Posted on 03/21/2005 4:15:13 PM PST by Helms
The Great American College Tuition Rip-Off By Paul Streitz Mar 3, 2005, 17:56
“How am I going to pay for my kid’s education?” is a nerve-wracking concern to most middle-class parents. “Why do college tuitions keep going up?” they ask. College tuitions have risen above the rate of inflation for twenty-years, not because costs have gone up, but because higher education has found that parents will continually pay more for their children’s education. If you are charging a dollar a doughnut at your store, and you double the price, and the line does not go down, you keep raising the price. Eventually, the price will go down by a lower price being charged by the store across the street.
But education is not the same as a free marketplace. Students apply for admissions to a college and the college accepts you or not. You do not apply to buy a doughnut. Each college occupies a unique position on the educational hierarchy, and all parents want their children to go to the “best” school possible. Therefore, there is a constant demand to move up the educational ladder, not the typical marketplace controls that exist with consumer products.
The rankings of U.S. News and World Reports are extremely important in this regard. They give parents the feeling that their child has accomplished something if the student is enrolled in a number ten school as opposed to a number twenty school. The ranking system is composed of many useful pieces of data such as the SAT scores of the students and the student-to-teacher ratios.
What is horrendous is that the USNWR rankings also include faculty salaries and the amount spent per student. While this sounds harmless or positive, the effect is to drive colleges to spend more and more money, and to never be economical. If a college doubled its salary to faculty, making no other changes, it would rise in the rankings. And the rankings are what a used by parents to determine the relative desirability of the schools. Consequently, every college is in a race to raise and spend more money. Tuitions go up because colleges want more money to stay in the rankings game. No administrator or college can charge less or reduce expenditures because their rankings would plummet. Tuitions continue to go up because parents are willing to pay. College tuitions have gone from about 20% of the mean family income in 1960 to over 50% today. It is vicious circle that needs to be broken.
Colleges with universities with higher endowments do not charge less for tuition. The money is simply spent. Williams College, the wealthiest private college, has $1.2 billion dollar assets but it does not charge any less than schools with a tenth of its assets. It simply wastes more. It stays on top of the rankings by outspending everyone else.
The financial tactics of modern private education are akin to the rape and run tactics of U.S. mining companies. These companies have historically stripped the land of all the valuable ore and then run from the billions of dollars environmental damage. The citizens of the state and federal funds pay for the mining companies’ short-term horizons and their denial of the secondary effects of their policies.
In a similar fashion, tuitions are set by the colleges based on how much money they can extract from parents and students. There is absolutely no thought about the long-run consequences to the students, the parents or the society. Colleges and universities regularly expect parents will go into long-term debt, such as a second mortgage, to finance their children’s education. When parents apply for a college aid the question is not just “How much have you saved for college?” The question is “What is the value of your house?” Higher education is engaged in financial asset stripping of both parents and students.
The secondary effect of the rapacious policies of higher education is the impoverishment of the middle-class family, which leaves many students with a mountain of post-college debt. It further destroys the middle-class with young families deciding to have fewer children because of the “high cost of a college education.”
Eventually, the rapacious policies of the mining companies were changed by enraged environmentalists, who brought the situation to the public’s attention. Eventually the public changed its mining practices because of stringent environmental laws. Similar corrections are now needed in the world of higher education.
In order to correct the financial, social and educational faults of modern education, the boards of trustees must be removed from operational and financial control of private colleges and universities. Without the later, the former is impossible.
Control of colleges and universities must go into the hands of Parent-Student-Alumni Associations. Tuition would go into an escrow account. The associations would then collectively bargain with the administration as to levels of tuition, staffing, social and academic issues.
Parents and students pay million dollars a year in tuition, alumni contribute thousands, but they have no voice in the decisions of the colleges and universities.
That must be changed.
Mr. Streitz has just published The Great American Tuition Rip-Off. (Available on Amazon.com) This fall his Bring Back The Jobs will be published. He was a candidate for the Republican nomination in Connecticut for U.S. Senate.
