a bundled product. In order to get the education, you have to buy the football team, the gardens and the climbing walls and stuff. You can’t just buy the education. But I think that the private sector is going to offer learning experiences that are compelling enough that families will start to say, I’d love for my kid to go to Georgetown, I’d love for them to have that experience, but the difference between $10,000 and $300,000 is just unbridgeable. They’re going to say, sorry Junior, we’re going to invest in your education, but we’re not going to invest in you going to a resort for four years.
The same logic, by the way, applies to private schools, the most prestigious of which are almost as unaffordable as college.