A diploma mill (also known as a degree mill) is an organization
that awards academic degrees and/or diplomas with substandard or no academic study
and/or without recognition by official educational accrediting bodies. The purchaser
can then claim to hold an academic degree. Such an organization is motivated almost
exclusively by a profit. Their goal is not to provide students with education. At least that is not the main goal. The main
goal is to extract as much money from a student as possible and preferably convert a student into a debt slave. The more
naive student is the more likely he/she will be converted into the debt slave with useless degree in hand. Today we live in a
world of predatory education. And this is not words that should be taken lightly. They really are out to get you in debt. Often in a
very subtle ways (for example by gently pushing you into specialties which have close to zero changes of employment with a decent
salary). Unless you are really rich or extremely talented specializing in, say, English literature is not the way to earn decent
salary. It is useful for broadening your understanding of life, though.
During dot-com boom thousands flocked to private computer-training institutes of every hue and shade, paying enormous amounts of money, with the hope that this will finally
catapult them into the job market. Very few got jobs.
University as a supermarket is dominant paradigm of education under neoliberalism and this explains proliferation of for-profit colleges. Most universities
in the USA became diploma mills to a large extent, so this only the degree of blatant profiteering that distinguish them.
The key idea of neoliberal university if to view students as customers and the degree as a product
to sell. The try to cut their cost by using temp labor, often without necessary qualification or lingering in poverty (because
the amount they pay them is below poverty level). This is called adjunct professors problem. The academic precariat
Often the victims is not young people but people over 50 who try in wane to get additional education in a hope of
finding new job. Mosr commonly this is illusion and they are milked of the last funds they have. Some specialties (such as
economics) are essentially neoliberalism indoctrination programs, which create completely brainwashed and obedient servants of
financial oligarchy.
Some specialties pushed by the colleges are just and essentially guarantee the unemployment or low paid entry level job
(secretaries and such) after the graduation (Communications, Public relations and similar specialties) unless you have
connections (meritocracy under neoliberalism is a myth and the USA society is pretty rigid making is very difficult to escape social
strata of your parents, unless you do have exceptional abilities and strong character. Which make is possible (although not
very probable) to advance to the upper class in almost any human society, including, paradoxically, feudalism; example of Franklin,
Hamilton, Lomonosov are well known)
This fast-growing American industry has become a conspicuous beneficiary of the
recession: shady for-profit colleges and trade schools that are mostly oriented
getting government funding and pushing loans, not so much in providing education.
Most of them have IT programs. One problem is the cost which is often several times
(yes times) higher that in a typical community college while the level is the same, or worse. Prerequisites for enrolling are usually minimal, if exist at all.
Like in subprime housing loans industry that main incentive in not education but
growth of enrollment (and profit) at all costs. As one NYT poster noted:
This is a replica of the subprime fraud. Government guaranteed loans, with
the tease of temporarily low interest rates, attract profit-making "capitalists"
to the public trough. The school recruiters are the real estate agents, the
financial aid department is the mortgage broker, and dream sold to the poor
is the same: middle class living.
Some of the them are pretty close to racket:
Vinaya Saijwani, Princeton Junction NJ March 14th, 2010
Another racket: the massage therapist school, which requires you to buy
a massage table at over $300. Yet another racket: the English as a Second
Language School which charges $3500 and up for 8 weeks. The latter is favored
by East Europeans, Russians and South Americans as
an easy student visa into the US. The "student" can
continue on the F1 visa, allegedly "studying" English,
while working illegally to meet living expenses.
This shady industry can be called "subprime education industry". In essence along with legit institutions we have the
whole army of con
artists praying on the gullible and hunting for Pell grants and like.
You
should not cast all "for profits" into the same category. Some for-profit certification oriented programs like
vendor training (Sun, Oracle, IBM, etc), provide pretty high quality education for a very narrow field. For
example, for IT I can mention Red Hat and Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) courses; they are very
expensive (approx $5K per week, but you can get a discount, if you order a package
of 4 or more courses), but they do provide knowledge necessary for, say, Unix sysadmin
job. Also, Sun (now Oracle) does provide some free high quality online training (see Oracle Open Learning Center).
Sun certification (in the past) and Red Hat certification
(now) are pretty highly valued on marketplace.
In 2009 the average yearly tuition in "for
profit" private colleges was about $14,000, compared with $2,500 at a community
college. Quality of education in private colleges is the same
or lower. Unless you are getting education assistance from you employee
think twice before enrolling into more expensive school.
That does not mean that classic state colleges are paradises. They have their
problems and quality of education deteriorated recently, but still they are educational
institutions not "diploma mills". In any case education only addresses the
"supply side" of the employment equation. The problem is a lack of transparency
of the "demand side." What degrees will actually be required by tomorrow's economy?
For example IT was in demand ten years ago. Not so much now. What about 10 years
from now ?
It is difficult to see "employment prospectus" for any degree program
without spending some time in the industry. This is a Catch 22 situation. Watch
out for regular colleges false advertisement too. It can be in reality a huge
surplus in particular specialty, like now in IT, but college will gladly take your
tuition money. You need carefully analyze trends and your chances before jumping
into water. Otherwise your money are lost or worse you are now in debt.
One of the US's advantages is the community college system. There is nothing
quite like it elsewhere. It allows inexpensive education for every citizen. Also
it helps to train yourself for a new job.
While I dislike the profiteering prevalent in a subprime private education, to
suggest that conventional schools don't have similar problems is, in my experience,
simply hypocrisy! But any state university cannot raise tuition without the consent
of the legislature.
In any case recession is a typical 'blood in the water' environment, and
the little fish are being gobbled up by the subprime education sharks. There are
several signs that a particular school belongs to "subprime education industry".
Among them:
Aggressive TV, unsolicited mail and other media advertisement (University
of Phoenix is one such example)Here is one telling comment
This article was fantastic and confirmed my long-held suspicions but
I'm surprised that the NY Times did not go after any of the local institutions
in this category. The subway cars are plastered
with ads--maybe 25% of all ads total--for Monroe college, DeVry, MCNY, and
many others. The advertising campaign for Monroe college
is particularly brazen and hype-ful--'Your new career is just one stop away'
etc. So what about these guys?
And for those who say it's no less the same for traditional schools--I couldn't
disagree more. I went to a spendy 4-year as a Philosophy and Math major
and it is the foundation for everything I've done since..
Unverifiable promises of employment after graduation with the stress on
high earnings potential ($60K is usually cited). Predatory educators are of
the same ilk as predatory lenders. Each rely on a human propensity for easy
answers and fast payoffs.
Compensation of employees based on enrollment.
Prices that are several times higher comparable state education costs. For
example two year ultrasound technician at $30K. Absence of full disclosure (try
to request a binding document like printout of per semester costs) is typical symptom that you will be ripped off. Here is
a
post to NTY times that explains the problem in more details:
During the summer of 1990 I worked in the collections department of SallieMae
in Kansas, an office specifically created to buy and service student loans
from trade school borrowers. Numerous borrowers explained to me that many
trade schools recruited students with false promises about employment opportunities
and never disclosed completely the financial aid awards, and eventually
stuck them with thousands of dollars of student loan debt.
This problem
with trade schools, both non-profit and for-profit, has been around for
decades and it is time that the government took more action with stricter
guidelines.
We have another example of welfare for the wealthy while the majority of
the population slips into infinite debt.
Hard ball enrollment tactics; you should understand that the "admission
counselors" of these for-profit schools are salesmen who can use boiler room
tactics -- force feeding education to people who don’t really want
it:
Ashford University (BPI) former enrollment counselor - “Every 6 months
we get a review that looks at how many students we enrolled and what percentage
of them finished their first class. As long
as they finish their first class we get full credit and after that they
are not our problem…”
“We are under so much pressure we are forced to do anything necessary
to get people to fill out an application…” APOL former enrollment counselor
- “The EC [enrollment counselor] review matrix is all smoke and mirrors
so we could fly under the radar of the DOE…”
I was taken in by one of these technology schools two years ago. The
recruiter made sure he was my friend by the second meeting and it was
bright prospects and $100,000 dollar salary promises from then on. I
was ushered into financial aid where I quickly signed several documents
that
put me in the first semester for $8,000 dollars.
The students were
basically low-income and the classes over-crowded but with some teachers
being well-meaning and talented. Finally after talking with friends
I dropped out. It was a good decision because I later would find many
of these same students would graduate with debt of $80,000 dollars!
The employment office was the tick-off with it's one or two jobs
that were at most $12.00 an hour. Also the fact that the "front office"
went through people like salt, began to show me the elephant in the
room. It is too bad because some of the teachers were very well-meaning
and had very good skill set levels. The student body was made up of
half pursuing "homeland security" degrees, whatever that is. The library
was a farce and the fact that no graduates ever visited started to make
me very nervous.
I now owe $5,000 and it's a real pain. I am wiser but amazed there is
no regulation of these thieves. But then again why should there be in
this economy, where even the sacred institution of education is debased
and sold out.
The associate degree/technical schools are a very dubious bunch.
I started an aviation maintenance program in 1983 at 18 upon promise
of high wages and unlimited openings. Well in reality I found low wages
and unions being busted at all major airlines. When a well heeled recruiter
sits with a prospective student and their parent who has the advantage?
The dis-information? And the risk? I still am unable to pay the now
exponential loan amounts due to the inability to pay back the loans.
This has ultimately limited my ability to work for defense contractors
due to the bad credit the debt has incurred....
FYI. Get a good mentor if you want to learn a tech skill. Or any skill
for that matter Universities are following the same business plan.
Amy
The ironic thing is that in many cases, the same skill and technical
programs offered by these for-profit schools can be found for much,
much less at a local community or vocational college. In NM, our local
vo-tech, CNM, offers free tuition to NM residents for certain programs.
CNM has a culinary program, auto repair, drafting, graphic design, etc.
- the exact same programs I see for-profit schools advertise. Anyone
looking at one of these for-profit programs needs to investigate their
local junior college and vo-tech college options before committing to
tens of thousands of dollars in loan debt. As with everything, shopping
around can usually get you the same item much cheaper.
dmp142
I worked at ITT Tech as a Financial Aid Administrator some years
ago. It was considered a cash cow by ITT Corp. And the tuition tied
to the max amount of financial aid available.... coincidence?
Sicily726
Thankfully, I currently teach at a public, community college that
offers remedial reading, writing (basic English) and math classes to
students who need them. The community college I teach at also offers
vocational training, such as welding, mechanics, etc. (remember when
high schools offered shop classes?). I have great students, and great
administrators. However, before securing my current position, I had
a brief, unfortunate and illuminating experience teaching at one of
those two year, for-profit trade schools, which offered certificate
programs in accounting, medical assisting, dental assisting, computer
(?), criminal justice, etc. I quickly discovered I was working with
very low income students, many of whom were also functionally illiterate.
Many of my students could neither read nor write--let alone succeed
in a college level class (which I taught). Upon discovering this state
of affairs, I requested many of my struggling students' records and
transcripts. Nearly all of these students had transcripts from a nearby
public, community college evidencing that they had failed the remedial
reading, English and/or math classes they took there. These students
were nevertheless accepted into this trade school. Needless to say,
the trade school did not offer remedial classes in reading, basic English
and math. That trade school knowingly took taxpayer dollars (Pell grants,
government subsidized loans) by enrolling functionally illiterate students.
It was then that I discovered what a scam I was working for. The practice
of accepting and enrolling functionally illiterate students, who have
no prayer of ever succeeding, into these trade schools, is abominable.
They are engaging in fraud, and they are stealing from the students,
the government, and you and me.
Fake accreditation…the inmates running the asylum. In many instances,
for-profit institution’s representatives sit on the boards of their own Accrediting
body, inevitably influencing the approval process and oversight of their own
institutions!
Undue influence on key regulatory bodies to dilute existing standards. Manipulation
of reported statistics and other regulatory measures to meet criteria for government
grants. The graduation rates 'appear' to be respectable because the students
are run through these programs like a car wash. Here is one quote:
I worked for 4 years in the "Career Services" dept of a "for profit"
'kolledge' in a semi-rural area. At our kolledge, the overwhelming majority
of graduates were barely literate and should've considered themselves fortunate
if their 'skills' would command even $10/hour.
Career Services is trotted out at Open Houses and orientations, like
the proverbial show pony to pull the okey~doke on prospective students and
their parents. Similar to the example in the article, we kept a list of
10 or 15 'success stories' of students who'd graduated earning $28 or $35k.
What prospective students were not told is that 8 to 12 of those 10 or 15
'success stories' would have been equally successful regardless of where
they went to school.
On the other hand, our admissions reps should have been shot for trolling
the bottom of the barrel inner-city students and high school drop outs in
the first place. Yes, there is more than enough blame to go around.
This is not funny, however, it does remind me of the old joke, "What do
you call the person who graduated dead last in their medical school class?"
Oday:
As a former Director of Food Services for many Universities, I saw
first hand the quality that the Food Service Trade Schools sent out.
I visited many of the schools and the education level was poor and the
"Professors" poor at best. When I asked how much the school was the
owner of one school told me the cost and I was floored. Asking how it
was paid for....Pell grants and student loans. Sadly I knew that most
of these folks would never work in the field. Now own a small sandwich
shop and across the street a Beauty Trade School..charging 12k for 8
months of school...and a Auto Trade School charging 13k....the students
that come in are not being prepared for the working world and most will
never land jobs in the industry they want to work in. Shame on these
companies for taking advantage of people who are poor and only want
to better their lives....
numiJax:
I taught at one of these 'Pell Grant' mills for one semester many
years ago. My classes were full of disinterested,
academically challenged students. Not necessarily a good thing in the
compsci field in the 70's. I was struck by the excitement
in the office when the Pell checks began arriving. But the 'councelors'
didn't get paid their commissions until the paperwork was done. So students
were called out of class to sign the papers (and the check) and begin
their ill-advised march to decades of debt. Like I said, I lasted 1
semester. I just couldn't get into the swing of it.
By the way, this so called 'college' was fully accredited, proving only
that you can get a front porch swing accredited, if you pay the proper
fee.
Substandard library, equipment, instructors, difficulties in access to graduates
should make you very nervous. Verify that the faculty are experts in the field,
have advanced degrees and are certified by national and state boards. This is
not guarantee that they are good teachers but it is some guarantee that they
at least know what they are talking about.
The key idea is to bury the student in as much debt as he/she can bear
That
can be achieved in two ways: to give education in the area where there is no jobs
or to give subprime education in the area with some job prospects.
The key
problem that after graduation most students have no solid knowledge of the topics they have studies (subprime students)
and have crushing debt will little or no prospect to obtain the job. All this obnoxious and fraudulent advertisement
about rosy job prospects during enrollment process now turns into cruel joke.
While they might be an OK way to get an education if your company pay for it and
degree improves you job prospect, paying out of the pocket often has disastrous
consequences (average debt after two years of education is staggering $50K).
A rule of thumb for prospective borrowers :
the total $$ value of loans that you can reasonably be able to pay back
should be equal to the yearly income you can reasonably expect to make at
prevailing entry level wages for the position (not promised wages). Do your
homework!
In almost all such cases community colleges and/or local state university are
a much better deal (up to 80% cheaper). They also have an additional discount for
in-state students. They have their warts too, but still they less of a hunters for
other people money.
There is a traditional relationship between matching means and cost in education.
Typically, families of lesser financial means seek lower cost colleges in order
to maximize the available Title IV loans and grants — thereby getting the most
out of every dollar and minimizing debt burdens.
The for-profit model seeks to recruit those with
the greatest financial need and put them in high cost institutions. This formula
maximizes the amount of Title IV loans and grants that these students receive.
With billboards lining the poorest neighborhoods in America and recruiters
trolling casinos and homeless shelters (and I mean that literally),
the for-profits have become increasingly adept at
pitching the dream of a better life and higher earnings to the most vulnerable
of society.
If the industry in fact educated its students and got them good jobs that
enabled them to receive higher incomes and to pay off their student loans, everything
I’ve just said would be irrelevant.
So the key question to ask is — what do these
students get for their education? In many cases, NOT much, not much at all.
At one Corinthian Colleges-owned Everest College campus in California, students
paid $16,000 for an eight-month course in medical assisting. Upon nearing completion,
the students learned that not only would their credits not transfer to any community
or four-year college, but also that their degree is not recognized by the American
Association for Medical Assistants. Hospitals refuse to even interview graduates.
And look at drop-out rates. Companies don’t fully disclose graduation rates,
but using both DOE data and company-provided information,
I calculate drop out rates of most schools are 50%-plus per year.
Default rates on student loans are already starting to skyrocket. It’s just
like subprime — which grew at any cost and kept weakening its underwriting standards
to grow.
Many of those institutions are in reality do have decent teachers and do not
provide the knowledge necessary for the position or are put in a situation when
no matter how they teach they will fail (for example, how you can teach a meaningful
class in software testing, if half of your class needs help with Windows). Small
private courses often take anybody from the street and do not check for any eligibility
requirements. That reminds that approach used in subprime marketing schemes ("high
education for anybody with pulse").
Here are a couple of quotes from Wikipedia about discovered controversies that
provide some useful input in the decision making process. Again you need to understand
that this is not black and white situation. Individual circumstances differ (for
example already employed in the given specialty people vs. unemployed just out of
high school) and what is poison of one can be a cure for another:
ITT Technical Institute has been involved in several controversies over
its business and academic practices, the most famous of which are listed
below.
In August 1998, 15 former students alleged misrepresentation, fraud
and concealment by ITT arising out of their recruitment and education
at ITT campuses. In September 1998, ITT settled all of the claims of
the 15 claimants.[9]
On February 25, 2004, federal agents raided the company's headquarters
and 10 of its campuses.[10]
The investigation negatively affected the company's stock and triggered
several class action lawsuits by investors.[11][12]
In October 2005, ITT agreed to pay $725,000 to settle a lawsuit
with California in which employees alleged that it inflated students’
grade point averages so they qualified for more financial aid from the
State of California.[13]
The University of Phoenix has been the subject of legal and regulatory
controversies as a result of its student recruitment practices and accelerated
academic schedule. There has also been concern expressed by former students,
employees, and academics that in its quest for higher profits, the university
has compromised academic quality.[26][27][28][60]
“
Its reputation is fraying as prominent educators,
students and some of its own former administrators say the relentless
pressure for higher profits, at a university that gets more federal
student financial aid than any other, has eroded academic quality.[27]
”
The student-led learning teams that abbreviate class schedules and substitute
for direct instruction time, the use of part-time faculty, high-pressure
sales techniques, coupled with minimal acceptance standards to degree programs
and low graduation rates as measured by Department of Education standards
are some of the sources of this perception.[26][27][28]
The concern that its quality of education is too basic is echoed by its
collegiate peers.
“
'[Its] business degree is an M.B.A. Lite,' said
Henry M. Levin, a professor of higher education at Teachers College
at Columbia University. “I’ve looked at [its] course materials.
It’s a very low level of instruction.”[27]
”
An instructor at the university explained that he could only cover a
fraction of the syllabus because he said that the university required him
to cram too much information into too few sessions.[27]
In 2009, the
U.S. Department of Education provided a preliminary report to the university
that cited untimely return of unearned
Title IV
funds for more than 10 percent of sampled students. The report also expressed
a concern that some students enroll and begin attending classes before completely
understanding the implications of enrollment, including their eligibility
for student financial aid. As a result, in January 2010, its parent company,
Apollo Group Inc., was required to post a letter of credit for $125 million
by January 30 of the same year.[61]
A 2003 federal whistle-blower/false-claims lawsuit filed by two former
UOPX admission counselors alleged that the university improperly obtained
hundreds of millions of dollars in financial aid by paying its admission
counselors solely based on the number of students they enrolled in violation
of the
Higher Education Act.[26][27][62][63][64]
The school counters that the lawsuit is a legal manipulation by two former
university employees over a matter previously resolved with the U.S. Department
of Education,[65] however
the Department does not share that view.[66]
UOPX's position was rejected by the
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in its 2006 published opinion, which
reversed the Eastern California
U.S. District Court's 2004 decision dismissing the lawsuit.[67][68]
The lawsuit was set for trial on March 9, 2010.[69]
In December 2009, Apollo agreed to settle the dispute by paying the United
States $67.5 million, without acknowledging any wrongdoing. In addition,
Apollo will pay the plaintiff's attorneys $11 million.[60][70]
In 2004, as a result of the filing of the false-claims lawsuit, the Department
of Education performed a program review and alleged that UOPX had violated
Higher Education Act provisions that prohibit distributing financial
incentives to admission representatives, had pressured its recruiters to
enroll students, and had concealed the practices from the Department.[71]
UOPX disputed the findings but paid a record $9.8 million dollar fine as
part of a settlement where it admitted no wrongdoing and was not required
to return any financial aid funds.[72][73][74][75]
UOPX's President states that though recruiters are paid a commission based
on the number of students enrolled, their compensation is not based solely
on that criteria, which makes the practice legal.[28]
In January 2008, the university’s parent company,
Apollo Group Inc., was found guilty of misleading stockholders when
it withheld the results of the 2004 Program Review cited above. A jury awarded
$280 million to shareholders.[76][77]
However, U.S. District Judge James Teilborg overturned the verdict in August
2008, ruling that though UOPX misled the market, investors failed to prove
that they were damaged by UOPX's actions.[78][79]
The plaintiffs have appealed the judges' decision,[80]
and the verdict requiring the payment was reinstated on June 23, 2010.[81]
In 2000, government auditors found UOPX did not meet conditions for including
study-group meetings as instructional hours, thus its courses fell short
of the minimum time required for federal aid programs. The university paid
a $6 million fine as part of a settlement wherein it admitted no wrongdoing.
However, in 2002, the Department of Education relaxed requirements covering
instructional hours.[26][27][82]
The
U.S. Department of Education ordered the university to pay $650,000
for failing to promptly refund loans and grants for students who withdrew.[26]
In December 2008, three former University of Phoenix students filed a
class-action complaint against UOPX, alleging that when the students withdrew,
UOPX returned their entire loan money to the lender and then sought repayment
from them.[83] The alleged motivation
was to "artificially deflate the cohort default rates", which impact a school's
eligibility to receive
Title IV
funding.[84][85]
Apollo asserts that the students claim is that Apollo "improperly returned
the entire amount of the students' federal loan funds to the lender."[86]
On January 21, 2009, plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit without
prejudice to refiling.[87] That suit
was refiled in the Central District of California and is currently pending
(Case No. 2:09cv00904-Judge Valerie Baker Fairbank).
The university has had various labor and discrimination issues. It paid
$3.5 million to settle alleged violation of overtime compensation provision
with the
Department of Labor.[88][89]
In November 2008 it agreed to pay $1.89 million to settle allegations by
the
EEOC for alleged religious discrimination favoring
Mormon
enrollment counselors.[90] In settling
these matters, University of Phoenix did not admit any liability or wrongdoing.
In 1995, DeVry was suspended from
Ontario's student loan program after a large number of its students misreported
their income. DeVry was reinstated after paying fines of
CAD$1.7 million and putting up a bond of
CAD$2 million.[21]
In 1996, students of DeVry's
Toronto campus
filed a
class-action
suit claiming poor educational quality and job preparation; the suit was dismissed
on technical grounds.[22][23][24]
In November 2000, Afshin Zarinebaf, Ali Mousavi and another graduate of one
of DeVry University’s Chicago-area campuses filed a class-action lawsuit accusing
DeVry of widespread deception, unlawful business practices and false advertising
and alleging that students were not being prepared for high tech jobs.[25]
The lawsuit contributed to a 20% slide in the company's stock.[26]
The class was not certified and the case was resolved for less than $25,000
in June 2006.[27]
In January 2002, Royal Gardner, a graduate of one of DeVry University’s Los
Angeles-area campuses, filed a
class-actioncomplaint
against DeVry Inc. and DeVry University, Inc. on behalf of students in the post-baccalaureate
degree program in Information Technology. The suit alleged that the nature of
the program was misrepresented by the advertising. The lawsuit was dismissed
and refiled. During the first quarter of 2004, a new complaint was filed in
the same court by Gavino Teanio with the same general allegations. This action
was stayed pending the outcome of the Gardner lawsuit. The lawsuits were being
settled in late 2006.[27]
In April 2007 the State of New York settled with three schools that were
participating in questionable student loan practices. DeVry, Career Education
Corporation, &
Washington University in St. Louis were involved with the settlement. DeVry
agreed to refund $88,122 back to students.[31]
Here is a typical scenario when after "education" you have nothing but a huge
debt:
Yasmine Issa, a single mother of twins from Yonkers,
N.Y., testified how the Sanford Brown Institute in White Plains made several
promises and actively pursued her until she enrolled in its ultrasound technician’s
program.
She borrowed $15,000 of the $32,000 she paid to attend the school but did
not discover until after graduation that the program is not accredited although
the school is and that she would not be able to find a job in that field.
Issa later found a local community college that
offers an accredited ultrasound program at half the cost. When
she inquired about enrolling there, Issa was told the school would not accept
a transfer of credits from Sanford Brown.
“The closest that I have come to a real ultrasound job was the two months
when I worked as a temp for a private doctor while his ultrasound tech was on
vacation,” she told lawmakers. “It’s hard to find
any work without a marketable skill, but going to Sanford Brown to get one has
left my family and me worse off than if I had never gone back to school.”
Like many middle-class families, Cortney Munna and her mother began the
college selection process with a grim determination. They would do whatever
they could to get Cortney into the best possible college, and they maintained
a blind faith that the investment would be worth it.
Today, however, Ms.
Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University,
has nearly $100,000 in student loan debt from
her four years in college, and affording the full monthly
payments would be a struggle. For much of the time since her 2005 graduation,
she's been enrolled in night school, which allows her to defer loan payments.
This is not a long-term solution, because the interest on the loans continues
to pile up. So in an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands
of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning. They and their families
made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason, much as subprime
borrowers assumed the value of their houses would always go up.
The Project on Student Debt, a research and advocacy organization in
Oakland, Calif., used federal data to estimate that 206,000 people graduated
from college (including many from for-profit universities) with more than
$40,000 in student loan debt in that same period. That's a ninefold increase
over the number of people in 1996, using 2008 dollars.
No one forces borrowers to take out these loans, and Ms. Munna and her
mother, Cathryn, have spent the years since her graduation trying to understand
where they went wrong.
She started college at age 17 and borrowed as much money as she could
under the federal loan program. To make up the difference between her grants
and work study money and the total cost of attending, her mother co-signed
two private loans with Sallie Mae totaling about $20,000.
When they applied for a third loan, however, Sallie Mae rejected the
application, citing Cathryn's credit history. She had returned to college
herself to finish her bachelor's degree and was also borrowing money. N.Y.U.
suggested a federal Plus loan for parents, but that would have required
immediate payments, something the mother couldn't afford. So before Cortney's
junior year, N.Y.U. recommended that she apply for a private student loan
on her own with Citibank.
Over the course of the next two years, starting when she was still a
teenager, she borrowed about $40,000 from Citibank without thinking much
about how she would pay it back. How could her mother have let her run up
that debt, and why didn't she try to make her daughter transfer to, say,
the best school in the much cheaper state university system in New York?
The balance on Cortney Munna's loans is about $97,000, including all
of her federal loans and her private debt from Sallie Mae and Citibank.
What are her options for digging out?
Internet based genuine opportunities for self-education
At the same time Internet created many genuine opportunities for self-education.
I hope that includes Softpanorama my humble effort in CS education ;-) See for example
Apr 25, 2009 post at Baseline scenario blog
Why Pay Tuition?
One of our goals here at The Baseline Scenario is to explain basic
economics,
finance, and business concepts and how they apply to the things you read
about in the newspaper. I think I’m pretty good at this. But if you prefer video
and diagrams, I may have found something much better (thanks to a reader suggestion).
Salman Khan has created dozens of
YouTube videos
covering the basics of banking, finance, and the credit crisis. (There is also
a series
on the Geithner Plan that doesn’t seem to be on the main index page yet.)
I’ve only watched a few, but they are very clear and from what I can see everything
looks accurate.
But what’s really exciting is that he also has many, many more videos on
math - from pre-algebra through linear algebra and differential equations -
and physics. My wife and I watched the one on the chain rule and implicit differentiation
and she gave it two thumbs up. (My wife is an economics and statistics professor.)
So the next time you - or your child - needs to derive the quadratic formula,
just head on over to his web site. Hours and hours of fun.
Warren Buffett remarked that, "It's only when the tide goes
out that you learn who's been swimming naked.” It is the
receding tide of employment that has exposed the next likely
financial bubble: college debt.
Is It Worth It? One
of the biggest expenses impacting the resources for your
retirement is saving for your children’s college education.
So, one of the important questions to ask is, is it worth
it?
Much like housing, a college education has been
considered a valuable asset whose worth should continue to
rise. The economic value of a college education has been
documented relative to a high school diploma. According to
the Pew Research Center, the typical college graduate
earns approximately $650,000 more than a high school
graduate.
Harder Look: However, this is somewhat a
disingenuous calculation. Let’s say you were to offer two
potential C+ college students the following opportunity: 1)
full financing of a private college education ($40,476
annually); or, 2) the equivalent lump sum of the college
cost as an investment in lieu of a four year degree.
Let’s Assume the Following: 1) initial annual
earnings of 25-to-29 college graduate $50,000 and $31,000
for a non-graduate; 2) annual earnings growth of 3% and 2%
respectively; 3) a lump sum college cost investment growing
at 5% annually. Based on a 40 year career window, this
potential college student would be financially indifferent
as each would generate a sum total of approximately $3.0
million over that period.
Sub-Optimal Circumstances: However, since 2000,
the real cost of college is up by 23% while the real
earnings of college graduates is down 11%. At the height of
the economic cycle in 2006 and 2007, a college graduate had
a 90% chance of being gainfully employed by the following
spring. In 2010, the same odds were reduced to 56%,
approximately a 40% decline. This inability to procure
gainful employment has resulted in over 30% of the graduates
living at home with an average of $27,000 in student loans
which has translated into a rising loan default rate of 8.9%
Why It’s Personal: While we may shrug this off as
too bad for them, it has financial implications for the
taxpayers. U.S. student loan balances are now approaching $1
trillion with almost 40% being added since 2006. It now
surpasses credit card debt totals and is second only to
mortgages as consumer liabilities. Given 70% of student
loans are government sponsored, this means like the banks,
taxpayers are on the hook for non-payment — although,
student loans aren’t forgiven in a personal bankruptcy … try
collecting.
Is There a Bubble? The classic definition of a
bubble is steadily increasing price in the face of declining
values where the underlying assets are heavily leveraged —
in this case with government supported loans. This certainly
sounds very similar to conditions that pre-existed the
housing collapse.
Leading Indicator: If you want to look at a good
leading indicator, you can look at the for-profit college
sector. Almost half of the federal student loans made to
such institutions such as Apollo (APOL),
DeVry (DV),
Strayer (STRA),
etc., will end up in default. This has generated the
“gainful employment rule” by the Department of Education
regarding the ability to repay loans. In many cases the
student loans couldn’t be justified relative to compensation
received once graduated.
The following is a chart of the S&P Education Service
Sub Industry Index (S15EDSV-IND) versus the S&P 500
ETF (SPY).
"Until recently, I thought
that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an
industry as socially destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime
mortgage industry. I was wrong," Eisman said. "The for-profit education
industry has proven equal to the task."
Australia's tertiary education system is large, complex, and poorly regulated. Its
government funding sources, governance structures and annual reporting requirements lack
transparency and are inconsistent between and within jurisdictions. Distorted government
priorities and discredited ideological fixations have created a dysfunctional system that
devalues the work of academics and professional staff while imposing ever higher burdens on
students to pay more for less.
These statements and
others like them reinforce a widely held perception that the Coalition is
focused solely on higher education's economic contribution to the nation. At the same time
as it has raised its expectations of commercial outcomes from higher education, it has imposed
a wide range of additional funding cuts to teaching and research.
It is therefore clear that it is not the Federal Government that will primarily bear the
burden of its tertiary education ambitions. That burden will continue to fall squarely upon
Australian academics, students and professional staff. The ways governance and funding are
currently structured virtually guarantees such an outcome.
However, the overall contribution to the higher education system from the Federal Government
has halved over the last thirty years, from
around 80% to less than 40% . It has been able to do this by clawing back a much higher
proportion of universities' teaching costs from domestic students. Most of this transfer of the
cost burden to students has happened under the Coalition.
Even though total government funding for the higher education system grew 114% in real terms
since 1989, increasing from
$5.6 billion to $12 billion in 2018-19 , the number of domestic students in the system grew
by 165%, increasing from around 410,000 in 1989 to 1,087,850
in 2019 .
Allocated funding for higher education in the 2019‒2020 Federal Budget was $17.7
billion. But again, this included funding of $5.8 billion for HECS-HELP loans. Therefore,
actual government funding was only $11.9 billion out of total revenue for the higher education
system of $36.73 billion for that financial year. In other words, less than a third of the
system's total revenue was provided by the Commonwealth that year, yet it continues to behave
as though its contribution is far higher.
The combination of reduced revenue from domestic tuition fees due to government funding cuts
and from international students due to COVID has inevitably forced all of Australia's public
universities to cut expenditure over the last twelve months.
By late March 2020, however, cost savings in the core functions of teaching and research
were being sought by university executives, even though the full financial implications of the
pandemic were still far from clear.
Because labour costs have sat at around 57% of total university expenditure for the last
decade, they are always at the top of managerial priorities for cost-cutting, rather than
their own inflated wages or
latest pet projects . Executives have imposed early retirement and redundancies on
thousands of staff with little or no consultation. Many more casual and contracted staff have
been laid off or had their positions terminated at the end of their contracts. All the
indications from university executives are that
many more jobs are on the chopping block .
Universities made at least
17,000 full-time equivalent positions redundant in 2020 . This constitutes around 13% of
the total tertiary workforce. However, given that around half of that workforce
is employed casually or on contract , and has been for at least a decade, the total job
losses probably translate to around 50-60,000 in total. In other words, these job cuts need to
be grasped in the context of the massive casualisation of university teaching and
administration over the last few decades.
According to Universities Australia (UA), there was
130,000 full-time equivalent staff directly employed in the system in 2017 . However, like
the universities themselves, UA is unwilling to publicly acknowledge the number of casuals
working in the system. In 2018, there were
94,500 people employed on a casual basis at Australian universities . It would seem
reasonable on that basis to conclude that as many as half of all casuals have either totally
lost any work they had, or have had their work hours significantly reduced. However, most
universities steadfastly refuse to make employee headcount data public, so the data we do have
is inaccurate.
This has been borne out by a recent study of Victorian public university job losses in 2020
published by accounting professors James Guthrie and Brendan O'Connell. They have found that
even in Victoria, where universities are obligated to publish their casual workforce figures,
universities used inconsistent terminology and different techniques for recording their
staffing numbers at the end of 2020 . One estimate
from early May that 7,500 university employees in Victoria lost their jobs in 2020 is
therefore almost certainly an underestimate. Guthrie and O'Connell also found that universities
are using accounting losses to justify reducing employment.
The release of twenty-one university annual reports over the last few weeks strongly
reinforces their observations. UTS professor John Howard argues that the figures reported in
these annual reports raise
serious questions about the extent to which the financial crisis of the tertiary system
has been exaggerated . He points out that all but one of these universities recorded cash
surpluses, which averaged around 3% of total revenue. However, eight of them posted deficits
after they included 'non-cash' expenses such as depreciation, amortisation and changes in
investment valuations: none of these categories of 'expenses' constitute tangible revenue
losses. The bulk of university 'losses' were in decreased returns on investments (around $600
million) and the depreciation of assets, which totalled more than $1.4 billion.
Howard also points out that Australian universities had accessible cash or cash equivalent
reserves of
$4.6 billion at the beginning of the pandemic . Their own estimates indicate revenue losses
in 2020-21 of $3.8 billion. In other words, most of Australia's public universities have ample
financial assets at their disposal to offset any short- to medium-term loss of revenue.
Depreciation, amortisation and finance costs have seen the most significant growth in
'expenses' over the last decade. According to Deloitte, this category of expenses has seen the
highest growth, at
7.5% as a year-on-year average . Universities' adoption of accrual accounting has enabled
them to write off the value of fixed assets more quickly to inflate their expense claims every
year. These inflated expenses are used as an excuse to sack staff and cut programs. Howard
argues that if public universities did not use this business accounting convention, none
of the twenty-one universities he studied would have recorded any earnings deficit in 2020
.
It should therefore be clear that the main problem public universities face is not a lack of
revenue, or a lack of disposable assets to ride through a crisis. Their main problem is a lack
of transparency and accountability at the executive level which has enabled them to misallocate
financial resources, together with a corporate governance regime that has empowered executives
to behave in this fashion. These two issues need to be front and centre of reform of the
Australian higher education system.
Dr Adam Lucas is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
at the University of Wollongong. Adam's contemporary research focuses on energy policy
responses to anthropogenic climate change and obstacles to a sustainable energy
transition.
The corporatization of Australia's public universities has been driven by government
funding cuts and regressive changes to how universities are governed. The rationale for
corporatization was that it would encourage universities to become more entrepreneurial by
turning vice-chancellors into CEOs and governing bodies into corporate boards. The resulting
hybrid has been very successful at promoting university 'brands' to international students but
has utterly failed to maintain a supportive and collegial work environment for staff and
students on university campuses.
While it is indisputable that most Australian universities have experienced huge
growth in international student revenues over the last decade, the billions of dollars in
'operating surpluses' that have flowed through the system during this time have not been
invested in expanding and developing academic workforces, or
lowering staff-student ratios , or increasing teaching and learning support for students.
Instead, those responsible for making these decisions have
spent billions of dollars on construction and marketing programs that laud their
institutions' world-class status (usually in the techno-sciences), while systematically
degrading the working conditions of academic and professional staff and the quality of
education received by students.
Resources critical to the performance of a wide range of tasks and initiatives are regularly
withheld for no good reason. Hiring freezes and the imposition of annual staff performance
assessments further contribute to the general atmosphere of fear and anxiety promoted by senior
management, who never appear to have the same performance metrics applied to them. Student and
staff services that had previously been free or subsidized have been monetized and privatized.
Professional services and expertise that could easily be sourced 'in-house' are routinely
outsourced to external consultants.
Few of these negative trends are captured in the metrics senior management regularly deploy
to spruik the virtues of their universities to students, parents and potential donors.
Preoccupied with 'cost recovery', 'performance metrics' and 'efficiency dividends', senior
managers and executives have reconstructed staff and students as revenue-generators who are
surplus to requirements if not producing financial surpluses and/or 'measurable outcomes' that
contribute to improved university rankings. International league tables, performance
monitoring, teaching and research excellence awards, and all the other 'metrics of excellence'
with which university executives and managers are currently obsessed are means to these
ends.
These legislative changes have been primarily motivated by a long-held belief within the
Coalition and certain elements of the Labor Party that universities should be run like
corporations. Those who have embraced this belief are convinced that business and industry
provide the best models for university governance because they always perform better than
public sector institutions.
Following the Dawkins reforms of Australia's higher education system in the early 1990s,
this item of faith has been progressively embedded in all of the administrative and managerial
functions of universities. As successive state and federal governments have continued to reduce
funding to the system they have sought to graft an increasingly Frankensteinian model of
'corporate governance' onto Australia's public universities.
For example, in 2012 the NSW Coalition Government inserted specific clauses in the
enabling
NSW legislation concerning university governance and finances which specify that appointed
members require financial and management experience, while those sub-clauses specifying
requirements for tertiary, professional and community experience have been removed. Similar
changes to university acts were made by the
WA Coalition Government in 2016 .
In a public corporation, the executive is accountable to shareholders and the board of
directors. Poor performance is questioned, and senior executives and managers can be removed if
the board or shareholders are unhappy with that performance. However, unlike corporate boards,
which are answerable to their shareholders, and to some extent, the public as 'clients' or
'consumers' of their goods and services, the accountability of university governing bodies is
effectively restricted to financial issues.
The auditors-general of each state and territory are empowered to annually scrutinize the
financial
accounts of all universities under their jurisdiction . Even so, it is highly unusual for
them to call universities to account for anything other than minor infringements of accounting
rules and standards. They have rarely shown any willingness to delve deeply into university
finances under their jurisdiction, despite some clear cases of
maladministration, mismanagement and even corruption . There is no evidence that any audits
have ever uncovered wrongdoing, conflicts of interest, or incidents of malfeasance, even though
we know from our own colleagues in administrative positions at multiple universities that such
behaviour is not at all uncommon.
Universities, therefore, have the worst of both worlds as far as their governance is
concerned. Staff and students have little or no say over how priorities are set and strategies
are pursued. They are subject to the whims of management, who generally regard academics as an
obstacle to the efficient running of 'their' universities, and who have no legitimate
contributions to make as far as they are concerned. They rarely admit to having made mistakes
or demonstrate any willingness to learn from them.
