Posted on 01/21/2012 9:10:12 AM PST by bthockey
Students drowning in their own student loan debt has caused massive amounts of public outcry because graduates have no way to pay off the cost of their education. Even though sometimes it is the student’s fault for pursuing and graduating with a worthless degree, the problem of the student debt cannot be ignored.
The true source of the problem is government intervention in (what should be) a free market education system. As it stands right now, the Federal government is guaranteeing student loans so it looks like Old Uncle Sam is trying to invest in American students and the future of the country. However, all the students are doing is bidding up the price of college tuition.
(Excerpt) Read more at thebandofpatriots.com ...
Higher ED also has a Sherman Anti-Trust exemption.
The key to fixing the education mess is to remove the college’s responsibility to educate.
Give the responsibility of education back to industry.
The only responsibility colleges should have in regards to education is certification.
The reason is because 99.9% students dont pay for it all up front, and thus thinks that money is no object.
150.00 for a book? No problem!
Required to live in expensive dorms? Cool!
Forced to take tons of unrelated classes to keep worthless professors employed? OK!
Given the option to coast by with fake majors like painting, poetry, and gender studies? Where do I sign!
Universities know that they have these kids by the stones. What are they going to do, work in a trade?
If you run off to a another state, pay out-of-state rates, and have a bill of $80k sitting on you at the end....and the best salary you can raise is $40k, then you are screwed. You will spend at least twenty years trying to pay this off. All that money you tossed back....could have gone to a house, or to a 401k plan.
So the same kid goes to local community college for two years, and then a regional college, and owes $10k at the end....thanks to living in Dad’s house for big part of this, and the cheaper rates. You pay off your loan in a couple of years, with the same $40k salary. You start to buy a house, and you start to manage a 401k by age 28.
One person can retire by age 55, and the other needs to work until he’s 65. Take a guess which one works the longest.
600% debt increase-—A CAUTIONARY TALE
NJ’S Kean University’s full time faculty and professional staff union claims that Kean President Dawood Farahi falsified his credentials dating back to his employment application in 1982. In a news release, the union said, “Under Dr. Farahi’s failed leadership, New Jersey’s third-largest university has closed academic departments, laid-off critical student advisors, reduced the number of full-time faculty and increased tuition and fees to pay for debt that has skyrocketed over 600 per cent.” The staff is calling it “Soprano State University.”
Farahi famously hired ex-Gov. Jim McGreevey-—the “gay American” who quit b/c he was exposed as a fraud-— to teach ethics at the Union County school.
Credentials are taken very seriously in academic circles. There should be an investigation that includes people from other colleges who understand academia to clear the air once and for all. This could be settled easily by producing the documents in question or evidence he accomplished what he said he did. There is a lot at stake. Loss of academic accreditation could make Kean degrees worthless. Read more for yourself here.
Dr. James A. Castiglione, President, Kean Federation of Teachers, Local 2187 wrote a letter in November to the school’s board.
EXCERPT I am writing to inform the Board of Trustees, as the University’s fiduciary body, that the available evidence indicates academic fraud has occurred in multiple representations by President Dawood Farahi of his own academic credentials. In various resumes and Curriculum Vitae that the President has prepared and submitted to Kean University and other entities over the years, he has made numerous academic claims for which no evidence can be found. These claims include:
Articles “accepted” for publication that cannot be found in any journal Journals and societies, in which he claims to have published or presented, that appear not to exist
Publishing houses, that he claims have published his manuscripts, that appear not to exist
The claim of “Over 50 technical articles in major publications”
The claim that he served as “Acting Academic Dean” at Avila College.
A number of individuals have conducted detailed academic searches of the scholarly literature and have found nothing attributable to President Dawood Farahi, including publications he has claimed on past resumes and CVs. These searches have been conducted using academia’s most powerful and sophisticated search engines by faculty and librarians at several institutions, both public and private, both inside and outside the State of New Jersey. In all cases, not a single claim of publication made by President Farahi has been verified. False claims of academic achievements on official documents seriously jeopardize the academic integrity, the reputation and the accreditation of Kean University.”
According to his resume from 1982, Farahi, who took over as Kean president in 2003 and is paid about $293,000 a year, got his undergraduate degree from Kabul University in Afghanistan (in affiliation with Bordeau U.) in 1970 and earned two other degrees at the University of Kansas.
If you’re paying list price for a degree, you’re doing it wrong. If you’re paying that plus interest, well...
My wife & I have 5 degrees between us, costing something under $100k. Cash. The last one paid her to go.
