Question 4. All of the following are mentioned in the passage EXCEPT that _______. ----- Passage 3 ----- (Para. 1) Colleges, and graduate programs, are in trouble. Enrollments are falling — and not just at the PC-tainted University of Missouri — student debt is rising, and, worst of all in any bursting-bubble industry, the rubes seem to be catching on. This weekend, walking out of the drugstore, I saw Consumer Reports’ cover story, “I kind of ruined my life by going to college.” It was all about student loan debt and what it does to people’s lives. (Para. 2) I noted some years ago that trends in higher education couldn’t continue. The cost of college goes up every year; salaries, on the other hand, have grown much more slowly, if at all. This means that where today’s parents might have been able to comfortably fund their educations with loans and part-time work, today’s students can’t. Tuition is too high to cover with a waitressing job, and salaries are too low to comfortably pay back the debt after graduation. Or, sometimes, to pay it back at all. (Para. 3) When I wrote that book, student loan debt was approaching a trillion dollars. Now, Charles Sykes’ new book, Fail U.: The False Promise of Higher Education says that it’s $1.3 trillion, unsurprising given that tuitions of $60-70,000 a year are common now, and most students borrow to cover expenses. (Para. 4) The problem is that neither students nor society are getting their money’s worth. (Para. 5) Politicians sell education as a solution to economic inequality because it has two features that politicians love: It sounds good, and people won’t discover that it isn’t true until much later. Plus, when you push spending on education, you can always count on support from educators, who have a lot of influence in the media. (Para. 6) But as Sykes notes, “college for all” isn’t actually a good idea. Not everyone — probably not even most people — will really benefit from college. Fifty-three percent of college grads under 25, he reports, are unemployed, or underemployed, working part-time or in low-paying jobs that don’t require a college degree. ----- Question 4. All of the following are mentioned in the passage EXCEPT that _______.