The College Racket

Debt

A growing problem with no solution or end in sight is the racket that is the university and collegiate system.  Student debt is, and will continue to, act as anchors holding back generations of students from life’s progressions.  The credentialing system keeps in place the need for a college degree while the university’s price gouge hurls tens of millions of students into a lifetime of debt.  The federal government keeps feeding this monster with more and more tax payer dollars that subsidize and make the problem worse.  According to Hannah Cox of Fee.org, “A former education secretary warned that government aid for students would lead directly to an increase in college costs (Known as the bennet hypothesis) and his predictions came true.  The federal Reserve found that for every dollar in student aid, tuition increases 65 cents.”  Unlike in the private sphere where the free market checks this behavior through competition and freedom of contract, the public universities stay insulated, free to continue the rising costs for an increasingly inferior product.  Currently there are 43.2 million student loan borrowers.  The average amount of student debt is $39,351 and the average monthly payment is $393.  Amazingly, the only proposed assistance plan for former students hampered with debt is to charge us once again through student loan relief which is paid for with our tax dollars and the devaluing of our dollar (Added inflation) via money printing.  The federal government does perform a magical sleight of hand when they say they will come to our rescue acting as if they are a private institution that generates its own wealth instead of what it is, paying our debt by adding more debt essentially robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Indentured Servitude

To quote comedian and political commentator Bill Maher, ‘Since 1985 the average cost of attending college increased by 500%.  The cost of college doubles every 9 years and every single year the cost increases 4x the rate of inflation, and yet, no one knows how to change a tire.”  While the cost of a degree continues to skyrocket, as does the futility of the degree itself. According to Bloomberg, half of college graduates are working outside of their field of study.  The census bureau using data from the federal reserve was able to determine that 34% of college graduates between the ages of 22-27 are underemployed, meaning they are getting paid at a level of what they referred to as “good, non-college jobs.”  Pew research finds that only 62% of college students finish their field’s program within 6 years at an average total cost for an in-state college (Room and board included) of $27,330 per year.  Despite these horrific numbers, the credentialing system, that is the hiring of only college graduates for jobs that should not require college degrees, holds people entering the workforce hostage.  College graduates with a bachelor’s degree out-earn their high school diploma counterparts at an average of $22,000 annually.  With all of academe’s talk of “Equity,” one can ask why we’re being forced to take on this form of indentured servitude that disproportionately affects the working and lower classes just to receive degrees that are often not worth the paper that they’re written on.

D.I.E.

If we’re going to look at the reasons for the rising costs of college, the fattest calf is the explosion of administrative staff.  To quote Dr. Jay P Greene of Heritage.org, “Universities are no longer focused on free academic inquiry in pursuit of the truth or the development of capable adults. Instead, they have employed an army of staff who either distract from that mission by providing therapeutic coddling to student or subvert truth-seeking be enforcing an ideological orthodoxy.”  According to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, “from 2010-2018, non-instructional spending including student services (29%) and administration (19%) grew faster than instructional spending (17%.)  Universities along with the federal government are creating larger and larger bureaucracies that are nothing more than outgrowths of their humanities department.  The average university has 45 student-service staff members dedicated to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.  To look at University of Michigan for example, they currently have 126 D.I.E. staff members which equates to $15 million in payroll.  $15 million in payroll is enough to fund over 1,000 full in-state scholarships to students, but instead, this is a $15 million dollar tab picked up by students in costs which falls back on the tax payer through subsidies.  Despite student services expanding at twice the rate of the instructional staff, there is no data to indicate that this has done absolutely anything to improve the lives of the students including graduation rates.  If we are looking for contributing reasons as to why universities have become woke indoctrination camps and the most anti-free speech institution in this country, we can turn our attention to the explosion of radical left diversity, equity, and inclusion staff along with other bodies of student services that have rather than facilitate an environment of personal and academic growth, undermine the goals of the institution while simultaneously infantilizing the student body at a cost that increases at 4x the rate of inflation annually.  If the administrative and student service bloat brought about an increase in the success of the student body, this would be a separate discussion, however they tangibly do not and they are holding students, alumni, and instructional staff hostage in the process.

Enrollment

Despite the critical nature in which I look at post-secondary education, I do not take glee in the fact that the universities are now in scramble mode as they were, and in some ways still are, bastions of American progress.  Due to a combination of the cost as well as the futility, students are now starting to avoid colleges at an alarming rate.  According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, in the last two years there has been a 7.3% (1.3 million students) decline in enrollment.  Undergrad enrollment is down 9.4% while since the spring of 2021 community college enrollment is down 7.8%.  I read an article looking at in-state schools here in Michigan where within the last 10 years Western Michigan University enrollment is down 24% and Central Michigan University is down a whopping 44.5%.  CMU was one of the schools I attended and I can tell you first hand that this is no surprise to me as the administrative and student service staff created the most frustratingly infantilizing environment possible, it is of no surprise that students decided to go elsewhere.  Both fortunately and unfortunately, I see a leaning up of the collegiate institution that has grown too bloated, coupled with a decrease in enrollment, if this does in fact happen and there is a reformation, I suggest we take a lesson from the past for the re-working of higher education’s future.

