Posted on 03/10/2023 8:43:08 PM PST by SeekAndFind
On February 28th, the Supreme Court heard arguments on President Biden’s plan to extinguish an estimated $400 billion in student debt. Biden deserves credit for highlighting a debilitating federal program in desperate need of reform. His proposal, however, would make the problem far worse, not better. Any serious reform would force academic institutions to take some responsibility for the education they provide—and to show some responsibility to the many young Americans they induce to go deeply into debt.
The problems run deep. American higher education has become a hollow bubble of an industry coasting on brand equity and past glory.
Notwithstanding pockets of world-class excellence, the industry does little well. Universities are top-heavy and inefficient. Their complex products bundle education, research, and campus life for many students who need—and can afford—only the first of the three. On campus, classrooms teach neither critical thinking nor employable skills. The return on research dollars is pitiful. Antisemitism and segregation thrive at levels unseen elsewhere in American society. Internal procedures fail to provide due process or equal protection.
American academia is a sham suffering from disastrously flawed structures and incentive systems.
Costs have risen uncontrollably. Forty-three years ago, my freshman tuition at Columbia (including mandatory fees, excluding residential costs) ran between $20,000 and $25,000 in today’s dollars. Ivy League schools today charge about $70,000—nearly triple in real terms. The 1980 price tag associated with America’s most expensive colleges—affordable to many like me only with the help of student loans—will now hardly cover in-state tuition at a top public university like Berkeley or Michigan.
The federal student loan programs have mushroomed to obscure the real costs. Free federal dollars flow through students who can’t fathom the burden of future repayment into university coffers. Colleges have taken advantage of this federal money to pad their payrolls with administrators—now employed in greater numbers than faculty, nationwide—most charged with little more than regulatory compliance and a desire to promote ideological purity.
From there, things get worse. All decisions concerning faculty hiring, promotion, tenure, publication, grants, awards, and prestige are made by the faculty. The key to professional success thus lies entirely in impressing senior colleagues. The vaunted peer review process means that other faculty members agree that your work furthers the ideas upon which they have based their own careers. Not exactly a recipe for innovation.
Why challenge conventional wisdom when doing so can create only ostracism, criticism, and career setbacks? It’s far safer to add your voice to the “consensus of experts” that already defines your field.
As to the students themselves—and recent graduates—they have little recourse. Prestigious faculty highlighted in promotional materials fade into the background as underpaid adjuncts and graduate students teach most of the classes. Implications about the value of a degree, perhaps accurate when applied to students who excel in engineering but way off the mark for most students, are never binding. Universities have zero liability for mislabeling their offerings, for bait-and-switch tactics, or for providing an unsatisfactory education. The entire system insulates colleges and universities from consumer displeasure.
Today’s wealthiest universities are blissfully protected from external economic pressures, external assessments of quality, external customer complaints, and external liability for unacceptable performance. Many take matters even further, providing their own security and internal adjudication procedures—minimizing their exposure to the police and the courts that govern the rest of us.
With that intense structural insulation in place, the rest is unsurprising. An industry handed an unlimited budget, unassailable prestige, tax benefits, liability shields, and autonomous policing and courts behaves precisely as you’d expect it to behave: It is committed to draining outside resources for the benefit of insiders. That the resulting institutions are woke and leftist is almost coincidental. The entire industry structure is designed to promote inefficiency, absurdity, self-adulation, and contempt for others. It is delivering on that design.
The current system saddles young adults with crushing debt, empowers the worst instincts of corrupt academic administrators, and tightens the control of government bureaucrats over education. America’s institutions of higher learning will never again produce informed citizens and talented leaders unless we address their deep structural flaws and corrupt incentive systems.
Student loan programs are overdue for reform. Debt relief for past loans, however, would make things worse rather than better. It would reward problematic behavior of the past and motivate worse behavior in the future.
