According to the Washington Post, New York University is charging $66,000 a year in tuition.  This includes room and board but is still a fantastically expensive figure.  Columbia University is charging $63,000 a year, and even less well-known schools like Sarah Lawrence College and Harvey Mudd College are charging about $65,000 a year.

Now, to be fair, these figures include room and board.  But even with room and board, these are fantastically expensive rates.  Many schools like NYU play a game, where they say that their asking tuition is $66,000, but after scholarships and grants, the average tuition is "only" $34,000.

But if $34,000 is the "average," who is paying below average, and who is paying above?

Incoming freshmen, Nia Mirza, started a petition to get the school to lower the cost of attendance. Mirza, a 19-year-old from Pakistan, claims the price went up after she committed to early admission to the class of 2019.  To be clear, it is not going to cost Mirza $71,000 to go to NYU. That figure is just a really detailed sticker price that doesn’t include financial aid discounts, like the $24,000 scholarship she received from the school. 

There is no reason for college to be so expensive.  The reason it is so expensive is because:

a) Students are subsidizing research and other activities unrelated to teaching.

b) Students are subsidizing a layer of bureaucratic employees (such as "Deans of Diversity") who, at best, do nothing and at worst, foment racial and gender hatred.

c) Many schools have enormous endowments, so big that they could practically let students attend for free.  NYU's endowment is 3.5 billion dollars.  That's bigger than the cash reserves of some small countries.  Columbia's is 9.2 billion.  Harvard is 36 billion.  Instead of using that money to make education affordable, they sit on it because leftists are hypocrites: they talk about redistribution of wealth, but they mean to redistribute only your wealth, not theirs.

You know, leftists always talk about the greed of big corporations.  Remember when gasoline used to be expensive and leftists were saying we should investigate oil companies for price-gouging?  Remember how they complain that Walmart isn't paying their workers enough?  But their silence is curious when it comes to colleges.  Because colleges are leftist cash cows and the left, like a snake, never bites its own tail.  I think the worst thing about leftists is their hypocrisy.  It's why I can disagree with Jeb Bush on the issues but admire his honesty, while disliking Scott Walker and Rand Paul for acting like policy wonk ping-pong balls who go back and forth based upon who's paddling them.

This article was produced by NewsMachete.com, the conservative news site.