There is a normal business tenet that as costs increase so does the price of the product or service to the consumer. Very seldom does that cost get absorbed by efficiencies or carve into profit. Anyone who gets monthly bills knows what I mean.

This leads me to an article sent to me by a friend of mine Chuck Lomax. The article is by Anthony Balderrama of careerbuilder.com called Generation Y: Too demanding at work? So what is the correlation? This segment –

Alison Bailin, 27, also believes her generation wants to see a significant return on years of education. "College expenses have skyrocketed, leaving many of us in debt," says the account executive. "Many career fields require one year or more of a [usually] unpaid internship, so we are joining the work force with a year or more experience than many previous generations."

This might be the first time that college graduates have tried to overtly pass the cost of college on to their employer. And the final sentence justifies it. But here is the kicker; is the return on investment greater than before? According to the article it is.

"Companies desperately want to be a part of the Web 2.0/user-generated content, MySpace, YouTube phenomenon. Who better to guide that shift than Gen Y?" asks Matt Dornic, 26, president of the public relations firm 3 Dog Communications.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that college costs have increased because of the emphasis on Web 2.0. If anything, the second quote implies that the skills would have been obtained regardless of the college education. So who is benefitting from the college cost increase? Most likely, the colleges themselves and maybe that is a good thing. Optimistically, maybe colleges have the long term in mind and the programs they are establishing are the foundation for something even greater than what we see now. But as I said in another post titled Does College Have a Future?, I think there are plenty of options out there for students and even more for business.