To illustrate this point, in the wake of COVID, it would make sense to proportionally cut
back on staffing and resources in those areas that had the highest proportions of international
students, and those related to their support and recruitment. However, there is no evidence
from any decisions made to date by university executives that these disciplines or activities
have borne the brunt of 'cost savings'. On the contrary, even prior to the current pandemic,
the arts, humanities and social sciences have been targeted for job cuts, including
non-replacement of tenured academics that have retired or resigned. In most of these instances,
the financial cases for these cuts have been based on decisions that have little or no evidence
to support them.
Many academics and students feel that senior managers target disciplines in these fields
because those who work and study in them are willing to speak out against management and
executive excesses. Critical thinking, teaching and research is deemed by university leaders to
be acceptable within those contexts,
but not when reflexively applied to their decision-making .
All of the distorted priorities that universities manifest today are an outcome of the
inappropriate and dysfunctional corporate governance and reporting models that successive
governments have imposed on universities throughout the country over many years. It is
noteworthy that Coalition governments throughout the country have made successive changes to
university acts that have the clear intention of disenfranchising staff and students from any
meaningful input into university governance.
It should be abundantly clear from all this that the existing legislation concerning
university governance is deeply flawed. It is an obstacle to better university governance and
degrades the value and quality of education for our young people and the next generation of
professionals. It also devalues the work of academic and professional staff and demonstrates no
capacity for critical self-reflection. It is therefore completely inadequate to the task of
confronting the enormous challenges that humanity faces in the twenty-first century.
We need to start a national conversation about the kinds of changes that are needed to bring
about genuine reform of Australia's higher education system. A good start would be to focus on
the ways in which university governing bodies are organized and constituted, with a particular
focus on how and why different categories of members are selected and represented.
Democratic accountability and transparency should be embedded in every new process and
structure.
Dr Adam Lucas is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social
Sciences at the University of Wollongong. Adam's contemporary research focuses on energy
policy responses to anthropogenic climate change and obstacles to a sustainable energy
transition.
In 2015, you wrote extensively about your concerns over neoliberalism in academia, calling
it the worst threat to education. You wrote: "In order to offset the lack of public funding,
administrators have raised tuition with students becoming the primary consumers and
debt-holders. Institutions have entered into research partnerships with industry shifting the
pursuit of truth to the pursuit of profits." To accelerate this "molting," they have "
hired a larger and larger number of short-term, part-time adjuncts ."
This has created large armies of transient and disposable workers who "are in no position to
challenge the university's practices or agitate for "democratic rather than monetary
goals."
Yes, neoliberalism is hegemonic. It affects all minority communities...
In the Spectator article linked -- thank you b and all -- Kimball quotes a canny friend
who said "I'd rather be ruled by the Chinese than the Yale faculty". Yes, I thought, that is
how the west is now.
I am a teacher in Australia's oldest university whose new vice-chancellor (CEO) is a pure
technocrat without academic background or a PhD.
This is the strange norm now: grey neoliberal managers are rushed into areas that require
specialists in order to 'streamline' or 'set up structures of accountability' or simply
hollow out the joint. This guy sees 'tech' as the answer, so will accelerate the pedagogical
catastrophe taking place across the world (Zoom-'teaching') whose implications are dystopian,
psychologically alienating and frankly depressing.
He is the Yale faculty at the local level; Blinken is the Yale faculty on the diplomatic
stage: a recognisable and familiar type of manager from no particular background whose career
is made leap-frogging from bureaucratisation process to bureaucratisation process.
He berates the Chinese thinking that they are the old faculty resisting the newspeak of
neoliberal managerialism, an empty meaningless feedback loop of tickboxing. The 'rules-based
order' is some imaginary thing produced in the mind of grey men to obscure their
self-aggrandisement in a vacuum; zero time has been invested in any thought about it. The
'Biden-Doctrine' is a vacuum of intellectual reflection. In short, Blinken simply doesn't
care about his job, he just cares about ticking a box on his CV as he sets himself up for the
promotion/next job. Where once we had career specialists dedicated to the actual job (like
Chas Freeman) now the whole world is run by these empty people. The consequences are very
depressing.
University administrators need not have doctoral or other academic achievements. What is
needed, in any enterprise, is the commitment to the health and to prosperity of that
enterprise.
In America, they promoted men who promised lower taxes and easier money. Men with dubious
loyalty to the long term health and well being of that country or her population. The results
is there for the world to see. Same in Italy; Mr. Berlusconi would promise to cut taxes, and
would omit to also mention that he would also cut state services. And foolish plebians would
vote for him.
When the late Mr. Khomeini came to power in Iran, one of his observations was that he
could not find enough men with integrity to put them in executive positions.
I would like to respectfully suggest to try to preserve what you can but do not try to be
a lean department or program. Maintain the "fat" so that you van save as much of the
scholarly muscle as you can when the cutting times come.
Also, reach out to the public and the alumni and ask for whatever help you can obtain. Use
Kung-Fu approaches, never attack directly. Keep trying to find alternative careers for your
older or newer faculties. Take any and all positive action and try to preserve Learning and
Scholarship for the future generations.
The late Joseph Stalin observed: "Cadres decide everything."
May be you cannot stop this, but you can delay and dlelay and derail, thus buying time for
people to adjust to their new circumstances.
That would be Mark Scott as Vice Chancellor of the University of Sydney? What a decline
from when Enoch Powell was Professor of Greek at Sydney. I greatly admire Powell's scholarly
work on Herodotus and his edition of Thucydides (one of my set texts when I was at Oxford).
How much of that work did he do at Sydney?
This is about neoliberlization of education. Early over-specialization essentially is
detrimental to professional development. this is clearlly a neoliberal approach -- to get ready
cogs into the machinery that does not reuare any additional trianing to be productive and save on
training.
Like Knuth said on a different potic "Premature optimization is the root of al evil"
Why has it taken so long for professional-services firms in the U.S. to adopt a bespoke
graduate-degree approach (
"Employers Customize Business Degrees," Business News, March 5)?
The former president of the University of Limerick, Edward Walsh, was way ahead of the game
in this regard. Dr. Walsh arguably created a new norm in Irish third-level education back in
the early 1970s, from the university's modest beginnings in the "White House" as the building
was and is still known, to a now very impressive campus with a proud record of innovation in
education and excellence in research and scholarship. Dr. Walsh customized our degrees to match
the requirements of Irish companies and industry.
My bespoke electronics-production degree was customized because the electronics industry in
Ireland at the time found that many electronic-engineering grads applying for
production-oriented positions weren't suitably qualified. As a graduate in engineering, I
believe it made my finding a job much easier than some of my counterparts in other
universities, both in Ireland and abroad. Our degrees opened many doors for my class in a lot
of different industries, and I believe they still hold us in good stead today when changing our
careers or setting up indigenous businesses.
Since inception in 2011, the Commercial Banking Program in the Mays Business School of Texas
A&M University has joined with the banking industry in implementing and teaching a required
commercial-banking curriculum that is designed to position our graduates for successful careers
in commercial banking. The banking industry provides us with valuable input on essential
training and skills they require of our students to be considered for employment. In addition,
selected parts of the program curriculum are taught by senior banking executives from our
advisory board of directors. Students receive current, relevant banking-industry training
taught by banking executives positioning them for successful careers in commercial banking.
Banks find our graduates are trained according to industry requirements and are productive
sooner than their peers, and the Commercial Banking Program is helping alleviate the shortage
of trained talent within the banking industry.
In neoliberalized universities there are too many PhD degree holders. It is a conveyer to produce them. .And too few real
scientists...
Notable quotes:
"... The previous generation of university educators didn't retire on schedule (I can't really blame them, tenure and ridiculously light teaching loads) and that, coupled with the rise of adjuncts and funding siphoned off for administrators, changed the nature of academia and the number of available jobs. ..."
"... I'm sorry for Herring, but she really should have anticipated what happened. I've read probably a dozen articles and essays repeating her exact experience, and none of them less that 15 years old. ..."
"Today, almost a year after I officially became Dr. Herring, I resigned from my postdoc at Ghent University. There are several reasons that motivated this decision but the
main one is that I no longer enjoy the work enough to justify how demanding it is .
As I neared
the end of my PhD, I worried about my future. It is hard to explain to those who are not in
academia just how bad things are for those who are starting out. Say the words "job market"
within earshot of a junior researcher and watch fatalistic dread cloud their face.
I was
relatively lucky because I secured a research job straight out of my PhD. But despite being
somewhat cushy, my position was still fixed-term. To hope to one day obtain an elusive
permanent contract, I had to accept that my current job would most likely be the first in a
series of short-term contracts in various distant locations.
To succeed in academia, I would
have to make a number of sacrifices. The simple truth is that I am no longer willing to make
these sacrifices. A great deal of enthusiasm is needed to survive early career academia with
its endless applications, rejections and precarity. Sadly, this enthusiasm is too often
exploited. For instance, academics are not paid to publish their research in journals. To
guarantee the quality of the research being published in these journals, they review the
findings of other researchers, also for free.
But journal publishers tend to charge thousands
in yearly subscription fees to university libraries. Increasingly, higher education staff
suffer casualisation and unreasonable workloads, and the pandemic (or rather, the ways in which
governments and university high-ups are dealing with the pandemic) is making things worse.
I do
not mean to discourage anyone who is currently working in academia or who might be considering
it as a profession. The enthusiasm and persistence of researchers is admirable and important.
Their work should be celebrated and their enthusiasm should be nourished rather than exploited.
I am proud of my friends who have managed to make things work despite all these obstacles. For
my part, I have come to terms with the fact that academia is not for me."
Regarding "Why I Am Leaving Academia," this has been true for a long time now, maybe
twenty years or so.
The previous generation of university educators didn't retire on schedule
(I can't really blame them, tenure and ridiculously light teaching loads) and that, coupled
with the rise of adjuncts and funding siphoned off for administrators, changed the nature of
academia and the number of available jobs.
How did the author not know this?
I was halfway through my MA when I understood that a PhD would likely end in economic and
professional disaster, so I gave up my dream (or more accurately, woke up).
I'm sorry for Herring, but she really should have anticipated what happened. I've read
probably a dozen articles and essays repeating her exact experience, and none of them less
that 15 years old.
This book considers the detrimental changes that have occurred to the institution of the university, as a result of the withdrawal
of state funding and the imposition of neoliberal market reforms on higher education. It argues that universities have lost their
way, and are currently drowning in an impenetrable mush of economic babble, spurious spin-offs of zombie economics, management-speak
and militaristic-corporate jargon. John Smyth provides a trenchant and excoriating analysis of how universities have enveloped themselves
in synthetic and meaningless marketing hype, and explains what this has done to academic work and the culture of universities – specifically,
how it has degraded higher education and exacerbated social inequalities among both staff and students. Finally, the book explores
how we might commence a reclamation. It should be essential reading for students and researchers in the fields of education and sociology,
and anyone interested in the current state of university management.
Quotes
If we are to unmask what is going on within and to universities, then we need to look forensically at the forces at work and
the pathological and dysfunctional effects that are placing academic lives in such jeopardy -- hence my somewhat provocative-sounding
title 'the toxic university 5 .
One of the most succinct explanations of what is animating me in writing this book was put by Lucal (2015) -- echoing arguably
the most significant sociologist ever. Charles Wright Mills (1971 [1959]) in his The sociological imagination -- when she said:
...neoliberalism is a critical public issue influencing apparently private troubles of college [university] students and teachers,
(p. 3)
... ... ...
Pathological Organizational Dysfunction
Just on 40 years ago, for all of my sins, I studied 'organizational theory and 'management behaviour' as part of my doctorate
in educational administration. I cannot remember encountering the term, but in light of mv subsequent four decades of working
in universities around the world, I think I have encountered a good deal of what 'pathological organisational dysfunction" (POD)
means in practice. I regard it is an ensemble term for a range of practices that fall well within the ambit of the 'toxic university
5 . The short explanation is that what I am calling POD has become a syndrome within which the toxic university has
become enveloped in its unquestioning embrace of the tenets of neoliberalism -- marketization, competition, audit culture, and
metrification. In other words. POD has become a major emblematic ingredient of the toxic university, which as Ferrell (2011) points
out looks fairly unproblematic on the surface:
Higher education on the corporate model imagines students as consumers, choosing between knowledge products and brands. It
imagines itself liberating the university from the dictates of the state/tradition/aristocratic self-replication, and putting
it in the hands of its democratic stakeholders. It therefore naturally subscribes to the general management principles and practices
of global corporate culture. These principles -- transparency, accountability, efficiency -- are hard to argue with in principle.
(p. 166 emphasis in original)
What is not revealed in this glossy reading of neoliberalism is the way in which it does its work, or its effects, as Ferrell
(2011) puts it in relation to universities, the way it has 'wrecked something worthwhile" (p. 181).
John Gatto. an award-winning teacher of the year in New York, comes closest to what I mean by POD in his description of'psychopathic
5 organizations. Gatto (2001) says that the term psychopathic, as applied to organizations, while it might conjure
up lurid images of deranged people running amuck, really means something quite different; he invokes the term to refer to people
'without consciences' (p. 303). The way he put it is that:
4.0 out of 5 stars Essential reading for anyone working in a UK university today.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 30, 2019
Reviewers of this book seem to conflate the price of, and access to, this book in an ironic context. This isn't fair as this
is very much a book written from a formal academic perspective. In that sense the book is probably priced reasonably.
However, as I don't work in this field I found that I had to read around some of the topics in order to get a deeper understanding
of the issues raised by the book. So one thing I think that author could do is to almost re-write the book in a more "journalistic"
sense and this would make it more accessible to a wider audience.
As it stands, however, this book is right on the money. Reading almost every page brought from me nods of agreement at familiar
practices from university "leaders". This book is therefore absolutely correct in its findings and this then makes it profoundly
depressing as the book describes, in my view, the dismantling of the university system as we know it. Every chapter details things
I have witnessed or heard about from other universities. The "rock star" academics section, usually focusing on "dynamic" researchers,
is the highlight as I know enough people who fit the descriptions given - people who would sell their mothers to get a grant or
get slightly higher up the greasy pole.
The critique of university leadership, marketing functions and financial (mis)management are also spot-on.
Overall, get past the formal academic nature of this book (it is not a book designed for a wide audience, which is a pity)
and it is excellent, timely and deeply depressing.
PHILIP TAYLOR5.0 out of 5 stars
Forensic Analysis of The Toxic Neo-Liberal University Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 19, 2019
A brilliant exposition of the toxic neo-liberal University
"Schools teach to the test, depriving children of a rounded and useful education."
Boy do they. I work in Business/IT training and as the years have rolled on I and every colleague I can think of have noticed
more and more people coming to courses that they are unfit for. Not because they are stupid, but because they have been taught
to be stupid.
So used to being taught to the test that they are afraid to ask questions. Increasingly I get asked "what's the right way to
do...", usually referring to situation in which there is no right way...
I had the great pleasure of watching our new MD describe his first customer-facing project, which was a disaster, but they
"learned" from it. I had to point out to him that I teach the two disciplines involved - businesss analysis and project management
- and if he or his team had attended any of the courses - all of which are free to them - they would have learned about the issues
they would face, because (astonishingly) they are well-known.
I fear that these incurious adult children are at the bottom of Brexit, Trump and many of the other ills that afflict us. Learning
how to do things is difficult and sometimes boring.
Much better to wander in with zero idea of what has already been done and repeat the mistakes of the past. I see the future
as a treadmill where the same mistakes are made repetitively and greeted with as much surprise as if they had never happened before.
@James
Speaks rn. I'm not fine with assuming that the end product will automatically produce
merit beyond what meritocracy is today – brown-nosing. True merit is you have
demonstrated you can do it.
The last 40+ years have seen an endless stream of "bright boys" graduating university with
MBAs, getting involved in the management structure as "change agents", screwing up the
business for 5 years then "taking another opportunity" to screw up a different company.
Prof. Henry Mintzberg calls them the wrong people, at the wrong time, for the wrong
reason, because they don't have a clue how the real world works. But hey, they are high IQ
people, so they must have merit.
@Curmudgeon
r medicine and sophisticated writing. The issue is that these individual were poorly educated
– first and foremost in the "greed is good" school of the America. After sipping deeply
of this dead-end, destructive ethical framework, these individuals were then carefully
trained on how to extract value from an economy/a company rather than add value.
High IQ is still desperately needed for progress and to maintain civilisation. But put to
ill-use, high IQ individuals can wreak commensurately wreak greater havoc.
Analogies could be made to guns, armies, cars. All of them can be put to exceptionally
ill-use. Few would argue that a modern nation can live without automobiles or some kind of
armed defence force.
Exclusive access to the elite universities is the key for reproducing the "new
aristocracy"
Notable quotes:
"... Meritocracy is supposed to function best when an insecure 'middle class' constantly strives to secure, preserve and augment their income, status and other privileges by maximizing returns to their exclusive education. But access to elite education – that enables a few of modest circumstances to climb the social ladder – waxes and wanes. ..."
"... Most middle class families cannot afford the privileged education that wealth can buy, while most ordinary, government financed and run schools have fallen further behind exclusive elite schools, including some funded with public money. In recent decades, the resources gap between better and poorer public schools has also been growing. ..."
"... Elite universities and private schools still provide training and socialization, mainly to children of the wealthy, privileged and connected. Huge endowments, obscure admissions policies and tax exemption allow elite US private universities to spend much more than publicly funded institutions. ..."
"... technological and social changes have transformed the labour force and economies greatly increasing economic returns to the cognitive, ascriptive and other attributes as well as credentials of 'the best' institutions, especially universities and professional guilds, which effectively remain exclusive and elitist. ..."
"... Welcome to cosmetic meritocracy to go along with your cosmetic democracy. And in America, you can have as much of either you can afford to buy ..."
"... I think several high cost colleges like U.C.Berkeley are replacing the SAT and ACT tests with the important Bank Balance test. (joke!) ..."
"... School maybe, but then admission to University was absolutely done on merit. at least where I grew up, in Romania, the admissions were based on multiple written exams, were completely anonymized, and there were two independent markers. If the grading of the two markers diverged by more than one point, another one was brought to check. ..."
"... I would argue that a real education is one that liberates the student to become a free citizen, to become someone who can think for herself or himself. ..."
Yves
here. Meritocracy is a pet topic, or perhaps more accurately, a pet peeve. This 2007 Conference
Board Review article explains why meritocracy is unattainable , so the whole
idea was always problematic.
Chinese mandarins, who won their positions via performance on the imperial examination, are
an early, if not the first, example of a meritocratic system. Napoleon standardized education
throughout France with the explicit goal of making it possible for poor but bright boys to be
identified and further schooled to become bureaucrats.
This article includes issues regularly discussed in comments, such as how higher education
has come to be mainly about credentialing. It provides a high-level, accessible discussion of
how whatever value the idea of meritocracy had in theory, it has become perverted in
practice.
By Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former economics professor, who was United Nations Assistant
Secretary-General for Economic Development, and received the Wassily Leontief Prize for
Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. Originally published at the Inter Press
Service
How often have you heard someone lamenting or even condemning inequality in society,
concluding with an appeal to meritocracy? We like to think that if only the deserving, the
smart ones, those we deem competent or capable, often meaning the ones who are more like us,
were in charge, things would be better, or just fine.
Meritocracy's Appeal
Since the 1960s, many institutions, the world over, have embraced the notion of meritocracy.
With post-Cold War neoliberal ideologies enabling growing wealth concentration, the rich, the
privileged and their apologists invoke variants of 'meritocracy' to legitimize economic
inequality.
Instead, corporations and other social institutions, which used to be run by hereditary
elites, increasingly recruit and promote on the bases of qualifications, ability, competence
and performance. Meritocracy is thus supposed to democratize and level society.
Ironically, British sociologist Michael Young pejoratively coined the term meritocracy in
his 1958 dystopian satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy. With his intended criticism rejected as
no longer relevant, the term is now used in the English language without the negative
connotations Young intended.
It has been uncritically embraced by supporters of a social philosophy of meritocracy in
which influence is supposedly distributed according to the intellectual ability and achievement
of individuals.
Many appreciate meritocracy's two core virtues. First, the meritocratic elite is presumed to
be more capable and effective as their status, income and wealth are due to their ability,
rather than their family connections.
Second, 'opening up' the elite supposedly on the bases of individual capacities and
capabilities is believed to be consistent with and complementary to 'fair competition'. They
may claim the moral high ground by invoking 'equality of opportunity', but are usually careful
to stress that 'equality of outcome' is to be eschewed at all cost.
As Yale Law School Professor Daniel Markovits argues in The Meritocracy Trap, unlike the
hereditary elites preceding them, meritocratic elites must often work long and hard, e.g., in
medicine, finance or consulting, to enhance their own privileges, and to pass them on to their
children, siblings and other close relatives, friends and allies.
Gaming Meritocracy
Meritocracy is supposed to function best when an insecure 'middle class' constantly strives
to secure, preserve and augment their income, status and other privileges by maximizing returns
to their exclusive education. But access to elite education – that enables a few of
modest circumstances to climb the social ladder – waxes and wanes.
Most middle class families cannot afford the privileged education that wealth can buy, while
most ordinary, government financed and run schools have fallen further behind exclusive elite
schools, including some funded with public money. In recent decades, the resources gap between
better and poorer public schools has also been growing.
Elite universities and private schools still provide training and socialization, mainly to
children of the wealthy, privileged and connected. Huge endowments, obscure admissions policies
and tax exemption allow elite US private universities to spend much more than publicly funded
institutions.
Meanwhile, technological and social changes have transformed the labour force and economies
greatly increasing economic returns to the cognitive, ascriptive and other attributes as well
as credentials of 'the best' institutions, especially universities and professional guilds,
which effectively remain exclusive and elitist.
As 'meritocrats' captured growing shares of the education pies, the purported value of
'schooling' increased, legitimized by the bogus notion of 'human capital'. While meritocracy
transformed elites over time, it has also increasingly inhibited, not promoted social
mobility.
A Different Elite
Thus, although meritocrats like to see themselves as the antithesis of the old
'aristocratic' elite, rather than 'democratize' society through greater inclusion, meritocracy
may even increase inequality and further polarize society, albeit differently.
While the old 'aristocratic' elite was often unable to ensure their own children were well
educated, competent and excellent, meritocrats – who have often achieved their status and
privileges with education and related credentials – have often increased their
significance.
Hence, a meritocratic system – seemingly open to inclusion, ostensibly based on
ability – has become the new means for exclusion, which Chicago University Professor
Raghuram Rajan attributes to the digital revolution.
Meritocrats have increased the significance of schooling, with credential attainment
legitimizing growing pay inequality, as they secure even better education for thus own
children, thus recreating and perpetuating inequalities.
Recent public doubts about, and opposition to rising executive remuneration, MBA education,
professional guild cartels and labour remuneration disparities reflect the growing
delegitimization of ostensibly meritocratic hierarchies and inequalities.
High Moral Ground
To add insult to injury, meritocratic ideology suggests that those excluded are undeserving,
if not contemptible. With progressive options lacking middle class and elite support, those
marginalized have increasingly turned to 'ethno-populism' and other 'communal' appeals in this
age of identity politics.
Unsurprisingly, their opposition to educational and economic inequalities and
marginalization is typically pitted against the ethnic 'Other' – real, imagined or
'constructed' – typically seen as 'foreign', even if domestic, as the 'alien within'.
Markovits argues that meritocracy undermines not only itself, but also democratic and
egalitarian ideals. He insists that meritocracy also hurts the new 'meritocratic' and
'technocratic' elite, hoping to recruit them to the anti-meritocracy cause, perhaps reflecting
his appreciation of the need to build broad inclusive coalitions to bring about social
transformation.
"Progressives inflame middle-class resentment, and trigger elite resistance while demagogues
and charlatans monopolize and exploit meritocracy's discontents. Meritocratic inequality
therefore induces not only deep discontent but also widespread pessimism, verging on
despair."
Reducing Inequality Possible
In the US and elsewhere, tax policy, other incentives and even Covid-19 will encourage
replacing mid-skilled workers with automation and highly skilled professionals, e.g.,
facilitated by the growing use of artificial intelligence applications.
One alternative is to reform labour market as well as tax policies and regulations to
promote more skilled, 'middle-class' employment. Those introducing new technologies would then
be motivated to enable more productive, higher income, middle-class employment.
A more open, inclusive and broader educational system would also provide the workforce
needed for such technologies. Thus, the transitions from school to work, which have tended to
increase inequality, can be transformed to reduce inequality.
Rather than de-skill workers to be paid less in order to become more profitable,
'up-skilling' workers to be more productive can also be profitable. For example, an Indian
cardio-thoracic hospital has trained nurses for many routine medical procedures, allowing
specialist doctors to focus on tasks really requiring their expertise.
At relatively lower cost, using workers who are not fully trained doctors, but are paid and
treated better, can cost-effectively deliver important healthcare services at lower cost at
scale. Such innovations would strengthen the middle class, rather than undermine and erode
it.
New Labour talked about a meritocracy.
A classless society where anyone could get to the top through their own hard work, drive and
ambition.
In a meritocracy those at the top do get their on their own merit and deserve their
rewards.
In a meritocracy those at the bottom are there through their own lack of effort and others shouldn't feel responsible for
them
But what happened?
We adopted meritocratic ideas, but never created a meritocracy.
What does a meritocracy look like?
1) In a meritocracy everyone succeeds on their own merit.
This is obvious, but to succeed on your own merit, we need to do away the traditional
mechanisms that socially stratify society due to wealth flowing down the generations.
Anything that comes from your parents has nothing to do with your own effort.
2) There is no un-earned wealth or power, e.g inheritance, trust funds, hereditary titles.
In a meritocracy we need equal opportunity for all. We can't have the current two tier
education system with its fast track of private schools for people with wealthy parents.
3) There is a uniform schools system for everyone with no private schools.
New Labour's meritocratic vision won a landslide victory in 1997, they just never followed
through to actually create that meritocratic society where everyone has equal
opportunity.
All we got were the meritocratic ideas.
Those at the top got there on a playing field tilted in their favour, but they swan around
thinking they got to the top in a meritocracy.
The poor suffer the legacy of New Labour's meritocratic ideas with people thinking we live in
a meritocracy and the poor are poor through their own lack of effort.
This is the worst of both worlds, meritocratic ideas without a meritocracy.
In a proper meritocracy you wouldn't be able to use your money to ensure your children
succeeded.
(Even someone like Boris can become Prime Minister, if you can afford the 30k a year fees for
Eton.
Look at Trump, inherited wealth personified.)
When you can't guarantee your own children's success, you are going to be a lot more
concerned with the well being of those lower down the scale as that is where your own
children might end up.
+1000! Exactly. My favorite example (from NC?) is schools. By de-funding education (55%
reduction in funding for higher education since 1972), public policy has made even public
universities dependent on tuition (gosh! I wonder why it's been rising) or student loans
(double gosh!) for an ever-growing portion of their budgets. Professors can't flunk the
incompetent with impunity, then, since it might impair the financial viability of the
institution that employs them.
A sensible society understands enhancing its human capital has merit in and of itself, so
directs resources to it beyond what tuition students can pay.
Meanwhile, no study validates merit pay for teachers, charter schools, and testing as ways
to improve educational outcomes. What does correlate with those outcomes? Answer: childhood
poverty rates.
This is a lot of BS when examined outside the unquestionable assumptions of the US
situation.
In the US you have locally funded and geographically segregated schools, which in a
rational world should be an absolute scandal that is a topic of constant discussion until the
situation gets fixed. Instead people are taking it for granted as they only way things could
be.
Well, if you are only allowed to go to the school in your neighborhood, which in turn is
funded by whatever the tax base is the immediate vicinity, then of course a system based on
educational achievement will very quickly cement existing inequalities into inherited class
differences.
A problem with a very simple solution -- fund public schools at the federal level and fund
them equally, and also ban all private schools.
That is what the USSR did back in the days, and it did in fact achieve very high level of
social equality and mobility. It works. All that is needed is to properly identify the problem and work toward addressing it.
Going after the idea that those who are best educated should be the ones doing the
decision making in society is not going to solve the problem and will in fact hurt society in
the long run.
Then there is the problem of wealth inequality, which is in fact a separate one from that
of status. There is no reason why social status has to be so tightly correlated with wealth.
It has not been at many times and in many places throughout history.
And we are once again fighting the wrong battle if we go after "meritocracy" instead of
the more concrete mechanismS that create wealth inequality.
Again, in the USSR there was no wealth inequality because the system redistributed very
effectively and prevented accumulation of excess wealth by individuals. And before someone
screams "but that was communism", we only have to go back to the situation in the 1950s in
the US when you had a 90% top income tax rate and the various loopholes that exist now for
hiding wealth derived from the wonders of financialization did not exist.
"That is what the USSR did back in the days, and it did in fact achieve very high level of
social equality and mobility. It works. "
Except that there still were better and worse schools (for various reasons), and party
members were better able to place their kids. Not to mention, that being a party member
meant a better post-school placement of your kids int he first place, and goign to the uni
w/o party membership in family as pretty hard.
And re the wealth distribution – hahahahah. Again, if you were a high-placed party
official (which was not based on meritocracy, but on massive political infighting), you did
not have to worry about "official" wealth. Because a lot of "state" assets were yours to use
as you wished (depending on where in the hierarchy you were).
So you had your 90% of non-communist party members (in mid 80s, party membership was about
10% of populatin), then your 10% of party members, of which you had your 1% and 0.01%
respectively.
For every kid from the ghetto placed in a technical school, after lowering admission
requirements, one fewer high testing child is placed.
U.C. Berkeley is no longer requiring SATs because they are "racist".
The affect of this is to elevate the status of the very privileged even higher and to
create strife and infighting among the middle class and lower middle class.
It's not at all clear that affirmative action is at odds with merit, though it is clearly
at odds with the credentialing (grade point averages, and all the resume padding) that one
sees on the resumes of the PMG progeny. My neck of the academic woods is full of PMC grinders
who don't really have much to offer and could use way more people with real life
experience.
Which gets to the real problem with meritocracy: it is only concerned with
ranking/allocation of of jobs, not the overall structure of the job market. If good jobs were
less rare, there would be less infighting about who got to fill them, more social mixing, and
we would all have an easier time dispatching the "meritocrats" who don't contribute.
The education system in the USSR was definitely meritocratic. There were 'special' schools
with advanced curriculum (I studied in one) and you needed to pass exams to get into one.
Likewise the admission to universities was also based on examinations and the alumni of these
elite schools and universities were overrepresented in the Soviet and then Russian elite
Yes, and it was based entirely on examinations. None of the "we ask for SAT but mostly
decide based on subjective crtiria" BS that results in 75% of the undergraduate slots at the
likes of Harvard going to children of alumni and the wealthy (which is mostly the same thing)
BS, but a clear cutoff based on exam scores alone. I myself have passed through that exact
same system too, so I know very well its virtues (and deficiencies too).
Perhaps even more importantly, kindergartens and primary schools provided as equal
educational opportunities as possible. There were no private schools so when the time to pass
those exams came, everyone was on as equal footing as possible, they had gone through the
same classes together. Unfortunately, there was an exception -- the offspring of high party
officials could bypass these barriers, which was deeply unfair and caused quite a bit of
resentment, but other than that it was a true meritocracy.
Yes, it was still not a system in which where you were born played no role. The children
of university professors will on average be academically far ahead of the children of
agricultural workers, just by virtue of the environment they grew up in. There is no way
around that other than taking kids away from their parents and raising them communally.
But it is important that everyone has the opportunity to rise through the ranks and that
starts from the bottom of the educational pyramid.
We are stubbornly avoiding having that discussion though, instead we talk about how we
should be giving preferential treatment to women and minorities when they are in their 20s
and applying for jobs and positions. It is almost as if the latter serves the purposes of
preventing us from talking about the former
That's not true. Party members had access to special schools for their own kids. Often
these schools weren't "officially" special, but very often in a district there was a school
that got more funding, first pick of teachers etc. and party members had preferential
acceptance to those. As I say, it often might not have been an official party line (although
I believe there were some schoold reserved for party member kids), but was a common local
party office practice.
I say this as someone who went through the system and actually had the advantage (which I
did not understand until I was much older) as a grandson of an important party functionary
and anti-nazi hero. It even managed to beat the fact that my uncle (from the other side of
the family) emigrated to the US, which was often a fatal hit to anyone's college/uni dreams
in the rest of the family.
School maybe, but then admission to University was absolutely done on merit. at least
where I grew up, in Romania, the admissions were based on multiple written exams, were
completely anonymized, and there were two independent markers. If the grading of the two
markers diverged by more than one point, another one was brought to check.
I know children of really big party wigs that couldn't get into university under these
circumstances
Or you needed to be a kid of a high-enough placed party hack, although in most cases, they
didn't bother to put their kids there, as they could get them a job they wanted w/o the
school. I _know_ (because I have seen it first hand numerous times) that who the parents were
and who they knew played an important role.
That all said, the school system was way less about credentials than the US one. And also,
because hard-science schools were not seen as a way to a (guaranteed large) career
advancement, the people who went there were most people who really wanted to do it, not
taking it as a soft option.
The career advancement path were the various "economic" schools, as that with a right set
of connections would more or less guarantee a very cushy top job.
This country doesn't value home grown STEM graduates.. if it did it wouldn't be
undercutting them with H1-B's. So you would have to start there and show kids that getting
into STEM is seen as equally valuable as getting an MBA.
IP-laws are the source of some/much of current inequality, those IP-laws are most
definitely a political choice and they most definitely are not automatically benefitting the
meritocratic. Sometimes they do, often they don't.
But as always this is seen as the 'cure':
Rather than de-skill workers to be paid less in order to become more profitable,
'up-skilling' workers to be more productive can also be profitable.
More training, more education ..
The de-skilling is done to jobs which might, but does not have to, lead to de-skilling of
workers. The stage is set to reduce the work-load and share the work, the de-skilled work is
designed to make workers easily replaceable so the 'skill-shortage' stopping a reduction of
the hours worked is not as valid of an excuse as it was 40 years ago.
The author does acknowledge the role that governments and legislation has but for some
reason reducing the hours worked by an individual and sharing the work is not seen as a valid
option. But then again this kind of futurists believe that in the future then there will not
be enough resources to house and feed the retired.
Another view might be that in the future there will be enough resources to house and feed the
retired but those resources might, due to political choices , be spent on luxury for the few
leaving homelessness and starvation for the rest.
McDonalds was a pioneer at the movement for de-skilling workers. When they first opened up
you actually had people at the back peeling bag after bag of potatoes. Eventually they were
able to replace the potatoes with bags of frozen fries which took no skill at all to use.
They actually spent a huge amount of effort at de-skilling work there so that workers could
be easily replaced and had no skills that they could bargain higher wages for.
I would argue that a real education is one that liberates the student to become a free
citizen, to become someone who can think for herself or himself. This is what used to be
called a liberal arts education. Vocational training may certainly be important, but ought
not be confused with education. Vocational training is perhaps best left to the institutions
that actually will employ the individual. An education in liberal arts prepares the student
to learn how to learn. But we are not the employees of society. We are citizens.
Indeed, stefan, that is entirely the point, and ought to be the goal. Society is only as
good as the quality of education given to all its members, not just the elite. This country
has forgotten how important education is to the stability of the state, education from the
first steps in public schools, so that when time comes to go on with that education at more
sophisticated levels, all minds (all minds!) whatever the parents' station in life, have the
ability to go where their talents take them. We know how to do this; it's not rocket
science!!
I say we know how to do this. But it is clear – this country is not doing it. And it
is not doing it on purpose.
That is something to be out on the streets protesting against. One of the many, many
things.
Maybe, but if you could tell in advance which kids are going to need it, it would be a lot
cheaper and waste less of people's time to do advanced degrees for only the best and
brightest. For most people, hitting the workforce at the tender young age of 31, for example,
has a certain reproductive cost, not to mention lost income. It isn't for everyone.
Also, in my experience, education just gets your foot in the door. Once you get there, it
is quite likely you are the worst guy on the factory floor (for some definition of factory)
-- the greenhorn -- and whether or not you do well will eventually boil down to quality of
work or maybe management potential. In this regard, some will shine and other will not, and
at the end of the day, in a meritocracy those are the ones that will do well. In this
environment, at least in most fields, the advance degree is quickly forgotten in the absence
of law enforcing strict hierarchy (e.g. medicine).
I'll add that orthodox Christianity does not endorse "salvation by works" (i.e.
meritocracy). The orthodox position is "salvation by grace [i.e. gift]" A wise man once told
me "Christianity is just Judaism for gentiles"
I discovered the idea/Ideal of a Liberal Education around fifth grade. That's what I
wanted, due to the influence of Jefferson, Emerson, Whitman and Nietzsche(yes, i was rather
strange as a child).
But as the Schooling continued, I was continually frustrated by the all but hidden fact that
this was not what American Education was for,lol.
This frustration extended all the way into the college experience I got accepted(with a GED,
no less) to Oberlin, Brown, etc but was told we didn't have the money so a state school it
was which turned out to be a High School with ashtrays..and an indelible focus on "Getting a
Job".
Registrar actually laughed when I said i wanted to major in Philosophy ""what good is
that?"
35 or so years later, and I got my Liberal Education, on my own .and it's had zero(if not a
negative) effect on my work-life.
we've raised up a generation or 3 of technicians and micromanagers and ladder-climbers who
don't have the smash to Think, except in very narrow terms. A favorite trope-like example:
"Biology"= "specialisation", not just in Beetles or even a specific Family of Beetles but on
a specific Species of Beetle with little regard for the world that Beetle is embedded in.(I
knew a guy like this. knew all about June Bugs)
While i understand the utility of specialisation, this laser focus has negated the ability
for so many to "Think Outside the Box" or to obtain a broader perspective of our complex
world.
State College, for me, was all about "Networking" and learning how to kiss ass and say "Yes
Sir" .not about becoming a Citizen let alone a Better Human
I hated it,lol.
It took a long time to be able to articulate it and that articulation is still wanting.
But the critique of "actually existing Meritocracy" is a good place to begin.
It's not really "Meritocratic", at all.
Just another justification for privilege and inequality and the status quo(world without
end).
I don't think specialization = narrow mindedness. A long time ago at the university I made
the progression from philosophy to anthropology to genetics/cell biology and of course my
graduate thesis answered a very specific question (about the extracellular effects on
collagen synthesis.) It is a fact that that rapidly growing knowledge requires people to
specialize in deeply understanding parts of that knowlege. But I have never stopped reading
philosophy (existential), Dostoevsky's novels, along with political reading. Specialization
is not the reason for people's horizons to be so narrow. It's the societal shift toward
disregarding anything that cannot be immediately monetized. It's also the disregard for
teaching all students the tools for critical thinking.
I stated that specialisation is necessary it just feels like(30 years on, mind you) that
there was a narrowness that was encouraged. The opposite of a "Liberal Education", where one
expands and learns to Think.
I'm also biased, because i went to two community colleges, and a state school that was famous
for Criminal Justice, and for being neighbors to a bunch of prisons,lol.
I'm certainly glad, for instance, that there are people who specialise in Grasshoppers,
cancer meds and soil biota.
But we long ago stopped encouraging big picture broadness .and i think that lack is rather
acute, at the moment.
My Da Vincian Renaissance tendencies were quite actively discouraged, over my entire primary
and secondary school experience to the point that i hated school from 3rd grade on(a
remarkable achievement, in retrospect). I had, therefore, high hopes for college which were
similarly dashed, due to the sort of ineffable culture of the place.
again, i admit that all this may be merely a function of place and time .as well as of my own
anomalousness and expectations.
I might feel differently if i had been allowed to go to some of the real colleges i managed
to get accepted to(but, Amor Fati, and all,lol would i be me without all that BS?)
Forget sham meritocracy. What's the value of *actual* meritocracy, when the underlying
activity -- say, investment banking -- is worthless or injurious?
Are prisons repositories of merit, because they hold the most active and determined of
criminals?
Running through an endless gauntlet of test-taking in order to have something approaching
a stable, non-precarious life does not sound like a very pleasant society either, even if it
is sufficiently "meritocratic." Neither does constantly chasing credentials. You get all
these wasteful arms races. This was the type of society that the Hunger Games depicted: a
never-ending, unremitting competition, with the stakes being just the ability to ensure one's
basic survival. It sounds awful, even for the "winners".
Life on this planet is a never-ending, unremitting competition, with the stakes being just
the ability to ensure one's genes survival.
This is true across a spectrum of geographic and temporal scales. The plants in the yard?
And endless evolutionary game of attracting pollinators at the expense of others while
simultaneously engaging in chemical warfare with their neighbors.
The trap is the thought that we should be able to do better. I think the Romans probably
showed the limit of what was possible, everything else has just been a remake with different
stage props.
We've spent 2000 years or so basically knocking around the limits of what humanity is
capable of achieving in terms of societal structure. Lots of technological advances made and
to be discovered, but the parallel attempts on the societal side seem to end up being
inherently unstable.
