Posted on 05/20/2011 6:24:50 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Amid all the uplifting clichés at their commencement ceremonies, graduating college students won’t hear a line applicable to some of them — you got ripped off.
Student debt just surpassed the country’s credit-card debt for the first time. It is projected to top $1 trillion this year, according to the New York Times, when it was less than $200 billion in 2000. For the class of 2011, the mean student-debt burden is nearly $23,000, up 8 percent from a year ago.
There’s no doubt that graduating from college brings a significant economic advantage, but that doesn’t excuse the waste and self-satisfied lassitude of American higher education. Colleges appropriate tuition dollars from America’s students with an ever-accelerating voracity, yet don’t deliver any additional educational benefits — indeed, they do the opposite. Higher education is one of the sectors of American life that most desperately needs a thorough re-conception.
What are students going into hock for? In their book Academically Adrift, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa sift through data that only Bluto could relish.
They cite the work of labor economists Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks showing that in the early 1960s, college students spent 40 hours per week on academic work; now they spend only 27 hours per week. In 1961, 67 percent of students said they studied more than 20 hours per week; now only one in five study that much.
Miraculously, grades haven’t dropped, despite less study. Such are the wonders of grade inflation and students’ selecting the classes where they can most easily slide by. The two labor economists believe that students have mastered “the art of college management,” whereby they succeed at “controlling college by shaping schedules, taming professors and limiting workload.”
There are fewer professors to tame than in the past. Full-time instructional faculty dropped from 78 percent in 1970 to 52 percent in 2005. “On average,” Arum and Roksa write, “faculty spend approximately 11 hours per week on advisement and instructional preparation and delivery.” The rest is devoted to research and sundry other professional and administrative tasks.
The hiring binge on campus has been devoted to what sociologist Gary Rhoades calls “managerial professionals” specializing in sundry student services. What kind of learning environment is it, after all, without a director of sustainability initiatives?
If increasingly students don’t study, teachers don’t teach, and college employees aren’t primarily concerned with either, it raises the question of what the hell happens on campus. Well, many students have a grand time during a years-long vacation from real life. They enjoy state-of-the-art facilities, socialize, and figure how to come away with the credential of a degree in exchange for minimal effort. (That is, if they graduate at all — four-year institutions only graduate about a third of their students in four years, and two-thirds of them in six.)
This is not a formula for drinking deeply from the fountain of learning. Arum and Roksa find only minimal gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing for many students. Forty-five percent of students barely ticked upward after two years, and 36 percent hadn’t budged after four years.
Reformers are brimming with ideas to renovate an expensive and inefficient system. Economist Richard Vedder suggests dismantling the current architecture of financial aid — which helps drive up costs in a never-ending cycle — and giving help only to truly needy students who are performing well academically. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.) asks why we can’t move toward three- rather than four-year degrees. Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute wants other ways to credential young people besides a BA. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is embarking on a controversial push to get the state’s universities to devote themselves more to teaching than to obscure research.
In their book, Richard Arum and Josipa Roska make the elementary suggestion that colleges foster “a culture of learning.” That would seem to go without saying, except in the groves of academe.
— Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.
Any day now the Democrats will call for the federal government to assume all this debt
Halleluia! Halleluia! Halleluia!
Pretty shrewd move on the Feds part...as it binds the elite pretty tightly to the future of the central government.
I hope future generations tag this debt to the Democratic Congresses of the past and the Democratic President serving today.
The Duke Power case is the central reason that almost any college degree has value today. Because of the SCOTUS interfering with business decisions about emplyment and promotion on the basis of merit and aptitude, businesses decided that they were less likely to incur litigation costs by using “objective” criteria that the university left would recognize - college degrees. Of course, that increased the cashflow to the college left and gave value to otherwise worthless “studies” degrees and othe racademic flotsam and jetsam. In a sane world, most colleges would offer about half the degrees they do now to about 20% of the number of students who are currently enrolled.
Never happen, look at the education they are getting.
So work for Organizing for America to start paying off their debt.
