Filmmaker Andrew Rossi’s new documentary, “Ivory Tower,” attempts to answer a question that’s on the minds of many debt-ridden, unemployed graduates: Is college a racket? The result is a scathing and dizzyingly thorough critique of the “time bomb” that is American higher education.
Rossi takes viewers from the gothic gates of Harvard to the vast bacchanal of Arizona State to plucky Silicon Valley startups that threaten to upend the very idea of the classic campus experience. The film tethers these diverse institutions to the same worsening problems: ballooning tuition costs driven by the “arms race” of providing luxury facilities to student-consumers; predatory loan systems burying students in debt; and the endangerment of a useful, worthwhile college degree in an era of job scarcity and rampant inequality.
The many characters and experts in “Ivory Tower,” which opened Friday in limited cities, all agree on one thing: higher education in this country is broken, and we may be reaching a tipping point very soon.
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http://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/college-worth-it-new-documentary-weighs-costs-higher-ed-n129991