I can't see how the plants in your backyard are a good model for any society. We do not
need to savagely compete by starving our neighbors, for instance, to get food or shelter. Any
scarcity of the basic necessities of life are pretty much induced.
Competition is instead over quality of life, social status, and most importantly, who gets
to decide. It is here where so-called meritocracy is supposed to be an "objective" measure
(but really, that there can be an objective measure of merit is where the idea fails, and
proves itself to be a Utopian value that really only the successful "meritocrats" can
embrace).
I think the real trap is in thinking we can't do any better (and your thought that
we haven't progressed farther than the Romans is telling). And in in the age of falling life
expectancy, incomes (for the bottom 90%), and social mobility, I would go so far as to say
such an idea forecloses on the reality that shared progress has actually happened.
Crab-in-a-bucket scenario: other crabs prevent that venturesome one from escaping.
Meritocracy, current version scenario: escaped arthropods act as guards to let in
only their own preferred candidates.
The latter has been in use at any number of companies, where the wrong kind of
applicant just isn't acknowledged. No need to write down any rules, as those unspoken
ones will do just fine. That can lead to a type of in-breeding with associated dysfunctions,
and relies heavily upon the upstream provider filtering mechanisms, such as they are. Game
those mechanisms in various ways and see the results populate, or pollute, the downstream
pools.
in the US our "meritocracy" is akin to the old saying;
"those who win in a rigged game too long ,get stupid"
We are stuck as a society because so many of the positions of authority are filled by
people , who may be "smart" in some sense . but are really just stupid.
Whatever the dynamic that enables a certain type of mindset and worldview, to rise within the
power structures , as they are is utterly insane and a serious flaw in the system.
the evidence of this is look who will be "running the free world" . today, and after the next
election all choices point to zero.
Look at our form of capitalism . we allow banks to create our money out of nothing . then
they can fund wall street speculation and corporate behemoths who dictate the playing
field(through control of the political class) all business must play on. and so the lives and
fortunes of the people and the planet and all of its life forms must endure.
the question of how stupid are we .. pretty damn stupid.
We can discuss the advantages and disadvantages of capitalism all day long – but we
don't have capitalism – we have crony capitalism.
We can discuss whether or not meritocracy is a good thing – but our "meritocracy" is
in fact massively rigged.
That said, a society has got to have some way to select leaders. If it doesn't select
based on some kind of merit, what's the alternative? Accident of birth? Random lottery?
Footraces?
Actually, I think random lottery of a group of citizens would be much better than a
president. Make the group big enough that a citizen has a good chance of assuming office at
least once in their average lifespan. Renumeration should be median of income. A democratic
executive body.
This would probably make the US more agreement capable.
Having worked in academia for 25+ years (and counting), I really can't agree with equating
the capability and/or competence with level of education. Just doesn't happen.
We have a rule of thumb: the more PhDs are involved in a project the more confused and
messier it'll be for us to sort out and make to work. If professors are involved, even we
can't sort it out.
Of course there are exceptions: some people can retain their common sense and competence
regardless of higher education. They just don't tend to climb very high in the academic
meritocracy.
Yes but for purposes of this discussion they are the same thing since TPTP have decided
that in our complicated society with so many millions of citizens credentials are a the way
to separate "the wheat from the chaff." There was a time when you had a lot more self made
men (and they were men) but our ossified economic system now makes that less likely. A
country where individualism was once the hallmark has been turned–elite
division–into a homogenized, fearful "safe space."
For the rest of us there is at least the internet where individualism can still thrive.
They are trying to stamp that out.
There are many legacy "socialist era" policies (free basic education, subsidised basic
healthcare, high ownership of public housing, well-functioning utilities and public transport
and public services that in spite of being ostensibly privatized are actually owned by a
state-owned enterprise – Temasek Holdings) that still keep things from becoming too
nasty. But we've been heading the same direction as you all.
That's because despite being semi authoritarian Singapore couldn't resist marketisation.
Doesn't make any sense to include market value of land in the price of public houses if the
government owns that land and you essentially rent it from them. Or the recent electricity
market privatisation. Just gets to show you that democratic or authoritarian, governments are
out of ideas.
OK, but then the alternative is . not very obvious.
I think in fact that the problems people have with meritocracy are more to do with the
"cracy" than the "merit" part of the term. After all, there are only three possible ways of
choosing people to fill positions and run organisations. The first is patronage, favouritism,
family and wealth, which has been the rule for most of human history, and was the only way to
make career in Europe until relatively recently. You might accidentally get a person of
ability appointed to an important job, but you obviously couldn't guarantee it. The second is
selection by lot, which worked OK in Athens for certain jobs, but is hard to generalise. The
only other option is competitive selection by merit, depending on the qualities needed for
the job, and for promotion. All modern states have ultimately gone for the third option.
When people say that they don't approve of meritocracy, then, they don't usually mean that
they want a return to the days when government positions were in the personal gift of
Ministers. They mean one of two things. First, that selection by merit doesn't always work
well or fairly, because the selection criteria can in practice favour candidates from
wealthier or more educated backgrounds, second that meritocracies can themselves become
hereditary, selecting people like themselves, just as patronage systems used to do. It's also
true that success in one field can generate a sense of individual and collective arrogance
and a belief that you are qualified to do anything. All of these are very valid criticisms
(and all can be addressed to some extent) but none of them is an argument against the
principle of merit-based selection. It's also important to remember that "merit" here really
means just "most suited"; It's not a value judgement or the equivalent of the keys to a
selective club.
Yes, this is the key problem. But I would suggest two other possibilities that also exist:
A) wide acceptance to entry-level positions, lots of training/assessment and promotions from
within, and promotion by seniority (above a threshold of competence) – a scheme which
has ups and downs and is probably not a good fit anymore for a world in which long term
employment with one employer is not the norm; and B) democratic control with promotion
determined from below (by those to be managed) rather than above. All the evidence suggests
that good management is a function of getting the best out of your subordinates (true
leadership), not all the fact BS around star performers.
The big problem with merit is that many jobs have no suitable pre-employment or even
current employment merit indicators (think of K-12 teaching, where test scores are used to
judge reading and math teachers but there are no comparable measures for teachers of any
other discipline), and the ones that are used can be gamed, and so merit becomes conflated
with credentials or test scores, which have limited real-world applicability. Another
example: in the old days, you could become a lawyer through "apprenticeship," which allowed
lots of talented people to become lawyers without the gatekeeping of law schools. It is
impossible to argue that the profession is now better with than it was in those days.
Anyone familiar with the notorious Kingsley Davis and Wilbur Moore stratification theory?
The theory attempted to legitimize economic and political stratification (i.e. inequality) in
modern societies by using quasi-Parsonian notions of meritocracy. There are standard
rebuttals to the Davis-Moore theory and this article sounds as though it has attempted to
regurgitate some of those rebuttals.
Also, however much merit one has, that should not allow her/him to steal from the
lessor-so via the use of what is, due to government privilege, the PUBLIC'S credit but for
private gain.
In other words, those with merit should not have to steal from the poor, should they?
Kinda of diminishes their triumph, doesn't it? Knowing their success is built on
oppression?
NFL wide receivers; NBA centers; MIT physics PHDs; University of Texas Petroleum
Engineering grads.
"Meritocracy legitimizes, deepens inequality"
"Meritocracy" based on gatekeeping (lawyers, civil service rules that say "must have a a
BA"; 7 years to become a physical therapist) these are, in my opinion , bad. I want to
measure outputs not inputs. And that means those hardworking, always dependable high school
girls who always turn in perfect homework (an input unconnected to knowledge) may have a high
class rank but I'll take the kid with the bad attitude, bad clothing and lousy social skills
who gets in the 98% percentile in the SAT Math exam (an output) every time (unless I'm hiring
people to be TV weathermen and weather girls- I like cute too).
What would happen in the NFL if we demanded a masters degree in wide receiver studies from
a state accredited university? Fewer blacks; fewer drug bust and girl friends beaten up and
fewer amazing catches.
Some of this rings with class warfare hogwash. I am very far from a conservative, but even
I must resort to that old saw in this case. Anyone who has worked in the same field or
company for 20 years will eventually come to realize that in time at the workplace the
academic degree is like so much kindling used to start a bonfire, and what really matters in
the long run is the contribution you make in your chosen field over that time. This can
hardly be lost on a bunch of academics nurturing their own career over decades so I must only
conclude that such an edgy interpretation is intended to make waves. Degrees don't matter for
sh__ once leadership figures out you don't know what you are doing. The best shine no matter
how much muck you throw on them.
Where education matters is getting your foot in the door in the first place. If you can't
manage that, then you may be a really great auto mechanic, rising to the top of your field,
but failing to really make the same splash as you might have from being a mechanical engineer
or chemist. Nonetheless, in almost any industry there is a need for smart competent people to
help make sure the endeavor doesn't go off the rails and those will do well. Maybe they can
afford to send their kids, who may be smart too probably, on to a better school.
It isn't about justifying inequality. It is about getting the best people in the right
places to produce he best outcomes. Consult your Napoleon. When good outcomes are needed, and
we aren't just writing papers, good people are essential.
It depends what those meritocrats are doing. MBA s are a good example. Plus nothing
original and creative comes out of a culture that prioritises corporate career building over
other aspects of human beings. That's why you see the children of these meritocrats are so
shallow and boring.
"... 1978 was the last year real wages showed significant growth in real terms in the USA. After that, came the great stagnation of the neoliberal era (1978-2008), 30 consecutive years of frozen earns for the American working classes. This era is not marked by a slow down in consumption, though. On the contrary: consumption continued to rise, but, this time, it was mainly debt-fueled. Americans wages stagnated, but they didn't want to give up their hyperconsumption privileges, so they contracted debt after debt. ..."
"... As the timeline shows, it is a myth neoliberalism begun in the USA only with Reagan's election in 1980. Most neoliberal reforms begun during Jimmy Carter's second half of his lonely term (1978-1980). It was Jimmy Carter, for example, who hired (nominated) Paul Volcker to the Fed. Other essential Acts that paved the way to neoliberalism were also passed during Jimmy Carter's later part of the reign. ..."
"... I heard some politician suggest that while many of the jobs will never come back that people can learn to code. We need drug testing for our politicians. I 'code' and I'm wetting my pants. It's not because I think that it's so easy I an be easily replaced but but we still need demand. If everyone is losing their jobs ... terrifies me. ..."
If it were true why would they need to repeat it again and again? The American Dream died
in 1969 - the last year of the post-war miracle in the USA. For the following five years, the
country continued to flourish, but at a clear slower pace. With the oil crisis of 1974-5, the
American Dream definitely died, albeit some indicators (e.g. real wages) still showed some
improvements.
1978 was the last year real wages showed significant growth in real terms in the USA.
After that, came the great stagnation of the neoliberal era (1978-2008), 30 consecutive years
of frozen earns for the American working classes. This era is not marked by a slow down in
consumption, though. On the contrary: consumption continued to rise, but, this time, it was
mainly debt-fueled. Americans wages stagnated, but they didn't want to give up their
hyperconsumption privileges, so they contracted debt after debt.
As the timeline shows, it is a myth neoliberalism begun in the USA only with Reagan's
election in 1980. Most neoliberal reforms begun during Jimmy Carter's second half of his
lonely term (1978-1980). It was Jimmy Carter, for example, who hired (nominated) Paul Volcker
to the Fed. Other essential Acts that paved the way to neoliberalism were also passed during
Jimmy Carter's later part of the reign.
Not only does the headline "The American Dream is Alive and Well" need to be repeated ad
nauseam but also the narrative it promotes, of the immigrant family that succeeds through
sheer hard work and dedication and nothing else - no help from government subsidies or
relatives already in the country, no dependence on bank loans that help start a business or
put teenagers through college, no discrimination whatsoever - has to be hammered constantly
over and over, even when everyone can see that the story template no longer has any legs if
it ever had any.
For all the sophisticated techniques and tools of propaganda that the likes of Edward
Bernays and his followers in the PR industry bequeathed to the US, the elites and their mass
media lackeys can't even get the repetition to look and sound more than banal and
one-dimensional.
Jen @6: "For all the sophisticated techniques and tools of propaganda that the likes of
Edward Bernays and his followers in the PR industry bequeathed to the US, the elites and
their mass media lackeys can't even get the repetition to look and sound more than banal and
one-dimensional."
Nice observation that incompetence is pervasive even among the empire's most important
servants. It must be asked, though, if better talent is really necessary? The propaganda and
brainwashing may be ham fisted and blunt as a hammer, but it does seem to work
nonetheless.
Anyway, the more sophisticated brainwashing is not in the infotainment field but rather in
the supposedly pure entertainment domain. Redneck dynasties built upon the monster
retail bonanza from selling duck lures, for example. Those implant "The American
Dream" directly into the subconscious without the need for awkward capitalist ideological
exposition, bypassing any potential bullshit filters that the typical media consumers might
possess.
I wonder what America would have become if sociopaths like Allen Dulles hadn't relocated to
Nazi braintrust after WWII. maybe it was inevitable that we would become the 4th reich.
David Talbot's book The Devil's Chessboard should be required reading for all
Americans.
Jen @6: "For all the sophisticated techniques and tools of propaganda that the likes of
Edward Bernays and his followers in the PR industry bequeathed to the US, the elites and
their mass media lackeys can't even get the repetition to look and sound more than banal and
one-dimensional."
Nice observation that incompetence is pervasive even among the empire's most important
servants. It must be asked, though, if better talent is really necessary? The propaganda and
brainwashing may be ham fisted and blunt as a hammer, but it does seem to work
nonetheless.
Anyway, the more sophisticated brainwashing is not in the infotainment field but rather in
the supposedly pure entertainment domain. Redneck dynasties built upon the monster
retail bonanza from selling duck lures, for example. Those implant "The American
Dream" directly into the subconscious without the need for awkward capitalist ideological
exposition, bypassing any potential bullshit filters that the typical media consumers might
possess.
We all know these main stream media outlets do little more than pump out propaganda to the
ignorant masses who need someone to tell them what they want to hear.
Wow, those guys were phoning it in. 1. Their dreamland pieces were identical to the ones
in 2015, 2. the bottom 20% who they claim either don't have it so bad or can easily improve
their lot, have been gutted like a fish and left out to dry. Did people write these opinion
pieces or robots, robots could easily replace their jobs, pity their jobs won't be automated
but I really don't see why they couldn't be. Actually Neocons could be replaced by
automatons.
I heard some politician suggest that while many of the jobs will never come back that
people can learn to code. We need drug testing for our politicians. I 'code' and I'm wetting
my pants. It's not because I think that it's so easy I an be easily replaced but but we still
need demand. If everyone is losing their jobs ... terrifies me.
As an aside that is nonetheless relevant, dealing as it does with issues of the
responsibility that banks have for the mess in this world, I recommend watching the TV
series, "Devils", described here on Wikipedia:
London, 2011. The Italian Massimo Ruggero is the head of trading at the banking giant
American New York - London Bank (NYL). While the financial crisis is raging across Europe,
Massimo is making hundreds of millions thanks to speculation. His mentor is Dominic Morgan,
the American CEO of NYL and the closest thing to a father Massimo has ever had. He fully
supports it, the talented trader seems to be the first choice in the run for vice-CEO. But
when Massimo is unwillingly involved in a scandal that sees his ex-wife implicated as an
escort, Dominic denies him the promotion, instead choosing the old school banker Edward
Stuart.
Massimo is amazed: his father turns his back on him. Convinced that he has been set up,
Massimo is determined to bring out the truth, but when Edward suddenly dies, Massimo
realizes that something bigger is at stake. With the help of his team and a group of
hackers, Massimo will discover the plot hidden behind apparently unrelated events such as
the Strauss-Kahn scandal, the war in Libya and the PIIGS crisis. Finding himself in front
of the Devils who pull the ropes of the world, Massimo will have to choose whether to fight
them or join them.
The series is well-written and well-acted. If you have access to it (I get it off the
Internet, but it does not appear to be available in the US market yet), it's well worth
watching. It is in some ways better than "Deep State", the spy series that was on a season or
two ago. It has already been renewed for a second season.
Cant Stop the M... on Wed,
03/04/2020 - 8:28am We base our entire politics on the idea that we're living in a
meritocracy. In other words, like the knights of old at a joust, we find out who is best
through competition, a competition assumed to be both fair and honest. In the old days, the
joust was assumed to be fair and honest because God was both omnipotent and just and therefore,
obviously, would not allow a bad man to win. Nowadays, even most of us who believe in God don't
believe that God controls the outcome of competitions in that way. Yet the assumption of a fair
and honest competition persists, despite blatant evidence to the contrary.
In the case of U.S. elections, it is assumed, not that the will of God controls the outcome
of competitions, but that the will of the people does. Voter suppression and election fraud are
hand-waved away on the dubious grounds that any candidate strong enough could overcome such
things. Or maybe the people are to blame. The supporters of the defeated candidate must not
have worked hard enough, or maybe the people generally are to blame for not voting in large
enough numbers. Those who challenge any of these assumptions are defeated, either by
institutional inertia or by gaslighting.
Nothing happens, so nothing happened
Here's what I mean by institutional inertia.
In 2000, there was ample evidence that George W. Bush had committed fraud in the
presidential election, with the help of his brother, the governor of Florida. In 2004, there
was ample evidence that George W. Bush had committed fraud once again, famously in Ohio, and
less famously in Florida for a second time. However, in the first case, Gore stopped fighting
after an obviously partisan and corrupt Supreme Court decision, and not a single member of the
U.S. Senate was willing to help the Congressional Black Caucus challenge the election. In the
second case, Kerry refused to challenge the election in Congress, and the legal case he brought
about election fraud, after the fact, did not even make it to the Supreme Court.
In 2016, when New Yorkers brought a case that there had been election fraud and voter
suppression in the Democratic primaries, the case was thrown out on the grounds that each
county in New York had to file such cases separately, and, by then, the election would be over.
Pleas to delay the vote count, or to delay declaring a winner, until the voting rights of the
people could be secured, were brushed aside. Much later, when a civil lawsuit was brought
against the DNC, the case was once again thrown out for lack of standing, but not before the
DNC lawyers had defended their client on the grounds that the DNC didn't have to provide a fair
competition, or any competition at all, really, and certainly didn't have to care what the
people thought.
The effect of this institutional inertia is not simply that cheaters win the day, or that
the people, whose will is being suppressed, lose morale and give up. The complaint itself
begins to fade from people's minds. People begin to make excuses for what happened, to justify
it, to act as if there never were cheating to begin with. Even many of those who dissent find
that, over time, the injustice they remember mellows: no less a person than Jimmy Dore, hardly
a weak-minded hack for the establishment, talks now about Gore's "loss" in 2000 as an evil
caused by the electoral college. While the electoral college is obviously a tool for elites to
control American politics (and never has that been so obvious as over the past two election
cycles), such a narrative ignores and erases the police checkpoints that were set up in 2000
near predominantly African American polling places in Leon county, Florida. It ignores the
Republican Speaker of the House, Tom DeLay, sending Republican staffers to Dade County to break
up Miami's vote count by marching into the Supervisor of Elections office and screaming at the
top of their lungs so that no accurate count could take place. It ignores and erases the
digital Jim Crow that purged the voter lists of African American Democrats by claiming,
falsely, that they were felons. It ignores the fact that emails between the State of Florida
and the company that created the Jim Crow software revealed that the company had warned that
their software would draw too many false positives, and that the State of Florida had replied
"That's just what we want."
Similarly, the DNC's perfidy in 2016 has been reduced to the following: 1) that they had
pre-selected their candidate, and didn't provide a real or fair competition, 2) that they gave
debate questions ahead of time to Hillary Clinton, 3)that they used the electoral college, most
particularly superdelegates, to overwhelm the Sanders movement, and that 4) the party primaries
were often closed, not allowing independents the right to vote. Left out, or forgotten, are the
multiple polling places closed in states from Arizona to New York (in New York, sometimes even
the open polling places had no staff or broken machines), the media calling California for
Clinton before the votes were counted, the 136,000 voters purged off Brooklyn's voter rolls (no
doubt because Bernie Sanders was born and grew up in Brooklyn and that might have given him an
advantage there), and the much larger multi-state purge of the Democratic party through
changing people's voter registration without their knowledge and consent.
I'm not bringing this up to attack Jimmy Dore, who is one of the most reliable truth-tellers
in the media today, but rather to point out what people's minds do under the stress of watching
the establishment normalize corruption again and again. If there is no power to challenge
institutional corruption, most people, over time, make of the corruption something less unjust
and outrageous. Simply smothering objections to injustice with institutional inertia, will,
over time, allow the victors to erase the evidence of their crime.
Sore Loserman
Since we believe, with the faith of fanatics, that competition must be honest and fair, it's
easy to gaslight the losers (or the apparent losers). The Republicans in 2000 did not need to
disprove the fact that George W. Bush had committed fraud and contravened the will of the
people when he climbed up a staircase of disenfranchised Black faces to become President. All
the Republicans needed to do was issue tens of thousands of bumper stickers that replaced the
words "Gore/Lieberman" with "Sore Loserman." The RNC was using the same argument that was
bruited about in the 1980s about poverty and employment. Unemployed poor people had lost the
economic competition. Therefore, there must be something wrong with them. Maybe they weren't
educated enough, smart enough, clean enough, hard-working enough; maybe they were people of bad
character. Bloomberg's racial profiling worked much the same way. Black people are losers in
the judicial game because they commit more crimes. That's why we put more police in their
neighborhoods, because there are more criminals among young Black men than anywhere else.
Corruption can't bring down a meritorious man. If you're good, you'll win. If you complain
about cheating or any other form of injustice, you must be a Sore Loserman, attempting to cover
up your own inadequacies by whining.
It's pretty obvious that this way of thinking makes it literally impossible to stop even the
most outrageous injustice, as long as the perpetrators of that injustice have enough power to
spread their "Sore Loser" messaging far and wide. So if I commit identity theft today and
access one of your bank accounts, I can be brought to account. But if Wall St cheats
homeowners, there was probably something wrong with the homeowners, or with the government for
suggesting that those homeowners should get loans. If George W. Bush cheats in an election,
there was probably something wrong with the other candidate, or with the voters.
People tend to get upset when I bring this up, because they think that talking about the
corruption of the system will demoralize voters, making such discussions their own form of
voter suppression. But I bring this up because the worst damage that can come out of Bernie
Sanders losing contests in a highly compromised electoral process is that the idea of
meritocracy be preserved. There are valid reasons for voting even in a corrupted system (of the
"make 'em sweat" variety). There are valid reasons for not voting in a corrupted system. But
whatever a citizen chooses to do on Election Day, the idea of meritocracy must die.
Despite all the truly horrendous policies, from both the Democrats and the Republicans, that
have laid our society, our people, and the world to waste, the most poisonous effect of the
tyranny we live under is its fraudulence: its pretense of being a fair, accurate, and
reasonable expression of the will of the people. Even the Democrats' attacks on Trump, who is
supposed to be a Manchurian candidate placed in office by Russian intelligence operatives and
an existential threat to our democracy, have, in the past two years, increasingly focused on
the people who support Trump. It's the voters fault for supporting the bad man. So even when we
are supposedly in a situation of foreign powers changing the outcome of a presidential
election, it's still the people's fault. Why? Well, there was a competition, and somebody won,
so the person who won must be there by the will of the people. It has to be the
people's fault.
Corruption among the powerful isn't a thing.
System-wide corruption in all the various infrastructures of our country, especially the
political ones, isn't a thing.
Or, if it is, you just didn't do enough lifting at the political gym to be able to fend it
off.
by Ingrid Robeyns on December 29, 2019 Some aspects of
academia show great international variation. There is one on which I haven't found any good
data, and hence thought I'll ask the crowd here so that we can gather our own data, even if it
will be not very scientifically collected.
The question is this: if you are a university teacher/professor and your department awards
PhD-degrees, do you get any official time allocated (or time-compensation) for PhD supervision?
If it is part of a teaching load model, how many hours (or % teaching load) is it equivalent
to? Or is there an expectation that you take on PhD-students but that this does not lead to a
reduction in other tasks?
How do international practices of the conditions for PhD-supervisors compare?
In my faculty (Humanities at Utrecht University, the Netherlands), all supervisors together
(which generally are two, sometimes three) are collectively given a teaching load reduction of
132 hours in the year follow the graduation of the PhD-candidate. So your teaching reduction
upon successful graduation of a PhD-candidate tends to be 66 hours. For the supervisory work
you effectively do in the four years prior to graduation, there is no time allocated; so you
effectively do this in your research or your leisure time.
To put this into perspective: most (assistant/associate/full) professors teach 50-70% of
their time, and a fulltime workload is 1670 hours, or 1750 hours if you are saving for a
sabbatical. This can be reduced if you have major managerial tasks (e.g. Head of Department) or
if a large part of your wage is paid by a research grant. So without reductions, we teach about
835-1190 hours a year (this includes the time for preparation and examination, but frankly, one
always needs more than the teaching load models allocate for a given course. And in general
there are no TAs or other support staff to help with the practical sides of teaching).
For writing the grants that are almost always needed to create the jobs for PhD students
(with success rates now around 15%), and for supervising those who in the end do not get their
PhD degree, there is no time put aside for the supervisor/applicants. That time also goes,
effectively, from our research time, or, more realistically, from our leisure time.
Recently, I heard from a British colleague and a Swedish colleague their models for
PhD-supervision, which were way more generous (and rightly so in my view), so thought I'll
throw the question on the table here: what, if any, time-compensation/teachingreduction do you
get for supervising PhD students?
I am not trying to suggest here that without adequate time set aside for doing this work, it
would not be worthwhile supervising PhDs. There are in many cases other forms of rewards for
the work one does as a PhD supervisor. One might be the honor of supervising PhDs, and in most
cases the intrinsic rewards of the supervisory process – the satisfaction of seeing a
young person take their first steps as a scholar, and being able to play a crucial role in this
process. There is , after all, a reason why the Germans call their PhD-supervisor
mein Doktorvater or meine Doktormutter – since yes, there is this element
of helping someone to grow, in a cognitive and professional sense. Professionally, there are
few people who had so much influence on me as my PhD-supervisor, and I am hoping that some of
my (former) PhD-students will think the same at some point in their lives. So it would be wrong
to frame it merely as a burden, since there is the intrinsic value of the rather unique
professional relationship. But that cannot be a reason to not give PhDsupervisors the time they
need to properly supervise, given how severe time pressure in academia is. I see this as a real
tension.
In some academic fields, there may be professional research benefits for the supervisors,
such as becoming co-authors on the publications the PhD-students write under your supervision.
I recently examined a PhD-thesis in medical ethics, and all chapters (being articles published
or under review) had been co-written with several members of the supervisory team. Even raising
the funds to hire the PhD is sometimes seen as sufficient reason to be listed as a co-author.
In the humanities there is no such a thing: we don't put our names on articles of our
PhDstudents, even if we contributed significantly to the development of that piece (rightly so
in my view).
I'm posting this because I am interested in the international comparison in its own right,
but also because of its relevance in discussions on higher education policies which are
currently very intense in the Netherlands, on which I'll write another blogpost
later.
In my part of my university each PhD student earns her supervisors around 60 notional
hours/1600 total per annum, but that's usually divided 5/1 between two supervisors, so that
the person actually doing the work has about 50 hours, so slightly over an hour/week given
annual leave etc. My greatest beef with this is when we admit non-anglophone PhD students.
Since they officially have a level of competence in English as a condition of their
admission, they do not get any extra time for supervision. But in practice, their work takes
much longer to read and you have to put a lot of work into improving their English.
In my faculty (Arts and Social Sciences at Sydney) the primary supervisor gets 40 hours per
year and an auxiliary supervisor gets ten. (There is some flexibility for the 50 total hours
to be divided differently.)
In a recent survey of faculty staff with a response rate of around 30%, most reported
spending longer per primary supervision: the median was 50 hours.
There's actually a growing literature on academic time use. Kenny and Fluck have published
a series of papers based on a large survey of Australian academics. The median reported time
spent supervising a higher degree student per year was 60 hours over all discipline groups,
50 hours for Arts, Law and Humanities. (Kenny and Fluck 2018 'Research workloads in
Australian universities', _Australian Universities Review_ -- and the companion papers on
teaching and admin workloads are also worth googling for the full results over lots of
tasks.)
When we tried to establish a "norm" at the University of York, it turned out that practice
varied widely not only across faculties, but within the arts and humanities and social
sciences. Some departments simply included it in "research time" and gave zero extra time,
others gave a (more-or-less generous) "teaching" allocation. So, I am not sure you can get
any useful comparisons even at an institutional level let alone internationally.
Currently, in the Law School at York, a PhD student – during the period of registration
(i.e., only for the first 3 years) – earns her supervisors around 80 notional hours of
teaching per year. This is split across the supervisory team in proportion to their
involvement.
Many colleagues think this is insufficient, in particular with non-anglophone students and it
can be particularly galling if one is putting a lot of work into the final "writing up"
year.
For what it is worth, I found this very hard to manage when I was Head of Department (and so
responsible for workloads). The issue for me was that in many cases senior colleagues had
several PhD students and (some) junior colleagues none (or very little involvement. This was
back in the day of most students have one supervisor.). Modelling a system where PhD
supervision was "properly" rewarded (that is, where I tried to allocate hours in accordance
to the amount of time it actually took) resulted in a very hierarchical department where
(roughly) senior colleagues did PhD supervision and junior colleagues taught undergraduates.
So, I didn't do it.
For what it is worth (addressing the wider issues of workload), it seems to me that there is
an inevitable gap between a workload system conceived of as a mechanism of "counting" (how
many hours does this job actually take?) and conceived of as a mechanism of "distribution"
(how much work is there to be done and how many people to do it?). Of course, the
distributive principles cannot stray too far from the realities revealed in counting, but it
(seems to me at least) perfectly okay to think that the distributive principles include other
considerations like the "shape" of the department, individual "goals" (having PhD students is
good for promotion at York) and personal development, gender, and so on.
Finally, this problem does not seem to be unique to PhD supervision (the current "hot topic"
at York is how to count/distribute time for research grant writing, which at the moment is
simply included in individual research in most, but not all, departments). York tried to
introduce a workload model across the university and never managed it because departmental
variations were so huge (in everything from whether/how to include teaching preparation time
to how to rank administrative tasks). That said, this may be the result of our particular
institutional history (until recently, we had a very flat structure with only relatively
autonomous departments and no faculties).
In Japan as far as I know there is no allowance at all, and senior staff (the professor who
is the official supervisor) often dump all supervisory responsibility on the most junior
staff. There is also often no limit on how many PhD students the professor can take on (and
dump on their assistant prof). This is particularly bad with masters students, whose theses
are much more time limited and challenging to supervise.
I don't know if it's a general thing but my colleagues in China tell me they are only
allowed a PhD student if they publish above a certain level – PhD students are treated
as a valuable asset you need to struggle to get. (I think they are paid by the uni but don't
quote me). In the universities I know of in China the PhD student has to publish to graduate
(sometimes like 3 papers) so the benefits to the supervisor are obvious.
I'm in public health where publication is relatively easy and quick. I don't know how it
is in other disciplines (but the Japanese professor dumping his responsibilities on junior
staff is quite common across disciplines as far as I can tell).
It's not part of a workload model for us. We're expected to teach 2 classes a semester (8
contact hours a week total), then research, service, and graduate supervision on top, but the
only thing that is specified is the 2 classes. So no compensation for PhD students. In
practice the number of PhD supervisions varies greatly across faculty (as you'd expect), as
does the amount of service work we do (if you're good at it you get asked to do more, if
you're tenured and responsible you generally try to say yes), as does the amount of time we
actually spend on the courses we teach.
As do our salaries, to be fair, which reflect years of service, perceived quality of
research, how much the people elected to the department budget value the other things we do,
and, to some extent, market forces.
What I've described is my own department. There's huge variation across campus, including
variation in numbers of courses we're expected to teach.
Possibly worth mentioning that from what I have gathered expectations of how many courses
we teach have fallen dramatically (across campus) over the past 50 years, and the number of
course releases granted have increased dramatically: I estimate faculty in the humanities
teach 30% less than 50 years ago, and in the sciences 50% less. I imagine this is similar
across public research universities and SLACs.
So, purely anecdotal and from the perspective of a PhD and post-doc in Science at 2
different, fairly well thought of UK Universities (Russel group, etc. etc.).
PhD students are highly valuable. This is because a Masters or summer student are
necessarily short term, and it is difficult to fulfil much breakthrough research (sometimes
you need a few years of banging your head against a wall ). Post-docs are phenomenally
expensive as in the UK as the University charges a huge amount just to have them – e.g.
a rough breakdown (from some years ago, so a little out of date) is to just have a post-doc
(i.e. no equipment, materials, etc.) is in excess of £110K per year. Some 31000 is for
salary, the rest goes to the University to keep the lights on. Having more than a few
post-docs, for all but the most successful labs, became prohibitively expensive.
However, as a PhD most of my time was with my post-docs (in my first year I saw my
professor once, for 1hr, in later years maybe a few times more, so approximately 15 hr over
3.5 years). As a post-doc, the PhD students had regular meetings in a group format once per
month (so, more or less 2-3 hr per month). In both cases it, in principle, was possible to go
and meet the supervisor if you felt the need, but generally speaking your post-doc was the
point of contact on a day-by-day, week-by-week basis.
I've not been a lecturer, so this is very speculative, but my impression is that
supervising PhD students is generally considered a research activity, and thus you are not
budgeted time for it specifically.
Not sure if any of this is useful, but feel free to hit me up for more details if you
think it is useful/interesting.
I taught for 15 years at 3 Dutch universities, 3 years at a Russell Group university in
England, and am now at an Irish university. I did my PhD in the United States. Like the other
posters, I have experienced wide variation in 'compensation' for PhD supervision. One of the
reasons I left my position at a British university was the bizarre (and I thought, unfair)
model for workload allocation. PhD supervision was highly 'compensated', and actual classroom
teaching of undergrads was not. I had colleagues who met all or most of their teaching
obligations with PhD supervision and did not teach undergrads.
I don't know what the best way to compensate PhD supervision is, but there are a couple of
aspects I think need more attention. The first is wide variation in the number of PhD
students in any given department and the rules/norms governing who is (de facto) permitted to
supervise PhDs. Dutch departments have fewer PhD students than UK/Irish departments (for
complicated reasons), and only full (and now associate?) profs are permitted to supervise.
PhD supervision is important for promotion (as it is in the UK and IE), so everyone wants to
do it, but not everyone has access. I am not sure that an activity that is so important for
career progression should be generously compensated.
The second issue concerns co-authoring with a PhD student. I can see the advantages of this
(which Ingrid mentions), but the proliferation of the article-based PhD where the supervisors
co-author all articles is a cause for concern. Again, I am not convinced that a PhD
supervisor should be generously compensated for something (publications) that strongly
advances their own career. And it is not clear to me that the supervisor's contribution to
the publication (in many cases, at least) amounts to more than what would be considered
'normal' PhD supervision in the US, Canada, and many European universities. This makes it
very difficult to evaluate a newly minted PhD's CV, and it inflates the publication list of
more senior academics.
A couple of ideas: 1) cap the number of PhD students that staff can supervise, or at least
cap the number for which teaching points are earned. 2) ensure that all academic staff have
access to PhD supervision.
Private university in Turkey : the basic assumption here is that supervising PhD students and
MA theses takes zero time (although people typically budget an hour per week per student.
The workload allocation for Humanities at the University of Exeter is similar to Chris's
account of Bristol (where I worked previously), though it's more common for the hours to be
divided 70/30, 60/40 or even 50/50 between first and second supervisors, with the latter
playing a much more active role. The biggest difference, however, is that you continue to
receive an allowance when the student is writing up, and even if they're revising after a
first examination, whereas the Bristol practice was, at least, that you get a workload
allowance for the first three years and then nothing for the period which in my experience
often required the greatest amount of work
I haven't – yet – supervised a doctoral student, but I did examine a viva this
year & was surprised to find that this carried no workload allowance at all, which seems
odd given the amount of reading time involved. (Fortunately I wasn't mad busy.)
Former US academic; taught at a few R1 uni's from 80s to aughts.
To echo the doughty Puritan: " the basic assumption here is that supervising PhD students
and MA theses takes zero time."
We had a standard teaching load, and expectations for research and service. But there was
no calculation of supervisory load -- it simply was not tracked, budgeted, or accounted for.
As Harry says above, there were wide disparities from person to person, since some people
attract a lot of grad students and some do not (and some repel them, either for strategic
purposes, or because they are repellent no matter what they try).
No one cared whether you supervised 15 PhD students or zero. Not quite true -- there was
some unofficial awareness among colleagues who thought collegially about things. And you
might get some private thanks or informal kudos for doing more than your share. But there was
absolutely no official account of it. And this was true at all 3 R1s I taught at over several
decades.
That's partly because -- in a Humanities field -- the funding of grad students does not
follow the prof, but the program as a whole. So, Central Admin knows that your department is
training 25 PhDs, because Central Admin has to figure their tuition, stipends, etc. But the
money then flows to your department as a whole, with no closer investigation of who in your
department is doing the work.
The picture must be radically different in the Sciences, where there is literal accounting
of PhD students, since they are supported by the professor's grant-money.
Surely there are other ways to offload work to PhD students one would otherwise have to do
oneself besides getting research recognition for their thesis. How much of that is possible
should also vary across countries. So a comparsion of alocated supervision time only seems a
bit one sided.
As regards co-authorship, my PhD students and postdocs are often keen to include me on the
theory that a paper with a more senior author will have a better chance of acceptance. My
impression is that, in economics, the expectation is that the main job market paper will be
sole-authored or else co-authored with another junior researcher, but that others are likely
to be co-authored with the supervisor.
To complicate things further, economics (like philosophy, I believe) works on average
quality rather than total contribution. So, a publication with a student in a journal lower
ranked than my average paper is actually a negative for me.
I assume that "Harry" above is Harry B of the blog. If so, he's showing why comparisons w/
the US on this will be hard, if not impossible. In many countries, there is a weird fantasy
that academics can and should be treated like hourly employees, with "hours" assigned to
things. (This is certainly so in Australia.) Of course, it's a fantasy in that, if it in fact
takes a lot more "hours" to do the things you're assigned, you don't get over-time, comp
time, or paid more. The other down-side is that this system leads, in my experience, to more
micro-managing – being expected to "account" for your time to a much greater degree.
The US system treats academics more like salaried employees – you get paid a certain
amount, you have certain tasks to do, and you must do them (some of them at particular times,
like teaching classes) but otherwise you're not dealing with "hours" for things. The
down-side is that there can be lots of variation in how much work people actually do –
even teaching the same "number" of classes can vary a lot depending on the number of preps,
size, how often you've taught it, if you have TAs, etc., and having more advisees may not
lead to more recognition on its own. The plus side is that less time is spent on being
mico-managed and bureaucratic nonsense. The relevant point here, though, is that it's really
hard to make a comparison like the one asked for between systems where one treats academics
more like hourly employees and the other more like salaried employees.
My wife (a New Zealand academic with confirmation) is allocated a. 24 hours per year for
supervising PhD students. She trusts that the ludicrousness of this number is not lost on
those present.
I am a Professor in an Engineering discipline at a small, state engineering school in the US.
Our workload is departmentally determined. My department is fairly small, ~100 undergrads,
but does quite a bit of research. My nominal workload is 40% teaching, 40% research and 20%
service. This is based on 40 working hours per week. My effective workload is 46% teaching,
8% advising (both undergrad and grad), 23% overseeing my funded research projects and about
25% service. This is more than 100%, which is true for almost all faculty at my school.
Thus, I estimate how much time I spend doing various things and then convert that to
credit hours, as my contract is specified in terms of 18 credit hours of work per semester,
making a credit hour about 2 hours and 40 minutes
In Technological University Dublin (formerly Dublin Institute of Technology), supervision of
a full-time PhD student attracts a time allowance of 2 hours per week (48 hours per annum),
from a weekly teaching load of 16 contact hours for lecturers (18 hours for assistant
lecturers). So, for example, a lecturer with two full-time PhD students will allocate 25% (4
hours) of his / her weekly contact teaching duties to this role.
In my department (at Uppsala University, Sweden) the workload norm is 88 hours per year
supervisory time for the main supervisor and 20 for the assistant supervisor. This time
includes the face-to-face hours, as well as reading, commenting, etc. The split can be done
differently to reflect other kinds of co-supervisory arrangements. This seems very generous
compared to what others are reporting, which is sad, since an average of 1 hour meeting, 1
hour reading per week for 44 weeks in a year would work out as very minimal supervision --
and supervisors typically spend much more time on supervision related tasks than this.
