Andrew Coulson at Cato does a great job of illustrating how disastrous it is to have had stagnant achievement outcomes for 17 year-old public school students since 1970, while per pupil spending has increased by a factor of 2.3 (adjusted for inflation). He likens it to paying $43,479 for a 1971 Chevy Impala, which is 2.3 times the $19,011 inflation-adjusted price back then ($3,460 before adjusting for inflation). Meanwhile, a brand new 2008 Impala sells for $21,975 and comes with features like On-Star, side air bags, and anti-lock brakes that weren’t even imagined in 1971.
In the automotive industry cars keep getting better with little increase in cost (after inflation), while education has not improved significantly and costs us 2.3 times as much (after inflation). It isn’t every day that people wish that an industry would be as efficient as car-makers.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
Students are different. Education requirements are different. The job market for women is different. Contrary to your comment – education standards are higher – even though graduation rates are not much different – those graduating are meeting higher standards than ever before.
Hi Jim,
The Long-Term NAEP results for 17 year-olds in reading and math show no change since the early 70s. (see http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ltt/results2004/nat-reading-scalescore.asp and http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ltt/results2004/nat-math-scalescore.asp )
And a study that Greg Forster and I did suggests that students do not come to school significantly less well-prepared to learn. At the very least it would be hard to argue, given the evidence we collected, that they are twice as difficult to educate. (see http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ewp_06.htm )
Would that CATO had carried this comparison on to the university & college ranks. Tuition inflation compared to general inflation is usually accepted to be twice as high. So your college-level Impala would cost $86,968.
Fortunately, college professors and public school teachers are not the brunt of this increase. Tables show both average salaries have been just keeping with the adjusted inflation rate and both are percentage-wise increasingly less of the entire spending for each agency than they wee 30-40 years ago.
A key question then: where are these increases coming from, if not from teachers or professors?
Let’s have more analysis and less analogies. As it is, using CATO’s analogy logic – college education is a bigger gyp than elementary & high school education.
“Arkansas, in particular, has reason to worry over graduation rates. The SREB keeps statistics on the percentage of entering college students who go on to earn a degree in six years’ time. In 2006, the national average was 55 percent. The average for the 16 states in the SREB, a group stretching from Texas to Delaware, was 52 percent. Arkansas’s rate was 38 percent. Louisiana, at 36 percent, was the only SREB state below Arkansas.”
Arkansas Times – Jul 08
Hmmmm….I seem to recall that about 70% of the students graduate from high school. Numbers don’t look to good for the colleges, especially Arkansas.