'Shovel-Ready' on Campus (Now even Colleges want a bail-out)

Wall Street Journal ^ | Dec 18,2008

[SeekAndFind]

With the Big Three seeking a bailout from Washington, the Big Ten are following suit. Earlier this week the Carnegie Corporation of New York took out a two-page ad in the New York Times, signed by executives of 36 public universities, state university systems and higher-education associations, urging Congress and President-elect Obama to rescue them.

Mr. Obama has already promised to expand federal subsidies to higher education by increasing Pell grants and making student-loan terms more permissive. The university chiefs seek an additional "federal infusion of capital" -- as much as $45 billion -- to build new facilities, especially "green" ones. "To ensure a rapid response, only projects that are shovel-ready or on which construction can begin within 120-180 days should be funded," says the ad.

The Higher Education Investment Act, as the university chiefs call their proposed bailout, would allow them to make an end run around parsimonious state lawmakers: "The dollars should not be subject to appropriation by state legislatures. Federal funds should be conditional on states' agreement not to use these federal funds as an excuse to reduce budgetary commitments to state universities."

Yet American higher education might benefit from more parsimony. Economist Richard Vedder has shown that large government subsidies already contribute to making universities "relatively inefficient institutions partly sheltered from the discipline of the market -- a discipline that provides incentives for cost reductions, product improvement, and innovation." The more subsidies rise, the higher tuitions seem to go. If taxpayers are going to shovel out more money to these schools, the academic executives should at least allow outsiders to perform a cost "restructuring."

[HoosierHawk]

I've been unemployed since July.

Does anyone know how I apply for a bailout?

[bs9021]

Campus Report has reported on this also.

http://www.campusreportonline.net/main/articles.php?id=2740

[VRWC For Truth]

One giant pyramid scam: Liberals ... including GWB.

[Parmy]

Why don’t they dip into their humoungous endowments?

[Cicero]

Universities have been spending like crazy on all sorts of stupid things, and just kept jacking up tuition rates. Now, as the economy turns down, they may find that they have priced themselves out of the market.

Too bad. Maybe they should get back to basics. And some of them deserve to fold.

[WhyisaTexasgirlinPA]

This congress has totally screwed college loans! They claim to be allowing more money into the system, but the new rules have banks dropping out all across the country. Some folks are in for a harsh awakening in the Fall when no one is offering student loans.....

[HighlyOpinionated]

You need a bail out? I am enrolled in a program that is bailing me out of unsecured (credit card) debt. If you’re interested, FReepmail me or leave a comment (will not be made public as I monitor them) at http://auntiecoosa.blogspot.com

If the banks get a bail out . . . shouldn’t you?

[Da Coyote]

The day they give even a penny to any school that retains their idiotic and juvenile lib arts groups (read fem studies, sociology, etc), that’ll do it for me.

They let their undereducated idiots riot, then so can we. Schools can burn as well as SUVs.

[I_Like_Spam]

Colleges are lucrative businesses. For-profit universities like DeVry (DV- NYSE) are still making money and have not suffered much due in the recent downturn.

There is no reason why the public and private schools can’t make a go of it. Maybe they need to slim down and get rid of some of the deadwood, maybe put a lid on some of the salaries.

How much should a history or english professor make anyhow? Isn’t there a pretty big supply of qualified PHD’s in the humanities out there compared to the number of jobs?

[VOA]

bump

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

***You need a bail out? I am enrolled in a program that is bailing me out of unsecured (credit card) debt.***

Get ready for a surprise next year or the year after! When you have credit cards forgiven that info WILL be reported to the IRS. You will be hit with income taxes as the IRS sees credit card forgiveness as income in the form of “goods and services.”

[hunter112]

Ha! Higher education has had megadollars being poured down it's throat for many, many years now. When a bridge or a road is built, sometimes we get one that is useless, but more often than not, it is done so after careful studies justifying it's use.

Any dimwit wanting to study some liberal arts basketweaving course of study can drag down a subsidized student loan, Pell grant, and lifetime learning credit, all at a tax-supported (or tax exempt) sham of a school. Many thousands of dollars wasted, and nobody with a lick of sense to act as gatekeeper...

Higher education will already get an influx from all of the above from people seeking a place to hide out from the recession. Many of them will have state assistance from their unemployment comp funds to "retrain" for something potentially useless in getting a skill that will pay the costs back. Screw Big Education, they've sucked down enough of our tax dollars.

[businessprofessor]

Universities are inefficient by design. They are still operating in the same way. They do not want to be efficient. They are protected cottage industries. The public has been sold on the university experience, an expensive bundle of products and services.

I told my colleagues that we need to reduce our tuition by 10%. They will not even consider it. They think that our enrollment will increase because university education is counter cyclical. I told them that millions of white collar workers will be out of work. Business school education will not improve their chances of employment. In addition, many have much less money to spend on higher education. All my colleagues can say is that Colorado does not adequately fund higher education so we should receive much higher subsidies.

The private sector has a wide variety of education choices for professional education. Some of the choices are very expensive. Some choices are low cost. There is no reason why much of higher education does not have the same choice structure. Certification should be judge for comparing eduational choices and results. In the current situation, university degrees are difficult to judge because the product is not standardized. There could be standard exams for many areas of university education.

[HoosierHawk]

Thanks, but I'm OK.

I haven't had to dip into my savings...yet.

[SeekAndFind]

I’ve said this before and will say this again — YOU DON’T NEED GOVERNMENT AID FOR A COLLEGE TO THRIVE AND PROVIDE GOOD EDUCATION at REASONABLE TUITION.

There are MANY great, conservative, private colleges out there that will educate your kids without you having to beggar yourself.

Unfortunately, very few Americans are aware of them, or even when they are, won’t even consider them.

[doug from upland]

Harvard -— I am for helping them, but only the sciences and medical department.

[Tzimisce]

They shouldn’t get the money.

They will, but they shouldn’t.

What have they produced other than...nothing?

[Albion Wilde]

"Higher education" has become not only a racket, but also a force of family destruction. Even at state universities, admissions committees now impose diversity formulae instead of recognizing the achievements of the local pool of applicants. Prospective students now, instead of applying to several local colleges and universities, apply online to as many as fifty schools across the country, increasing a sheer waste of time and effort by all concerned -- the applicant, the application reviewers, the admissions officers.

Young people who are accepted to schools far from home leave the place and family where they grew up at 17 or 18, are constantly reminded that they are now "adults" (in spite of studies showing that the adolescent brain does not fully mature until age 25), are thrown into Marxist coed dorms and are subjected to enormous peer pressure to have sex and keep their entire college life a well-guarded secret from their parents, even if their parents are footing the bills.

At college far from home, they may meet someone who offers them a job or a living arrangement halfway across the country, and they leave their home region permanently, destroying nuclear and extended family relations, church and community ties and any sense of accountability to persons who know them intimately.

Yet these are our future leaders. It's reminiscent of the poverty-stricken Irish, Italians and Eastern Europeans who flooded into this country at the turn of the last century, never to see their parents and homeland again. Today we have phones and email, but there is still a rivening separation from family values and connections that occurs when a son or daughter leaves home and goes to university, with its diversity, homosexual normalization, birth-control and abortion-promoting "health" indoctrination and sexual license on campus. What is surprising is that any of them marry at all. But it is not surprising that the rate of divorce in this country has risen along with the number of persons attending college or university.

[John Will]

Engineering and the Physical Sciences are certainly not useless.