A couple of years ago, I did a survey of the formal teaching duties at polisci departments at
Scandinavian universities for a report published by the Swedish Institute for Labour Market
Evaluation. The survey looked at the formal percentage of teaching duty for senior lecturers
and full professors, and the formal compensation in terms of hours allotted for various
teaching activities (e.g., lectures, supervision at different levels, examination and so on).
We found, first, that the formal teaching duty varied quite a lot across Scandinavian
universities, but that all Swedish universities had less generous conditions than Danish and
Norwegian universities, which came closer to the Humboldtian ideal of unity of teaching and
research.
Second, by multiplying teaching duty and compensation for a standard set of teaching
activities, we found that the consequences for the individual lecturer could be quite
drastic: over a hypothetical career from age 35 to retirement at 67, a lecturer at the least
generous university could have ten whole years more of teaching duty than their colleague at
the most generous university.
I'm an Associate Professor in Computer Science at a US R1 university.
As Matt says, the description in Ingrid's post is totally unlike how things are thought of
at all in US universities. My load is 40% research, 40% teaching, 20% service, which is
standard for tenure-track faculty in my department (and I think across departments here). The
standard teaching load is 3 courses per year (2 in one semester, 1 in the other). However,
there are several exceptions to this: before tenure, faculty are assigned only 2 courses per
year. Also, if you support (with external grant funding) 3 PhD students or post-docs in the
previous year then you only teach 2 courses the next year. Additionally, pre-tenure faculty
are asked to do considerably less service.
Furthermore, there are several additional differences that are relevant. First, and most
importantly, the distinction between "research" and "PhD supervision" does not exist in
science. Effectively all of my research is joint with PhD students, although sometimes they
are not "my" students, but those of my collaborators. Second, not all students are funded by
grants; PhD students can also be funded by teaching. So it's possible to have one or two
students without bringing in funding. Third, there's a strong expectation that training PhD
students is part of the job, you wouldn't get tenure/promotion/etc if you just didn't do
it.
In my institution, you don't get any teaching load reduction, whereas you do get a tiny but
non-zero reduction for supervising a master thesis, or even an undergraduate research
project. I believe that is the norm in France in science in general, and most likely overall.
The logic behind that choice is that supervising a PhD student is supposed to bring its own
benefits: the student will do a lot of lab work for the superviser, the superviser will
cosign the research papers etc.
In math (my own field), there is no lab work to be done and the French tradition is that
papers drawn from the PhD should be signed by the student alone, so the arrangement is quite
unfavorable to us.
On the other hand
So without reductions, we teach about 835-1190 hours a year
Did I read that right? Can you clarify how many hours are counted for one hour in front of
the students? That number looks like madness to me (and I have a heavy teaching load
myself).
"Highly research-active" profs teach one fewer course per year. There is some flexibility
as to how to maintain this designation, but typically you must have at least 2 active
graduate students at any given time (and meet various other requirements).
Going through our standard courseload: if you ignore the other work related to maintaining
status, your first two Ph.D. students are worth about 90 hours/year, and the remainder are
worth nothing.
As regards co-authorship, my Ph.D. students and postdocs are often keen to include me on
the theory that a paper with a more senior author will have a better chance of
acceptance.
This is an important point. I agree that it is somewhat dishonest to use your post-grad
students to increase you number of publications. But it should be weighted against the real
difficulties of young researchers to get their papers published. And the fact that sometimes
brilliant papers from them are rejected. Nobody can abolish clan behavior in the academy. And
the "academic kitchen" is pretty dirty, and takes years to understand ;-).
Sometimes publishing oversees helps here, and young researchers should keep this in mind.
For many foreign journals, just the fact that you are a foreigner from a prestigious
university is a plus that weights on the acceptance.
by Ingrid Robeyns on December 29, 2019 Some aspects of
academia show great international variation. There is one on which I haven't found any good
data, and hence thought I'll ask the crowd here so that we can gather our own data, even if it
will be not very scientifically collected.
The question is this: if you are a university teacher/professor and your department awards
PhD-degrees, do you get any official time allocated (or time-compensation) for PhD supervision?
If it is part of a teaching load model, how many hours (or % teaching load) is it equivalent
to? Or is there an expectation that you take on PhD-students but that this does not lead to a
reduction in other tasks?
How do international practices of the conditions for PhD-supervisors compare?
In my faculty (Humanities at Utrecht University, the Netherlands), all supervisors together
(which generally are two, sometimes three) are collectively given a teaching load reduction of
132 hours in the year follow the graduation of the PhD-candidate. So your teaching reduction
upon successful graduation of a PhD-candidate tends to be 66 hours. For the supervisory work
you effectively do in the four years prior to graduation, there is no time allocated; so you
effectively do this in your research or your leisure time.
To put this into perspective: most (assistant/associate/full) professors teach 50-70% of
their time, and a fulltime workload is 1670 hours, or 1750 hours if you are saving for a
sabbatical. This can be reduced if you have major managerial tasks (e.g. Head of Department) or
if a large part of your wage is paid by a research grant. So without reductions, we teach about
835-1190 hours a year (this includes the time for preparation and examination, but frankly, one
always needs more than the teaching load models allocate for a given course. And in general
there are no TAs or other support staff to help with the practical sides of teaching).
For writing the grants that are almost always needed to create the jobs for PhD students
(with success rates now around 15%), and for supervising those who in the end do not get their
PhD degree, there is no time put aside for the supervisor/applicants. That time also goes,
effectively, from our research time, or, more realistically, from our leisure time.
Recently, I heard from a British colleague and a Swedish colleague their models for
PhD-supervision, which were way more generous (and rightly so in my view), so thought I'll
throw the question on the table here: what, if any, time-compensation/teachingreduction do you
get for supervising PhD students?
I am not trying to suggest here that without adequate time set aside for doing this work, it
would not be worthwhile supervising PhDs. There are in many cases other forms of rewards for
the work one does as a PhD supervisor. One might be the honor of supervising PhDs, and in most
cases the intrinsic rewards of the supervisory process – the satisfaction of seeing a
young person take their first steps as a scholar, and being able to play a crucial role in this
process. There is , after all, a reason why the Germans call their PhD-supervisor
mein Doktorvater or meine Doktormutter – since yes, there is this element
of helping someone to grow, in a cognitive and professional sense. Professionally, there are
few people who had so much influence on me as my PhD-supervisor, and I am hoping that some of
my (former) PhD-students will think the same at some point in their lives. So it would be wrong
to frame it merely as a burden, since there is the intrinsic value of the rather unique
professional relationship. But that cannot be a reason to not give PhDsupervisors the time they
need to properly supervise, given how severe time pressure in academia is. I see this as a real
tension.
In some academic fields, there may be professional research benefits for the supervisors,
such as becoming co-authors on the publications the PhD-students write under your supervision.
I recently examined a PhD-thesis in medical ethics, and all chapters (being articles published
or under review) had been co-written with several members of the supervisory team. Even raising
the funds to hire the PhD is sometimes seen as sufficient reason to be listed as a co-author.
In the humanities there is no such a thing: we don't put our names on articles of our
PhDstudents, even if we contributed significantly to the development of that piece (rightly so
in my view).
I'm posting this because I am interested in the international comparison in its own right,
but also because of its relevance in discussions on higher education policies which are
currently very intense in the Netherlands, on which I'll write another blogpost
later.
In my part of my university each PhD student earns her supervisors around 60 notional
hours/1600 total per annum, but that's usually divided 5/1 between two supervisors, so that
the person actually doing the work has about 50 hours, so slightly over an hour/week given
annual leave etc. My greatest beef with this is when we admit non-anglophone PhD students.
Since they officially have a level of competence in English as a condition of their
admission, they do not get any extra time for supervision. But in practice, their work takes
much longer to read and you have to put a lot of work into improving their English.
In my faculty (Arts and Social Sciences at Sydney) the primary supervisor gets 40 hours per
year and an auxiliary supervisor gets ten. (There is some flexibility for the 50 total hours
to be divided differently.)
In a recent survey of faculty staff with a response rate of around 30%, most reported
spending longer per primary supervision: the median was 50 hours.
There's actually a growing literature on academic time use. Kenny and Fluck have published
a series of papers based on a large survey of Australian academics. The median reported time
spent supervising a higher degree student per year was 60 hours over all discipline groups,
50 hours for Arts, Law and Humanities. (Kenny and Fluck 2018 'Research workloads in
Australian universities', _Australian Universities Review_ -- and the companion papers on
teaching and admin workloads are also worth googling for the full results over lots of
tasks.)
When we tried to establish a "norm" at the University of York, it turned out that practice
varied widely not only across faculties, but within the arts and humanities and social
sciences. Some departments simply included it in "research time" and gave zero extra time,
others gave a (more-or-less generous) "teaching" allocation. So, I am not sure you can get
any useful comparisons even at an institutional level let alone internationally.
Currently, in the Law School at York, a PhD student – during the period of registration
(i.e., only for the first 3 years) – earns her supervisors around 80 notional hours of
teaching per year. This is split across the supervisory team in proportion to their
involvement.
Many colleagues think this is insufficient, in particular with non-anglophone students and it
can be particularly galling if one is putting a lot of work into the final "writing up"
year.
For what it is worth, I found this very hard to manage when I was Head of Department (and so
responsible for workloads). The issue for me was that in many cases senior colleagues had
several PhD students and (some) junior colleagues none (or very little involvement. This was
back in the day of most students have one supervisor.). Modelling a system where PhD
supervision was "properly" rewarded (that is, where I tried to allocate hours in accordance
to the amount of time it actually took) resulted in a very hierarchical department where
(roughly) senior colleagues did PhD supervision and junior colleagues taught undergraduates.
So, I didn't do it.
For what it is worth (addressing the wider issues of workload), it seems to me that there is
an inevitable gap between a workload system conceived of as a mechanism of "counting" (how
many hours does this job actually take?) and conceived of as a mechanism of "distribution"
(how much work is there to be done and how many people to do it?). Of course, the
distributive principles cannot stray too far from the realities revealed in counting, but it
(seems to me at least) perfectly okay to think that the distributive principles include other
considerations like the "shape" of the department, individual "goals" (having PhD students is
good for promotion at York) and personal development, gender, and so on.
Finally, this problem does not seem to be unique to PhD supervision (the current "hot topic"
at York is how to count/distribute time for research grant writing, which at the moment is
simply included in individual research in most, but not all, departments). York tried to
introduce a workload model across the university and never managed it because departmental
variations were so huge (in everything from whether/how to include teaching preparation time
to how to rank administrative tasks). That said, this may be the result of our particular
institutional history (until recently, we had a very flat structure with only relatively
autonomous departments and no faculties).
In Japan as far as I know there is no allowance at all, and senior staff (the professor who
is the official supervisor) often dump all supervisory responsibility on the most junior
staff. There is also often no limit on how many PhD students the professor can take on (and
dump on their assistant prof). This is particularly bad with masters students, whose theses
are much more time limited and challenging to supervise.
I don't know if it's a general thing but my colleagues in China tell me they are only
allowed a PhD student if they publish above a certain level – PhD students are treated
as a valuable asset you need to struggle to get. (I think they are paid by the uni but don't
quote me). In the universities I know of in China the PhD student has to publish to graduate
(sometimes like 3 papers) so the benefits to the supervisor are obvious.
I'm in public health where publication is relatively easy and quick. I don't know how it
is in other disciplines (but the Japanese professor dumping his responsibilities on junior
staff is quite common across disciplines as far as I can tell).
It's not part of a workload model for us. We're expected to teach 2 classes a semester (8
contact hours a week total), then research, service, and graduate supervision on top, but the
only thing that is specified is the 2 classes. So no compensation for PhD students. In
practice the number of PhD supervisions varies greatly across faculty (as you'd expect), as
does the amount of service work we do (if you're good at it you get asked to do more, if
you're tenured and responsible you generally try to say yes), as does the amount of time we
actually spend on the courses we teach.
As do our salaries, to be fair, which reflect years of service, perceived quality of
research, how much the people elected to the department budget value the other things we do,
and, to some extent, market forces.
What I've described is my own department. There's huge variation across campus, including
variation in numbers of courses we're expected to teach.
Possibly worth mentioning that from what I have gathered expectations of how many courses
we teach have fallen dramatically (across campus) over the past 50 years, and the number of
course releases granted have increased dramatically: I estimate faculty in the humanities
teach 30% less than 50 years ago, and in the sciences 50% less. I imagine this is similar
across public research universities and SLACs.
So, purely anecdotal and from the perspective of a PhD and post-doc in Science at 2
different, fairly well thought of UK Universities (Russel group, etc. etc.).
PhD students are highly valuable. This is because a Masters or summer student are
necessarily short term, and it is difficult to fulfil much breakthrough research (sometimes
you need a few years of banging your head against a wall ). Post-docs are phenomenally
expensive as in the UK as the University charges a huge amount just to have them – e.g.
a rough breakdown (from some years ago, so a little out of date) is to just have a post-doc
(i.e. no equipment, materials, etc.) is in excess of £110K per year. Some 31000 is for
salary, the rest goes to the University to keep the lights on. Having more than a few
post-docs, for all but the most successful labs, became prohibitively expensive.
However, as a PhD most of my time was with my post-docs (in my first year I saw my
professor once, for 1hr, in later years maybe a few times more, so approximately 15 hr over
3.5 years). As a post-doc, the PhD students had regular meetings in a group format once per
month (so, more or less 2-3 hr per month). In both cases it, in principle, was possible to go
and meet the supervisor if you felt the need, but generally speaking your post-doc was the
point of contact on a day-by-day, week-by-week basis.
I've not been a lecturer, so this is very speculative, but my impression is that
supervising PhD students is generally considered a research activity, and thus you are not
budgeted time for it specifically.
Not sure if any of this is useful, but feel free to hit me up for more details if you
think it is useful/interesting.
I taught for 15 years at 3 Dutch universities, 3 years at a Russell Group university in
England, and am now at an Irish university. I did my PhD in the United States. Like the other
posters, I have experienced wide variation in 'compensation' for PhD supervision. One of the
reasons I left my position at a British university was the bizarre (and I thought, unfair)
model for workload allocation. PhD supervision was highly 'compensated', and actual classroom
teaching of undergrads was not. I had colleagues who met all or most of their teaching
obligations with PhD supervision and did not teach undergrads.
I don't know what the best way to compensate PhD supervision is, but there are a couple of
aspects I think need more attention. The first is wide variation in the number of PhD
students in any given department and the rules/norms governing who is (de facto) permitted to
supervise PhDs. Dutch departments have fewer PhD students than UK/Irish departments (for
complicated reasons), and only full (and now associate?) profs are permitted to supervise.
PhD supervision is important for promotion (as it is in the UK and IE), so everyone wants to
do it, but not everyone has access. I am not sure that an activity that is so important for
career progression should be generously compensated.
The second issue concerns co-authoring with a PhD student. I can see the advantages of this
(which Ingrid mentions), but the proliferation of the article-based PhD where the supervisors
co-author all articles is a cause for concern. Again, I am not convinced that a PhD
supervisor should be generously compensated for something (publications) that strongly
advances their own career. And it is not clear to me that the supervisor's contribution to
the publication (in many cases, at least) amounts to more than what would be considered
'normal' PhD supervision in the US, Canada, and many European universities. This makes it
very difficult to evaluate a newly minted PhD's CV, and it inflates the publication list of
more senior academics.
A couple of ideas: 1) cap the number of PhD students that staff can supervise, or at least
cap the number for which teaching points are earned. 2) ensure that all academic staff have
access to PhD supervision.
Private university in Turkey : the basic assumption here is that supervising PhD students and
MA theses takes zero time (although people typically budget an hour per week per student.
The workload allocation for Humanities at the University of Exeter is similar to Chris's
account of Bristol (where I worked previously), though it's more common for the hours to be
divided 70/30, 60/40 or even 50/50 between first and second supervisors, with the latter
playing a much more active role. The biggest difference, however, is that you continue to
receive an allowance when the student is writing up, and even if they're revising after a
first examination, whereas the Bristol practice was, at least, that you get a workload
allowance for the first three years and then nothing for the period which in my experience
often required the greatest amount of work
I haven't – yet – supervised a doctoral student, but I did examine a viva this
year & was surprised to find that this carried no workload allowance at all, which seems
odd given the amount of reading time involved. (Fortunately I wasn't mad busy.)
Former US academic; taught at a few R1 uni's from 80s to aughts.
To echo the doughty Puritan: " the basic assumption here is that supervising PhD students
and MA theses takes zero time."
We had a standard teaching load, and expectations for research and service. But there was
no calculation of supervisory load -- it simply was not tracked, budgeted, or accounted for.
As Harry says above, there were wide disparities from person to person, since some people
attract a lot of grad students and some do not (and some repel them, either for strategic
purposes, or because they are repellent no matter what they try).
No one cared whether you supervised 15 PhD students or zero. Not quite true -- there was
some unofficial awareness among colleagues who thought collegially about things. And you
might get some private thanks or informal kudos for doing more than your share. But there was
absolutely no official account of it. And this was true at all 3 R1s I taught at over several
decades.
That's partly because -- in a Humanities field -- the funding of grad students does not
follow the prof, but the program as a whole. So, Central Admin knows that your department is
training 25 PhDs, because Central Admin has to figure their tuition, stipends, etc. But the
money then flows to your department as a whole, with no closer investigation of who in your
department is doing the work.
The picture must be radically different in the Sciences, where there is literal accounting
of PhD students, since they are supported by the professor's grant-money.
Surely there are other ways to offload work to PhD students one would otherwise have to do
oneself besides getting research recognition for their thesis. How much of that is possible
should also vary across countries. So a comparsion of alocated supervision time only seems a
bit one sided.
As regards co-authorship, my PhD students and postdocs are often keen to include me on the
theory that a paper with a more senior author will have a better chance of acceptance. My
impression is that, in economics, the expectation is that the main job market paper will be
sole-authored or else co-authored with another junior researcher, but that others are likely
to be co-authored with the supervisor.
To complicate things further, economics (like philosophy, I believe) works on average
quality rather than total contribution. So, a publication with a student in a journal lower
ranked than my average paper is actually a negative for me.
I assume that "Harry" above is Harry B of the blog. If so, he's showing why comparisons w/
the US on this will be hard, if not impossible. In many countries, there is a weird fantasy
that academics can and should be treated like hourly employees, with "hours" assigned to
things. (This is certainly so in Australia.) Of course, it's a fantasy in that, if it in fact
takes a lot more "hours" to do the things you're assigned, you don't get over-time, comp
time, or paid more. The other down-side is that this system leads, in my experience, to more
micro-managing – being expected to "account" for your time to a much greater degree.
The US system treats academics more like salaried employees – you get paid a certain
amount, you have certain tasks to do, and you must do them (some of them at particular times,
like teaching classes) but otherwise you're not dealing with "hours" for things. The
down-side is that there can be lots of variation in how much work people actually do –
even teaching the same "number" of classes can vary a lot depending on the number of preps,
size, how often you've taught it, if you have TAs, etc., and having more advisees may not
lead to more recognition on its own. The plus side is that less time is spent on being
mico-managed and bureaucratic nonsense. The relevant point here, though, is that it's really
hard to make a comparison like the one asked for between systems where one treats academics
more like hourly employees and the other more like salaried employees.
My wife (a New Zealand academic with confirmation) is allocated a. 24 hours per year for
supervising PhD students. She trusts that the ludicrousness of this number is not lost on
those present.
I am a Professor in an Engineering discipline at a small, state engineering school in the US.
Our workload is departmentally determined. My department is fairly small, ~100 undergrads,
but does quite a bit of research. My nominal workload is 40% teaching, 40% research and 20%
service. This is based on 40 working hours per week. My effective workload is 46% teaching,
8% advising (both undergrad and grad), 23% overseeing my funded research projects and about
25% service. This is more than 100%, which is true for almost all faculty at my school.
Thus, I estimate how much time I spend doing various things and then convert that to
credit hours, as my contract is specified in terms of 18 credit hours of work per semester,
making a credit hour about 2 hours and 40 minutes
In Technological University Dublin (formerly Dublin Institute of Technology), supervision of
a full-time PhD student attracts a time allowance of 2 hours per week (48 hours per annum),
from a weekly teaching load of 16 contact hours for lecturers (18 hours for assistant
lecturers). So, for example, a lecturer with two full-time PhD students will allocate 25% (4
hours) of his / her weekly contact teaching duties to this role.
In my department (at Uppsala University, Sweden) the workload norm is 88 hours per year
supervisory time for the main supervisor and 20 for the assistant supervisor. This time
includes the face-to-face hours, as well as reading, commenting, etc. The split can be done
differently to reflect other kinds of co-supervisory arrangements. This seems very generous
compared to what others are reporting, which is sad, since an average of 1 hour meeting, 1
hour reading per week for 44 weeks in a year would work out as very minimal supervision --
and supervisors typically spend much more time on supervision related tasks than this.
A couple of years ago, I did a survey of the formal teaching duties at polisci departments at
Scandinavian universities for a report published by the Swedish Institute for Labour Market
Evaluation. The survey looked at the formal percentage of teaching duty for senior lecturers
and full professors, and the formal compensation in terms of hours allotted for various
teaching activities (e.g., lectures, supervision at different levels, examination and so on).
We found, first, that the formal teaching duty varied quite a lot across Scandinavian
universities, but that all Swedish universities had less generous conditions than Danish and
Norwegian universities, which came closer to the Humboldtian ideal of unity of teaching and
research.
Second, by multiplying teaching duty and compensation for a standard set of teaching
activities, we found that the consequences for the individual lecturer could be quite
drastic: over a hypothetical career from age 35 to retirement at 67, a lecturer at the least
generous university could have ten whole years more of teaching duty than their colleague at
the most generous university.
I'm an Associate Professor in Computer Science at a US R1 university.
As Matt says, the description in Ingrid's post is totally unlike how things are thought of
at all in US universities. My load is 40% research, 40% teaching, 20% service, which is
standard for tenure-track faculty in my department (and I think across departments here). The
standard teaching load is 3 courses per year (2 in one semester, 1 in the other). However,
there are several exceptions to this: before tenure, faculty are assigned only 2 courses per
year. Also, if you support (with external grant funding) 3 PhD students or post-docs in the
previous year then you only teach 2 courses the next year. Additionally, pre-tenure faculty
are asked to do considerably less service.
Furthermore, there are several additional differences that are relevant. First, and most
importantly, the distinction between "research" and "PhD supervision" does not exist in
science. Effectively all of my research is joint with PhD students, although sometimes they
are not "my" students, but those of my collaborators. Second, not all students are funded by
grants; PhD students can also be funded by teaching. So it's possible to have one or two
students without bringing in funding. Third, there's a strong expectation that training PhD
students is part of the job, you wouldn't get tenure/promotion/etc if you just didn't do
it.
In my institution, you don't get any teaching load reduction, whereas you do get a tiny but
non-zero reduction for supervising a master thesis, or even an undergraduate research
project. I believe that is the norm in France in science in general, and most likely overall.
The logic behind that choice is that supervising a PhD student is supposed to bring its own
benefits: the student will do a lot of lab work for the superviser, the superviser will
cosign the research papers etc.
In math (my own field), there is no lab work to be done and the French tradition is that
papers drawn from the PhD should be signed by the student alone, so the arrangement is quite
unfavorable to us.
On the other hand
So without reductions, we teach about 835-1190 hours a year
Did I read that right? Can you clarify how many hours are counted for one hour in front of
the students? That number looks like madness to me (and I have a heavy teaching load
myself).
"Highly research-active" profs teach one fewer course per year. There is some flexibility
as to how to maintain this designation, but typically you must have at least 2 active
graduate students at any given time (and meet various other requirements).
Going through our standard courseload: if you ignore the other work related to maintaining
status, your first two Ph.D. students are worth about 90 hours/year, and the remainder are
worth nothing.
As regards co-authorship, my Ph.D. students and postdocs are often keen to include me on
the theory that a paper with a more senior author will have a better chance of
acceptance.
This is an important point. I agree that it is somewhat dishonest to use your post-grad
students to increase you number of publications. But it should be weighted against the real
difficulties of young researchers to get their papers published. And the fact that sometimes
brilliant papers from them are rejected. Nobody can abolish clan behavior in the academy. And
the "academic kitchen" is pretty dirty, and takes years to understand ;-).
Sometimes publishing oversees helps here, and young researchers should keep this in mind.
For many foreign journals, just the fact that you are a foreigner from a prestigious
university is a plus that weights on the acceptance.
Level of talent is another important factor. Especially difficult people are able to succeed in fields which are
absolutely closed for others. Think about the level of competition in middle ages when a single academic position needed to be
waited until previous holder retires. Still it did not prevented rising people like Euler to the top.
You should take the results from Clever.com published below with a grain of slat.
The unjustifiably high cost of college tuition in the US has dragged a whole generation into
debt slavery. The average cost of a 4-year degree in the US is 3x higher than it was in 1990.
Even tuition at in-state schools is climbing more quickly than incomes.
As more people are forced to go into deep levels of debt to afford an education, more
would-be students are being forced to take a hard look and reevaluate the ROI on a college
degree.
And as college tuition continues to outpace wage growth, for a growing number of people, the
answer to 'is college worth it?' is going to be no.
A reporter at
Clever.com did some digging, and tabulated the ROI on different types of degrees: the
bachelor's, master's and doctorate.
Generally speaking, people with at least a bachelor's degree typically earn more money over
their lifetime than those who never attended college, and it's also easier to get a job with a
degree.
But while Americans with a bachelor's degree might be on to something, those who earn a
Master's and PHD-level degrees can't say the same.
While nearly half the population has a bachelor's degree, only 13% of Americans have a
master's or Phd-level degree.
And according to Clever's analysis, many higher-level degrees may not be worth the time and
money that students spend.
In fact, the longer someone spends in school, the more the value of their degrees
diminishes.
Of course, ROI changes depending on the subject that an individual studies. Clever found
that the best bachelor's degrees, unsurprisingly, tend to be in the STEM area: operations
research, petroleum engineering, biological and physical sciences, biopsychology and
gerontology.
Here, the data are showing us something that we find to be very interesting. Namely, that
those who spend more money on a low-ROI bachelor's degree often find their careers to be more
'meaningful' than your average engineer. Does this mean there's an inverse relationship between
spiritual fulfillment and monetary compensation when it comes to ones' career path? Possibly.
But would like to suggest another possible explanation.
The children of America's wealthy often choose low-yield fields like journalism and English,
since they don't face as much pressure to maximize earnings (their parents very often cover the
cost of their education and living expenses) they can enjoy finding 'meaning' in low-paying
careers like being a social media manager or writing for Gawker Media - careers that also don't
require the hard work and dedication required of, say, a mechanical engineer at Boeing.
"... And while I am not as focused on the poverty ve wealth dynamic. this century has revealed something very disappointing that you address. That the elites have done a very poor job of leading the ship of state, while still remaining in leadership belies such a bold hypocrisy in accountability, it's jarring. The article could actually be titled: "The Myth of the Best and the Brightest." ..."
"... They are teaching the elite how to drain all value from American companies, as the rich plan their move to China, the new land of opportunity. When 1% of the population controls such a huge portion of the wealth, patriotism becomes a loadstone to them. The elite are global. Places like Harvard cater to them, help train them to rule the world .but first they must remake it. ..."
"... In my high school, there were roughly 15 of us who had been advanced two years ahead in math. Of those, 10 were Jewish; only two of them had a 'Jewish' last name. In my graduate school class, half (7) are Jewish. None has a 'Jewish' last name. So I'm pretty dubious of the counting method that you use. ..."
"... Regarding the declining Jewish achievement, it looks like it can be primarily explained through demographics: "Intermarriage rates have risen from roughly 6% in 1950 to approximately 40–50% in the year 2000.[56][57] This, in combination with the comparatively low birthrate in the Jewish community, has led to a 5% decline in the Jewish population of the United States in the 1990s." ..."
"... Jewish surnames don't mean what they used to. And intermarriage rates are lowest among the low-performing and highly prolific Orthodox. ..."
"... A potentially bigger issue completely ignored by your article is how do colleges differentiate between 'foreign' students (overwhelmingly Asian) and American students. Many students being counted as "Asian American" are in reality wealthy and elite foreign "parachute kids" (an Asian term), dropped onto the generous American education system or into boarding schools to study for US entrance exams, qualify for resident tuition rates and scholarships, and to compete for "American" admissions slots, not for the usually limited 'foreign' admission slots. ..."
"... As some who is Jewish from the former Soviet Union, and who was denied even to take an entrance exam to a Moscow college, I am saddened to see that American educational admission process looks more and more "Soviet" nowadays. Kids are denied opportunities because of their ethnic or social background, in a supposedly free and fair country! ..."
"... Actually, Richard Feynman famously rejected genetic explanations of Jewish achievement (whether he was right or wrong to do so is another story), and aggressively resisted any attempts to list him as a "Jewish scientist" or "Jewish Nobel Prize winner." I am sure he would not cared in the slightest bit how many Jews were participating in the Physics Olympiad, as long as the quality of the students' work continued to be excellent. Here is a letter he wrote to a woman seeking to include him in a book about Jewish achievement in the sciences. ..."
"... It would be interesting to know how well "true WASPS" do in admissions. This could perhaps be estimated by counting Slavic and Italian names, or Puritan New England last names. I would expect this group to do almost as well as Jews (not quite as well, because their ability would be in the lower end of the Legacy group). ..."
"... The missing variable in this analysis is income/class. While Unz states that many elite colleges have the resources to fund every student's education, and in fact practice need-blind admissions, the student bodies are skewed towards the very highest percentile of the income and wealth distribution. SAT scores may also scale with parents' income as well. ..."
"... Having worked with folks from all manner of "elite" and not so elite schools in a technical field, the main conclusion I was able to draw was folks who went to "elite" colleges had a greater degree of entitlement. And that's it. ..."
"... My own position has always been strongly in the former camp, supporting meritocracy over diversity in elite admissions. ..."
"... The Reality of American Mediocrity ..."
"... The central test of fairness in any admissions system is to ask this simple question. Was there anyone admitted under that system admitted over someone else who was denied admission and with better grades and SAT scores and poorer ? If the answer is in the affirmative, then that system is unfair , if it is in the negative then the system is fair. ..."
"... Harvard ranks only 8th after Penn State in the production of undergrads who eventually get Doctorates in Science and Engineering. Of course Berkeley has the bragging rights for that kind of attribute. ..."
"... There is an excellent analysis of this article at The Occidental Observer by Kevin MacDonald, "Ron Unz on the Illusory American Meritocracy". The MSM is ignoring Unz's article for obvious reasons. ..."
"... Could it be that the goal of financial, rather than academic, achievement, makes many young people uninterested in competing in the science and math competitions sought out by the Asian students? I ..."
"... America never promised success through merit or equality. That is the American "dream." ..."
"... Anyone famliar with sociology and the research on social stratification knows that meritocracy is a myth; for example, if one's parents are in the bottom decile of the the income scale, the child has only a 3% chance to reach the top decile in his or her lifetime. In fact, in contrast to the Horatio Alger ideology, the U.S. has lower rates of upward mobility than almost any other developed country. Social classses exist and they tend to reproduce themselves. ..."
"... The rigid class structure of the the U.S. is one of the reasons I support progressive taxation; wealth may not always be inherited, but life outcomes are largely determined by the class position of one's parents. In this manner, it is also a myth to believe that wealth is an individual creation;most financially successful individuals have enjoyed the benefits of class privilege: good and safe schools, two-parent families, tutors, and perhaps most important of all, high expecatations and positive peer socialization (Unz never mentions the importants of peeer groups, which data show exert a strong causal unfluence on academic performance). ..."
"... And I would challenge Unz's assertion that many high-performing Asians come from impovershed backgrounds: many of them may undereport their income as small business owners. I believe that Asian success derives not only from their class background but their culture in which the parents have authority and the success of the child is crucual to the honor of the family. As they assimilate to the more individualist American ethos, I predict that their academic success will level off just as it has with Jews. ..."
"... All I can say is see a book: "Ivy League Fools and Felons"' by Mack Roth. Lots of them are kids of corrupt people in all fields. ..."
Just before the Labor Day weekend, a front page New York Times story broke the news of the largest cheating scandal in Harvard University
history, in which nearly half the students taking a Government course on the role of Congress had plagiarized or otherwise illegally
collaborated on their final exam.
[1] Each year, Harvard admits just 1600 freshmen while almost 125 Harvard students now face possible suspension over this single
incident. A Harvard dean described the situation as "unprecedented."
But should we really be so surprised at this behavior among the students at America's most prestigious academic institution? In
the last generation or two, the funnel of opportunity in American society has drastically narrowed, with a greater and greater proportion
of our financial, media, business, and political elites being drawn from a relatively small number of our leading universities, together
with their professional schools. The rise of a Henry Ford, from farm boy mechanic to world business tycoon, seems virtually impossible
today, as even America's most successful college dropouts such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg often turn out to be extremely well-connected
former Harvard students. Indeed, the early success of Facebook was largely due to the powerful imprimatur it enjoyed from its exclusive
availability first only at Harvard and later restricted to just the Ivy League.
During
this period, we have witnessed a huge national decline in well-paid middle class jobs in the manufacturing sector and other sources
of employment for those lacking college degrees, with median American wages having been stagnant or declining for the last forty
years. Meanwhile, there has been an astonishing concentration of wealth at the top, with America's richest 1 percent now possessing
nearly as much net wealth as the bottom 95 percent.
[2]
This situation, sometimes described as a "winner take all society," leaves families desperate to maximize the chances that their
children will reach the winners' circle, rather than risk failure and poverty or even merely a spot in the rapidly deteriorating
middle class. And the best single means of becoming such an economic winner is to gain admission to a top university, which provides
an easy ticket to the wealth of Wall Street or similar venues, whose leading firms increasingly restrict their hiring to graduates
of the Ivy League or a tiny handful of other top colleges.
[3] On the other side, finance remains the favored employment choice for Harvard, Yale or Princeton students after the diplomas
are handed out. [4]
As a direct consequence, the war over college admissions has become astonishingly fierce, with many middle- or upper-middle class
families investing quantities of time and money that would have seemed unimaginable a generation or more ago, leading to an all-against-all
arms race that immiserates the student and exhausts the parents. The absurd parental efforts of an Amy Chua, as recounted in her
2010 bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother , were simply a much more extreme version of widespread behavior among her
peer-group, which is why her story resonated so deeply among our educated elites. Over the last thirty years, America's test-prep
companies have grown from almost nothing into a $5 billion annual industry, allowing the affluent to provide an admissions edge to
their less able children. Similarly, the enormous annual tuition of $35,000 charged by elite private schools such as Dalton or Exeter
is less for a superior high school education than for the hope of a greatly increased chance to enter the Ivy League.
[5]
Many New York City parents even go to enormous efforts to enroll their children in the best possible pre-Kindergarten program,
seeking early placement on the educational conveyer belt which eventually leads to Harvard.
[6] Others cut corners in a more
direct fashion, as revealed in the huge SAT cheating rings recently uncovered in affluent New York suburbs, in which students were
paid thousands of dollars to take SAT exams for their wealthier but dimmer classmates.
[7]
But given such massive social and economic value now concentrated in a Harvard or Yale degree, the tiny handful of elite admissions
gatekeepers enjoy enormous, almost unprecedented power to shape the leadership of our society by allocating their supply of thick
envelopes. Even billionaires, media barons, and U.S. Senators may weigh their words and actions more carefully as their children
approach college age. And if such power is used to select our future elites in a corrupt manner, perhaps the inevitable result is
the selection of corrupt elites, with terrible consequences for America. Thus, the huge Harvard cheating scandal, and perhaps also
the endless series of financial, business, and political scandals which have rocked our country over the last decade or more, even
while our national economy has stagnated.
Just a few years ago Pulitzer Prize-winning former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden published The Price
of Admission , a devastating account of the corrupt admissions practices at so many of our leading universities, in which every
sort of non-academic or financial factor plays a role in privileging the privileged and thereby squeezing out those high-ability,
hard-working students who lack any special hook.
In one particularly egregious case, a wealthy New Jersey real estate developer, later sent to Federal prison on political corruption
charges, paid Harvard $2.5 million to help ensure admission of his completely under-qualified son.
[8] When we consider that Harvard's
existing endowment was then at $15 billion and earning almost $7 million each day in investment earnings, we see that a culture of
financial corruption has developed an absurd illogic of its own, in which senior Harvard administrators sell their university's honor
for just a few hours worth of its regular annual income, the equivalent of a Harvard instructor raising a grade for a hundred dollars
in cash.
An admissions system based on non-academic factors often amounting to institutionalized venality would seem strange or even unthinkable
among the top universities of most other advanced nations in Europe or Asia, though such practices are widespread in much of the
corrupt Third World. The notion of a wealthy family buying their son his entrance into the Grandes Ecoles of France or the top Japanese
universities would be an absurdity, and the academic rectitude of Europe's Nordic or Germanic nations is even more severe, with those
far more egalitarian societies anyway tending to deemphasize university rankings.
Well, legacy programs are alive and well. According to the read, here's the problem:
"The research certainly supports the widespread perception that non-academic factors play a major role in the process,
including athletic ability and "legacy" status. But as we saw earlier, even more significant are racial factors, with black
ancestry being worth the equivalent of 310 points, Hispanics gaining 130 points, and Asian students being penalized by 140
points, all relative to white applicants on the 1600 point Math and Reading SAT scale."
These arbitrary point systems while well intended are not a reflection of AA design. School lawyers in a race not be penalized
for past practices, implemented their own versions of AA programs. The numbers are easy to challenge because they aren't based
on tangible or narrow principles. It's weakneses are almost laughable. Because there redal goal was to thwart any real challenge
that institutions were idle in addressing past acts of discrimination. To boost their diversity issues, asians were heavily recruited.
Since AA has been in place a lot of faulty measures were egaged in: Quotas for quotas sake. Good for PR, lousy for AA and issues
it was designed to address.
I think the statistical data hides a very important factor and practice. Most jews in this country are white as such , and
as such only needed to change their names and hide behaviors as a strategy of surviving the entrance gauntlet. That segregation
created a black collegiate system with it's own set of elite qualifiers demonstrates that this model isn't limited to the Ivy
league.
That an elite system is devised and practiced in members of a certain club networks so as to maintain their elite status, networks
and control, this is a human practice. And it once served as something to achieve. It was thought that the avenues of becoming
an elite were there if one wanted to strive for it. Hard work, honesty, persistence, results . . . should yield X.
And while I am not as focused on the poverty ve wealth dynamic. this century has revealed something very disappointing
that you address. That the elites have done a very poor job of leading the ship of state, while still remaining in leadership
belies such a bold hypocrisy in accountability, it's jarring. The article could actually be titled: "The Myth of the Best and
the Brightest."
I don't think it's just some vindictive intent. and while Americans have always known and to an extent accepted that for upper
income citizens, normal was not the same as normal on the street. Fairness, was not the same jn practice nor sentiment. What may
becoming increasing intolerant has been the obvious lack of accountability among elites. TARP looked like the elites looking out
for each other as opposed the ship of state. I have read three books on the financials and they do not paint a pretty portrait
of Ivy League leadership as to ethics, cheating, lying, covering up, and shamelessly passing the buck. I will be reading this
again I am sure.
It's sad to think that we may be seeing te passing of an era. in which one aspired to be an elite not soley for their wealth,
but the model they provided od leadership real or imagined. Perhaps, it passed long ago, and we are all not just noticing.
I appreciated you conclusions, not sure that I am comfortable with some of the solutions.
Since I still hanker to be an elite in some manner, It is interesting to note my rather subdued response to the cheating. Sadly,
this too may be an open secret of standard fair - and that is very very sad. And disappointing. Angering even.
The shifting social demography of deans, house masters and admissions committees may be a more important metric than the composition
of the student body, as it determines the shape of the curriculum, and the underlying culture of the university as a legacy in
itself.
If Ron harrows the literary journals of the Jackson era with equal diligence. he may well turn up an essay or two expressing
deep shock at Unitarians admitting too many of the Lord's preterite sheep to Harvard, or lamenting the rise of Methodism at Yale
and the College of New Jersey.
Harvard is a university, much like Princeton and Yale, that continues based on its reputation, something that was earned in
the past. When the present catches up to them people will regard them as nepotistic cauldrons of corruption.
Look at the financial disaster that befell the USA and much of the globe back in 2008. Its genesis can be found in the clever
minds of those coming out of their business schools (and, oddly enough, their Physics programs as well).
They are teaching the elite how to drain all value from American companies, as the rich plan their move to China, the new
land of opportunity. When 1% of the population controls such a huge portion of the wealth, patriotism becomes a loadstone to them.
The elite are global. Places like Harvard cater to them, help train them to rule the world .but first they must remake it.
• Replies: @Part White, Part
Native I agree, common people would never think of derivatives , nor make loans based on speculation
First, I appreciated the length and depth of your article.