( on a side issue my son just finished Grad School and doing his internship now, they charged us for 3 classes this summer while he is working in Tampa. Unreal
“Rick Perry of Texas is embarking on a controversial push to get the state’s universities to devote themselves more to teaching than to obscure research.”
Hmmm, as a Texian, I fail to see what’s controversial about Perry’s push to get state universities to devote themselves to teaching - except perhaps with the professorship class.
Big risks here for the GOP, as offering student loan “forgiveness” and threatening to let Elizabeth Warren regulate credit card rates become powerful political weapons for the Left.
My kid is living at home, working the late shift at UPS and going to college. Just finished up his sophomore year, is very frugal (no expensive habits like booze & other drugs & girlfriends) &, with some help for tuition from Mom & Dad, he has zero debt. I’m pretty proud of him.
I wondered that in the mid 90's.
Since you cannot discharge student loan indebtedness through bankruptcy is is truly the modern version of indentured servitude.
The advice I gave my kids was to assume a total student debt load of no more than the equivalent of one year’s starting salary in the career you intend to pursue. If you plan to get a BS in Engineering, $50,000 of student loans is an absolute maximum. If you plan to get a BA in English, better not take on more than $16,000 in student loans. Well, $20,000 if they raise minimum wage to $10/hr.
Anyone who is just getting a college degree because they believe need a 4-year degree to get a job is better off living at home and going to the local University than going off to a fancy school and racking up $100K+ in student loans.
This is the next economic bubble. See
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpZtX32sKVE&feature=player_embedded
The dirty little secret is lots of people use these loans as living expenses. Don’t think 19 y/o college student. Thin 27 y/o single mother who keeps continually signed up for at least one class - as long as you are still ‘in school’, you don’t have to start paying back.
The financial aid departments just dole out cash. A responsible way to handle student loans would be to make payment for specific expenses - tuition, books, lab fees. But they don’t - just hand out cash. And I can’t emphasize enough: people use this money to pay rent, buy food, pay the babysitter, pay the car insurance.
Student Loan debt hasn’t surpassed credit card debt, it is a cleverly disguised version of credit card debt.
Qualifying exams could start as early as 1st grade. If a child demonstrated mastery of a specific subject he could be immediately promoted to the next level. He would no longer be held back by slower or less motivated students. The material could be completely available on-line, and the cost to the student could be free if the producers of the material accepted advertising.
Children could finish their K-12 educations years earlier by doing this. Also, employers would have the certifying exams that prove that applicant is literate and numerate.
Think about it. How much of the work done in the U.S. actually requires a college education? How much of the important work, that benefits all of us, could ( and was once done) by competent 8th grade graduates of our parents and grandparent's generations? Employers,today, demand community college or 4 year college experience merely as a means of weeding out illiterates and innumerates! I know. I, as an employer, did this!
Another benefit of starting qualifying exams in the first grade would be that parents and children would begin to take responsibility for their own educations. Free On-line courses would proliferate and private tutoring would flourish. The child could enter the workforce, marry, start a family, and buy their first home years earlier. They could start life debt free and no longer as an indentured servant to government education debt.
Finally, with students finishing their educations sooner, and with fewer students actually attending K-12 schools or college, there would be greatly reduced state budgets for education, fewer government K-12 teachers, and schools could be consolidated and completely closed and **SOLD**!
At the local state university, the ratio of staff to faculty has risen over the past ten years from 2:3 to 3:2.
sfl
15 credits at the local community college costs $900. It is $4600 at the local university, including online classes. Why can a community college offer classes in person for roughly 20% the cost of taking online classes thru the university?
To make it worse: if I take a 5 credit math class thru the university, it would cost over $3200. The same class would be <$300 at the community college. Does Calculus change when taught at a university?
Took me 7 years to pay off my student loans. Fortunately I found out about work study. worked 20 hours a week in a computer lab that nobody would use till mid terms and finals. So mainly study and little work. I think that there are more female students now than in 1960 as a percentage and that has driven a lot of change in the schools. Especially sports; I don’t think women basketball earns the revenue that men basketball does.
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