"The Great American College Tuition Rip-Off" by Paul Streitz Buy "The Great American College Tuition Rip-Off" from Amazon.com
© Copyright 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 by Magic City Morning Star
I agree about the salaries. 35K starting out is considered exceptional for a PhD in the hunanities. The ones making the big bucks usually have endowed positions which are few and far between. I always found it annoying at schools where they put more effort into lawn care, stadiums, and facilities than salaries.
I'm thinking of taking the 100 grand it would cost to get my son through college and instead buying him a dump truck, a CDL, and the address of the local stone quarry.
What we NEED to do is remove ALL Federal money from ALL educational services. We need to defund the colleges so that they will find themselves having to respond to the market, instead of being artificially proped up by the Federal government. (I'm not against State universities, by the way)
The Dept. of Education is anti-Constitutional.
BTW, I think the federal funding of education is partially responsible for the inflation of school tuition.
Exactly, look what government spending has done to medical care.
The question is not "Why are college costs going up." It is "Why are they going up at four times the rate of inflation?".
While I agree that normal "humanities" professors are overpaid ideologues unable to utter a coherent philosophy on things, it is a mistake to portray the "professor elite" in such populist fashion. The hard science professors are cool, because to be one requires talent, while somebody like Paul Krugman can do whatever he did and receive recognition. The problem with the "humanities" started with a resurgent New Left invasion of academia in the 60s, and since then their rule has become the law of the land, endangering the academic freedoms of people like Larry Summers, who apparantly doesn't want his freedoms. In the moral relativistic academia there exists not a void of morality, but a mixture of whatever they done mixed into the thing that is loosely attacked as "liberalism". In essence the Left has redefined intellectual morality and used it to measure the virtues of "humanities" professors. This explains to a large degree why every university has a brigade of communist comrades.
It should be noted that the liberal intellectual gulags can only mindwash men of mediocre congnition, the rest will shy away from it in disgust. Therefore the "academia" does not represent the best people in America. The lack of intellectual competition in the academia should contribute to its decline within thirty years. (who are they going to run out? Obama isn't an intellectual)
More blather can be found here:
www.teencritics.com/forums
It is a website composed of mainly conservative young people in stuyvesant High School, although the level of activity, or lack of, suggests widespread apathy.
The problem with the Churchills of the world is they are not the norm and their actions lead others to paint all of academia with one brush. While most of academia is populated with left wing weenies, the majority do try to achieve a modicum of professionalism and keep their personal opinions to themselves. I know of a number of Freepers who are fighting the good fight in academia. We are on the front lines of the culture war, fighting the lefties every day, all the while dealing with low wages and, unfortunately, not getting very much encouragement from our fellow conservatives. If we are to take academia back, or at least, make it more balanced, conservatives are going to have to get PhDs and produce solid scholarship. Those not inclined to scholarship should consider funding chairs and supporting conservatives in academia. Republican governors and legislators need to start appointing more doctrinaire conservatives to state college boards. Complaining about academica won't change it, action will.
There are far too many students in college right now who simply can't handle college level work.
Maybe HS students would apply themselves more if virtually everyone wasn't guaranteed a slot in college. My first college room mate couldn't even read.
Whoa! Couldn't read?!!
Literally
that's pretty bad, how did your roommate get into college?
From what he told me, his teachers worked with him (like oral tests). I have no idea what he did for standardized tests. The college gave him a nearly full time tutor as well as some reading lessons which helped.
An admissions guy at Harvard told us it was partly rising health-care costs for every employee.
I'm against shuttling students into trade schools because they are pigen holed as less intelligent or labeled as college material simply because of a standardized test score. I've been to both trade school and the university and I think ambition is the greatest determinant of success in either setting.
My daughter reports that many of her friends (class of '99 and thereabouts) couldn't find jobs so they went to graduate school. Now they have six-figure debt instead of five-figure debt and still can't find jobs. She and all of her friends are in this fallen-off-the-train category, with expensive degrees from classy colleges and grad schools.
plus the more money gov't gives to the school for grants, scholarships, etc... the more the schools hike the costs of tuition. It's such a sham it's unbelievable.
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