Having said that, to boil it down to its essence:
Subconcious bias/groupthink + affirmative action/diversity focus + corruption + innumeracy = student bodies at elite institutions
that are wildly skewed vis-a-vis both: 1) the ethnic makeup of the general population; and 2) the makeup of our top-performing
students.
Since these institutions are pipelines to power, this matters.
I rather doubt that wage stagnation (which appears to have begun in ~1970) can be pinned on this – that part stuck out, because
there are far more plausible causes. To the extent you're merely arguing that our elite failed to counter the trend, ok, but I'm
not sure a "better" elite would have either. The trend, after all, favored the elite.
Anyway, I find your case is plausible.
Your inner/outer circle hybrid option is interesting. One (perhaps minor) thing jumps out at me: kids talk. The innies are
going to figure out who they are and who the outies are. The outies might have their arrogance tempered, but the innies? I suspect
they'd be even *more* arrogant than such folks are now (all the more so because they'd have better justification for their arrogance),
but I could be wrong.
Perhaps more significantly, this:
But if it were explicitly known that the vast majority of Harvard students had merely been winners in the application
lottery, top businesses would begin to cast a much wider net in their employment outreach, and while the average Harvard student
would probably be academically stronger than the average graduate of a state college, the gap would no longer be seen as so
enormous, with individuals being judged more on their own merits and actual achievements
Is a very good reason for Harvard, et al. to resist the idea. I think you're right that this would be a good thing for the
country, but it would be bad for Harvard. I think the odds of convincing Harvard to do it out of the goodness of their administrators
hearts is unlikely. You are basically asking them to purposefully damage their brand.
All in all, I think you're on to something here. I have my quibbles (the wage stagnation thing, and the graph with Chinese
vs USA per capita growth come on, apples and oranges there!), but overall I think I agree that your proposal is likely superior
to the status quo.
Don't forget the mess one finds after they ARE admitted to these schools. I dropped out of Columbia University in 2010.
You can "make it" on an Ivy-league campus if you are a conservative-Republican-type with all the rich country-club connections
that liberals use to stereotype.
Or you can succeed if you are a poor or working-class type who is willing to toe the Affirmative Action party line and be a
good "progressive" Democrat (Obama stickers, "Gay Pride" celebrations, etc.)
If you come from a poor or working-class background and are religious, or culturally conservative or libertarian in any way,
you might as well save your time and money. You're not welcome, period. And if you're a military veteran you WILL be actively
persecuted, no matter what the news reports claim.
It sucks. Getting accepted to Columbia was a dream come true for me. The reality broke my heart.
Regarding the overrepresentation of Jewish students compared to their actual academic merit, I think the author overstates
the role bias (subjective, or otherwise) plays in this:
1) , a likely explanation is that Jewish applicants are a step ahead in knowing how to "play the admissions game." They therefore
constitute a good percentage of applicants that admission committees view as "the total package." (at least a higher percentage
than scores alone would yield). Obviously money and connections plays a role in them knowing to say precisely what adcoms want
to hear, but in any case, at the end of the day, if adcoms are looking for applicants with >1400 SATs, "meaningful" life experiences/accomplishments,
and a personal statement that can weave it all together into a compelling narrative, the middle-upper-class east coast Jewish
applicant probably constitutes a good percentage of such "total package" applicants. I will concede however that this explanation
only works in explaining the prevalence of jews vs. whites in general. With respect to Asians, however, since they are likely
being actively and purposefully discriminated against by adcoms, having the "complete package" would be less helpful to them.
2) Another factor is that, regardless of ethnicity, alumni children get a boost and since in the previous generation Jewish
applicants were the highest achieving academic group, many of these lesser qualified jews admitted are children of alumni.
3) That ivy colleges care more about strong verbal scores than mathematics (i.e., they prefer 800V 700M over 700V 800M), and
Jewish applicants make up a higher proportion of the high verbal score breakdowns.
4) Last, and perhaps more importantly we do not really know the extent of Jewish representation compared to their academic
merit. Unlike admitted Asian applicants, who we know, on average, score higher than white applicants, we have no similar numbers
of Jewish applicants. The PSAT numbers are helpful, but hardly dispositive considering those aren't the scores colleges use in
making their decision information.
@Bryan– Getting accepted to Columbia was a dream come true for me. The reality broke my heart.
I'm touched by this. I've spent tons of time at Columbia, a generation ago -- and my background fit fine -- the kind of WASP
background Jews found exotic and interesting. But I can see your point, sad to say. There are other great schools -- Fordham,
where my wife went to law school at night, has incredible esprit de corps - and probably, person for person, has as many lawyers
doing good and interesting work as Columbia.
"There are other great schools–Fordham, where my wife went to law school at night, has incredible esprit de corps - and
probably, person for person, has as many lawyers doing good and interesting work as Columbia."
"Tiffany was also rejected by all her other prestigious college choices, including Yale, Penn, Duke, and Wellsley, an outcome
which greatly surprised and disappointed her immigrant father.88″
In the fall of 1990, my parents had me apply to 10 colleges. I had the profile of many Indian kids at the time – ranked in
the top 10 of the class, editor of school paper, Boy Scouts. SAT scores could have been better, but still strong. Over 700 in
all achievement tests save Bio, which was 670.
Rejected by 5 schools, waitlisted by 3, accepted into 2 – one of them the state univ.
One of my classmates, whose family was from Thailand, wound up in the same predicament as me. His response, "Basketball was
designed to keep the Asian man down."
The one black kid in our group – got into MIT, dropped out after one year because he could not hack it. The kid from our school
who should have gone, from an Italian-American family, and among the few who did not embrace the guido culture, went to Rennsealer
instead, and had professional success after.
As a University of Chicago alum, I infer that by avoiding the label "elite" on such a nifty chart we can be accurately categorized
as "meritocratic" by The American Conservative.
Then again, this article doesn't even purport to ask why elite universities might be in the business of EDUCATING a wider population
of students, or how that education takes place.
Perhaps, by ensuring that "the best" students are not concentrated in only 8 universities is why the depth and quality of America's
education system remains the envy of the world.
In my high school, there were roughly 15 of us who had been advanced two years ahead in math. Of those, 10 were Jewish;
only two of them had a 'Jewish' last name. In my graduate school class, half (7) are Jewish. None has a 'Jewish' last name.
So I'm pretty dubious of the counting method that you use.
Also, it's clear that there are Asian quotas at these schools, but it's not clear that Intel Science Fairs, etc, are the best
way to estimate what level of talent Asians have relative to other groups.
I was curious so I google High School Poetry Competition, High School Constitution Competition, High School Debating Competition.
None of the winners here seem to have an especially high Asian quotient. So maybe a non-technical (liberal arts) university would
settle on ~25-30% instead of ~40% asian? And perhaps a (small) part of the problem is a preponderance of Asian applicants excelling
in technical fields, leading to competition against each other rather than the general population? Just wonderin'
Regarding the declining Jewish achievement, it looks like it can be primarily explained through demographics: "Intermarriage
rates have risen from roughly 6% in 1950 to approximately 40–50% in the year 2000.[56][57] This, in combination with the comparatively
low birthrate in the Jewish community, has led to a 5% decline in the Jewish population of the United States in the 1990s."
Jewish surnames don't mean what they used to. And intermarriage rates are lowest among the low-performing and highly prolific
Orthodox.
Jewish birth rates have been falling faster than the white population, especially for the non-Orthodox:
"In contrast to the ongoing trends of assimilation, some communities within American Jewry, such as Orthodox Jews, have significantly
higher birth rates and lower intermarriage rates, and are growing rapidly. The proportion of Jewish synagogue members who were
Orthodox rose from 11% in 1971 to 21% in 2000, while the overall Jewish community declined in number. [60] In 2000, there were
360,000 so-called "ultra-orthodox" (Haredi) Jews in USA (7.2%).[61] The figure for 2006 is estimated at 468,000 (9.4%).[61]"
"As against the overall average of 1.86 children per Jewish woman, an informed estimate gives figures ranging upward from 3.3
children in "modern Orthodox" families to 6.6 in Haredi or "ultra-Orthodox" families to a whopping 7.9 in families of Hasidim."
These statistics would suggest that half or more of Jewish children are being born into these lower-performing groups. Given
their very low intermarriage rates, a huge portion of the secular, Reform, and Conservative Jews must be intermarrying (more than
half if the aggregate 43% intermarriage figure is right). And the high-performing groups may now be around 1 child per woman or
lower, and worse for the youngest generation.
So a collapse in Jewish representation in youth science prizes can be mostly explained by the collapse of the distinct non-Orthodox
Jewish youth.
Incidentally, intermarriage also produces people with Jewish ancestry who get classified as gentiles using last names or self-identification,
reducing Jewish-gentile gaps by bringing up nominal gentile scores at the same time as nominal-Jewish scores are lowered.
The center of power in this country being located in the Northeast is nothing new. Whether it be in it's Ivy League schools
or the ownership of natural resources located in other regions, particularly the South, the Northeast has always had a disproportionate
share of influence in the power structures, particularly political and financial, of this nation. This is one of the reasons the
definition of "white" when reviewing ethnicity is so laughably inaccurate. There is a huge difference in opportunity between WASP
or Jewish in the Northeast, for instance, and those of Scots Irish ancestory in the mountain south. Hopefully statistical analysis
such as this can break open that stranglehold, especially as it is directly impacting a minority group in a negative fashion.
Doing this exercise using say, white Baptists compared to other white subgroups, while maybe equally valid in the results, would
be seen as racist by the very Ivy League system that is essentially practicing a form of racism.
Yeah, my ultimate goal was to attend law school, and a big part of the heartbreak for me–or heartburn, the more cynical would
call it–was seeing how skewed and absurd the admissions process to law school is.
I have no doubt that I could have eventually entered into a "top tier" law school, and that was a dream of mine also. I met
with admissions officers from Duke, Harvard, Stanford, Fordham, etc. I was encouraged. I had the grades and background for it.
But–and I'm really not trying to sound corny 0r self-important here–what does it profit a man to gain the world and lose his
soul? I really don't feel that I'm exaggerating when I say that that's exactly how it felt to me.
The best experience I had while In New York was working as an after-school programs administrator for P.S. 136, but that was
only because of the kids. They'll be old and bitter and cynical soon enough.
At one point it occurred to me that I should have just started claiming "Black" as my ethnicity when I first started attending
college as an adult. I never attended high-school so it couldn't have been disproved. I'm part Sicilian so I could pass for 1/4
African-American. Then I would have received the preference toward admission that, say, Michael Jordan's kids or Barack Obama's
kids will receive when they claim their Ivy-league diplomas. I should have hid the "white privilege" I've enjoyed as the son of
a fisherman and a waitress from one of the most economically-depressed states in America.
The bottom line is that those colleges are political brainwashing centers for a country I no longer believe in. I arrived on
campus in 2009 and I'm not joking at all when I say I was actively persecuted for being a veteran and a conservative who was not
drinking the Obama Kool-aid. Some big fat African-American lady, a back-room "administrator" for Columbia, straight-up threw my
VA benefits certification in the garbage, so my money got delayed by almost two months. I had no idea what was going on. I had
a wife and children to support.
The fact that technology has enabled us to sit here in real-time and correspond back-and-forth about the state of things doesn't
really change the state of things. They are irredeemable. This country is broke and broken.
If Abraham Lincoln were born today in America he would wind up like "Uncle Teardrop" from Winter's Bone. Back then, in order
to be an attorney, you simply studied law and starting trying cases. If you were good at it then you were accepted and became
a lawyer. Today, something has been lost. There is no fixing it. I don't want to waste my time trying to help by being "productive"
to the new tower of Babel or pretending to contribute.
Perhaps only one thing you left out, which is especially important with regard to Jewish enrollment and applications at Ivy
leagues, and other schools as well.
Jewish high school graduates actively look out for campuses with large Jewish populations, where they feel more comfortable.
I don't know the figures, but I believe Dartmouth, for example, has a much smaller Jewish population than Columbia, and it will
stay that way because of a positive feedback loop. (i.e. Jews would rather be at Columbia than Dartmouth, or sometimes even rather
be at NYU than Dartmouth). This explains some of the difference among different schools (and not solely better admission standards).
This is also especially relevant to your random lottery idea, which will inevitably lead to certain schools being overwhelmingly
Asian, others being overwhelmingly Jewish, etc., because the percentage of applicants from every ethnicity is different in every
school. This will necessarily eliminate any diversity which may or may not have existed until now.
I like the lottery admissions idea a lot but the real remedy for the US education system would be to abandon the absurd elite
cult altogether. There is not a shred of evidence that graduates of so-called elite institutions make good leaders. Many of them
are responsible for the economic crash and some of them have brought us the disaster of the Bush presidency.
Many better functioning countries – Germany, the Scandinavians – do not have elite higher education systems. When I enrolled
to University in Germany, I showed up at the enrollment office the summer before the academic year started, filled out a form
(1), and provided a certified copy of my Abitur certificate proving that I was academically competent to attend University. I
never wasted a minute on any of the admissions games that American middle class teenagers and their parents are subjected to.
It would surely have hurt my sense of dignity to be forced to jump through all these absurd and arbitrary hoops.
Americans, due to their ignorance of everything happening outside their borders, have no clue that a system in which a person
is judged by what "school" they attended is everything but normal. It is part of the reason for American dysfunction.
Since they are the pool from which tomorrow's governing elites will be chosen, I'd much rather see Ivy League student bodies
which reflected the full ethnic and geographic diversity of the US. Right now rural and small town Americans and those of Catholic
and Protestant descent who live in the South and Mid-West - roughly half the population - are woefully under-represented, which
explains why their economic interests have been neglected over the last forty years. We live in a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic
representative democracy and our policy-making elites must reflect that diversity. Else the country will come apart.
Thus I recommend 'affirmative action for all' in our elite liberal arts colleges and universities (though not our technical
schools). Student bodies should be represent 'the best and the brightest' of every ethnic group and geographical area of the country.
Then the old school ties will truly knit our society together in a way that is simply not happening today.
A side benefit - and I mean this seriously - is that our second and third tier colleges and universities would be improved
by an influx of Asian and Ashkenazi students (even though the very best would still go to Harvard).
I believe that this article raises – and then inappropriately immediately dismisses – the simplest and most likely reason for
the over-representation of Jewish students at Ivy League Schools in the face of their declining bulk academic performance:
They apply to those schools in vastly disproportionate numbers.
Without actual data on the ethnicity of the applicants to these and other schools, we simply cannot rule out this simple and
likely explanation.
It is quite clear that a large current of Jewish American culture places a great emphasis on elite college attendance, and
among elite colleges, specifically values the Ivy League and its particular cache as opposed to other elite institutions such
as MIT. Also, elite Jewish American culture, moreso than elite Asian American culture, encourages children to go far away from
home for college, considering such a thing almost a right of passage, while other ethnic groups tend to encourage children to
remain closer. A high performing Asian student from, say, California, is much more likely to face familial pressure to stay close
to home for undergrad (Berkeley, UCLA, etc) than a high performing Jewish student from the same high school, who will likely be
encouraged by his or her family to apply to many universities "back east".
Without being able to systematically compare – with real data – the ethnicities of the applicants to those offered admission,
these conclusions simply cannot be accepted.
Different expectations for different races should worry traditional Americans.
If we become comfortable with different academic standards for Asians will we soon be expected to apply different laws to them
also? Will we apply different laws or at least different interpretations of the same laws to blacks?
The association of East Asians with CalTech is now as strong as the association of blacks with violent crime. Can not race
conscious jurisprudence be far behind?
Around a millenium ago in England it mattered to the court if you were a commoner or a noble. Nobles could exercise 'high justice'
with impunity. They were held to different standards. Their testimony counted for more in court. The law was class concious.
Then we had centuries of reform. We had 'Common Law'. By the time of our revolution the idea that all were equal before the
law was a very American kind of idea. We were proud that unlike England we did not have a class system.
Today we seem to be on the threshold of a similar sytem of privileges and rights based on race. Let me give an example. If
there were a domestic riot of somekind and a breakdown of public order, the authorities might very well impose a cufew. That makes
good sense for black male teens but makes little or no sense for elderly Chinese women. I can envision a time when we have race
specific policies for curfews and similar measures.
It seems to be starting in schools. It could be that the idea of equality before the law was an idea that only flourished between
the fifteenth century and the twenty first.
"But filling out a few very simple forms and having their test scores and grades scores automatically forwarded to a list of
possible universities would give them at least the same chance in the lottery as any other applicant whose academic skills were
adequate."
They get a lot of applications. I am guessing they chuck about 1/2 or more due to the application being incomplete, the applicant
did not follow instructions, the application was sloppy, or just obviously poor grades/test scores. The interview and perhaps
the essay and recommendations are necessary to chuck weirdos and psychopaths you do not want sitting next to King Fahd Jr. So
the "byzantine" application process is actually necessary to reduce the number of applicants to be evaluated.
I have a friend who went to Stanford with me in the early 80s. She has two sons who recently applied to Stanford. The older
son had slightly better grades and test scores. The younger son is gay. Guess which one got in?
If you were in Columbia's GS school, (or even if you were CC/SEAS/Barnard) you ought to reach out to some of on-campus and
alumni veteran's groups. They can help you maneuver through the school. (I know there's one that meets at a cafe on 122 and Broadway)
CU can be a lonely and forbidding place for anyone and that goes double for GSers and quadruple for veterans.
You ought to give it another go. Especially if you aren't going somewhere else that's better. Reach out to your deans and make
a fuss. No one in the bureaucracy wants to help but you can force them to their job.
Mr. Unz, the issues of jewish/gentile intermarriage and the significance of jewish-looking names do indeed merit more consideration
than they were given in this otherwise very enlightening article.
What would the percentage of jews in Ivy-League universities look like if the methodology used to determine the percentage
of jewish NMS semifinalists were applied to the list of Ivy League students (or some available approximation of it)?
For background: I'm an Asian-American who worked briefly in legacy admissions at an Ivy and another non-Ivy top-tier, both
while in school (work-study) and as an alum on related committees.
Mendy Finkel's observations are spot on. Re: her 1st point, personal "presentation" or "branding" is often overlooked by Asian
applicants. An admission officer at another Ivy joked they drew straws to assign "Night of a 1000 Lee's", so accomplished-but-indistinguishable
was that group.
A few points on the Asian analysis:
1. I think this analysis would benefit from expanding beyond HYP/Ivies when considering the broader meritocracy issue. Many
Asians esteem technical-leaning schools over academically-comparable liberal arts ones, even if the student isn't a science major.
When I was in college in the 90′s, most Asian parents would favor a Carnegie Mellon or Hopkins over Brown, Columbia or Dartmouth
(though HYP, of course, had its magnetic appeal). The enrollment percentages reflect this, and while some of this is changing,
this is a fairly persistent pattern.
2. Fundraising is crucial. The Harvard Class of '77 example isn't the most telling kind of number. In my experience, Jewish
alumni provide a critical mass in both the day-to-day fundraising and the resultant dollars. And they play a key role, both as
givers and getters, in the signature capital campaign commitments (univ hospitals, research centers, etc.). This isn't unique
to Jewish Ivy alumni; Catholic alumni of ND or Georgetown provide similar support. But it isn't clear what the future overall
Asian commitment to the Ivy "culture of fundraising" will be, which will continue to be a net negative in admissions.
Sidenote: While Asians greatly value the particular civic good, they are uneasy with it being so hinged to an opaque private
sector, in this case, philanthropy. That distinction, blown out a bit, speaks to some of the Republican "Asian gap".
3. I would not place too much weight on NMS comparisons between Asians and Jews. In my experience, most Asians treat the PSAT
seriously, but many established Jews do not – the potential scholarship money isn't a factor, "NMS semifinalist" isn't an admissions
distinction, and as Mendy highlighted, colleges don't see the scores.
On a different note, while the "weight" of an Ivy degree is significant, it's prestige is largely concentrated in the Northeast
and among some overseas. In terms of facilitating access and mobility, a USC degree might serve you better in SoCal, as would
an SMU one in TX.
And like J Harlan, I also hope the recent monopoly of Harvard and Yale grads in the presidency will end. No doubt, places like
Whittier College, Southwest Texas State Teachers' College, and Eureka College gave earlier presidents valuable perspectives and
experience that informed their governing.
But thank you, Ron, for a great provocative piece. Very well worth the read.
Hey Ron, your next article should be on the military academies, and all those legacies that go back to the Revolutionary War.
How do you get into the French military academy, and do the cadets trace their family history back to the soldiers of Napoleon
or Charles Martel or whatever?
"Thus, there appears to be no evidence for racial bias against Asians, even excluding the race-neutral impact of athletic recruitment,
legacy admissions, and geographical diversity."
Yes, at UCLA, at least up to 2004, Asian and white admits had nearly identical SATs and GPAs.
Further, it just isn't the case that Asians are so spectacular as people seem to think. Their average on the SAT Verbal is
slightly less than whites, their average on SAT Writing is slightly more. Only in math do they have a significant advantage, 59
points or .59 standard deviation. Total advantage is about .2 over the three tests. Assuming that Harvard or Yale admit students
at +3 standard deviations overall, and plugging the relative group quantiles +(3, 2.8) into a normal distribution, we get that
.14% of white kids would get admitted, versus .26% of Asian kids. Or, 1.85 Asian kids for every one white kid.
But, last year 4.25 times as many whites as Asians took the SAT, so there still should be about 2.28 times as many white kids
being admitted as Asians (4.25/1.85).
On GPA, whites and Asians are also pretty similar on average, 3.52 for Asians who took the SAT, 3.45 for whites who took the
SAT. So that shouldn't be much of a factor.
I am a Cadet at the US Military Academy at West Point and generally pretty familiar with trans-national Academy admissions
processes. There's an excellent comparative study of worldwide military academy admissions that was done in the late '90′s you
might find interesting (IIRC it was done by a group in the NATO Defence College) and I think you will find that although soldiers
are often proud of their family histories to a fault, it is not what controls entrance to the officer corps in most countries.
"Legacy" is definitely meaningless in US Military Academy admissions, although can be very helpful in the separate process
of securing a political appointment to attend the Academy once accepted for admission and in an Army career. West Point is not
comparable to the Ivy League schools in the country, because (ironically) the admissions department that makes those comparisons
lets in an inordinate number of unqualified candidates and ensures our student body includes a wide range of candidates, from
people who are unquestionably "Ivy League material" to those who don't have the intellect to hack it at any "elite" institution.
Prior the changes in admissions policies and JFK ordering an doubling of the size of the Corps of Cadets in the '60′s, we didn't
have this problem. But, I digress. My point is, the Academy admissions system is very meritocratic.
I am a Jewish alum of UPenn, and graduated in the late 90s. That puts me almost a generation ago, which may be before the supposed
Jewish decline you write about. I was in an 80%+ Jewish fraternity, and at least 2/3 of my overall network of friends at Penn
was also Jewish. As was mentioned earlier, I have serious qualms with your methods for counting Jews based upon last name.
Based upon my admittedly non-scientific sample, the percentage of us who had traditionally Jewish last names was well under
half and closer to 25%. My own last name is German, and you would never know I am Jewish based solely upon my name (nor would
you based upon the surname of 3/4 of my grandparents, despite my family being 100% Jewish with no intermarriages until my sister).
By contrast, Asians are much easier to identify based upon name. You may overcount certain names like Lee that are also Caucasian,
but it is highly unlikely that you will miss any Asian students when your criterion is last name.
Admittedly I skimmed parts of the article, but were other criterion used to more accurately identify the groups?
The Jewish presence is definitely understated by just looking at surnames. As is the American Indian.
My maternal grandfather was Ashkenazi and his wife was 1/2 Ashkenazi and 1/4 Apache. He changed his name to a Scots surname
that matched his red hair so as to get ahead as a business man in 20s due to KKK and anti-German feelings at the time. Their kids
had two PHDs and a Masters between them despite their parents running a very blue collar firm.
My surname comes from my dad and its a Scottish surname although he was 1/4 Cherokee. On that side we are members of the FF
of Virignia. Altogether I am more Jewish and American Indian than anything else yet would be classified as white. I could easily
claim to be
Jewish or Indian on admissions forms. I always selected white. I was NMSF.
Both my sister and I have kids. Her husband is a full blood Indian with a common English surname. One of my nieces made NMSF
and another might. My sisters kids do not think of themselves as any race and check other.
My wife is 1/4 Indian and 3/4 English. My kids are young yet one has tested to an IQ in the 150s.
Once you get West of the Appalachians, there are a lot of mutts in the non-gentile whites. A lot of Jews and American Indians
Anglicized themselves a generation or two ago and they are lumped into that group – as well as occupy the top percentile academically.
Interesting article with parts I would agree with but also tinged with bias and conclusions that I would argue are not fully
supported by the data.
I think more analysis is needed to confirm your conclusions. As others have mentioned there may be problems with your analysis
of NMS scores. I think graduate admissions and achievements especially in the math and sciences would be a better measure of intellectual
performance.
Now, I didn't attend an Ivy League school, instead a public university, mainly because I couldn't afford it or so I thought.
I was also a NMS finalist.
But I always was of the opinion that except for the most exceptional students admission to the Ivies was based on the wealth
of your family and as you mentioned there are quite a few affluent Jews so I imagine they do have a leg up. Harvard's endowment
isn't as large as it is by accident.
It is interesting that you didn't discuss the stats for Stanford.
Lastly, I think your solution is wrong. The pure meritocracy is the only fair solution. Admissions should be based upon the
entrance exams like in Asia and Europe.
There are plenty of options for those who don't want to compete and if the Asians dominate admissions at the top schools so
be it.
Hopefully, all of this will be mute point n a few years as online education options become more popular with Universities specializing
in graduate education and research.
Ron Unz on Asians (ie Asian Americans): "many of them impoverished immigrant families"
Why do you twice repeat this assertion. Asians are the wealthiest race and most of the wealthiest ethnic groups tracked by
the Census Bureau, which includes immigrants.
A potentially bigger issue completely ignored by your article is how do colleges differentiate between 'foreign' students
(overwhelmingly Asian) and American students. Many students being counted as "Asian American" are in reality wealthy and elite
foreign "parachute kids" (an Asian term), dropped onto the generous American education system or into boarding schools to study
for US entrance exams, qualify for resident tuition rates and scholarships, and to compete for "American" admissions slots, not
for the usually limited 'foreign' admission slots.
Probably people from non-Asian countries are pulling the same stunt, but it seems likely dominated by Asians. And expect many
more with the passage of the various "Dream Acts"
So American kids must compete with the offspring of all the worlds corrupt elite for what should be opportunities for US Americans.
Am I the only one that finds the comparison of Asians (a race) to Jews (a religion) as basis for a case of discrimination completely
flawed? I got in at Harvard and don't remember them even asking me what my religion was.
The value of diversity is absolutely key. I have a bunch of very good Asian friends and I love them dearly, but I don't believe
a place like CalTech with its 40% demographics cannot truly claim to be a diverse place any more.
Regarding the SAT, we do know more than just differences of averages between whites and Asians. We have some years of
score distributions . As recently
as 1992, 1.2% of whites and 5.1% of Asians scored between 750 and 800 on the math subtest. As recently as 1985, 0.20% of whites
and 0.26% of Asians scored in that range on the verbal/critical reading subtest.
On a different form of the writing subtest than is currently used, 5.0% of whites and 3.0% of Asians scored greater than 60
in 1985. We also know that, as the white-Asian average verbal/critical reading gap shrank to almost nothing and the average math
gap grew in Asians' favor, the standard deviations on both for Asians have been much higher than every other group but have stayed
relatively unchanged and have become, in fact, slightly lower than in 1985.
Therefore, Asians probably greatly increased their share of top performers.
@Milton F.: "Perhaps, by ensuring that "the best" students are not concentrated in only 8 universities is why the depth and
quality of America's education system remains the envy of the world."
Hardly. America's education system is "the envy" because of the ability for minorities to get placement into better schools,
not solely for the education they receive. Only a very select few institutions are envied for their education primarily, 90% of
the colleges and universities across the country are sub-standard education providers, same with high schools.
I would imagine you're an educator at some level, more than likely, at one of the sub-standard colleges or even perhaps a high
school teacher. You're attempting to be defensive of the American education system, when in reality, you're looking at the world
through rose colored glasses. Working from within the system, rather than from the private sector looking back, gives you extreme
tunnel vision. That, coupled with the average "closed mindedness" of educators in America is a dangerous approach to advancing
the structure of the American education system. You and those like you ARE the problem and should be taken out of the equation
as quickly as possible. Please retire ASAP or find another career.
Aside from the complete lack of actual ivy league admission data on jewish applicants, a big problem with unz's "jewish affirmative
action" claim is how difficult such a policy would be to carry out in complete secrecy.
Now, it would be one thing if Unz was claiming that jews are being admitted with similar numbers to non-jewish whites, but
in close cases, admissions staff tend to favor jewish applicants. But he goes much further than that. Unz is claiming that jews,
as a group, are being admitted with lower SAT scores than non-jewish whites. Not only that, but this policy is being carried out
by virtually every single ivy league college and it has been going on for years. Moreover, this preference is so pervasive, that
it allows jews to gain admissions at many times the rate that merit alone would yield, ultimately resulting in entering classes
that are over 20% Jewish.
If a preference this deep, consistent and widespread indeed exists, there is no way it could be the result of subjective bias
or intentional tribal favoritism on the part of individual decision makers. It would have to be an official, yet unstated, admissions
policy in every ivy league school. Over the years, dozens (if not hundreds) of admission staff across the various ivy league colleges
would be engaging in this policy, without a single peep ever leaking through about Jewish applicants getting in with subpar SAT
scores. We hear insider reports all the time about one group is favored or discriminated against (we even have such an insider
account in this comment thread), but we hear nothing about the largest admission preference of them all.
Remember, admissions staffs usually include other ethnic minorities. I couldn't imagine them not wondering why jews need to
be given such a big boost so that they make up almost a quarter of the entering class. Even if every member of every admissions
committee were Jewish liberals, it would still be almost impossible to keep this under wraps.
Obviously, I have never seen actual admission numbers for Jewish applicants, so I could be wrong, and there could in fact be
an unbreakable wall of secrecy regarding the largest and most pervasive affirmative action practice in the country. Or, perhaps,
the ivy league application pool contains a disproportionate amount of high scoring jewish applicants.
As some who is Jewish from the former Soviet Union, and who was denied even to take an entrance exam to a Moscow college,
I am saddened to see that American educational admission process looks more and more "Soviet" nowadays. Kids are denied opportunities
because of their ethnic or social background, in a supposedly free and fair country!
But this is just a tip of the iceberg. The American groupthink of political correctness, lowest common denominator, and political
posturing toward various political/ethnic/religious/sexual orientation groups is rotting this country inside out.
"Similarly, Jews were over one-quarter of the top students in the Physics Olympiad from 1986 to 1997, but have fallen to just
5 percent over the last decade, a result which must surely send Richard Feynman spinning in his grave."
Actually, Richard Feynman famously rejected genetic explanations of Jewish achievement (whether he was right or wrong to
do so is another story), and aggressively resisted any attempts to list him as a "Jewish scientist" or "Jewish Nobel Prize winner."
I am sure he would not cared in the slightest bit how many Jews were participating in the Physics Olympiad, as long as the quality
of the students' work continued to be excellent. Here is a letter he wrote to a woman seeking to include him in a book about Jewish
achievement in the sciences.
Dear Miss Levitan:
In your letter you express the theory that people of Jewish origin have inherited their valuable hereditary elements from their
people. It is quite certain that many things are inherited but it is evil and dangerous to maintain, in these days of little knowledge
of these matters, that there is a true Jewish race or specific Jewish hereditary character. Many races as well as cultural influences
of men of all kinds have mixed into any man. To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish
heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory.
Such theoretical views were used by Hitler. Surely you cannot maintain on the one hand that certain valuable elements can be
inherited from the "Jewish people," and deny that other elements which other people may find annoying or worse are not inherited
by these same "people." Nor could you then deny that elements that others would consider valuable could be the main virtue of
an "Aryan" inheritance.
It is the lesson of the last war not to think of people as having special inherited attributes simply because they are born
from particular parents, but to try to teach these "valuable" elements to all men because all men can learn, no matter what their
race.
It is the combination of characteristics of the culture of any father and his father plus the learning and ideas and influences
of people of all races and backgrounds which make me what I am, good or bad. I appreciate the valuable (and the negative) elements
of my background but I feel it to be bad taste and an insult to other peoples to call attention in any direct way to that one
element in my composition.
At almost thirteen I dropped out of Sunday school just before confirmation because of differences in religious views but mainly
because I suddenly saw that the picture of Jewish history that we were learning, of a marvelous and talented people surrounded
by dull and evil strangers was far from the truth. The error of anti-Semitism is not that the Jews are not really bad after all,
but that evil, stupidity and grossness is not a monopoly of the Jewish people but a universal characteristic of mankind in general.
Most non-Jewish people in America today have understood that. The error of pro-Semitism is not that the Jewish people or Jewish
heritage is not really good, but rather the error is that intelligence, good will, and kindness is not, thank God, a monopoly
of the Jewish people but a universal characteristic of mankind in general.
Therefore you see at thirteen I was not only converted to other religious views but I also stopped believing that the Jewish
people are in any way "the chosen people." This is my other reason for requesting not to be included in your work.
@Rob Schacter – your last point is basically spot-on. The Ivies are fairly unique in the high proportion of Jewish applicants.
History, geographical bias, and self-selection all play a role. I think the overall preference distortion is probably not as wide
as Unz claims, but you will see similar tilts at Stanford, Northwestern, etc. that reflect different preference distortions.
@Leon, two quick points.
1st – the census tracks by household, which generally overestimates Asian wealth. Many families have three generations and
extended members living in one household (this reflects that many of them work together in a small family business).
2nd – most of the time, it's clear in the application (the HS, personal info, other residency info, etc.) which Asian applicants
are Asian-American and which are "Parachute Kids". But the numbers are much smaller than one might think, and the implication
depends on the school.
At Ivies, parachute kids (both Asian and not) tend to compete with each other in the application pool, and aren't substantially
informing the broader admissions thesis in this article. I'm not saying that's right, just saying it's less material than we might
think.
They more likely skew the admissions equation in great-but-not-rich liberal arts colleges (like Grinnell) and top public universities
(like UCLA), which are both having budget crises and need full fare students, parachute or not. And for the publics, this includes
adding more higher-tuition, out-of-state students, which further complicates assertions of just whose opportunities are being
lost.
I will bring this back to fundraising and finances again, because the broader point is about who is stewarding and creating
access: so long as top universities are essentially run as self-invested feedback loops, and position and resource themselves
accordingly (and other universities have to compete with them), we will continue to see large, persistent discrepancies in who
can participate.
When I applied to Harvard College back in 1976, I was proud of my application essay. In it, I proposed that the US used the
Israeli army as a proxy, just as the Russians were using the Cuban army at the time.
Alas, I wasn't admitted (I did get into Yale, which didn't require free-form essay like that).
This, of course, illustrates the point that coming from an Application Hell instead of from central Illinois helps a student
know how to write applications. It also illustrates what might help explain the mystery of high Jewish admissions: political bias.
Jews are savvier about knowing what admissions officers like to hear (including the black and Latino ones, who as a previous commentor
said aren't likely to be pro-semite). They are also politically more liberal, and so don't have to fake it. And their families
are more likely to read the New York Times and thus have the right "social graces" as we might call them, of this age.
It would be interesting to know how well "true WASPS" do in admissions. This could perhaps be estimated by counting Slavic
and Italian names, or Puritan New England last names. I would expect this group to do almost as well as Jews (not quite as well,
because their ability would be in the lower end of the Legacy group).
The missing variable in this analysis is income/class. While Unz states that many elite colleges have the resources to
fund every student's education, and in fact practice need-blind admissions, the student bodies are skewed towards the very highest
percentile of the income and wealth distribution. SAT scores may also scale with parents' income as well.
Tuition and fees at these schools have nearly doubled relative to inflation in the last 25-30 years, and with home prices in
desirable neighborhoods showing their own hyper-inflationary behavior over the past couple of decades (~15 yrs, especially), the
income necessary to pay for these schools without burdening either the student or parents with a lot of debt has been pushed towards
the top decile of earners. A big chunk of the upper middle class has been priced out. This could hit Asian professionals who may
be self made harder than other groups like Jews who may be the second or third generation of relative affluence, and would thus
have advantages in having less debt when starting their families and careers and be less burdened in financing their homes. Would
be curious to see the same analysis if $$ could be controlled.
I would also like to add that I am a late '80′s graduate of Wesleyan who ceased his modest but annual financial contribution to
the school after reading The Gatekeepers.
If I had a penny for every Jewish American I met (including myself) whose first and last name gave no indication of his religion
or ethnicity, I'd be rich. Oh–and my brother and I have four Ivy League degrees between us.
I almost clicked on a different link the instance I came across the word "elite" , but curiosity forced my hand.
Just yesterday my mom was remarking how my cousin had gotten into MIT with an SAT score far below what I scored, and she finished
by adding that I should have applied to an ivy-league college after high school. I as always, reminded her, I'm too "black for
ivy games".
I always worked hard in school, participated in olympiads and symposiums, and was a star athlete. When it came to applying
for college I found myself startled when forced to "quantify" my achievements in an "application package". I did not do or engage
in these activities solely to boost my chances of gaining admission into some elite college over similarly-hardworking Henry Wang
or Jess Steinberg. I did these things because I loved doing them.
Sports after class was almost a relaxation activity for me. Participating in math olympiads was a way for me to get a scoop
on advanced mathematics. Participating in science symposiums was a chance for me to start applying my theoretical education to
solve practical problems.
The moment I realized I would have to kneel down before some admissions officer and "present my case", outlining my "blackness",
athleticism, hard work, curiosity, and academic ability, in that specific order I should point, in order to have a fighting chance
at getting admitted; is the moment all my "black rage" came out in an internal explosion of rebellion and disapproval of "elite
colleges".
I instead applied to a college that was blind to all of the above factors. I am a firm believer that hard work and demonstrated
ability always win out in the end. I've come across, come up against is a better way to put it, Ivy-league competition in college
competitions and applications for co-ops and internships, and despite my lack of "eliteness" I am confident that my sheer ability
and track record will put me in the "interview candidate" pool.
Finally, my opinion is: let elite schools keep doing what they are doing. It isn't a problem at all, the "elite" tag has long
lost its meaning.
The difficulty with using Jewish sounding last names to identify Jewish students works poorly in two ways today. Not only,
as others have pointed out, do many Jews not have Jewish sounding last names, but there are those, my grandson for example, who
have identifiably Jewish last names and not much in the way of Jewish background.
Interesting reading. The article opens a deceptively simple statistical window into a poorly understood process - a window
which I would guess even the key participants have never looked through. I especially appreciated the insights provided by the
author's examination of Asian surname-frequencies and their over-representation in NMS databases.
Though this is a long and meticulously argued piece, it would have benefited from a more thorough discussion of the statistical
share of legacies and athletic scholarships in elite admissions.
Perhaps, though, it would be better to focus on increasing meritocracy in the broader society, which would inevitably lead
to some discounting of the value of educational credentials issued by these less than meritocratic private institutions.
It is precisely because the broader society is also in many key respects non-meritocratic that the non-meritocratic admissions
practices of elite institutions are sustainable.
Despite the very long and detailed argument, the writer's interpretation of a pro-Jewish admissions bias at Ivy-league schools
is worryingly flawed.
First, he uses two very different methods of counting Jews: name recognition for counting various "objective" measures such
as NMS semifinalists and Hillel stats for those admitted to Harvard. The first is most likely an underestimate while the latter
very possibly inflated (in both cases especially due to the very large numbers of partially-Jewish students, in the many interpretations
that has). I wonder how much of his argument would just go away if he simply counted the number of Jews in Harvard using the same
method he used to count their numbers in the other cases. Would that really be hard to do?
Second, he overlooks the obvious two sources that can lead to such Asian/Jewish relative gaps in admissions. The first is the
different groups' different focus on Science/Math vs. on Writing/Culture. It is very possible that in recent years most Asians
emphasize the former while Jews the latter, which would be the natural explanation to the Caltech vs Harvard racial composition
(as well as to the other stats). The second is related but different and it is the different group's bias in applications: the
same cultural anecdotes would explain why Asians would favor applying to Caltech and Jews to Harvard. A natural interpretation
of the data would be that Jews have learned to optimize for whatever criteria the Ivy leagues are using and the Asians are doing
so for the Caltech criteria.
Most strange is the author's interpretation of how a pro-Jewish bias in admissions is actually put into effect: the application
packets do not have the data of whether the applicant is Jewish or not, and I doubt that most admission officers figure it out
in most cases. While it could be possible for admissions officers to have a bias for or against various types of characteristics
that they see in the data in front of them (say Asian/Black/White or political activity), a systematic bias on unobserved data
is a much more difficult proposition to make. Indeed the author becomes rather confused here combining the low education level
of admissions officers, that they are "liberal arts or ethnic-studies majors" (really?), that they are "progressive", and that
there sometimes is corruption, all together presumably leading to a bias in favor of Jews?