Booker T Washington

I had the chance recently to audiobook “Up from Slavery,” an autobiographical account of Booker T Washington.  Having only a familiarity with Washington, I was completely blown away by the book and by the man, there are very few people in the history of this country that were as great as him.  From being born into slavery, teaching himself how to read and write until he was eventually able to receive a formal education, he went on to being the cornerstone of education and progress of the Reconstruction south.  Though I could write volumes on the incredible man that was Booker T Washington, it is instead his approach to higher education that I want to focus on.  Washington’s idea of how to integrate the south following slavery was not through artificial means such as politics but rather organically through the economy, relying on the southern white’s self-interest to organically create a dependency on the black population. “The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges.” What Washington discovered is that there was a great desire to get educated in the languages of Greek and Latin as to appear smart and be envied by the reconstruction south.  What Washington also noticed is that despite the  learning of a smattering of foreign language, the educated had no knowledge of how to be useful in life for themselves or for their communities.  When he went on to open the Tuskegee Institute, the premier educational institution of what he referred to as “The black belt,” he wanted to teach an industrial as well as an academic curriculum.  He believed that the best route to go for his people to establish their place and equality in the post-slavery south was to make them as knowledgeable on skills and trades that had a direct human need.  His curriculum consisted of the core subjects but also skills such as brick-making, carpentry, agriculture, ability to create and repair carts, buggies, and wagons, 38 trades and professions in total.  Washington’s goal was to provide a practical education as to make his students no only self-reliant, but also so that the integrated communities themselves became reliant on the services of the black population.  To draw a quote from Up from Slavery in which Washington describes the trade of brick-making and the impact it had within the community, “Brickmaking has now become such an important industry at the school that last season our students manufactured twelve hundred thousand of first–class bricks, of a quality stable to be sold in any market. Aside from this, scores of young men have mastered the brickmaking trade—both the making of bricks by hand and by machinery—and are now engaged in this industry in many parts of the South. The making of these bricks taught me an important lesson in regard to the relations of the two races in the South. Many white people who had had no contact with the school, and perhaps no sympathy with it, came to us to buy bricks because they found out that ours were good bricks. They discovered that we were supplying a real want in the community. The making of these bricks caused many of the white residents of the neighbourhood to begin to feel that the education of the Negro was not making him worthless, but that in educating our students we were adding something to the wealth and comfort of the community. As the people of the neighbourhood came to us to buy bricks, we got acquainted with them; they traded with us and we with them. Our business interests became intermingled. We had something which they wanted; they had something which we wanted. This, in a large measure, helped to lay the foundation for the pleasant relations that have continued to exist between us and the white people in that section, and which now extend throughout the South. Wherever one of our brickmakers has gone in the South, we find that he has something to contribute to the well–being of the community into which he has gone; something that has made the community feel that, in a degree, it is indebted to him, and perhaps, to a certain extent, dependent upon him. In this way pleasant relations between the races have been simulated. My experience is that there is something in human nature which always makes an individual recognize and reward merit, no matter under what colour of skin merit is found.”  The point of referencing Washington is not in regards to race but rather education.  Outside of the S.T.E.M. and medical fields, much of what today’s universities are providing is an impractical and useless education which in-turn produces impractical and useless young adults.  There is an extreme need for workers in the trades, supply chain, several other fields that require post-high school education and training.  Higher education needs to be reformed to shape the needs of our time which includes core-curriculum while also offering trade-programs.  What is not needed is for students to continue to pick through a cafeteria menu of general courses in which they gain no useful or practical knowledge at $30,000 a pop.  Generations of students are leaving the universities with a useless piece of paper that cost $100,000 to achieve and are without any plan or direction as everything they learned and paid for is not in demand in the real world.  This too is partly the reason for the explosion of administration in higher education, these are careerist academics who learned of these fantastical theories that are not built-in reality nor do they provide anything of need, therefor the universities hire them and the letters following their names to run equity and HR departments.  We need to take a lesson from one of our best and return to an education that is practical and useful for both the student as well as the community. 

Grade Inflation

Above is a graph showing the nationwide distribution of grades which depicts the sky rocketing and most common grade that is given being an A.  Based on this, one would assume that we are a nation of rocket scientists.  The problem with this is that despite apparently being a nation of Rhodes scholars, everyone seems to know increasingly less and less.  There seems to be a direct correlation with the explosion in the cost of college and the distribution of higher grades, it is not that Johnny and Susie got smarter, it is that the education became watered down and turned into a racket.  We are paying exponentially more for exponentially less of a product.  There is also a clear-cut correlation between the saturation of an academic product and the churning out of social activists.  In addition to students leaving schools without a useful niche or knowledge of anything that took place prior to their birth, the humanities, social-science, and education departments have turned into indoctrination camps where generations of students are being presented radical left postmodern collectivist ideology as objective fact.  Students, through an incredibly narrow and myopic lens are being presented “What” to think instead of “How” to think.

Reform

I do not see how this current system of higher education is sustainable.  Enrollment is down, the product is watered down, the value of the dollar is down, and debt is up.  There are talks of government relieving of student debt, what this represents is asking the working and lower class to pay for the middle and upper class’s education.  Wayne & Monroe Counties pick up the tab for Oakland County.  Despite college enrollment and degree achievement being in a period of an all-time high in this country it seems that our common sense and practicality is at an all-time low.  We need to rethink higher education in this country, starting first with a trimming of the fat. College administrators and student service provider positions need to be cut in half. The federal subsidizing of higher education that is facilitating an explosion in cost of tuition needs to stop. We need to return to an age of core-curriculum instead of ideological indoctrination and we need to introduce practicality within our education so that those who leave the institutions are both useful to themselves as well as their communities in which they reside. We need to examine what parts of accreditation is futile and useless for example the need for people who have been working in professions for decades being forced to go into debt to get a higher degree in which they learn absolutely nothing during the process of attaining it (I.E. Teachers having to return and get a masters.) Regardless of the methods of reformation within colleges, one thing is clear, this isn’t working for students, employers, and the general health of the workforce and economy as a whole.