Screwed up kids, voters for Bernie.
I would wager that over half of the university degrees granted are worthless.
The reason the price of higher education has increased at up to several times the rate of inflation over the years is because of unbridled government spending. Basically anything the government gets its hands into turns to crap. We find professors like Elizabeth Warren, fake “Native American” getting paid huge salaries for doing very little work.
Unfortunately, Elizabeth Warren is becoming more the rule than the exception. One of my uncles spent over a decade hanging around collecting degrees at universities. Now he feels entitled to collect a very large salary because he is so highly educated. But he didn’t spend all that time at college because he wanted to make himself an extremely valuable commodity; he did it because he was a hippie trying to avoid having to make his way into the real world for over a decade. Thanks to the government many people like him who are life long malingerers are currently collecting huge salaries for doing very little.
Eliminate ALL diversity staff and programs. That will free up some cash.
Reform is easy. It begins with a state legislator saying that the *purpose* of government funding for universities is so that students will be able to get better jobs than they could with just a high school diploma.
Then that legislator holds up a list of college majors offered by the university, which also lists how many students were hired in that field of study within six months after graduation.
At the top of the list will be majors like nursing, that is an expensive degree, but almost guaranteed job placement; along with subjects like criminal justice.
At the bottom of the list will be majors like ethnic and gender studies, literature, drama, some specialized political science and history degrees, some psychology and counseling degrees, etc.
While these may be enjoyable for the students, they do not fit in the “better jobs” reason for subsidy. So while those courses should still be offered, they must be fully paid by the student, not the government.
And this means not just the state government, but also that no student loans should be permitted. And this is important.
Even if a student wants to take a dumb subject, if they can gather *all* the money to do, fine. But they should not be allowed to impoverish themselves with a crushing debt load to do so. This is little more than usury, so should be prohibited by the state.
The vast majority of people teaching at colleges are not professors, they are instructors.
The question is, how many grads wind up staying in-state to work, if many leave the State, then it’s not worth the investment.
I think the biggest issue with colleges anymore is they have become a place where students go to learn about something. Colleges need to be a place where students go learn how to do something. Graduates need skills employers find valuable.
There is only one liberal solution to wasteful spending—spend more!
If there were no government money in higher education then college would be affordable for just about everybody without the hangover of mammoth student loans and the directing of students into dead-end majors.