Two education related stories on CNN.com today. The first includes two supposedly unrelated points in the very first paragraph:

A draft report released Monday by a national commission on higher education calls for more federal money to help low-income students attend college, and places much of the blame for rising prices on the inefficiencies of colleges themselves.

It couldn't be that colleges charge more because they perceive that their customers' incomes have risen as a result of receiving more federal money through financial aid, and thus feel little pressure to be more efficient. Not that I'm denying higher education's supreme ability at engaging in inefficient production.

The draft also calls for states to require public universities to measure what students learn, and recommends several surveys and standardized tests that some colleges have begun using.

I don't know how many of you at AACSB schools have had to adapt to the Assurance of Learning standards, but from my perspective it has just seemed like busywork.

The second and more interesting story discusses teachers who buy and sell their original work online, a la Ebay. When you spend hours and hours making those perfect PowerPoint slides, with the shifting curves and animated text, don't you think other lazy professors might be more willing to pay for those slides than to spend the time to make them themselves? Wouldn't the quality of all instruction improve? Certainly, the availability of good presentations would improve if the author could be paid over a situation where good presentations are made available for free. Heck, if I could sell my slides for P>$0 instead of P=$0 then I would be richer and more students would be exposed to them, including the slides where I discuss Adam Smith's argument that it is not out of charity that producers produce but out of their own self interest, and that we're all better off as a result.

It might be interesting to compare the price of tuition for a class with the price that professor could receive for the material he uses in the class. Compare price of the slides with the number of students signing up for a class. Is it worth spending hours to make pretty presentations?

BTW, there are currently no economics materials on the site. Let the price gouging begin!