Finally, the author's suggestion for changing admittance criteria is down-right bizarre for a conservative: The proposal is
a centralized solution that he aims to force upon the various private universities, each who can only loose from implementing
it.
Despite the long detailed (but extremely flawed) article, I am afraid that it is more a reflection of the author's biases than
of admissions biases.
Both the article and the comments are illuminating. My takeaways:
1) Affirmative action in favor of blacks and Hispanics is acknowledged.
2) Admissions officers in the Ivy League appear to limit Asian admissions somewhat relative to the numbers of qualified applicants.
3) They may also admit somewhat more Jewish applicants than would be warranted relative to their comparative academic qualifications.
The degree to which this is true is muddled by the difficulty of identifying Jews by surnames, by extensive intermarriage, by
changing demographics within the Jewish population, by geographic factors, and by the propensity to apply in the first place.
4) (My major takeaway.) White Protestants and Catholics are almost certainly the sole groups that are greatly under-represented
relative to their qualifications as well as to raw population percentages.
5) This is due partly to subtle or open discrimination.
6) I would hypothesize that a great many of the white Protestants and Catholics who are admitted are legacies, star athletes,
and the progeny of celebrities in entertainment, media, politics, and high finance. White Protestant or Catholic applicants, especially
from the hinterlands, who don't fit one of these special categories–though they must be a very large component of Mr Unz's pool
of top talent–are out of luck.
7) And everyone seems to think this is just fine.
The inner and outer ring idea seems to me an excellent one, though the likelihood of it happening is next to nil, both because
some groups would lose disproportionate access and because the schools' imprimatur would be diminished in
value.
The larger point, made by several respondents, is that far too many institutions place far too much weight on the credentials
conferred by a small group of screening institutions. The great advantage of the American system is not that it is meritocratic,
either objectively or subjectively. It is that it is–or was–Protean in its flexibility. One could rise through luck or effort
or brains, with credentials or without them, early in life or after false starts and setbacks. And there were regional elites
or local elites rather than, as we increasingly see, a single, homogenized national elite. Success or its equivalent wasn't something
institutionally conferred.
The result of the meritocratic process is that we are making a race of arrogant, entitled overlords, extremely skilled at the
aggressive and assertive arts required to gain admission to, and to succeed in, a few similar and ideologically skewed universities
and colleges; and who spend the remainder of their lives congratulating each other, bestowing themselves on the populace, and
destroying the country.
This article is the product of careful and thoughtful research, and it identifies a problem hiding in plain sight. As a society,
we have invested great trust in higher education as a transformative institution. It is clear that we have been too trusting.
That the admissions policies of elite universities are meritocratic is hardly the only wrong idea that Americans have about
higher education. Blind faith in higher education has left too many people with largely worthless degrees and crushing student-loan
debt.
Of course, the problems don't end with undergraduate education. The "100 reasons NOT to go to grad school" blog offers some
depressing reading:
The higher education establishment has failed to address so many longstanding internal structural problems that it's hard to
imagine that much will change anytime soon.
"I believe that this article raises – and then inappropriately immediately dismisses – the simplest and most likely reason
for the over-representation of Jewish students at Ivy League Schools in the face of their declining bulk academic performance:
They apply to those schools in vastly disproportionate numbers."
Here's the problem with that point. What Ron Unz demonstrates, quite effectively, is that today's Jews simply don't measure
up to either their Asian or their White Gentile counterparts in terms of actual performance when they get into, say, Harvard.
The quite massive difference in the proportions of those groups who get into Phi Beta Kappa renders this quite undeniable. What
is almost certain is that policies that favored Asians and White Gentiles over the current crop of Jewish students would create
a class of higher caliber in terms of academic performance.
If indeed it's true that Jews apply to Harvard in greater numbers, then, if the desire is to produce a class with the greatest
academic potential, some appropriate way of correcting for the consequent distortion should be introduced. Certainly when it comes
to Asians, college admissions committees have found their ways of reducing the numbers of Asians admitted, despite their intense
interest in the Ivies.
One way of understanding Unz's results here might be not so much that today's Jewish student is far less inclined to hard academic
work than those of yesteryear, but rather that others - White Gentiles and Asians - have simply caught up in terms of motivation
to get into elite schools and perform to the best of their abilities.
Certainly among members of the upper middle class, there has been great, and likely increasing, emphasis in recent years on
the importance of an elite education and strong academic performance for ultimate success. This might well produce a much stronger
class of students at the upper end applying to the Ivies.
It may be that not only the Asians, but upper middle class White Gentiles, are "The New Jews".
I don't always agree with, Mr. Unz, but his expositions are always provocative and informative. As far as the criticisms of
his data set go, he openly admits that they are less than ideal. However, the variances are so large that the margin of error
can be excused. Jews are 40 TIMES more likely to be admitted to Harvard than Gentile whites. Asians are 10 times more likely.
Of course, it could be possible that Jews, because of higher average IQs, actually produce 40 times as many members in the upper
reaches of the cognitive elite.
Given Richard Lynn's various IQ studies of Jews and the relative preponderance of non-Jewish and Jewish whites in the population,
however, whites ought to have a 7 to 1 representation vis-a-vis Jews in Ivy League institutions, assuming the IQ cutoff is 130.
Their numbers are roughly equivalent instead.
Because Ivy League admissions have been a hotbed of ethnic nepotism in the past, it seems that special care should be taken
to avoid these improprieties (or the appearance thereof) in the future. But no such safeguards have been put in place. David Brooks
has also struck the alarm about the tendency of elites to shut down meritocratic institutions once they have gained a foothold:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/opinion/brooks-why-our-elites-stink.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
Clannish as the WASPs may have been, they were dedicated enough to ideals of fairness and equality that they opened the doors
for their own dispossession. I predict that a new Asian elite will eventually eclipse our Jewish elite. Discrimination and repression
can restrain a vigorously ascendant people but for so long. When they do, it will be interesting to see if this Asian cohort clings
to its longstanding Confucian meritocratic traditions, embodied in the Chinese gaokao or if it too will succumb to the temptation,
ever present in a multiethnic polity, of preferring ethnic kinsmen over others.
Does anyone know how a minority such as the Uighurs fares in terms of elite Chinese university admissions?
This may sound like special-pleading, but it's not clear that full-scale IQ measures are meaningful when assessing and predicting
Jewish performance. Jewish deficits on g-loaded spatial reasoning task may reflect specific visuo-spatial deficits and not deficits
in g. As far as I know, no one doubts that the average Jewish VIQ is at least 112 (and possibly over 120). This score may explain
jewish representation which seems to exceed what would be projected by their full-scale iq scores. Despite PIQ's correllation
to mathematical ability in most populations, we ought also remember that, at least on the WAIS, it is the VIQ scale that includes
the only directly mathematical subtest. We should also note that Jewish mathematicians seem to use little visualization in their
reasoning (cf. Seligman
That said, I basically agree that Jews are, by and large, coasting. American Jews want their children to play hockey and join
'greek life' and stuff, not sit in libraries . It's sad for those of us who value the ivory tower, but understandable given their
stigmatiziation as a nerdish people.
I wonder if it would be at all possible to assess the political biases of admissions counselors at these schools by assessing
the rates at which applicants from red states are admitted to the elite universities. I suppose you would have to know how many
applied, and those data aren't likely to exist in the public domain.
One major flaw with this article's method of determining Jewish representation: distinctive Jewish surnames in no way make
up all Jewish surnames. Distinctive Jewish surnames happen to be held by only 10-12% of all American Jews. In fact, the third
most common American Jewish surname after Cohen and Levy is Miller. Mr. Unz' methodology does not speak well for itself, given
that he's comparing a limited set of last names against a far more carefully scrutinized estimate.
I'm not suggesting his estimate of national merit scholars and the like is off by a full 90%, but he's still ending up with
a significant undercount, possibly close to half. That would still mean Jews may be "wrongfully" over-represented are many top
colleges and universities, but the disproportion is nowhere near as nefarious as he would suggest.
@Nick – the "red state" application and admission rates isn't useful data.
Short answer: There are many reasons for this, but basically, historical momentum and comfort play a much bigger role in where
kids apply than we think. I assure you, far more top Nebraska HS seniors want to be a Cornhusker than a Crimson, even though many
would find a very receptive consideration and financial aid package.
Long answer: 1st, although this article and discussion have been framed in broad racial/cultural terms, the mechanics of college
admissions are mostly local and a bit like athletic recruiting – coverage (and cultivation) of specific regions and districts,
"X" high school historically deliver "X" kinds of candidates, etc. So to the degree we may see broader trends noted in the article
and discussion, some of that is rooted at the HS level and lower.
2nd, in "red states", most Ivy applicants come from the few blue or neutral districts. E.g.: the only 2 Utah HS's that consistently
have applicants to my Ivy alma mater are in areas that largely mirror other high-income, Dem-leaning areas nationwide rather than
the rest of Utah.
3rd, but, with some variation among the schools, the Ivy student body is more politically balanced than usually assumed. Remember,
most students are upper-income, Northeastern suburban and those counties' Dem/Rep ratio is often closer to 55/45 than 80/20.
But to wrap up, ideology plays a negligible role in admissions generally (there's always an exception); they have other fish
to fry (see below).
"Quota against Asians" is not entirely wrong, but it's too strong because it implies the forward intent is about limiting their
numbers.
Put another way, Unz believes the Ivies are failing their meritocractic mission by over-admitting a group that is neither disadvantaged
nor has highest technical credentials; and this comes at the expense of a group that is more often disadvantaged and with higher
technical credentials. The Ivies would likely reply, "well, we define 'meritocractic mission' differently".
That may be a legitimate counter, but it's also what needs more expansion and sunlight.
But Unz' analysis has a broader causation vs correlation gap. Just because admissions is essentially zero-sum doesn't mean
every large discrepancy in it is, even after allowing for soft biases. I've mentioned these earlier in passing, but here are just
a couple other factors of note:
Admissions is accountable for selection AND marketing and matriculation – these are not always complementary forces. Essentially,
you want to maximize both the number and distribution (racial, geographic, types of accomplishment, etc.) of qualified applicants,
but also the number you can safely turn down but without discouraging future applications, upsetting certain stakeholders (specific
schools, admissions counselors/consultants, etc.) or "harming" any data in the US News rankings. And you have a very finite time
to do this, and – not just your competition, but the entire sector – is essentially doing this at the same time. You can see how
an admissions process would develop certain biases over time to limit risks in an unpredictable, high volume market, even if rarely
intended to target a specific group. Ivy fixation (but especially around HYP) is particularly concentrated in the Northeast –
a sample from several top HS' across America (public and private) would show much larger application and matriculation variations
among their top students than would be assumed from Unz's thesis. Different Ivies have different competitors/peers, which influences
their diversity breakdowns – to some degree, they all co-compete, but just as often don't. E.g.: Princeton often overlaps with
Georgetown and Duke, Columbia with NYU and Cooper Union, Cornell with SUNY honors programs because it has some "in state" public
colleges, etc.
There's much more, of course, but returning to Unz's ethnographic thesis, I have this anecdote: we have two friends in finance,
whose families think much of their success. The 1st is Asian, went to Carnegie Mellon, and is a big bank's trading CTO; the 2nd
is Jewish, went to Wharton, and is in private equity.
Put another way, while both families shared a pretty specific vision of success, they differed a lot in the execution. The
upper echelon of universities, and the kinds of elite-level mobility they offer, are much more varied than even 25 years ago.
While the relative role of HYP in our country, and their soft biases in admission, are "true enough" to merit discussion, it's
probably not the discussion that was in this article.
While you may have a point as to the difficulty in some cases of identifying a Jewish surname, the most important thing methodologically
is that the criteria be performed uniformly if one is comparing Jewish representation today vs. that of other periods. I can't
think, for example, of any reason that Cohens or Levys or Golds should be any less well represented today as opposed to many years
ago if indeed there has not been an underlying shift in numbers of Jews in the relevant categories. (Nor, for that matter, should
issues like intermarriage affect the numbers much here - for every mother whose maiden name is Cohen who marries a non-Jew with
a non-Jewish surname, and whose half Jewish child will be counted as non-Jewish, there is, on average, going to be a man named
Cohen who will marry a non-Jew, and whose half Jewish child will be counted as Jewish.)
One might suppose that all this "inequity" and "discrimination" matters if we're keeping score. However, seems to me that too
much emphasis is typically placed on equality whereas real criteria in productive and satisfying lives are neglected. Kind'a like
some people wanting bragging rights as much, if not more, than wanting positive reality.
I guess I just went about my way and lived a pretty god life (so far). Who knows?; maybe those "bragging rights" are meaningful.
Ditto to many comments about the "last name problem", even if its correction weakens but doesn't invalidate the argument. (One
imagines, chillingly, a new sub-field: "Jewish last name theory", seeking to determine proportionalities of classic names validated
against member/donor lists of synagogues and other Jewish organizations.)
Regarding the 20% inner ring suggestion, it suffers from its harsh transition. Consider a randomized derating scheme: a random
number between some lower bound (say 0.90) and 1.00 is applied to each score on the ranked applicant list.
The added noise provides warmth to a cold test scores list. Such an approach nicely captures the directive: "study hard, but
it's not all about the grades".
By adjusting the lower bound, you can get whatever degree of representativeness relative to the application base you want.
That it's a "just a number" (rather than a complex subjectivity-laden labyrinth incessantly hacked at by consultants) could
allow interesting conversations about how it could relate to the "top 1% / bottom 50%" wealth ratio. The feedback loop wants closure.
You missed my point, candid. A relatively small proportion of Jews, intermarried or otherwise, have distinctive Jewish names.
I didn't make that 10-12% figure up. It's been cited in numerous local Jewish population studies and is used in part (but certainly
far from whole) to help estimate those populations. It's also been significantly dragged down over the years as the Jewish population
(and hence the surname pool) has diversified, not just from intermarriage, but in-migration from groups who often lack "distinctive
Jewish surnames" such as Jews from the former Soviet Union. Consider also that for obvious reasons, Hillel, which maintains Jewish
centers on most campus, has an incentive to over-report by a bit. Jewish populations on college campuses in the distant past were
easier to gather, given that it was far less un-PC to simply point blank inquire what religious background applicants came from.
Again, I'm not saying there isn't a downward trend in Jewish representation among high achievers (which, even if one were to
accept Unz's figures, Jews would still be triple relative to were they "should" be). But Unz has made a pretty significant oversight
in doing his calculations. That may happen to further suit his personal agenda, but it's not reality.
This is interesting, but I suspect mostly bogus, based on your not having a decent algorithm for discovering if someone's Jewish.
I'm not sure what exact mechanism you're using to decide if a name is Jewish, but I'm certain it wouldn't have caught anyone,
including myself, in my father's side of the family (Sephardic Jews from Turkey with Turkish surnames), nor my wife's family,
an Ellis Island Anglo name. Or probably most of the people in her family. And certainly watching for "Levi, Cohen and Gold*" isn't
going to do anything.
Isn't the point about Jewish over representation in the Ivy League about absolute numbers?
Yes the Jewish demographic has a higher IQ at 115 to the Goyishe Kop 100 but Jewish people are only 2% of the population so
you have 6 million Jewish people vying with 200 million white Goys for admission to the Ivy League and future control of the levers
of power. That is a 33 times larger Bell curve so the right tail of the Goys' Bell curve is still much larger than the Jewish
Bell curve at IQ levels of 130 and 145, supposedly there are seven times more Goys with IQs of 130 and over 4 times more Goys
with IQs of 145. So why the equality of representation, one to one, Jewish to white Goy in the Ivy Leagues?
Russell K. Nieli on study by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford (mentioned by Unz):
"When lower-class whites are matched with lower-class blacks and other non-whites the degree of the non-white advantage becomes
astronomical: lower-class Asian applicants are seven times as likely to be accepted to the competitive private institutions as
similarly qualified whites, lower-class Hispanic applicants eight times as likely, and lower-class blacks ten times as likely.
These are enormous differences and reflect the fact that lower-class whites were rarely accepted to the private institutions Espenshade
and Radford surveyed. Their diversity-enhancement value was obviously rated very low."
Having worked with folks from all manner of "elite" and not so elite schools in a technical field, the main conclusion I was
able to draw was folks who went to "elite" colleges had a greater degree of entitlement. And that's it.
If all of the author's suspicions are correct, the most noteworthy takeaway would be that Jewish applicants have absolutely
no idea that they are being given preferential treatment when applying to Ivys.
Not that they think they are being discriminated against or anything, but no Jewish high school student or their parents think
they have any kind of advantage, let alone such a huge one. Someone should tell all these Jews that they don't need to be so anxious!
Also, I know this is purely anecdotal but having gone to an ivy and knowing the numbers of dozens of other Jews who have also
gone, I don't think I have ever witnessed a "surprise" acceptance, where someone got in with a score under the median.
I don't doubt for a minute that it's increasingly difficult for Asian students to get into so-called "elite" universities.
Having grown up in that community, I know a lot of people who were pressured into applying at Harvard and Yale but ended up *gasp*
going to a very good local school. My sarcasm aside, we can't really deny that having Harvard on your CV can virtually guarantee
a ticket to success, regardless of whether or not you were just a C student. It happens.
But what worries me about that is the fact that I know very well how hard Asian families tend to push their children. They
do, after all, have one of the highest suicide rates and that's here in the US. If by some means the Asian population at elite
universities is being controlled, as I suspect it is, that's only going to make tiger mothers push their children even harder.
That's not necessarily a good thing for the child's psyche, so instead of writing a novel here, I'll simply give you this link.
Since the author brought up the subject of Amy Chua and her book, I think it's a pretty fitting explanation of the fears I have
for my friends and their children if this trend is allowed to continue.
As a former admissions staff person at Princeton, I always sigh when I read articles on elite college admissions processes
which build cases on data analysis but which fail to consult with admissions experts on the interpretation of that data.
I am neither an expert in sociology, nor am I a statistician, but I have sat in that chair, reading thousands of essays, and
I have a few observations:
The most selective part of any college's admissions process is the part where students themselves decides whether or not to apply.
Without data on the actual applicant sets, it is, at the least, misleading to attribute incongruities between the overall population's
racial/ethnic/income/what-have-you characteristics and the student bodies' make-ups entirely to the admission decisions. The reality
is that there is always a struggle in the admission offices to compensate for the inequities that the applicant pool itself delivers
to their doorsteps. An experienced admission officer can tell you that applicants from cultures where academics and education
are highly valued, and where the emphasis on a single test is quite high, will generally present with very high SAT scores. Race
does not seem to be correlated, but immigrant status from such a culture is highly correlated. (This may partially explain Unz's
observation of a "decline" in Jewish scores, although I also do not believe that the surname tool for determining which scores
are "Jewish" holds much water.) One of the reasons that such students often fare less well in holistic application processes is
that the same culture that produces the work ethic and study skills which benefit SAT performance and GPA can also suppress activities
and achievement outside of the academic arena. Therefore, to say that these students are being discriminated against because of
race is a huge assumption. The true questions is whether the students with higher test scores are presenting activity, leadership
and community contributions comparable to other parts of the applicant pool which are "overrepresented". All of these articles
seem to miss the point that a freshman class is a fixed size pie chart. Any piece that shrinks or grows will impact the other
slices. My first thought upon reading Unz' argument that the Asian slice shrank was, "What other pieces were forced to grow?"
Forced growth in another slice of the class is the more likely culprit for this effect, much more likely than the idea that all
of the Ivies are systematically discriminating against the latest victim. I could go on and on, but will spare you! My last note
is to educate Mr. Unz on what an "Assistant Director" is in college admissions. Generally that position is equivalent to a Senior
Admission Officer (one step up from entry level Admission Officer), while the head of the office might be the Dean and the next
step down from that would be Associate Deans (not Assistant Directors). So while Michelle Hernandez was an Assistant Director,
she was not the second in charge of Admissions, as your article implies. A minor distinction, but one which is important to point
out so that her expertise and experience, as well as my own, as AN Assistant Director of Admission at Princeton, are not overstated.
A last personal note: During Princeton's four month reading season, I worked 7 days a week, usually for about 14 hours a day,
in order to give the fullest, most human and considerate reading of each and every applicant that I could give. I am sure that
the admission profession has its share of incompetents, corruptible people and just plain jerks, and apparently some of us are
not intelligent enough to judge the superior applicants . . . . But most of us did it for love of the kids at that age (they are
all superstars!), for love of our alma maters and what they did for us, and because we believed in the fairness of our process
and the dignity with which we tried to do it.
The sheer numbers of applicants and the fatigue of the long winters lend themselves to making poor jokes such as the "Night
of 1000 Lee's", but a good dean of admission will police such disrespect, and encourage the staff, as mine did, to read the last
applicant of the day with the same effort, energy and attention paid to the first. We admission folk have our honor, despite being
underpaid and playing in a no-win game with regard to media coverage of our activities. I am happy to be able to speak up for
the integrity of my former colleagues and the rest of the profession.
My own position has always been strongly in the former camp, supporting meritocracy over diversity in elite admissions.
When these Ivy League institutions were first begun in the colonial period, they were not strictly speaking meritocratic. The
prevailing idea was that Christocentric education is the right way to go, both from an eschatological and a temporal perspective,
and the central focus was on building and strengthening family ties. The Catholic institutions of higher learning took on the
vital role of preserving Church tradition from apostolic times and were thus more egalitarian and universalist. The results went
far beyond all expectations.
Nothing lasts forever. Your premise misses the essential point that the economy is for man and not vice-versa.
Many of the statements in this article relating to Jews are rather misleading: for while the Hillel data regarding percentage
of students who self-identify as Jews may be fairly accurate, the numbers the author cites based upon "likely Jewish names" are
a gross under-count of the real numbers, leading to the appearance of a large disparity between the two which, in reality, does
not exist. The reason for the under-count is that a large percentage of American Jews have either Anglicized their family name
or intermarried, resulting in their being mistaken for non-Hispanic whites. Thus, one ends up with incorrect statements such as
"since 2000, the percentage (of Jewish Putnam Fellows) has dropped to under 10 percent, without a single likely Jewish name in
the last seven years". The reality is that Jews, by Hillel's definition of self-identified students, have continued to be prominent
among the Putnam Fellows, US IMO team members, and high scorers in the USA Mathematical Olympiad. I have published a careful analysis
of the true ethnic/racial composition of the very top-performing students in these math competitions from recent years (see, Andreescu
et al. Notices of the AMS 2008; http://www.ams.org/notices/200810/fea-gallian.pdf
). For example, Daniel Kane, a Putnam Fellow in 2002-2006, is 100% of Jewish ancestry; his family name had been Cohen before
it was changed. Brian Lawrence was a Putnam Fellow in 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2011; his mother is Jewish. Furthermore, many of the
non-Jewish Putnam Fellows in recent years are Eastern European or East-Asian foreigners who matriculated to college in the US;
they were not US citizen non-Jewish whites or Asian-Americans, respectively. Rather, my data indicate that in recent years both
Jews and Asians have been 10- to 20-over-represented in proportion to their percentage of the US population among the students
who excel at the highest level in these math competitions. The authors conclusions based upon data from other types of competitions
is likely similarly flawed.
The title of this piece captured me to read what it was all about. What was discussed was admissions into elite colleges as
the only focus on "meritocracy" in America. That leaves the tail of the distribution of high IQ people in America, minus those
that make it into elite colleges, to be ignored, especially those that managed to be admitted to Cal Tech, or MIT, or a number
of other universities where significant intellectual power is admitted and fostered. this seems to further the meme that only
the elite graduates run the nation. They may have an early advantage through connections, but I believe that the Fortune 400 CEO's
are fairly evenly spread across the university world.
(1) Jews are better at verbal IQ, Asians at math. Your measures are all math. That woudl be OK if all else were equal across
time, but especially because Jews care a lot about admissions to Ivies, what we'd expect is that with growing Asian competition
in math/science, Jews would give up and focus their energy on drama/writing/service. I wonder if Jewish kids are doing worse in
music competitions too? Or rather- not even entering any more.
(2) For college numbers, adjustment for US/foreign is essential. How many Asians at Yale are foreign? It could well be that
Asian-Americans are far more under-represented than it seems, because they face quota competition from a billion Chinese and a
billion Indians. Cal Tech might show the same result as the Ivies.
(3) A separate but interesting study would be of humanities and science PhD programs. Different things are going on there,
and the contrast with undergrads and with each other might be interseting.
I also learned that Jews are no longer as prominent in math and science achievement, and that's not surprising to me at
all, because everyone in the elite knows that STEM is for Asians and middle-class kids. Jewish parents have learned that colleges
value sports and "leadership" activities more than raw academic achievement and nerdy activities like math olympiads, and that
the most prestigious careers are value transference activities which don't require science or high-level math.
The higher representation of Jews in the Ivies compared to Asians who have better average academic records compared to Jews
(applicants that is ) in the Ivies is due to the greater eligibility of Jews for preferences of every kind in the Ivies. In a
typical Ivy school like Harvard, at least 60% of the freshman class will disappear because of the vast system of preferences that
exists. There is no doubt that there is racial animus involved despite the denials of the Ivies and other private universities
despite the constant denials involved like that of Rosovsky who happens to be a historian by training. Jews are classified as
white in this country, hence there would presumably greater affinity for them among the white Board of Trustees and the adcom
staff. This is in contrast to Asians who do not share the same culture or body physiogonomy as whites do.
I had read the Unz article and the Andrew Goldman response to it. I just do not agree with Unz with his solutions to this problem.
First of all private schools are not going to give legacy preferences and other kinds of preferences for the simple reason that
it provides a revenue stream. Harvard is nothing but a business just like your Starbucks or Mcdonald's on the corner.
Around the world private universities regarded as nothing but the dumping ground of the children of the wealthy, the famous
and those with connections who cannot compete with others with regards to their talent and ability regardless of what anyone will
say from abroad about the private universities in their own country. Bottomline is in other countries , the privates simply do
not get the top students in the country, the top public school does. People in other countries will simply look askance at the
nonsensical admissions process of the Ivies and other private schools, the system that the Ivies use for admission does not produce
more creative people contrary to its claims.
The Goldman response has more to do with the humanities versus math . My simple response to Andrew Goldman would be this :
a grade of A in Korean history is different from a grade of A in Jewish history, it is like comparing kiwis and bananas. The fast
and decisive way of dealing with this problem is simply to deprive private schools of every single cent of tax money that practices
legacy preferences and other kinds repugnant preferences be it for student aid or for research and I had been saying that for
a long time. I would like to comment on the many points that had been raised here but I have no time.
The solution to a lot of problems would be transparency. I'd love to see the admissions and grade data of even one major university.
Public universities should be required to post publicly the names, SAT scores, and transcripts of every student. Allowing such
posting should be a requirement for admission.
The public could then investigate further if, for example, it turned out that children of state senators had lower SAT scores.
Scholars could then analyze the effect of diversity on student performance.
Of course, already many public universities (including my own, Indiana), post the salaries of their professors on the web,
and I haven't seen much analysis or muckraking come out of that.
One factor hinted at in the article, but really needing to be addressed is the "school" that is being attended.
By this, I mean, you need philosophy students to keep the philosophy department going. When I was in college 20 years ago,
I was a humanities major. I took 1 class in 4 years with an Asian American student. 1 class. When I walked through the business
building, it was about 50% Asian.
Could Asian-American students only wanting to go to Harvard to go into business, science, or math be skewing those numbers?
I don't know, but it's just a thought to put out there.
You are preaching to the choir! I blog on this extensively on my Asian Blog: JadeLuckClub. This has been going on for the last
30 years or more! All my posts are here under Don't ID as Asian When Applying to College:
All private schools basically practice legacy prefrences and other kinds of preferences and this practice has been going on
in the Ivies since time immemorial. The income revenue from these gallery of preferences will certainly not encourage the Ivies
to give them up.
In many countries around the world, private universiites are basically the dumping ground for the children of the wealthy ,
the famous and the well connected who could not get into the top public university of their choice in their own country. This
no different from the Ivies in this country where these Ivies and other private universities are just a corral or holding pen
for the children of the wealthy, the famous and the well connected and the famous who could not compete with others based on their
won talent or ability.
Abroad you have basically 3 choices if you could not get into the top public university of that country , they are:
Go to a less competetive public university
Go to a private university
or go abroad to schools like the Ivies or in other countries where the entrance requirements to a public or private university
are less competetive compared to the top public universities in your own home country.
You can easily tell a top student from another country, he is the guy who is studying in this country under a government scholarship
( unless of course it was wrangled through corruption ). the one who is studying here through his own funds or through private
means is likely to be the one who is a reject from the top public university in his own country. That is how life works.
I am generally satisfied with the data that Ron provided about Jews compared to Asians where Jews are lagging behind Asians
at least in grades and SAT scores in the high school level, from the data I had seen posted by specialized schools in NY like
Stuy , Bronx Sci, Brook Tech, Lowell (Frisco ) etc.
Ron is correct in asserting that the Ivies little represents the top students in this country. Compare UCLA and for example.
For the fall 2011 entering freshman class at UCLA , there were 2391 domestic students at UCLA compared to 1148 at Harvard who
scored above 700 in the Math portion of the SAT and there were 439 domestic students who scored a perfect 800 in the Math portion
of the SAT at UCLA, more than Harvard or MIT certainly. For the fall 2012 freshman classs at UCLA the figure was 2409 and 447
respectively.
We can devise a freshman class that will use only income, SATS,grades as a basis of admissions that will have many top students
like UCLA has using only algorithms.
The central test of fairness in any admissions system is to ask this simple question. Was there anyone admitted under that
system admitted over someone else who was denied admission and with better grades and SAT scores and poorer ? If the answer is
in the affirmative, then that system is unfair , if it is in the negative then the system is fair.
I like the comments from Chales Hale. (Nov. 30, 2012) He says: "Welcome to China". It said all in three words. All of these
have been experienced in China. They said there is no new things under the sun. History are nothing but repeated, China with its
5000 years experienced them all.
I meant that there were 439 domestic students in the fall 2011 freshman class at UCLA and 447 domestic students in the fall
2012 freshman class at UCLA who scored a perfect score of 800 in the Math portion of the SAT. In either case it is bigger than
what Harvard or MIT has got.
In fact for the fall 2011 of the entire UC system there were more students in the the freshman class of the entire UC system
who scored above 700 in the Math portion of the SAT than the entire fall 2011 freshman of the Ivy League (Cornell not included
since it is both a public and a private school )'
As I mentioned earlier there were 2409 domestic students in the fall 2012 UCLA freshman class who scored above 700 in the Math
portion of the SAT. We know that Harvard had only 1148 domestic students in its fall 2011 freshman class who scored above 700
in the Math portion of the SAT, why would Harvard ever want to have that many top students like Berkeley or UCLA have ? The answer
to that is simple , it has to do with money. For every additional student that Harvard will enroll it would mean money being taken
out of the endowment .
Since the endowment needs constant replenishment. Where would these replenishment funds come from ? From legacies,from the
children of the wealthy and the famous etc. of course . It would mean more legacy admits, more children of the wealthy admitted
etc.
That would mean that the admission rate at Harvard will rise, the mean SAT score of the entering class will be no different from
the mean SAT scores of the entering freshman classes of Boston University and Boston College
down the road. With rising admission rates and lower mean SAT scores for the entering freshman class that prospect will not prove
appetizing or appealing to the applicant pool.
Harvard ranks only 8th after Penn State in the production of undergrads who eventually get Doctorates in Science and Engineering.
Of course Berkeley has the bragging rights for that kind of attribute.
In the scenario I had outlined above, it would mean that the mean SAT score of the Harvard freshman class will actually go
down if it tried to increase the size of its freshman class and that kind of prospect ia unpalatable to Harvard and that is the
reason as to why it wants to maintain its current " air of exclusivity ".
There is another way of looking at the quality of the Harvard student body. The ACM ICPC computer programming competition is
regarded as the best known college competition among students around the world , it is a grueling programming marathon for 2 or
3 days presumably. Teams from universities around the world vie to win the contest that is dubbed the "Battle of the Brains "
What is arguably sad is that Ivy schools, Stanford and other private schools teams fielded in the finals of the competition are
basically composed of foreign students or foreign born students and foreign born coaches.
The University of Southern California team in this competition in its finals section was made up of nothing but foreign Chinese
students and a Chinese coach. The USC team won the Southern California competition to win a slot in the finals. Apparently they
could not find a domestic student who could fill the bill. However the USC team was roundly beaten by teams from China and Asia,Russia
and Eastern Europe. The last time a US team won this competition was in 1999 by Harvey Mudd, ever since the US had gone downhill
in the competition with the competition being dominated by China and Asia and by countries from Eastern Europe and Russia. Well
I guess USC's strategy was trying to fight fire with fire (Chinese students studying in the US versus Chinese students from the
Mainland ), and it failed.
Thank you Mr. Unz for scratching the surface of the various forms of corruption surrounding elite college admissions. I hope
that your next article further discusses the Harvard Price (and Yale Price and Brown Price etc). The recent press surrounding
the Hong Kong couple suing the person they had retained to pave their children's way into Harvard indicates the extent of the
problem. This Hong Kong couple just were not savvy enough to lay their money down where it would produce results.
Additionally, a discussion of how at least some North Eastern private schools facilitate the corrupt process would be illuminating.
Finally, a more thorough discussion of whether the Asian students being admitted are US residents or nationals or whether they
are foreign citizens would also be worth while and reveal. I suspect, an even lower admit percentage for US resident citizens
of Asian ethnicity.
For these schools to state that their acceptances are need blind is patently untrue and further complicates the admissions process
for students who are naive enough to believe that. These schools should come clean and just say that after the development admits
and the wealthy legacy admits spots are purchased, the remaining few admits are handed out in a need blind fashion remembering
that many of admit pools will already be filled by the development and wealthy legacy admits resulting in extraordinarily low
rates for certain non-URM type candidates (I estimate in the 1% range).
"By contrast, a similarly overwhelming domination by a tiny segment of America's current population, one which is completely
misaligned in all these respects, seems far less inherently stable, especially when the institutional roots of such domination
have continually increased despite the collapse of the supposedly meritocratic justification. This does not seem like a recipe
for a healthy and successful society, nor one which will even long survive in anything like its current form."
I completely agree that it is not healthy for one tiny segment of our population to basically hold all the key positions in
every major industry in this country. If Asians or Blacks (who look foreign) all of a sudden ran education, media, government,
and finance in this country, there would be uproar and resistance. But because Jewish people look like the majority (whites),
they've risen to the top without the masses noticing.
But Jewish people consider themselves a minority just like blacks and Asians. They have a tribal mentality that causes stronger
ethnic nepotism than most other minority groups. And they can get away with it because no one can say anything to them lest they
be branded "jew-hunters" or "anti-semists."
The question is, "where do we go from here?" True race-blind meritocracy will never be instituted on a grand scale in this
country both in education and in the work force. One group currently controls most industries and the only way this country will
see more balance is if other groups take more control. But if one group already controls them all and controls succession plans,
how will there ever be more balance?
If Jews become presidents or regents of universities, that's a credit to their ability. Nothing sinister there.
But when Jews (or anyone) buy into an institution to create the 'Goldman School of Business', or when they give large donations,
that is not a credit to anyone's ability and there may well be something sinister there.
It is no secret that corporations and individuals look for influence, if not control, in return for cash. The same thinking
can easily affect admissions policy.
It's always the same. In spite of all the jingoism about "democracy" and "freedoms" and the "free market capitalist system",
the trail of money obfuscates and corrupts. It is still very true that whoever pays the piper, calls the tune. And naive to believe
otherwise.
How recent was it that Princeton cancelled its anti-Semitism classes for lack of participation, and at least one Jewish organisation
was screaming that Princeton would never get another penny from any Jew, ever.
That is close to absolute control of a curriculum. I give you money, and you teach what I want you to teach.
How far is that from I give you money and you admit whom I want you to admit? Or from I give you money and you hire whom I
want?
A university that is properly funded by the government – "the people" – doesn't have these issues because there is nothing
you can buy.
Operating educational institutions as a business, just like charities and health care, will always produce this kind of corruption.
Two other points:
1. It occurred to me that the lowly-paid underachiever admissions officers might well have been mostly Jewish, and hired for
that reason, and that in itself could skew the results in a desired manner.
2. I think this is a serious criticism of the othewise excellent article:
At the end, Ron Unz wants us to believe that a $30-billion institution, the finest of its kind in the world, the envy of the
known universe and beyond, the prime educator of the world's most prime elites, completely abandons its entire admissions procedures,
without oversight or supervision, to a bunch of dim-witted losers of "poor human quality" who will now choose the entire next
generation of the nation's elites. And may even take cash payments to do so.
Come on. Who are you kidding? Even McDonald's is smarter than this.
Some of the comments suggest major problems with estimating who is Jewish. But the authors information is underpinned by data
collected by Jewish pressure groups for the purpose of ensuring the gravy train keeps flowing. It's either their numbers, or the
numbers are consistent with their numbers.
This article, to me, is shocking and groundbreaking. I don't think anyone has gone this in-depth into this biased and un-meritocratic
system. This is real analysis based on real numbers.
Why is this not getting more coverage in the media? Why are people so afraid to talk about this?
There is an excellent analysis of this article at The Occidental Observer by Kevin MacDonald, "Ron Unz on the Illusory
American Meritocracy". The MSM is ignoring Unz's article for obvious reasons.
I don't know if there's any truth behind the idea that Japanese Americans have become lazy relative to their Korean and Chinese
counterparts. I've grew up in Southern California, a part of the country with a relatively high percentage of Japanese Americans,
yet I've know very few other Japanese Americans in my life. I can recall one Japanese American classmate in jr. high, and one
Japanese classmate in my high school (who returned to Japan upon graduating). Even at the UC school I attended for undergrad,
I was always the only Japanese person in the every class, and the Japanese Student Association, already meager in numbers, was
almost entirely made up of Japanese International students who were only here for school.
If, in fact, 1% of California is made up of Japanese Americans, I suspect they are an aging population. I also think many 2nd
and 3rd generation Japanese Americans are only partially Japanese, since, out of necessity, Japanese Americans have a very high
rate of out marriage.
The carefully researched article makes a strong case that there is some discrimination against Asian-Americans at the Ivy League
schools.
On the other hand, I don't see how a percentage of 40-60% Asian-Americans at the selective UC schools, even given the higher
percentage of Asian-Americans in California, does not perhaps reflect reverse discrimation, or at least affirmative action on
their behalf. To be sure one way or the other, we would have to see their test scores AND GPA, apparently the criteria that the
UC schools use for admission, considered as well in the normalization of this statistical data.
The replies to date make some good points but also reflect precisely the biases pointed out in the article as likely causing
the discussed distortions.
1) use of name data in achievement vs use of Hillel data for Ivy admits: definitely an issue but is this only one of the measures
used in this study. Focusing only on this obscures the fact that Jewish enrollment as measured over time by Hillel numbers (apples
to apples) increased significantly over the past decade while the percent of Jewish high school age students relative to other
groups declined. One explanation for this surge could be that Jewish students became even more academically successful than they
have been in the past. The achievement data using Jewish surnames is used to assess this thesis in the absence of other better
data. Rejecting the surname achievement data still leaves a huge enrollment surge over time in Jewish attendance at the Ivies
relative to their percentage of the population.
2) many comments accept that the numbers show disproportionate acceptance and enrollment growth but simply then go on to assert
that Jewish students really are smarter (absolutely or in gaming the system) relying on anecdotal evidence that is not at all
compelling. All definitions of "smarter" contain value judgments". Back in the '20s the argument was that the Ivies should rely
more on objective testing to remove bias against the then high testing Jewish students; now the writers argue conveniently wthat
the new subjective tests that are applied to disproportionately admit Jewish students over higher scoring Asians and non-Jewish
Caucasians are better measures. In both cases, there is still an issue of using a set of factors that disproportionately favors
one group. In all such cases of significant disproportionate admits, the choice of the factors used to definemmerit and their
application should be carefully evaluated for bias. The burden of proof should shift to those defending the status quo in this
situation. In any event, it is clear that given the large applicant pool, there is no shortage of non-Jewish caucasians and Asians
who are fully qualified, so if the desire was there for a balanced entering class, the students are available to make it happen
3) the numbers don't break down admissions between men and women. When my child was an athletic recruit to Harvard, we received
an ethnic breakdown of the prior year's entering class. I was surprised to discover that the Caucasian population skewed heavily
male and the non-white/Asian population skewed heavily female. It seemed that Harvard achieved most of its ethnic diversity that
year by admitting female URMs, which made being a Caucasian female the single most underrepresented group relative to its percentage
in the school age population. I'm curious if this was an anomaly or another element of bias in the admissions process.