There are LOTS of options for paying discounted, even negative, prices. Just have to realize that universities want something from students (not always in the form of money), there are lots of scholarships & grants out there, and that saving large amounts of money will not be trivial. There is also a difference between education and certification: the former is free if you’re willing to go without the expensive latter.
Upshot is that prices are high because students figure out ways of paying those prices. “A thing is only worth what someone is willing to give for it.” College must be worth a lot because people are willing to pay a lot for it.
When you get a loan that covers tuition, you don’t care about how much the tuition is, as long as the loan covers it.
The additional staff and administration handle such things as the “diversity” offices (both in student population and employee hiring), handicap services, and staff that seems to be doing government paperwork 100% of the time. Faculty no longer have secretaries to do typing and duplicating. We do our own on word processors and on really excellent copy machines. The secretaries are now called "administrative assistants" and they spend their time on paperwork for the Dean's office.
In my classrooms we have all sorts of new things including note takers and personal assistants. There is no limit to the expenses that must be endured for any student coded as “learning disabled.” Just to illustrate one ridiculous expense, I have to teach double entry accounting to students who can't read a number because of dyslexia.
The vast number of university employees who spend their time assisting these students and filling out government paperwork plus all of the HR employees spending their time filling out government forms to prove we don't discriminate in hiring are most of the reason for high tuition. On the infrastructure side, we have had to redesign every building and office at great expense and we have to provide custom bus service to every building on campus. This is quite expensive as well.
There are other reasons, but they are relatively minor. Our full-time faculty budget is now down to 7% of the total budget.
Well the answer is obvious: Outsource college to China.
Ship the little darlings over and let them spend 4 years getting a real education.
One word: Tenure
The apple example in the article is a pretty good analogy, but the situation with higher education is much, much worse.
The apple analogy starts out with the premise that all apples are good for all consumers, and the more apples, the better. To complete the analogy one has to introduce the possibility that, in addition to good apples, there are poison apples, and that many, maybe most, consumers don’t like good apples but can develop a taste for poison apples. The former includes rigorous study in the fields of engineering, mathematics, physical sciences, medicine, and classical liberal arts; the latter, journalism, sociology, and all of the phony curricula ending with “studies” (e.g., women’s studies) and “science” (e.g., political science).
But that’s not the only problem with the apple analogy. Unlike apple growers and apple merchants, the purveyors of higher education are organized as non-profit entities. With the prospect of higher demand and growing revenues, apple growers would expand their orchards and apple merchants would expand their distribution systems. But they would not willingly and knowingly offer poison apples for fear of litigation. Those in charge of institutions of have little to fear because they have no equity interest in their operations. So they offer poison apples knowing full well that many of their customers will get sick (waste time, learn useless stuff, and get falsely indoctrinated) or die (drop out).
Another huge problem with higher ed is that the non-profit model forces administration to spend substantially all of the money that takes in. As a result, enormous amounts are squandered on administration and physical facilities that have very little to do with genuine education. The fixed costs of maintaining physical facilities and other ongoing obligations are such that, even if government subsidies were eliminated, tuition must remain high until the entire higher ed industry is restructured.
To err is human, but to really screw things up you need the government.
Your last sentence says it all.
“What are they going to do, work in a trade?”
University Education has created, just like Big Government,
a mystique for itself as being absolutely essential to the welfare of every new generation “in this highly competitive world”, while it is losing ground virtually everywhere in that objective. No need to quote statistics which have been around for decades as to just how much better educated (especially in
science, math, etc.) foreign students from less “prosperous” countries are than we are.
Higher education and the need for it has become the most cynical of political tools manipulated by the left to continue that mystique and make the whole issue one of who will ensure student loans to facilitate it, and who won’t.
It’s disgusting.
Meanwhile, the trades suffer also, as it becomes harder and harder to find independent tradesmen (from auto mechanics, to plumbers to carpenters) who don’t have to come off as overcharging elitist prima donnas just to stay in business.
When ever you have the Government HEAVILY regulate and HEAVILY subsidize an industry you have exploding prices. Think Healthcare and Education.
Compare that to the free market. Think computers. Power doubles every 18 months and prices drop in half every 10 years.
#13 —beautifully expressed in only 3 basic paragraphs/
KUDOS!
I know everyone is going to chime in now and say, "These kids should all have become plumbers or car mechanics instead of going to college! Not everybody needs to go to college!" Maybe. But not everybody can be a plumber. Not everybody has the mental aptitude to be a mechanic. Not everybody has the physical strength to be a carpenter. And by the way, there aren't very many jobs for blue-collar workers now either. So becoming a blue-collar worker wouldn't have been a great career choice.
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