By Glenn Harlan Reynolds. "Why am I paying so much tuition to people whose job seems to be telling me to call someone else?"
That was my daughter's lament last week as she tried to pry an essential form out of her college's labyrinthine bureaucracy, but it's a question that many Americans should be asking. Administrative bloat at American colleges and universities is out of hand, and it's probably the biggest cause of the skyrocketing tuitions that afflict students and parents today. Everyone knows that tuitions have skyrocketed, though many may not appreciate the full extent of the problem. As University of Michigan economics and finance professor Mark Perry has calculated, college tuition increased from 1978 to 2011 at an annual rate of 7.45%. More...

The spectre of higher college fees is looming again as universities prepare to put pressure on the Government to tackle the issue of who will foot the growing bill for third-level education. Universities are to launch a new campaign warning the Education Minister that he faces a stark choice: give more Exchequer money to third-level colleges or raise fees substantially from 2016.
Under Ruairi Quinn, the charge for students has been rising by €250 a year, to a maximum of €3,000 in September 2015. At the same time, Exchequer funding for third-level institutions has been falling. More...

By Annaliese Davis. John Burbank, a Seattle-based liberal policy analyst, had been studying the escalation of college tuition for several years when, in 2012, he hit on a plan to help students complete higher education degrees without going into thousands of dollars of debt.
Frustrated by the state’s disinvestment in higher education — which Burbank calls “a financial and psychological barrier for students” — he proposed that the state charge nothing upfront if students agreed to return a small share of their future income.
Burbank, executive director of the Economic Opportunity Institute, took his idea to Rep. Larry Seaquist, D-Gig Harbor. Seaquist liked the idea, but couldn’t find the money to put it into action. Read more...

A plan to pay community college tuition for recent Mississippi high school graduates who are not covered by other financial aid is advancing.
Representatives passed House Bill 424 Tuesday by a vote of 115-4. It now goes to the Senate for more debate.
The bill would set up a two-year pilot program at all of Mississippi's 15 community colleges. Read more...

By Dave Waddell. Graduating law students in Ontario were hit with a massive fee hike this month that will nearly double the cost of completing the articling and written exam process required to be called to the bar to approximately $5,000.
The big change is a new articling/legal practice program fee that will see nearly $3,200 including HST added to the bill.
The Law Society of Upper Canada, which regulates the legal profession in the province, has added the fee to cover the costs of the legal practice program being launched in September to address the shortage of articling positions in law firms. More...

By Andrew Foote. Fees required to become lawyer jump more than $2,000 after taxes, a 79 per cent increase.
Many Ontario law students say they've been caught off-guard by a large increase in fees they must pay as part of the process of becoming a lawyer. Common law students in Ontario must pay a series of fees to the Law Society of Upper Canada in order to get mandatory post-graduation training and write the bar exam. Based off last year's fee schedule, students who spoke to CBC News said they expected to pay slightly more than the approximately $2,600 graduating students paid in 2013. Instead, their bill came in at nearly $5,000, an increase one blogger calculated as 79 per cent. More...