I will note that there is one flaw in this whole argument, and that flaw is thus:
Harvard and Yale aren't the best universities in the country. As someone who went to Vanderbilt, I knew people who had been
to those universities, and their evaluation was that they were no better – and perhaps actually worse – than Vanderbilt, which
is "merely" a top 25 university.
While there is a great deal of, shall we say, "insider trading" amongst graduates of those universities, in actuality they
aren't actually the best universities in the country today. That honor probably goes to MIT and Caltech, which you note are far
more meritocratic. But most of the other best universities are probably very close in overall level, and some of them might have
a lot of advantages over those top flight universities.
Or to put it simply, the Ivy League ain't what it used to be. Yeah, it includes some of the best universities in the country,
but there are numerous non-Ivy League universities that are probably on par with them. This may indeed be in part a consequence
of some of what you have described in the article, as well as a sense of complacency.
I suspect that in twenty or thirty years a lot of Ivy League graduates are going to feel a lot less entitled simply because
there has been an expansion of the top while they weren't paying attention.
I'm against the Ivies going up to 30-50% Asian but I'm also against the over-representation of a tiny minority group. This
country is going to go downhill if we continue to let one group skirt a fair application process just because they possess money
and influence. Who will stand up for fairness and equality?
Many of those commenting above don't seem to be picking up on Unz's evidence of bias against white Gentiles, which by meritocratic
measures is far worse than the bias against Asian Americans.
A drop of 70 PERCENT??? What's going on? Why is so much of the discussion that this article has spawned focused only on Asian
Americans and (secondarily) Jews?
National Merit Scholarship semifinalists are chosen based on per-state percentiles.
What this means is that NMS semifinalist numbers would be skewed _against_ a high-performing demographic group to the extent
that group's demographics concentrate geographically. Mr. Unz acknowledges that geographical skewing of Jewish populations is
huge. However, he ignores its effect on the NMS semifinalist numbers he uses as a proxy for academic performance on a _national_
level to predict equitable distributions at _national_ universities.
Please somebody explain to me how this oversight isn't fatal to his arguments
Surely the author must be aware that approximately half the children with "Jewish" names are not fully Jewish. Over half of
the marriages west of the Mississippi are reportedly mixed. Many non-Jews have last names that start with "Gold". Just these two
facts make the entire analysis ridiculous. Hillel does not keep statistics on how Jewish a student is, while many of Levys and
Cohens are not actually Jewish. What would we call Amy Chua's daughters? Jewish or Asian? It is therefore impossible to tease
out in a multi-racial society who is who.
I am an elementary school teacher at a Title One school in northern California. I supported your "English for the Children"
initiative when it was introduced.
However, the law of unintended consequences has kicked in, and what exists now is not at all what you (or anyone else, for that
matter) had intended.
The school day was not lengthened to create a time slot for English language instruction. Instead, history and science classes
were elbowed aside to make way for mediocre English language instruction. These usually worthless classes have crowded out valuable
core academic instruction for English language learners.
To make matters worse, while English language learners are in ESL classes, no academic instruction in science or history can
be given to "regular" students because that would lead to issues of "academic inequity." In other words, if the Hispanic kids
are missing out on history, the black kids have to miss out on it, too.
As a teacher, I hope you will once again consider bringing your considerable talents to focus on the education of low-income
minority children in California.
Could it be that the goal of financial, rather than academic, achievement, makes many young people uninterested in
competing in the science and math competitions sought out by the Asian students? I wonder about the different percentages
of applicants to medical school versus law or business.
I must also add that I am surprised that the author used the word "data" as singular, rather than plural. Shouldn't he be stating
that the data ARE, not IS; or SHOW, not SHOWS.
The author perhaps pays an incredible amount of attention to those with strengths in STEM fields (Science, technology, engineering,
and math), even though the proportion of all native-born white students majoring in these fields has plummetted in recent decades.
That means that he overlooks a shift in what kinds of training is considered "prestigious," and that this might be reflected in
the pursuits of students in high school. Perhaps there is a movement away from Jewish students' focus on Math Olympiad because
they are in no way interested in majoring in math or engineering fields, instead preferring economics or business. Is that the
fault of the students, or of the rewards system that corporate America has set up?
Jobs in STEM fields pay considerably less than do jobs in numerous professions - investment banking and law. So that is why
~ 40% of the Harvard graduating class - including many of its Jewish students - pursue that route. But to rely on various assessments
of math/science/computing as the measure of intelligence fails to incorporate how the rewards structure in our society has changed
over time.
I teach at an Ivy League university, and believe that many of the authors' arguments have merit, but there are also many weaknesses
in his argument. He sneers at Steinberg and the other sociologists he cites for not quite getting how society has changed - but
he clearly doesn' tunderstand how other aspects of our society have changed. Many of our most talented undergrads have no desire
to pursue careers in STEM fields. Entrance into STEM jobs even among those who majored in those fields is low, and there is very
high attrition from those fields, among both men and women. Young adults and young professionals are voting with their feet. While
our society might be better off with more Caltech grads and students interested in creating our way to a better future rather
than pursuing riches on wall street, one cannot fault students for seeking to maximize their returns on their expensive education.
That's the system we have presented them with, at considerable cost to the students and their families.
Personally, what I found profoundly disturbing is not the overrepresentation of Jewish students or the large presence of Asians
who feel they are discriminated against, but the fact that Ivy League schools have not managed to increase their representation
of Blacks for the last 3 decades. We all compete for the same talent pool. And until the K-12 system is improved, Black representation
won't increase without others screaming favoritism. The other groups - high performing Asians, middle class Jews - will do fine,
even if they don't get into Ivy League schools but have to "settle" for elite private schools. But if the Ivy Leagues are the
pathway to prestige and power, than we're not broadening our power base enough to adequately reprewsent the demographic shifts
reshaping our nation. more focus on that, please.
I've been an SAT tutor for a long time in West Los Angeles (a heavily Asian city), and I feel that at least some of Asians'
over-representation in SAT scores and NMS finalists is due to Asian parents putting massive time and money into driving their
children's success in those very statistics.
In my experience, Asian parents are more likely than other parents to attempt to ramrod their kids through test prep in order
to increase their scores. For example, the few students I've ever had preparing for the PSAT - most students prepare only for
the SAT - were all Asian.
Naturally, because it's so strange to be preparing for what is supposed to be a practice test, I asked these parents why their
9th or 10th grade child was in this class, and the answer was that they wanted to do well on the PSAT because of its use in the
NMS! Similarly, many Asian immigrants send their children to "cram school" every day after regular school lets out (and I myself
have taught SAT at one of these institutions), essentially having their students tutored in every academic subject year-round
from early in elementary school.
Because whites are unlikely to do this, it would seem to me that the resulting Asian academic achievement is analogous to baseball
players who use steroids having better stats than baseball players who do not.
It seems reasonable that the "merit" in "meritocracy" need not be based solely on test scores and grades, and that therefore
a race-based quota system is not the only conclusion that one can draw from a decrease in the attendance rate of hard-driving
test-preppers. Maybe the university didn't want to fill its dorms with grade-grubbers who are never seen because they're holed
up in the library 20 hours a day, and grade-grubbers just happen to be over-represented in the Asian population?
Unz's piece analyzes only the data that lead up to college - when the Asian parents' academic influence over their children
is absolute - whereas the Ivy League schools he criticizes are most concerned with what their students do during and after college.
Is the kid who went to cram school his entire life as likely to join student organizations? To continue practicing his four instruments
once his mom isn't forcing him to take lessons 4 days a week? To start companies and give money to his university? Or did he just
peak early because his parents were working him so hard in order to get him into that college?
However, the remedies considered are not. It is silly to believe that all abilities can be distilled into a small set of numbers,
and anyway, no one knows what abilities will succeed in marketplaces. The source of the problem is the lack of competition in
education, including higher education, a situation written in stone by current accreditation procedures. The solution to the problem
is entry. Remember Brandeis U? With sufficient competition, colleges could take whomever they pleased, on whatever grounds, and
everyone would get a chance.
Concerning the drop in non-Jewish white enrollment:
I am a recent graduate of a top public high school, where I was a NMS, individual state champion in Academic Decathlon, perfect
ACT score, National AP Scholar, etc. etc. Many of my friends – almost exclusively white and Asian – had similar backgrounds and
were eminently qualified for Ivy. None of us even applied Ivy, let alone considered going there. Why? At $60,000/yr, the cost
is simply not worth it, since none of us would have been offered anything close to substantial financial aid and our parents were
unable/unwilling to fully fund our educations. Meanwhile, my Asian friends applied to as many Ivies as they could because it was
understood that (a) their parents would foot the bill if they got in or (b) they would take on a large debt load in order to do
it.
This article discounts financial self-selection, which (at least based on my own, anecdotal evidence) is more prevalent than
we tend to think.
The author ignores the role that class plays in setting kids up for success. At one point he notes, "Given that Asians
accounted for just 1.5 percent of the population in 1980 and often lived in relatively impoverished immigrant families. . ."
When I was at Harvard in the mid-1980s, there were two distinct groups of Asian students: children of doctors, academics, scientists
and businesspeople who came from educated families in China, Korea and Vietnam, and therefore grew up with both strong educational
values and parental resources to push them; and a much smaller group of kids from Chinatown and Southeast Asian communities,
whose parents were usually working class and uneducated. The second group were at a severe disadvantage to the first, who were
able to claim "diversity" without really having to suffer for it.
I would expect you'd see the same difference among higher-caste educated South Asian Brahmins and Indians from middle and
lower castes or from places like Guyana. It is ridiculous to put South Asians and East Asians in the same category as "Asian."
They have different cultural traditions and immigration histories. Ask any Indian parent what race they are and they'll answer
"Caucasian." Grouping them without any kind of assessment of how they might be different undermines the credibility of the
author.
The takeaway is not that affirmative action is damaging opportunities for whites, but that whites are losing against Asians.
The percentage of Hispanic and Black students at leading schools is still tiny. Hence, if invisible quotas for Asians are lifted,
there will be far fewer white students at these schools. This isn't because of any conspiracy, but because white students are
scoring lower than the competition on the relevant entry requirements. I would love to see an article in this publication titled,
"Why White Students Are Deficient." How about some more writing about "The White Student Achievement Gap?"
As parents of 2 HYP grads, We can tell you from experience that Asian students are not under-represented in the Ivies today.
(In fact, I think they are slightly over represented, for the same reasons and stats the author cited).
True, if one looks at stats, such as SAT, scientific competition awards etc, it seems to imply that a +35% enrollment of Asian
students is warranted. However, these indicators are just a small part of a "holistc" approach in predicting the success of a
candidate not only in the next 4 years, but the individual's success in life and be able to impact and contribute to society later.
I have seen candidates of Asian background, who score almost full mark in SAT but was less than satisfactory in all other aspects
of being a potential achiever in life.
Granted, if one wants to be an achiever in science and technology, by all means go with Caltech and MIT. But if one wants an
real "education" and be a leader later on in life, one has to have other qualities as well (skin color is NOT one of them). Of
course, history, and current cultural and political climate may influence the assessment of such qualities because it is highly
subjective. (Is is unfair to pick a pleasant looking candidate over a lesser one, if the rest are the same?)
That is why an interview with the candidates is a good way to assess a potential applicant. I always encourage my children
to conduct interviews locally for their alma mater.
I just hope that the Ivies do not use this holistic approach to practice quota policies.
Here's a quote from a friend just today about this related topic: "Just like the Catholic church in the middle ages recruited
the smartest peasants in order to forestall revolutionary potential, and to learn mind bending religious dogma to befuddle the
remaining peasants, current practice is much the same. To twist Billy Clinton's mantra, "its the economy stupid", No ,"its the
co opted brains"! "
We can substitute economics dogma to the befuddlement mix. The bottom line is every ruling elite has co-opted the top 1%-5%
of high wage earners, to make the pyramid work. Sociology writing is all over this. Veblen, Weber, etc. We can see this little
group created everywhere minerals or natural resources are coveted by private empires.
The universities are doing exactly what they are supposed to do to protect the interests of the Trustees and Donors who run
them for a reason. They are a tool of, not a cause of, the inequality and over-concentration. It is interesting how the story
goes into hairsplitting and comparing Asians to others, etc. But, the real story is a well understood sociology story. This article
explains why Napoleon established free public education after the French Revolution.
This is a fascinating article. So much data. So many inferences. It's hardly surprising to any parent of high school students
that college admissions are only marginally meritocratic. Whether that's a good a thing or a bad thing is an open question. I
think meritocracy has a place in college admissions. But not the only place. Consider athletics, which are themselves almost exclusively
meritocratic. Only the best among the best are offered Division I scholarships. The same, I think, applies to engineering schools,
the physical sciences, and (to a lesser degree), elite law schools. It also applies to auto-mechanics, plumbers, and electricians.
Regarding the humanities (a field in which I hold a PhD), not so much. I think Unz's beef is less with admissions policies per
se (which I agree are mind-bogglingly opaque) than with the status of elite institutions. I also think, and I may be wrong, that
Unz appears heading down the Bobby Fisher highway, intimating that those pesky Jews are
America never promised success through merit or equality. That is the American "dream." America promises freedom of
religious belief and the right to carry a gun.
This is a fascinating and extremely important article which I am very eager to discuss privately with the author, having spent
my whole life in higher education, albeit with a unique perspective. I was flabbergasted the findings about Jewish and non-Jewish
white representation, and intrigued, all the more so since my own ancestry is evenly divided between those two groups. I do want
to make one criticism, however of something the author said about the 1950s which I do not think is correct.
At one point in the article the author makes the claim that the breakdown of Ivy League Jewish quotas in the 1950s reflected
the power of Jews in the media and Hollywood. The statistics he gives about their representation there may be correct, but the
inference, I believe, is unsustainable. The Proquest historical database includes the Washington Post, New York Times, and many
other major newspapers. I did a search for "Harvard AND Jewish AND quota" for the whole period 1945-65 and it turned up only 20
articles, not one of which specifically addressed the issue of Jewish quotas at Harvard and other Ivy League schools. The powerful
Jews of that era had reached their positions by downplaying their origins–often including changes in their last names–and they
were not about to use their positions overtly on behalf of their ethnic group. (This could be, incidentally, another parallel
with today's Asians.) Those quotas were broken down, in my opinion, because of a general emphasis on real equality among Americans
in those decades, which also produced the civil rights movement. The Second World War had been fought on those principles.
I could not agree more that the admissions policies of the last 30 years have produced a pathetic and self-centered elite that
has done little if any good for the country as a whole.
It is really refreshing to see in print what we all know by experience, but I have to wonder out loud, what is our higher purpose?
Surely, you have a largely goal than merely exposing corruption in the academy. Lastly, I have to wonder out loud, how would the
predicament of the working class fit into your analysis? I thank you for this scathing indictment of higher ed that has the potential
to offer us a chillingly sobering assessment.
This is why we need to reinstate a robust estate tax or "death tax" as conservatives derisively call it. To break the aristocracy
described in this article. No less than Alexis de Tocqueville said that the estate tax is what made America great and created
a meritocracy (which now is weaker and riddled with loopholes, thus the decline of America). Aristocracies dominated Europe for
centuries because they did not tax the inheritance.
The day when I learned so many Chinese ruling class' offspring are either alumni or current students of Harvard (the latest
example being Bo GuaGua), it was clear to me Harvard's admission process is corrupt. How would any ivy college determine "leadership"
quality? Does growing up in a leader's family give you more innate leadership skills? Harvard obviously thinks so.
Therefore, it's not surprising that Ron said the following on this subject. " so many sons and daughters of top Chinese leaders
attend college in the West ..while our own corrupt admissions practices get them an easy spot at Harvard or Stanford, sitting
side by side with the children of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and George W. Bush." I hope world peace will be obtained within reach
in this approach.
The chilling factor is a hardworking Chinese immigrant's child in the U.S. would have less chance of getting into ivies than
these children of privileged.
It was also very disappointing to see another Asian parent whose children are HYP alumni saying too many Asians in ivies, despite
the overwhelming evidence showing otherwise.
Perhaps it's to be expected given the length of the article (over 22,000 words), but so many of the objections and "oversights"
raised in the comments are in fact dealt with – in detail and with a great deal of respect – by Unz in the article itself.
For example, this:
National Merit Scholarship semifinalists are chosen based on per-state percentiles.
What this means is that NMS semifinalist numbers would be skewed _against_ a high-performing demographic group to the extent
that group's demographics concentrate geographically. Mr. Unz acknowledges that geographical skewing of Jewish populations
is huge. However, he ignores its effect on the NMS semifinalist numbers he uses as a proxy for academic performance on a _national_
level to predict equitable distributions at _national_ universities.
Please somebody explain to me how this oversight isn't fatal to his argument
because geographical skewing of Asian populations is also huge, yet we don't witness the same patterning in admissions data
pertaining to Asian students. As the article states: "Geographical diversity would certainly hurt Asian chances since nearly half
their population lives in just the three states of California, New York, and Texas."
Unz goes on to note: "Both groups [Jews and Asians] are highly urbanized, generally affluent, and geographically concentrated
within a few states, so the 'diversity' factors considered above would hardly seem to apply; yet Jews seem to fare much better
at the admissions office."
So there's your answer.
And aside from the fact that your "basic question" has a very simple answer, it's just ludicrous in any case to suggest that
the validity of the entire article rests on a single data point.
There is no doubt this is more of a political issue than the academic one. If only merit is considered then asian american
would constitute as much as 50% of the student population in elite universities. Politically and socially this is not a desired
outcome. Rationale for affirmative action for the african americans and hispanics is same – leaving a large population is in elite
institution is not desired, it smacks of segregation.
But the core issue remains unsolved. Affirmative action resulted in higher representation but not the competitiveness of the
blacks. I am afraid whites are going the similar path.
Anyone famliar with sociology and the research on social stratification knows that meritocracy is a myth; for example,
if one's parents are in the bottom decile of the the income scale, the child has only a 3% chance to reach the top decile in his
or her lifetime. In fact, in contrast to the Horatio Alger ideology, the U.S. has lower rates of upward mobility than almost any
other developed country. Social classses exist and they tend to reproduce themselves.
The rigid class structure of the the U.S. is one of the reasons I support progressive taxation; wealth may not always be
inherited, but life outcomes are largely determined by the class position of one's parents. In this manner, it is also a myth
to believe that wealth is an individual creation;most financially successful individuals have enjoyed the benefits of class privilege:
good and safe schools, two-parent families, tutors, and perhaps most important of all, high expecatations and positive peer socialization
(Unz never mentions the importants of peeer groups, which data show exert a strong causal unfluence on academic performance).
And I would challenge Unz's assertion that many high-performing Asians come from impovershed backgrounds: many of them
may undereport their income as small business owners. I believe that Asian success derives not only from their class background
but their culture in which the parents have authority and the success of the child is crucual to the honor of the family. As they
assimilate to the more individualist American ethos, I predict that their academic success will level off just as it has with
Jews.
1. HYP are private universities: the success of their alumni verifies the astuteness of their admissions policies.
2. Mr. Unz equates "merit" with "academic". I wonder how many CalTech undergrads would be, or were, admitted, to HYP (and vice-versa).
3. I would like ethnic or racial stats on, for several examples, class officers, first chair musicians*, job holders, actors^,
team captains, and other equally valuable (in the sense of contributing to an entering freshman class) high-school pursuits.*By
17, I had been a union trombonist for three years; at Princeton, I played in the concert band, the marching band, the concert
orchestra, several jazz ensembles, and the Triangle Club orchestra.^A high school classmate was John Lithgow, the superb Hollywood
character actor. Harvard gave him a full scholarship – and they should have.
What if we were one homogeneous ethnic group? What dynamic would we set up then?
I suggest taking the top 20% on straight merit, based on SAT scores, whether they crammed for them or not, and take the next
50% from the economically poorest of the qualified applicants (1500 – 1600 on the SAT?) by straight ethnicity percentages to directly
reflect population diversity, and 30% at random to promote some humility, and try that for 20 years and see what effects are produced
in the quality of our economic and political leadership. And of course, keep them all in the dark as to how they actually got
admitted.
Maybe one effect is that more non-ivy league schools will be tapped by the top recruiters.
"Surely the author must be aware that approximately half the children with "Jewish" names are not fully Jewish. Over
half of the marriages west of the Mississippi are reportedly mixed. Many non-Jews have last names that start with "Gold". Just
these two facts make the entire analysis ridiculous. Hillel does not keep statistics on how Jewish a student is, while many
of Levys and Cohens are not actually Jewish. What would we call Amy Chua's daughters? Jewish or Asian? It is therefore impossible
to tease out in a multi-racial society who is who."
Well, there are several arguments to be made. First, unless you are advocating that there has been a mass adoption of words
like "Gold" in non-Jewish last names these past 10, 15 years, that argument sinks like a stone. Second, by selecting for specifically
Jewish last names, intermarriage can be minimized but not eliminated. How many kids with the lastname "Goldstein" was a non-Jew
in the last NMS? Not likely a lot of them.
Intermarriage can account for some fog, but not all, not by a longshot. Your entire argument reeks of bitter defensiveness.
You have to come to grips that Jews have become like the old WASPs, rich, not too clever anymore, and blocking the path forward
for brighter, underrepresented groups.
With all due respect, I was worried that I would get an answer that lazily points to the part of the essay that glosses over
this point (which mind you I had combed through carefully before posting my question). However, I was hoping that in response
someone might respond who had thought a little more carefully about the statistical fallacy in Unz's essay: that far-reaching
statements about nation-wide academic performance can be drawn directly from per-state-percentiles.
Yes, Asian Americans, like Jews, have concentrations. But their geographical distributions differ. Yes, it might be possible
that upon careful analysis of relative distributions of populations and NMS semifinalists in each state Unz might be able to draw
a robust comparison: he might even come up with the same answer. The point that I made is that he doesn't even try.
Given the lengths Unz goes to calculate and re-calculate figures _based_on_ the assumption of _equal_ geographic distributions
among Asians and Jews, it is - and I stand by this - a disservice to the reader that no effort (beyond hand-waving) is made to
quantitatively show the assumption is at all justified.
The statistical analysis used in this article is flawed. The author uses last names to identify the religion (or birth heritage)
of NMS semifinalists? Are you serious? My son was a (recent) National Merit Finalist and graduated from an ivy league university.
His mother is Jewish; his father is not, thus he has a decidedly WASP surname and according to the author's methods he would have
been classified as WASP. With the growing numbers of interfaith and mixed-race children how can anyone draw conclusions about
race and religion in the meritocracy or even "IQ" argument? Anecdotally, my son reported that nearly half his classmates at his
ivy league were at least one-quarter Jewish (one or more parents or one grandparent). To use last names (in lieu of actual demographic
data) to make the conclusion that Jews are being admitted to ivies at higher rates than similarly qualified Asians is irresponsible.
Essentially, the leftist forces in this country are trying to put the squeeze on white gentiles from both directions.
Affirmative action for underachieving minorities to take the place of white applicants.
Meritocracy for highly achieving Asians to push down white applicants, while never mentioning that full meritocracy would push
out other minorities as well (that's not politically correct).
The whole thing has become more about political narrative than actual concern for justice. I want you to know that as an Asian
man who graduated from Brown, I sympathize with you.
Very interesting article. The case that East Asian students are significantly underrepresented and Jewish students overrepresented
at Ivy League schools is persuasive, although not dispositive. The most glaring flaw in the analysis is the heavy reliance on
performance on the PSAT (the discussion of the winners of the various Olympiad and Putnam contests has little informational value
relevant to admissions, since those winners are the outliers on the tail of the distribution), which is a test that can be prepped
for quite easily. Another flaw is the reliance on last names to determine ethnicity, which I doubt works well for Jews, although
it probably works reasonably well for East Asians.
Unfortunately, the article is also peppered with (very) thinly supported (and implausible) claims like Asians are better at
visuospatial skills, worse at verbal skills, and that the situation is reversed for Jews. This kind of claim strikes me as racial
gobbledygook, and at least anecdotally belied if one considers the overrepresentation of Jews among elite chess players, both
in the US and worldwide.
In any event, the fundamental point is that the PSAT (as is the case with all standardized tests) is a fixed target that can
be studied for. Whether one chooses to put in 100s of hours studying for the PSAT is not, and should not be, the only criterion
used for admissions.
I find the relative percentage of East Asians and Jews at schools like MIT (and also Caltech and Berkeley, although obviously
those are in part distorted by the heavy concentration of East Asians in California) as compared to HYP as strong evidence that
the admissions process at HYP advantages Jews and disadvantages East Asians.
I suspect, though, that the advantages Jews enjoy in the admissions process are unconscious and unintentional, whereas the
disadvantages suffered by East Asians are quite conscious and intentional.
The graph entitled "Asians Age 18-21 and Elite College Enrollment Trends, 1990-2011″ is misleading. It contrasts percentage
of enrolled Asian students vs. the total number of the eligible Asian applicants. Therefore, it led to a flawed argument
when comfusing number vs. percentage . For proof, if a similar graph of Hispanic student percentage vs. eligible applicants
were drawn, it would appear that they were discriminated against as well. So would be the Black!
well, even a fair and objective admission criteria can have devastating consequences. here at IIT, we admit about 1 in 100.
this has the same effect on student ethics, career options and so on. in fact, even worse, since IIT is an engineering college,
the very definition of engineering in India has now distorted as serving international finance or distant masters in a globalized
world. our own development problems remain unattended.
also, the above is a part of the current trend of knowledge concentration, i.e., a belief that only a few universities can
impart us "true" knowledge or conduct "true" research.
see http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~sohoni/kpidc.pdf
This is a very valuable article. It deals with a subject that has received too little attention. I believe that cultural bias
in many cases outweighs the racial bias in the selection program. Time and again, I have seen young people with great potential
being selected against because they are culturally different from what the selectors are looking for (often people who are like
them culturally). The article's mentioning that students who participated in R.O.T.C., F.F.A. and/or 4H are often passed over
is a good illustration.
It was interesting to note that the girl who wrote an essay on how she dealt with being caught in a drug violation found acceptance.
I suspect that a student with similar academic qualifications who wrote an essay on the negative aspects of drug use would not
be so lucky.
comes news that Yale President Levin's successor will be Peter Salovey, tending to confirm Unz's observations regarding the
grossly disproportionate number of Jewish presidents at Ivy League schools.
All very interesting but I am among the National Merit Scholars from California who has a not obviously Jewish name despite
having two Jewish parents. It was changed in the 1950s due to anti-Semitism and an urge to assimilate. A lot of other names can
be German or Jewish for example. I suspect in light of that and intermarriage cases where the mom is Jewish and the dad is not,
not to mention a lot of Russian names, you may be undercounting Jews among other things. Although to be fair, you are probably
also undercounting some half-Asians given most of those marriages have a white husband and Asian wife.
I'm an Asian HYP grad. I applaud this article for being so extremely well researched and insightful. It's an excellent indictment
of the arbitrariness and cultural favoritism concentrated in the hands of a very small group of unqualified and ideologically
driven admissions officers. And I hasten to add that I am a liberal Democratic, an avid Obama supporter, and a strong proponent
of correcting income inequality and combating discrimination in the workplace.
To me, the most compelling exhibit was the one towards the end which showed the % relative representation of enrolled students
to highly-qualified students (I wish the article labeled the exhibits). This chart shows that in the Ivies, which administer highly
subjective admission criteria, Jews are overrepresented by 3-4x, but in the California schools and MIT, which administer more
objective criteria, Jews are overrepresented by only 0-50%, a range that can easily be explained by methodology or randomness.
This single exhibit is unequivocal evidence to me of systematic bias in the Ivy League selection process, with Jews as the
primary beneficiary. I tend to agree with the author this this bias is unlikely to be explicit, but likely the result of cultural
favoritism, with a decision-making body that is heavily Jewish tending to favor the activities, accomplishments, personalities,
etc. of Jewish applicants.
The author has effectively endorsed one of the core tenets of modern liberalism – that human beings tend to favor people who
look and act like themselves. It's why institutions dominated by white males tend to have pro-white male biases. The only twist
here is that the decision-making body in this instance (Ivy League admissions committees) is white-Jewish, not white-Gentile.
So if you're a liberal like me, let's acknowledge that everyone is racist and sexist toward their own group, and what we have
here is Jews favoring Jews. We can say that without being anti-semitic, just like we can say that men favor men without being
anti-male, or whites favor whites without being anti-white.
Just some puzzling statistics: In p. 32, second paragraph, it is mentioned "The Asian ratio is 63% slightly above the white
ratio of 61 percent", then in the third paragraph "However, if we separate out the Jewish students, their
ratio turns out to be 435 percent, while the residual ratio for non-Jewish whites drops to just 28 percent, less than half of
even the Asian figure", leading to the conclusion that "As a consequence, Asians appear under-represented relative to Jews by
a factor of seven, while non-Jewish whites are by far the most under-represented group of all". Not very clear on the analysis!
Let me try to make a guess on the calculation of this statistics ratio: Assume that all groups in NMS will apply, with mA=Asians,
mJ=Jews, mW=Whites be the respective numbers in NMS. Suppose that nA, nJ, and nW are those Asians, Jews, and Whites finally admitted.
Then if the statistics ratio for G means ((nG)/(mG))/(mG/mNMS), where mNMS is the total number in the NMS, then the ratio will
amplify the admission rate (nG/mG) by (mNMS/mG) times and becomes very large or very small for small group size. For example,
for a single person group, being admitted will give a ratio as large as mNMS, and a zero for not being admitted. Why can this
ratio be used for comparing under-representation between different groups?
Very well. Loved the fact that the author put a lot into reseaching this piece. But i would like to know how many asians who
manage to attend this ivy schools end up as nobel leaurets and professors?? This demonstrates the driving force behind the testscore
prowess of the asians-financial motivation. The author talks about asians being under-represented in the ivies but even though
they manage to attend then what?? do they eventually become eintiens and great nobel leurets or great cheese players. Also what
is the stats like for asian poets, novelist, actors.etc Pls focus should be given on improving other non-ivy schools since we
have a lots of high SAT test scores than high running universities.
Look at Nobel prizes, field medals and all kind of prizes and awards that recognize lifetime original academic contributions.
Not many asians there yet. Perfect grades or SAT scores does not guarantee creativity, original thinking, intelectual curiosity
or leadership. The problem is that those things are hard to measure and very easy to fake in an application.
Loved all the research in the article and I am on board with the idea that moving in the tiger mother direction will kill creativity
in young people. And I agree with the observation that our country's top leadership since 1970 or so has been underwhelming and
dishonest especially in the financial services industry which draws almost entirely from the Ivies.
However, I am not so convinced that the over representation of Jewish students in the Ivy league is created by intentional
bias on the part of Jewish professors or administrators at these institutions. Is it possible that admissions officers select
Jewish applicants at such a high rate because they are more likely to actually attend? Once a family of four's income exceeds
$160k the net price calculation for a year at Harvard jumps up pretty quickly. By the time you hit annual income of $200k you
are looking at $43k/yr or $172k for 4 years. And at the lower income levels, even if a family has to pay just $15k a year, how
will they do that if they are struggling to make it as it is? Do they want/does their student want to graduate with $60k worth
of debt? Why not choose a great scholarship offer from a state university to pay nothing at all or go to community college for
2 years and then on to the state public institution?
There are many options for top students who can compete at the Ivy level. If I am an admissions officer looking to fill slots
left over after minority admissions (ones poor enough to get the education for free and thus to say yes), legacies, athletic recruits,
and the few super special candidates, wouldn't I choose those most likely to take me up on the admissions offer and protect my
yield number? Might an easy way to get this done be to consult a demographic tool showing net worth by zip code? And to stack
the yield odds a little more in my favor might I also choose families with Jewish appearing last names knowing they would be extremely
likely to accept my offer since I obviously have recent history to show me that these families say yes to our prices? I think
this is a much more plausible explanation then assuming some secret quota in force at these schools.
I am a conservative but I cannot believe Jewish liberals would go that far just to ensure more Jewish liberals attend their
institutions or to keep conservative white non Jewish middle income students out. Dollars and cents and the perception a yield
number conveys about the desirability of a school are what is at work here in my humble opinion.
There is a very simple solution. There is no legal definition of race. Simply check the "Negro" (or "African-American" or whatever
it is called today) box on the application form. You don't look it? Neither do many others, because your ancestry is really mixed.
This may get you in. It won't hurt your chances, which are essentially zero before you check that box. At the very least, it will
make it harder for the bigots in the admissions office to exercise their bigotry.
"Look at Nobel prizes, field medals and all kind of prizes and awards that recognize lifetime original academic contributions.
Not many asians there yet. Perfect grades or SAT scores does not guarantee creativity, original thinking, intelectual curiosity
or leadership. The problem is that those things are hard to measure and very easy to fake in an application."
Last year, 75% of Ph.D candidates where foreign born, most of which were either Indian or Chinese. You should rely on statistics
that are more current and relevant.
Wow, another article on how corrupt higher eduation is.
Folks, open your eyes a bit. Online education is growing massively; sharing this growth are websites that write academic papers
(even Ph.D. theses) on demands .these websites in toto have nearly as many customers as there are online students.
Harvard is unusual in that they actually banned students for cheating. Every investigation of cheating on campus shows it exists
on a massive scale, and reports of half or more of a class cheating are quite common in the news.
The reason for this is simple: administrators care about retention, nothing else. Faculty have long since gotten the message.
I've taught in higher education for nearly 25 years now, and I've seen many faculty punished for catching cheaters; not once has
there been any reward.
Over 90% of remedial students fail to get a 2-year degree in three years, yet administration sees no issue with talking them
into loans that will keep them in debt forever. Admin sees no issue with exploiting the vulnerable for personal gain, of course.
Here's what higher education is today: desperate people take out loans to go to college. They use the money to pay the tuition,
and they use the money to buy academic papers because they really aren't there for college, they're there for the checks. Their
courses are graded by poorly paid faculty (mostly adjuncts), again paid by those checks. The facutly are watched over by administrators
to make sure there is no integrity to the system and again, admin is paid by those checks (in fact, most of the tuition money
goes to administrators).
Hmm, what part of this could be changed that would put integrity back into the system?
I think your sources who claim to be familiar with China are very wrong concerning entrance into Chinese universities, especially
those so-called upper tier unis. It is well known amongst most Chinese students who take the gaokao, the all-or-nothing university
entrance examination, bribes, guanxi (connections) and just being local, are often better indicators of who will be accepted.
• Replies: @KA Same and
some more in India.
In India it is politics of the gutter. Someone can get to medical school and engineering school even if he or she did not qualify,if
scored say 3 points out of 1000 points as long as he or she belonged to lower caste of Hindu. The minimum requirements they have
to fulfill is to pass the school leaving examinations with science subjects .A passing level is all that matters . The process
then continues (in further education -master , training, post doctoral, and in job and in promotion)
While upper caste Hindu or Christian or Muslim may not be allowed despite scoring 999 out of 1000. It is possible and has happened.
Unfortunately the lower caste has not progressed much. Upper caste Hindus have misused this on many occasions and continue to
do do by selling themselves as lower caste with legal loopholes .Muslim or Christians can't do that for they can't claim to be
Hindu
Ron Unz is a brilliant man. He created software that made him rich, and has written articles on all kinds of subjects. But
apparently, Ron shares a problem with a very tiny number of humanity. Ron is one of those oddball characters, that, no matter
where the truth leads him, he simply has to express it, regardless of political correctness. He did this in California with the
debate on English,etc.
Compared to the administrators of these Ivy League Institutions, Ron is a mental giant, not even near being in the same class
as these supposedly important but in reality, worthless beurocrats.
If ten million Gentile whites and Asians changed their surname to Kaplan, Levy, Golden, Goldstein, Goldman, it obviously would
throw a monkey wrench into the process of ethnic favoritism.
To paraphrase Unz - the "shared group biases" of Ivy League college admission officers that have "extreme flexibility and subjectivity",
does harm white Gentiles and Asians, but only because the process lacks objective, meritocratic decision making, and in its place
is a vile form of corrupt cronyism and favoritism.
An Asian speaking here, I agree that America isn't a meritocracy, but has it ever been? It seems like this article's falling
for the oldest trick in the book - looking back at the "good old days". I'd argue that now more than ever, the barrier to entry
is lower than ever, and that every individual can rise to the occasion and innovate for the better. Places like Exeter (my alma
mater) aren't just playgrounds for the rich - I'm not extremely wealthy, and neither were my classmates. Most of us were even
on financial aid. Don't just point fingers at institutions to account for shortcomings - if you had the stroke of fortune to be
born in a nation with such opportunity, with hard work and CREATIVITY and INNOVATION, anything is possible.
Has anyone thought about why the test-prep business has expanded so much? It's to feed into the very same system that you're
complaining about. Be the change you wish to see in the world, not a victim of it. To many of the Asians out there, I'd say get
over your 4.0 GPA and 2400 SAT score and be unique for once.
To put Unz's findings in social and historical perspective, it is important to understand where Jewish academics come from.
The Eastern European Jews who immigrated to Northeast US in the Twentieth Century ran into an immigrant world dominated by Catholics
and particularly Irish Catholics. The Irish, who were as "hungry" as the Jews got control over government and its ancillary economic
benefits. I wasn't there at the time, but I imagine we Irish did not do much to help Jewish immigrants compared with Catholic
immigrants.
One area abandoned by the Catholic Church was public and secular education. The Church formed its own educational Catholic
ghetto. Jewish immigrants adopted the public-secular educational world as their own and became strong adherents of education as
the key to Americanization. Education became their small piece of turf. The only memorable political conflict between Jews and
AfricanAmericans in New York City was over control of the public schools.
Just as the Irish react against affirmative action for non-Irish in government jobs, the descendants of these Jewish immigrants
react to the plagiarism of their assimilation plan by the Chinese/Koreans. When you have de facto Irish affirmative action you
don't want de jure African American affirmative action. When you have Jewish "meritocracy" you don't want Asian meritocracy.
The result is what you see today. The Irish still have a stranglehold on government related jobs in the Northeast with a smattering
of minorities ("New Irish") and the Jews try to protect their secular education turf from the "New Jews". It's just business.
Don't take it personally.
All I can say is see a book: "Ivy League Fools and Felons"' by Mack Roth. Lots of them are kids of corrupt people in all
fields.
But I disagree that opportunity is being closed off to most Americans. Here in North Dakota I work for a high school graduate,
self made trucking millionaire. Five years ago she was a secretary in Iowa. But she got off her butt and went to where the money
is circulating. Just my 2 cents
Sorry, but quick correction regarding rankings (and I only have to say this because I go to MIT). Technically, MIT and Caltech
are *both* ranked the same. The only reason why Caltech appears on the list before MIT is because it come before it alphabetically
to suggest otherwise would be untrue. When you look at individual departments, you'll find that MIT consistently ranks higher
than that of Caltech in all engineering disciplines and most scientific disciplines. Also, personally speaking, MIT has a far
better humanities program that Caltech (especially in the fields of economics, political science, philosophy, and linguisitics).
We do have a number of Pulitizer Prize winners who teach here.
Also generally, in academic circle, MIT is usually viewed with higher regard than Caltech, although that isn't to say Caltech
isn't a fantastic school (it really and truly is–I loved it there and I wish more people knew more about it)
One observation about methodology that struck me while reading this:
The Jewish population of universities is being evaluated based on Hillel statistics, with the "Non-Jewish white" population
being based on the white population minus the Jewish population.
This can be problematic when you consider that these population are merging at a pretty high rate. (I don't have much information
here, but this is from the header of the wikipedia article: "The 1990 National Jewish Population Survey reported an intermarriage
rate of 52 percent among American Jews.")
What percentage of partially Jewish students identify as "Jewish" or does Hillel identify as Jewish? If you're taking a population
that would have once identified as "white" and now identifying them as Jewish, obviously you'll see some Jewish inflation, and
white deflation. And when a large percentage of this population bears the names "Smith", "Jones", "Roberts" etc., you're obviously
not going to see a corresponding increase in NMS scores evaluated on the basis of last names.
Of course, I have no idea what methodology Hillel is using, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it's an inflated one.
Thank you Mr. Unz for this provocative article. It isn't the author's first one on Jewish & Asian enrollment at Ivy League
colleges. I remember another one, in the 1990s I believe.
According to what I read, less and less American Jews apply for medical school nationwide, and Jewish women are very educated,
but it comes also with a low birthrate and high median age. It makes the recent spike in Jewish admissions at Harvard College
all the more curious, intriguing.
This month, the NY Times published a list of the highest earners in the hedge fund industry in 2012, and 8 out of 10 were Jewish.
Are certain universities aggressively seeking donations from this super rich demographic since the 2000s?
The young American Jew is not like his grandparents. They are just as fun loving and lazy as any other. This is the result
of a lack of perceived persecution that use to keep the group together. In the major cities, half of the young people leave the
tribe through intermarriage. This is human nature. The Rabbis changed the rules some time ago to define a Jew as coming from the
mother, so the Jewish man would marry a Jewish woman, instead of a woman outside of the tribe. Read the Bible. In David's time,
the men had an eye for good looking women outside of the tribe(like all men). Now days, the young people just laugh at the Rabbi's
words.
