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The scandal of American universities goes way beyond Temple

There's a lot of controversy being tossed around Temple's North Philly campus, but the root cause of the crisis is simple. College is not affordable for the middle class. Do Democrats finally have a plan?

The worst kept secret in America is that the entire system of higher education -- the supposed cornerstone of the future growth of the nation's economy -- is having something of a meltdown.

Middle-class kids are told they'll never get anywhere without a diploma (increasingly a graduate-school diploma) right before their parents are told there's no way your family can afford that sheepskin. Millions of young people are already drowning in a tsunami of student debt. To get the sliver of kids whose rich parents can actually pay full freight, American universities increasingly a) market their insanely fancy gyms and dorms that look like a Soho boutique hotel over anything to do with their Weimar-Republic-sized-grade-inflation academics or b) bulk up on students from China and other developing economies, a process that ought to be called "in-sourcing."

The most successful institutions often resemble giant real-estate development firms, with an education subsidiary. The notion of a liberal arts education -- "learning for the sake of learning," if you can still believe in such a thing -- is about as relevant in 2016 as an afternoon newspaper. The damn system has so many holes that hucksters and con artists -- this guy, for example -- have rushed in to fill the void.

Now it appears that chickens are starting to come home to roost, especially right  up Philadelphia's North Broad Street at Temple University. Tonight, the campus is an uproar: The school's No. 2 official, or provost, was fired less than a month ago, and now -- in a move that's shocked just about everyone -- the board of trustees is moving towards ousting the university's president, Neil Theobald, who's been on the job less than four years.

Figuring out who's actually in charge at the state-supported university, as we've seen in recent controversies like the school's ties to disgraced entertainer Bill Cosby, can be a little bit like Kremlinology during the Cold War. But we do know part of what lies at the center of the rift: A dispute over Temple running a substantial deficit in its financial aid budget; the cash needed to make sure that most Temple students can actually...you know, go to Temple. More smarter  students were qualifying for merit scholarships, which is good. But that also created a $22 million hole, a situation that the university has managed to elevate into an academic Watergate.

It wasn't the greatest accounting, perhaps. But given the massive college affordability gap, Temple should be able to find a way to pay for scholarships it promised these kids who played by the rules and earned good grades. Did I mention that Temple is also working toward spending $100 million on a football stadium that few, if any, of its working-class neighbors even want; in fact, the school's trustees actually authorized an additional $250,000 to study the stadium's feasibility at the same meeting they voted "no confidence" in Theobald.

Excuse me for a second while I yank my last two or three remaining hairs out.

OK, I'm back.

The bigger picture seems to be this. Over the last generation or two, the nature of the U.S. economy has changed so it's very hard to succeed without a college degree, and so university officials have promised the middle class not to worry, that they've got you covered with enough financial aid to meet the actual need of deserving students.

That already shaky ideal -- as evidenced by the nation's more than $1 trillion student loan debt -- seems poised on the brink of further collapse. On the Main Line, Haverford College -- rated as one of the nation's top liberal arts schools -- had to back away from a fully "needs-blind" admission policy because the rising cost in financial aid is unsustainable. Colleges are more expensive; too many families are poorer. You don't need a Ph.D. in math.

Talk to just about any American parent, and this issue -- how to pay for their kids' education -- dwarfs about 90 percent of the baloney that our political leaders prattle on about most of the time. And yet it rarely bubbles to the top of the national debate. And it wouldn't have in 2016, either, were it not for the efforts of one man: Bernie Sanders.

The Vermont senator's idea for universal college -- including free tuition for all at public universities -- animated his millions of supporters. At the Sanders rallies, that I covered, the proposal won more applause than anything except perhaps for getting billionaire money out of politics. His bold idea was easy for people to understand -- Europe does this, so why can't we? -- even if part of the actual policy (asking states, including the same "red states" that nixed Obamacare, to pay some of the cost) were a tad too simplistic.

But what Sanders was trying to do -- and what he accomplished -- was to change the nature of the entire debate. Before his presidential campaign, Democratic proposals on college affordability had been weak and incremental, focusing on narrow areas such as reducing student loan interest rates. Today, the Democratic Party platform is committed toward making in-state public college and university tuition free for all families earning less than $125,000 a year, and presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton has now embraced this idea as her own.

That probably won't happen in the immediate future, thanks to our current reactionary Congress; at next week's GOP confab in Cleveland, you're more likely to see Bobby Knight throwing Clint Eastwood's "empty chair" than hear any real talk about college affordability. But an audacious proposal is starting point for real progress. Consider how the $15 living wage was said to be an outlandish idea that's now been been embraced by states and large municipalities and continues to grow.

And then keep this in mind as you watch the controversy up at Temple play out. The real college scandal is the cost.