Proper reform would make the institutions accountable for the debt they induce America’s youth to incur. Loan guarantees—even if conditional and partial—would force them to consider efficiency, economics, and program quality for the first time in decades.
Reforming the student loan system wouldn’t fix many of the problems plaguing American academia. It would, however, go a long way toward realigning institutional incentives with the needs of a healthy industry. Let the universities scream that forcing them to assume responsibility would mark the end of American education as we know it. It would mark the beginning of American education as we need it.
Clueless millennials and Zs borrowing $200k for a degree in queer studies are SHOCKED to learn that they are unemployable.
Circa 1966 I was a roughneck during the summers on the drilling rigs. I made about 800 dollars a month. That is about 7200 dollars today. It was hot dirty and dangerous work. I worked 12 hour tours for 8 days and then 4 days off. In effect my work week 64 hours averaged through the month.
I was grateful for the job. With these earnings I could pay for two semesters of college, room and board. This is impossible today. The reason it is impossible is the vast amount of federal loans to students. The universities have no motive to keep costs low when they know the Federal Loans will subsidize their economic malfeasance.
Case in point is the administrative building was 1/3 of the chemistry building of perhaps 30 offices. Today the administrative building is a 3 story behemoth easily 10 times the size with a student population it serves about three times the size in 1966. I find the new ratio odd.
Academia is a vomitorium of Marxism.
Bfl
A lot of this is clearly not understood by the teenagers/their parents, journalists, or politicians.
If you went to a public university in your state and asked for a manpower sheet and what people actually do....you will get a line of BS and refusal to cooperate. Probably one out of every three university employees are unnecessary.
Then you gauge value of degrees. Science, engineering and medical degrees will immediately start your pay-scale at a higher level, and every three years...move up another notch. You can’t say that for the other 75-percent of degree programs.
Finally, I’d question if you are really learning much of anything within half the university programs in the US....to be worth $100,000 of value. It’s like buying a Yugo car and saying it has x-value when you know it’s only one-tenth that value.
Apparently there has been a drastic decline in enrollment for the past few years. Many colleges are going have to lay off the dead weight to survive. DEI admin will be the first to go.
The reform is simple, do away with Federal Guaranteed Loans, shut the program down. Go back to Student Loans made by private banks and such. Costs would drop fast and a number of colleges would simply go out of business. The real value of a College Degree today approaches ZERO.
Not true. A great many of them are being hired -- at lucrative salaries -- by NGOs, government agencies, and corporations. They find jobs as CDOs (Chief Diversity Officer) and diversity consultants, they find jobs in HR departments, etc.
Yes, there are more graduates than positions available. But a great many are being hired, and causing great damage in their jobs while being generously compensated for it.
“The universities have no motive to keep costs low when they know the Federal Loans will subsidize their economic malfeasance.”
That is the heart of the problem. In the triangle that is a student, Big Education, and finance (FedGov, banks, etc) only BigEd has no market pressure to control costs. BigEd will not let a student start classes until all charges are paid up front, BigEd does not care where the money comes from, and BigEd has no vested interest in the product they turn out (educated student).
One possibility is to force BigEd to finance some significant percentage of the tuition and fees they charge, say 75%. If they are on the hook for a substantial chunk of the loan, they will be more interested in turning out a student that can earn enough to pay it back.
Are you saying that 800 1966-dollars are (due to inflation) now equivalent (= purchasing power) to 7200 2023-dollars?
Or are you saying that the nominal salary for such work in 1966 was $800 / month, and is now $7200 / month?
Regards,
No one ever mentions what happens to the FUTURE STUDENTS DEBT!!
The added money enables the hiring of administrators who add no value to actual education, but who can spend their days working on left-wing activism.
The one thing that would do the most would be to make it legal for employers to use testing for employment, even if it results in “disparity of outcomes”.
If the college co-signer the loan,they would be much less interested in admitting unqualified students, or offering worthless courses.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.