Instead of the old folks liberal ideas of race and ethnic divisions, let us change it to go by economic class. According to
liberal thought, intelligence is equally distributed throughout all economic classes, so higher education admissions should be
by economic class, and not the old divisive ideas of race and ethnic background. After all, affirmative action programs are institutionalized
racism and racial profiling.
• Replies: @KA Yes . You
have points . This is one of the fears that drove the Zionist to plan of Israel in 1880 . It was the fear of secular life free
from religious persecution and freedom to enjoy life to its fullest in the post industrial non religious Europe guided by enlightenment
that drove them embrace the religious ethnic mix concept of statehood.
These and many other ills would be alleviated if government would stop: (a) banning aptitude tests or even outright discrimination
as determinants of employment; (b) subsidizing private institutions such as Harvard; and (c) close down all government schools,
starting with state institutions of "higher learning."
I know, pie in the sky. But the author's suggestions by comparison are mere Band-Aids.
Great analysis, but pie-in-the-sky prescription, which was presumably just intended to be thought provoking. If you want to
know why Harvard would never adopt the author's recommendation, just read what he wrote:
"But if it were explicitly known that the vast majority of Harvard students had merely been winners in the application lottery,
top businesses would begin to cast a much wider net in their employment outreach, and while the average Harvard student would
probably be academically stronger than the average graduate of a state college, the gap would no longer be seen as so enormous,
with individuals being judged more on their own merits and actual achievements. A Harvard student who graduated magna cum laude
would surely have many doors open before him, but not one who graduated in the bottom half of his class."
I wonder why Harvard officials would desire this outcome?
So a lot of ivy league presidents with Jewish-sounding names somehow influence admissions staff who may not have Jewish-sounding
names to favor undeserving applicants because they also have Jewish-sounding names? And this is because of some secret ethnic
pride thing going on? And nobody's leaked this conspiracy to the outside world until our whistle blowing author? The guy's a nut
job.
All of your statistics are highly suspect due to the enormous, and rapid annual increase in Jewish intermarriage. I do not
have the statistics, but over many years, it certainly appears that Jewish men are far more likely to intermarry than Jewish women
(the lure of the antithesis to their Jewish mother??) and to complicate matters further, Jewish men seem to have a predilection
for Asian women, at least in the greater NY Metro Area. But that still does not represent the majority of Jewish men marrying
Christians. QED. More Jewish last names, for children who are DNA wise only half Jewish than non Jewish names for the intermarried.
And if one wanted to get really specific, the rapidly rising intermarriage is diluting the "Jewish" genetic pool's previously
demonstrable intelligence superiority., strengthened by the fact that most couples use the Jewish fathers last name.
These observations are in no way associated with how the various Jewish denominations define 'Jewish"
In short: Unz substantially overestimated the percentage of Jews at Harvard while grossly underestimating the percentage of
Jews among high academic achievers, when, in fact, there is no discrepancy.
In addition, Unz's arguments have proven to be untenable in light of a recent survey of incoming Harvard freshmen conducted
by The Harvard Crimson, which found that students who identified as Jewish reported a mean SAT score of 2289, 56 points higher
than the average SAT score of white respondents.
First. I was thrilled to see your advocacy of admissions by lottery. I have advocated such a plan on various websites that
I participate in, but you have written the first major article advocating it that I have seen. Congratulations.
Just a small quibble with your plan, I would not allow the schools any running room for any alternatives to the lottery. They
have not demonstrated any willingness to administer such a system fairly. After a few years of pure lottery it would be time to
evaluate it and see if they should be allowed any leeway, but I wouldn't allow any variation before that.
I would hypothesize that one effect of a lottery admissions plan would be a return to more stringent grading in the class rooms.
It would be useful to the faculty to weed out the poor performers more quickly, and the students might have less of an attitude
of entitlement.
Second, I am glad that you raised the issue of corruption of the admissions staffs. It would be a new chapter in human history
if there was no straight out bribe taking of by functionaries in their positions. My guess is that the bag men are the "high priced
consultants". Pay them a years worth of tuition money and a sufficient amount will flow to the right places to get your kid in
to wherever you want him to go.
Third, three observations about Jewish Students.
First, Jews are subject to mean reversion just like everybody else.
Second, the kids in the millennial generation were, for the most part, born into comfortable middle class and upper class homes.
The simply do not have the drive that their immigrant grandparents and great-grandparents had. I see this in my own family. My
wife and I had immigrant parents, and we were pretty driven academically (6 degrees between us). Our kids, who are just as bright
as we were, did not show that same edge, and it was quite frustrating to us. None of them have gone to a graduate or professional
school. They are all working and are happy, but driven they aren't.
Third, Hillel's numbers of Jewish students on their website should be taken cum grano salis. All three of our kids went to
Northwestern U. (Evanston, IL) which Hillel claimed was 20% Jewish. Based on our personal observations of kids in their dorms
and among their friends, I think the number is probably 10% or less.
Finally, the side bar on Paying Tuition to a Hedge Fund. I too am frustrated with the current situation among the wealthy institutions.
I think that it deserves a lot more attention from policy makers than it has received. The Universities have received massive
benefits from the government (Federal and state) - not just tax exemptions, but grants for research and to students, subsidized
loans, tax deductions for contributions, and on, and on. They have responded to this largess by raising salaries, hiring more
administrators, spending billions on construction, and continually raising tuitions far faster than the rate of inflation. I really
do not think the tax payers should be carrying this much of a burden at a time when deficits are mounting without limit.
Henry VIII solved a similar problem by confiscating assets. We have constitutional limits on that sort of activity, but I think
there a lot of constitutional steps that should be considered. Here a few:
1. There is ample reason to tax the the investment gains of the endowments as "unrelated business taxable income" (UBTI, see
IRS Pub 598 and IRC §§ 511-515) defined as income from a business conducted by an exempt organization that is not substantially
related to the performance of its exempt purpose. If they do not want to pay tax on their investments, they should purchase treasuries
and municipals, and hold them to maturity.
2. The definition of an exempt organization could be narrowed to exclude schools that charge tuition. Charging $50,000/yr and
sitting on 30G$ of assets looks a lot more like a business than a charity.
3. Donations to overly rich institutions should be non deductible to the donors. Overly rich should be defined in terms of
working capital needs and reserves for depreciation of physical assets.
Is the proposed mechanism that Jewish university presidents create a bias in the admissions department?
That could be tested by comparing Jewish student percentages between schools with Christian and Jewish presidents. If Christian
presidents produce student bodies with a high proportion of Jews, then Jewish ethnocentrism is not the cause. (We'd have to find
a way to control for presidents' politics.)
If admissions departments are discriminating in favor of liberals, that will boost the proportion of all liberals, including
many Jews, but it will be political discrimination, not ethnic discrimination. (Both are bad, but we should be accurate.)
Liberals see a discrepancy in ethnic outcomes and consider it proof of ethnic discrimination. Are we doing the same thing?
After Russian emancipation, the Jews from Pale settlement spread out and took up jobs in government services, secured admissions
in technical and medical schools, and established positions in trade in just two decades. Then they started interconnecting and
networking more aggressively to eliminate competition and deny the non-Jews the opportunities that the non Jews rightfully claimed.
This pattern was also evident in Germany after 1880 and in Poland between interwars .
The anti-Jewish sentiment seen in pre revolutionary Russia was the product of this ethnic exclusivisity and of the tremendous
in-group behaviors .
@Ira The young American
Jew is not like his grandparents. They are just as fun loving and lazy as any other. This is the result of a lack of perceived
persecution that use to keep the group together. In the major cities, half of the young people leave the tribe through intermarriage.
This is human nature. The Rabbis changed the rules some time ago to define a Jew as coming from the mother, so the Jewish man
would marry a Jewish woman, instead of a woman outside of the tribe. Read the Bible. In David's time, the men had an eye for good
looking women outside of the tribe(like all men). Now days, the young people just laugh at the Rabbi's words.
Instead of the old folks liberal ideas of race and ethnic divisions, let us change it to go by economic class. According to
liberal thought, intelligence is equally distributed throughout all economic classes, so higher education admissions should be
by economic class, and not the old divisive ideas of race and ethnic background. After all, affirmative action programs are institutionalized
racism and racial profiling.
Yes . You have points . This is one of the fears that drove the Zionist to plan of Israel in 1880 . It was the fear of secular
life free from religious persecution and freedom to enjoy life to its fullest in the post industrial non religious Europe guided
by enlightenment that drove them embrace the religious ethnic mix concept of statehood.
@Anonymous I think your
sources who claim to be familiar with China are very wrong concerning entrance into Chinese universities, especially those so-called
upper tier unis. It is well known amongst most Chinese students who take the gaokao, the all-or-nothing university entrance examination,
bribes, guanxi (connections) and just being local, are often better indicators of who will be accepted.
Same and some more in India. In India it is politics of the gutter. Someone can get to medical school and engineering school
even if he or she did not qualify, if scored say 3 points out of 1000 points as long as he or she belonged to lower caste of Hindu.
The minimum requirements they have to fulfill is to pass the school leaving examinations with science subjects .A passing level
is all that matters . The process then continues (in further education -master , training, post doctoral, and in job and in promotion)
While upper caste Hindu or Christian or Muslim may not be allowed despite scoring 999 out of 1000. It is possible and has happened.
Unfortunately the lower caste has not progressed much. Upper caste Hindus have misused this on many occasions and continue to
do do by selling themselves as lower caste with legal loopholes .Muslim or Christians can't do that for they can't claim to be
Hindu
Takeaways:
Jews are really good at networking and in-group activity. They have centuries of practice, and lived a meritocratic existence
of self-sorting in the Pale and elsewhere.
That is evident to all who look.
Other groups have different approaches, and different organizational or affiliation bonds, based on their history, culture
and other factors.
NE Asians share some traits, and both value education as a way to improve themselves and to some extent their groups.
S Asians will demonstrate their own approach, focusing heavily on STEM.
Expect demographics to win out, given 2.5B Asians versus a smaller NAM or NE European-base populace.
Thanks for the informative article. Your proposal sounds reasonable. Another option would be to attempt to vastly decrease
the significance of these elite private schools. Why should we allow undemocratic little fiefdoms to largely control entry into
our country's ruling class? It would probably be considerably more fair, more transparent and more efficient to pour a lot of
resources into our public universities. If Berkeley, Michigan, UVA, UMass, etc. were completely free, for instance–or if they
provided students with living expenses as well as free tuition, the quality of their students would conceivably surpass that of
the Ivy League's, and over time the importance and prestige of Harvard, Stanford, etc. would diminish. Instead, we are subsidizing
students at elite private colleges more than those at public colleges–an absurd state of affairs (see this article, whose author
is a bit of an ideologue but who is right on this issue:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Robert-Reich/2014/1014/How-the-government-spends-more-per-student-at-elite-private-universities-than-public
).
Mr. Unz; thank you for the long, informational and scholarly article. I read the whole thing, and from Sailer I am familiar
with your reputation as a certified genius. I must admit however, after the 5-10,000 words you had written, I was a bit shocked
that your answer to how to improve elite University enrollment, was to FLIP A FIGURATIVE COIN.
I expected some chart with differential equations that I would have to consult my much more intelligent brother, the electrical
engineer to explain to me. Not that it does not make a lot of sense.
The issue with your solution is that you go from a three class university:
1) Legacy Admits
2) Non athletic, black admits
3) everyone else
to a much-more rigid, two class university:
1) academic admits
2) coin-flip admits
One tier being one of the smartest 15-18 year olds in the world, the other being "somewhat better than good student at Kansas
State."
My brother works at a little ivy league school. Well endowed because the parents Dun and Bradstreet reports are at the top
of the selection sheets with parents jobs also. Extra points for finance and government jobs at executive levels.
This article was excellent and reinforced everything he has told me over the years. One thing he did mention i would like to
add. Asians, which for years were their choice for filling minority quotas, are horrible when it comes to supporting the alma
mater financially during the fund drives. This information was confirmed by several other schools in the area when they tried
a multi-school drive in the far east and south east asia to canvas funds and returned with a pitiful sum.
Diversity is a scheme that is the opposite of a meritocracy. Diversity is a national victim cult that generally demonizes gentiles,
and more specifically demonizes people that conform to a jewish concocted profile of a nazi.
Why would anyone use the word diversity in the same sentence as the word meritocracy?
"Are elite university admissions based on meritocracy and diversity as claimed?" Why would anybody claiming to be intelligent
include meritocracy and diversity in the same sentence?
@Sean Gillhoolley Harvard
is a university, much like Princeton and Yale, that continues based on its reputation, something that was earned in the past.
When the present catches up to them people will regard them as nepotistic cauldrons of corruption.
Look at the financial disaster that befell the USA and much of the globe back in 2008. Its genesis can be found in the clever
minds of those coming out of their business schools (and, oddly enough, their Physics programs as well). They are teaching the
elite how to drain all value from American companies, as the rich plan their move to China, the new land of opportunity. When
1% of the population controls such a huge portion of the wealth, patriotism becomes a loadstone to them. The elite are global.
Places like Harvard cater to them, help train them to rule the world....but first they must remake it.
I agree, common people would never think of derivatives , nor make loans based on speculation .
"Tiffany Wang['s] SAT scores were over 100 points above the Wesleyan average, and she ranked as a National Merit Scholarship
semifinalist "
"Julianna Bentes her SAT scores were somewhat higher than Tiffany's "
Did Ms. Wang underperform on her SATs? NMS semifinalist status depends purely on the score on a very SAT-like test being at
a 99.5 percentile level, as I understand it (and I was one, albeit a very long time ago) and I gather from the above that her
SAT scores did not correspond to the PSAT one. That is, merely " 100 points above the Wesleyan average" doesn't seem all that
exceptional. Or am I wrong?
Mr. Unz several times conflates NMS semifinalist status with being a top student. Which I most definitely was not. It's rather
an IQ test. As was the SAT.
In a nation grappling with growing inequality, stagnating social mobility, crushing
personal debt, and crumbling job security, efforts to set America's generations against one
another persist. Don't blame the system, blame the "greedy" boomers. Or the "slacker" Gen
Xers. Or "entitled" millennials. But who gains from such discourses?
Efforts to foment that warfare, intentionally or not, serve specific agendas. Numerous
writers warn that age-group hostilities are "coming." And then, pitting generations against
one another, aside from their war metaphors, writers reach for doomsday predictions,
lachrymose empathy for "our kids," and questionable data. All this relies on the invention of
mendacious attributes, conferring on millions of diverse people implausible character flaws
or virtues. Karl Mannheim, the 20th-century sociologist known for explaining the uses of
generational units, would be rolling over in his grave.
Here is the hidden history of a perverse political discourse: It started with the
so-called boomers. As they aged toward peak midlife wages in the 1980s, they got saddled with
a reputation for being rich and greedy. The media concocted a lie that made it seem as if
they wouldn't ever need Social Security.
Bill Gates was born in 1955. That makes him what is commonly called a boomer. Rene Lavoie
was also born in 1955. The Globe recently recounted the problems that led this white Army vet
to spend time in Boston's homeless shelters. According to the principal investigator of a
recent study, Dennis Culhane, many people of Lavoie's age are indeed part of a boom -- "a
boom in aging homeless people." They were "less well educated people who faced economic
challenges in their youth -- falling wages and rising housing costs -- and never recovered
financially. ... Now in their 50s and 60s, they are biologically older than most people their
age. ... The average lifespan for a homeless person is 64."
Unlike Gates's co-billionaires in the .01 percent, 29 percent of people 55 and over have
nothing at all saved for retirement, according to the Government Accountability Office, and
many of the rest have little. Ageism in the workforce is one reason they lose a job and then
can't find an equally good one -- or find any work at all. Boomers are often treated as
"deadwood." Corporations drop them by the thousands. Even Xers are now old enough to be at
risk of having their resumes discarded. When people suffering from middle ageism stop looking
for work they are omitted from the unemployment data. At midlife, some submit to deaths of
despair.
Succeeding cohorts (all containing the same disparities -- of class, race, gender, and
education) have also been treated as if they were a single human with a character flaw.
During the 1990s recessions, when the so-called Xers couldn't find work, they too were
branded with a slur -- "slackers" -- while boomers were represented as the horde bullies who
held onto all the good jobs.
The baleful technique is still at work today. Given the same problem -- lack of decent
jobs for all ages, especially people without college degrees and people over 50 -- it's the
turn of the millennials. One of them complains about the stereotypes, defensively, in Vox:
"We demand participation trophies, can't find jobs, and live with our parents until we're
30." His response is to bash -- you guessed it -- the boomers, who "have a ton of maladaptive
personality characteristics."
In the Atlantic, pundits Niall Ferguson, from the Hoover Institution, and Eyck Freymann
defend millennials because their "early working lives were blighted by the financial crisis"
-- but ignore how home foreclosures, sluggish growth, and job losses also blighted people
around Ferguson's own age (55).
Millennials are supposed to be so ignorant and cruel that they would dismiss old people's
needs because of the boomers' alleged wealth. "Cutting old-age benefits for boomers would be
an easy call if millennials are anywhere on the line of fire," write the original concoctors
of the age-war distraction, Neil Howe and William Strauss, in their latest pandering assault,
"Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation."
We frequently hear that our elders' retirement needs will "break the bank" despite their
lifelong pay-ins. If Republicans manage to destroy the whole system of social trust, cutting
Social Security could indeed be one of the dire outcomes of the lies of generational warfare.
Otherwise, experts say, its financial failure is not remotely in the cards. For families it
has always been the most popular government program, because it provides a measure of
dignified independence for older people and a measure of relief for their adult children.
Younger people should support the expansion of Social Security for another reason, writes
one millennial who doesn't take the bait. Nick Guthman argues in The Hill that because of
student debt, "Millennials and Generation Z will need Social Security even more than our
parents and grandparents do."
The 2100 Act, now before Congress, would raise the cap on taxable-wage contributions.
Conservatives reject this easy fix, but it is overwhelmingly popular with the public.
Manipulating cohort characteristics damages far more than attitudes toward Social
Security, bad as the effect of that contrived skepticism could be. Blaming an older
generation that is already maligned allows many real perpetrators to smugly hide from their
irresponsibility. Will the climate movement find youngsters blaming the boomers for
ecological destruction, because some drove big cars? Wouldn't it be better to turn on the
CEOs of Exxon, who hid the dangers of burning fossil fuels that their scientists discovered
so thoroughly that few of us knew to stop flying?
Persistent precarity is indeed the historical issue that is obscured by these discourses.
The fact of American decline is this: Most people in each generation have had it worse than
their parents. According to a report on The State of Working America, the United States lags
behind its peer countries in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development)
in measurements of father-son mobility. In the United States, the "sons" have been receiving
stagnant wages, fewer benefits, jobs in the insecure gig economy. Many women too have lost
the progress narrative of rising expectations. That progress narrative, when upward mobility
was more widespread, supported the American Dream. It gave hope that democracy would work for
increasing numbers.
Don't blame your parents. Every article manipulating cohort stereotypes lets the
government and corporations off the hook for outsourcing abroad, the crash of rust-belt
industries, de-unionization, and the decades of cascading downward mobility we now endure.
You can't even want to get justice until you know the true sources of injustice.
How do imaginary reputations and hostile emotions get nailed onto struggling groups,
decade after decade, in this pernicious way? Naming each imagined age cohort makes it
possible. The process is called reification. Naming makes vague temporal proximity into a
thing.
Only the name baby boomers had an adequate demographic and historical reason to exist.
These millions were born (from 1946 to 1964) of the relative affluence that spread after
World War II. Their numbers did give them unifying experiences as they grew up -- made their
elders build new schools for them, made their working lives more competitive. Now they are
confronted by a president who, after promising not to, is cutting their security and health
care in devious ways.
But, even undergoing historical events together, age-peers don't build the same memories,
share the same beliefs, behave uniformly. During Vietnam, some young men were conscripted
into the war while others fought to end it. Stark differences likewise mark the current group
of young people (unimaginatively called "post-millennials"). Some of them are woke and ready
to take on racism, sexism, homophobia, gun control, global warming. At the same age,
neo-Nazis are setting fire to synagogues.
Once cohorts are reified by name, the labels become dog-whistles. Envy and fear can divide
a nation and abet destructive political changes. Malice can turn one generation against
another.
We could mitigate the divisiveness. Editors could stop soliciting age-war articles by
second-rate phrasemakers. We ordinary people need to defy the lies, and build
intergenerational bonds. Let us understand that capitalist and neoliberal choices have
worsened life, for decades, for every later, unequal subculture. And a comforting, unifying
cross-age coalition should eject politicians unwilling to maintain and repair our precious
communal institutions.
This is a classic catch 22 situation with this "oath" described below...
Also I think a lot of professors of neo-classical economics look like the member of Komsomol
described below ;-) For them it is about opening new opportunities for advancement not about the
truth and the level of corresponding to the reality of this pseudo-scientific neo-classical garbage, with the smoke screen of
mathematics as a lipstick on the pig (mathiness)
Most such people will teach students complete garbage understanding that this is a complete garbage with a smile.
Still, in in Soviet way it is possible for some to accept the position and work to undermine neo-classical economics acting within
the institution using Aesopian language in lectures and papers.
"... Consider an example from the contemporary United States. Today a number of private universities, colleges, and schools in several states require teachers and professors to take a "loyalty oath" to ensure that they do not "hold or foster undesirable political beliefs.... ..."
"... From a political standpoint she disagreed with the practice of taking loyalty oaths, and later, in her role as professor of the sociology of law, she voiced political positions counter to those mentioned in the oath and challenged the oath-taking practice itself. ..."
"... However, before she could do this, she first had to take the oath, understanding that without this act she would not be employed or recognized by the institution as a legitimate member with a voice authorized to participate in teaching, research, and the institution's politics (committees, meetings, elections, and so forth), including even the possibility to question publicly the practice of taking oaths. ..."
"... "The oath did not mean much if you took it, but it meant a lot if you didn't." ..."
"... However, "when a vote had to be taken, everyone roused -- a certain sensor clicked in the head: 'Who is in favor?' -- and you raised your hand automatically" (see a discussion of such ritualized practices within the Komsomol in chapter a). ..."
"... Participating in these acts reproduced oneself as a "normal" Soviet person within the system of relations, collectivities, and subject positions, with all the constraints and possibilities that position entailed, even including the possibility, after the meetings, to engage in interests, pursuits, and meanings that ran against those that were stated in the resolutions one had voted for. ..."
"... These acts are not about stating facts and describing opinions but about doing things and opening new possibilities. ..."
A general shift at the level of concrete ritualized forms of discourse, in which the
formal dimension's importance grows, while the
informal, substantiative dimension opens up to new meanings, can and does occur in different historical and
cultural contexts.
Consider an example from the contemporary United States. Today a number of private
universities, colleges, and schools in several states require teachers and professors to take a
"loyalty oath" to ensure that they do not "hold or foster undesirable political
beliefs....
While the statutes vary, [these institutions] generally deny the right to teach to those who
cannot or will not take the loyalty oath" (Chin and Rao 2003, 431 -32). Recently, a sociologist
of law took such a loyalty oath at a Midwestern university when her appointment as a professor
began.
From a political standpoint she disagreed with the practice of taking loyalty oaths, and
later, in her role as professor of the sociology of law, she voiced political positions counter
to those mentioned in the oath and challenged the oath-taking practice itself.
However, before
she could do this, she first had to take the oath, understanding that without this act she
would not be employed or recognized by the institution as a legitimate member with a voice
authorized to participate in teaching, research, and the institution's politics (committees,
meetings, elections, and so forth), including even the possibility to question publicly the
practice of taking oaths.
Here, the informal, substantiative dimension of the ritualized act experiences a shift, while the
formal dimension remains fixed and important: taking the oath opens a world of
possibilities where new informal, substantiative meanings become possible, including a professorial position
with a recognized political voice within the institution. In the sociologist's words, "The
oath did not mean much if you took it, but it meant a lot if you didn't." 3
^
This example illustrates the general principle of how some discursive acts or whole types of
discourse can drift historically in the direction of an increasingly expanding formal
dimension and increasingly open or even irrelevant informal, substantiative dimension. During Soviet late
socialism, the formal dimension of speech acts at formal gathering and rituals became
particularly important in most contexts and during most events.
One person who participated in large Komsomol meetings in the 1970s and 1980s described how
he often spent the meetings reading a book. However, "when a vote had to be taken, everyone
roused -- a certain sensor clicked in the head: 'Who is in favor?' -- and you raised your hand
automatically" (see a discussion of such ritualized practices within the Komsomol in chapter
a).
Here the emphasis on the formal dimension of organizational discourse was unique both
in scale and substance. Most ritualized acts of "organizational discourse" during this time
underwent such a transformation.
Participating in these acts reproduced oneself as a
"normal" Soviet person within the system of relations, collectivities, and subject positions,
with all the constraints and possibilities that position entailed, even including the
possibility, after the meetings, to engage in interests, pursuits, and meanings that ran
against those that were stated in the resolutions one had voted for.
It would obviously be wrong to see these acts of voting simply as informal, substantiative statements
about supporting the resolution that are either true (real support) or false (dissimulation of
support). These acts are not about stating facts and describing opinions but about doing
things and opening new possibilities.
When Students Melt Down Over a 'B'
Rampant grade anxiety is a reflection of deeper American social dysfunction, with our children the biggest
victims.
By
David Masciotra
•
September 17, 2019
By Marjan Apostolovic /Shutterstock
The library on campus of a small Catholic university in Illinois was largely empty. Since
the administrators had replaced most of the bookshelves with plush furniture, conference tables, and chairs, it better
resembled an airport terminal just before a redeye. A handful of students were staring intensely into computer screens,
while another pair talked loudly -- no more than 10 feet from the silent, visibly demoralized librarian -- about the rap song
that one of them had just played moments earlier. Not one student was near a book. There wasn't a single newspaper or
journal in sight. The university had canceled its subscriptions and removed the periodical section a few semesters
earlier.
I was making my way toward the front door when one of the students
from my Intro to Literature course stopped me, tears rolling down her cheeks, her body nearly convulsing as she
attempted to suppress her sobs. Because any human contact is potentially criminal, I ignored my impulse to offer a
consoling hand to the shoulder, and asked what was wrong. Expecting her to tell me about a personal tragedy -- perhaps the
terminal diagnosis of a loved one -- I almost began to weep myself when she said, "You gave me a 'B' on the paper."
Her crying made the harangue that followed difficult to fully comprehend, but it
seemed that she must maintain a certain GPA to remain in athletics. When I countered that a "B" is a good grade and that
she would have plenty of time to aspire towards an "A" on other assignments, she began pleading with me for
opportunities to "bring up the grade." I declined, and asked if some other, more personal factor was contributing to her
stress over a passing grade on one paper in a course entirely unrelated to her major. She insisted that there was not.
Helpless and baffled, I wished her well, offered her reassurance, and proceeded out of the library and into the parking
lot.
Fielding an existential meltdown, complete with a crying jag, is not part of my
professional training. Yet rarely does a semester go by without some kind of grade-related complaint, appeal for mercy,
and panic attack. When a student appears as if he has just undergone a life-altering trauma because he's realized he is
hanging over the edge of a "C," I think of my father, who at around the same age was in Vietnam. We all have our crosses
to bear, whether surviving guerrilla warfare or dealing with a professor who will not give extra credit.
Advertisement
"Grade anxiety," to use the more popular term, is not unique to my students or school
of employment. Studies from Penn State and reports from
Psychology Today
,
Boston University
, and many other
sources have confirmed that debilitating anxiety is now the leading mental health problem for college students. A quick
Google search of "grade anxiety" reveals endless pages of advice to students apoplectic about their exam scores, the
professors on the receiving end of their complaints and concerns, and the parents who cannot cope with anything other
than perfection.
In all fairness, contemporary college students, contrary to Baby Boomer sanctimony, do
have a tougher task than their predecessors. More of them work, often full-time, while completing their degree
requirements, and must shoulder heavy financial burdens to acquire their education -- which they understand they will
carry, in the form of student debt not dischargeable in bankruptcy, for the majority of their working lives.
Yet even acknowledging the peculiar injustice that exists in American higher
education, there is no avoiding the conclusion that 20-year-old adults obsessing and crying over their grades is not a
sign of societal health. It's a tornado siren blasting 100 yards away from a trailer park.
As tempting as it is to ridicule the students for their inability to put their lives
in mature perspective, it's more instructive to recognize that they are products of American families, institutions, and
culture. The overwhelming prevalence of severe grade anxiety indicts a society that is failing to strengthen children
into thoughtful and resilient adults. As Gore Vidal once quipped, "I've never met a boring six-year-old in America, and
I've never met an interesting 16-year-old."
Even before reaching the age of six, children are under the constant influence of
their families. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff document in their important book
The Coddling of the American Mind
how
"helicopter parenting" has weakened us all. Paranoid about safety, aggressively committed to their children's
achievement, parents aspire to protect their sons and daughters from all potential hardship, pushing them into closely
monitored extracurricular activities. They treat school work as an accountant treats an actuarial table. The wealthier
the parents, the more likely they are to enter their children into the vigilant competition of meritocracy. Some
families even send their kids to elite preschools, believing that failure to do so will keep them off the Ivy League
university trajectory.
The self-esteem movement has ensured that children will not only aspire to the
materialistic measurement of the "best," but believe that they are innately worthy of it. Hearing for their entire lives
that they are flawless specimens of Da Vinci-esque brilliance and creativity leaves them unprepared for even the mildest
form of criticism. One of the most common rebuttals to a low grade from a student is an indignant "I think I did a great
job," spoken as if the teacher should receive a pupil's opinion about his own work as a Catholic priest receives a papal
encyclical.
Since the move toward standardized testing as the ultimate metric for student and
school success, educational institutions in both rich and poor neighborhoods have relegated the learning experience to
high stakes exam preparation, indoctrinating children to believe that they can reduce the value of their intellectual
pursuits to a number on a results sheet. The testing model of education complements the American adult's inevitable
entrance into a consumer culture with a hierarchy of social status and purchasing power. The earning power of the
Kardashians or Waltons allows them to accrue more political influence and cultural value than the typical family in a
city without a "Real Housewives" franchise.
Too many conservatives insist on demoting education to nothing more than job training,
encouraging the prevalent anti-intellectualism in the United States with suspicion, or outright derision, towards the
"impractical" liberal arts. Liberals don't help matters by too often transforming the humanities into conduits of
leftist social theory, and before that making elementary and secondary schools too bureaucratic. Formulaic lesson plans
and mechanical approaches to pedagogy prevent teachers from developing fruitful bonds with their students, or adjusting
their class agendas according to student need and interest.
The
Atlantic
has run informative but also demoralizing reports on how elementary schools in Finland
allow children plenty of free time for play, while also encouraging them to indulge their curiosities in the classroom.
In the United States, organic and unrestrained learning is a privilege for children whose parents pay the high prices of
a Montessori school. An American kindergartener has an average of 30 minutes of homework per night.
One of my favorite assignments as a child, at the Lutheran elementary school I
attended from first through eighth grade, was the book report. Our teacher would walk us to the library and tell us to
pick any book, read it, and write a page on it. Depriving children of choice robs them of any joy they might associate
with learning. I now teach students in perpetual panic over their grades, and more times than not, the only questions I
receive after attempting to facilitate a discussion on a masterpiece of literature is "Will this be on the test?" or
"How long does the paper have to be?"
Standards of evaluation are necessary. But I often try to inculcate in my students the
knowledge that, in any walk of life and in comparison with the development of passions and the need to sharpen one's
ability to look at a complex world, grades are not that important.
This is a tough sell -- pun intended -- in a country that has so thoroughly degraded its
public vision of life to an endless quest for wealth and power. There is now a handy measurement of everything. Are you
successful? Check your bank account. Are you important? Check your social media followers. Are you attractive? Check the
likes on your latest profile picture.
Grades, with the weight of an institution behind them, act as a final judgment in the
minds of too many students. They equate A's not only with immediate academic success, but also the chance of having a
successful life. Anything less than the optimum might lead to unhappiness.
All lives have moments of failure, pain, and agony. Real adversity is not a "B" on a
paper, but your best friend in a coffin, your child's frightening medical condition, your injury that leads to a
permanent disability. Education at its best can bequeath what Albert Murray called "equipment for living."
Students who panic and cry over less than perfect grades demonstrate that America has
not given them equipment that is helpful and durable. America, in that respect, is worthy of an "F."
Amazing; I had no idea Betsy Voss – advocate of for-profit charter schools (privatizing
education) and The New Curriculum – and Eric Prince (advocate for privatizing war) are
brother and sister. Blood will tell.
Profiteering is naked and in the open now in the west, and public systems increasingly
favour the wealthy – if you want better, you should be ready to pay for it. I guess
that's what all those tax cuts were about – shifting a burden off of the wealthy, so
that now public services are pay-as-you-go because the government can't afford to provide
them for everyone. However, tax cuts also favoured the wealthy – gee, it almost makes
you think the class system is coming back, dunnit?
I recall Jeremy Scahill mentioning in his book on Blackwater (before it started changing its
name faster than you can change your socks) that Erik Prince was related to Betsy deVos. This
was long before Scahill turned his own name and reputation into mud when he walked out of a
London conference back in 2012 or 2013 because the Syrian nun Agnes Mariam de la Croix, who
was known to support President Assad at the time, was a guest speaker at the conference.
"... When the issues of poverty and inequality came up, a common neoliberal dodge was to invoke the Horatio Alger myth -- that in America, with hard work one can, or should be able to, raise oneself up by one' bootstraps. This switches the question from security ..."
"... As it happens, mobility has declined over the long term in the United States, but that aside, it's a two-way street. The escalator of life runs in both directions. Moreover, it's a separate issue from that of poverty or inequality. One can have more mobility and the same or worse poverty or inequality. The rising tide goes out as well as in. ..."
"... The neoliberal remedy for poverty and inequality is commonly held to be education, because workers lack the requisite skills to earn a living wage. It's kind of their fault. All that's needed is some reasonable public expenditure. No deeper structural factors are at issue. This mindset is contradicted now in two ways. ..."
When the issues of poverty and inequality came up, a common neoliberal dodge was to invoke
the Horatio Alger myth -- that in America, with hard work one can, or should be able to, raise
oneself up by one' bootstraps. This switches the question from security made possible by
the public sector to an individual responsibility for economic mobility.
As it happens, mobility has declined over the long term in the United States, but that
aside, it's a two-way street. The escalator of life runs in both directions. Moreover, it's a
separate issue from that of poverty or inequality. One can have more mobility and the same or
worse poverty or inequality. The rising tide goes out as well as in.
The neoliberal remedy for poverty and inequality is commonly held to be education, because
workers lack the requisite skills to earn a living wage. It's kind of their fault. All that's
needed is some reasonable public expenditure. No deeper structural factors are at issue. This
mindset is contradicted now in two ways.
First, the idea of education as an essential,
missing ingredient is being supplanted by the idea that what's at issue is power , both
political and economic . The wealthy control streams of income and institutions of
credentialization that could be rerouted, via taxation, to finance education ("free college") that has an equalizing effect on
wealth and enhances economic security..
Neoliberalism and Education
(To borrow a term often seen here at NC term – more evidence of "crapification")
In the new issue of the American Affairs Journal, the following article may be of interest
to those who tune into scholastic matters. Two quotes are posted here in case the paywall
obstructs.
1. "But the technology pushed into schools today is a threat to child development and an
unredeemable waste. In the first place, technology exacerbates the greatest problem of all in
schools: confusion about their purpose. Education is the cultivation of a person, not the
manufacture of a worker. But in many public school districts we have already traded our
collective birthright, the promise of human flourishing, for a mess of utilitarian pottage
called 'job skills.' The more recent, panicked, money-lobbing fetish for STEM is a late
realization that even those dim promises will go unmet [E]ducational technology is a
regressive political weapon, never just a neutral tool: it increases economic inequality,
decreases school accountability, takes control away from teachers, and makes poorer students
more vulnerable to threats from automation and globalization."
2. "Dumping gadgets on children is a win-win proposition in poor school districts. It's a
win for tech billionaires looking to buy progressive indulgences (e.g., Mark Zuckerberg
in Newark), and it's a win for local mayors wanting to gesture toward needy schools
without changing the underlying economic reality (e.g., Cory Booker in Newark, Pete
Buttigieg in South Bend) The meanest trick of all is when funds allocated to bring struggling
students "into the future" are used instead to banish them into the realm of for-profit
programs called "online charter schools," which consist mostly of children watching lecture
videos all day instead of being taught by a teacher. Online charter schools are a worsening
catastrophe. Compared to the performance of peers in traditional public schools with similar
income, race, gender, and first-language characteristics, the impact of online charter
attendance on student reading is so bad, it's like missing 72 days of school each year.
In math, being afflicted by an online charter school is like being absent for 180 days!"
This is a clear lack of up mobility. In other words American Dream is now a fake for all but
extremely talented or extremely lucky. .
Class Warfare
"6 findings that show the dire state of America's middle class" [
Business Insider ] (From May, still germane). "Nearly 60% of those who said they grew up
affluent now consider themselves to be in a lower class -- about half of this group said
they're middle-class or upper-middle-class, while the other half said they're poor or
working-class. Nearly 60% of those who said they had an upper-middle-class upbringing
identified with a lower class -- half of this group said they're middle-class, while the
remaining half said they're poor or working-class. And while half of those who said they grew
up in the middle class said they're still in it today, more than one-third identified with a
lower class. Only about 12% said they're now part of a higher class." • Lover
https://acdn.adnxs.com/ib/static/usersync/v3/async_usersync.html <img
src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=16807273&cv=2.0&cj=1" /> By
Natalia Abrams, the Executive Director of Student Debt Crisis, and Cody Hounanian, the Program
Director of Student Debt Crisis. Originally published at
openDemocracy
Student debt has been solely responsible for the majority of my decision-making as an
adult
(Erin – Portland, Maine)
The student debt crisis is not the burden of a single generation. It impacts Baby Boomers in
their 60s and 70s; Gen Xers in their 40s and 50s; Millennials in their 20s and 30s – as
well as Gen Z high school students still planning for college. Thus it's a grave mistake to
frame student loan debt as exclusively or even primarily a "Millennial problem." At the same
time, Millennials have borne the brunt of the astounding rise in college costs. They are the
first generation to experience a life shaped by the near-certainty of student debt.
Weighted for inflation, college costs (including tuition and fees) rose 81% between 2001 and
2009 – the decade when well over half of Millennials graduated high school.
Traditionally, when the price of a commodity rises rapidly, demand for that commodity drops.
Necessities like food and shelter are usually exempt from that general rule. However, college
has become one of those essentials, with the perceived cost of not attending growing at
least as fast as the actual costs themselves. As a result, student loans make the essential,
attainable.
Not everyone saddled with a tremendous debt burden ends up with a degree. Whether a borrower
receives a degree or not, few are in a position to rapidly repay their student loans. While a
college degree may or may not expand opportunities; as we're finding, student loan debt
absolutely shuts doors that might have otherwise remained open.
Lower Homeownership rates
Growing up I was told by my parents, teachers, and guidance counselors to go to college
because it would give me a better life. I graduated in 2013 with a Master's Degree in English
with the hopes of being a teacher myself. There are no teaching jobs in high schools or
colleges and I owe over $100,000 in student debt. I now work a job that doesn't even require
a degree, and was turned down for a mortgage because my debt to income ratio was too high.
Not a day goes by where I don't think about my debt
(Danielle – Roseville, California)
If homeownership is fundamental to the 'American dream', then student loan debt puts that
dream out of reach for millions of Americans. After years of growth, homeownership rates
noticeably declined in 2017. While partly due to factors unrelated to student debt (such as
rising housing prices , particularly in urban areas), the rate of Millennial homeownership
has fallen faster than that of the general population.
In a January 2019 study, the
Federal Reserve revealed the connection between lower homeownership rates and the
Millennial generation most burdened by student debt: "our estimates suggest that increases in
student loan debt are an important factor in explaining (young people's) lowered homeownership
rates." The study went on to conclude that "a little over 20 percent of the overall decline in
homeownership among the young can be attributed to the rise in student loan debt. This
represents over 400,000 young individuals who would have owned a home in 2014 had it not been
for the rise in debt."
While the Federal Reserve study focused on the decade between 2005-2014, a 2019 survey by
Bankrate
of nearly 4,000 American borrowers found that 31% of Millennial respondents postponed buying a
home because of student loan debt. By comparison, when the Baby Boomers were entering the
housing market 40 years ago, only 15% delayed a purchase because of student loan debt.
It's also worth noting that the real number of Millennials unable to purchase a home because
of student debt is likely much higher. While 31% of Millennial respondents reported that
student debt directly delayed homeownership, this figure only accounts for potential buyers who
still consider future homeownership a real possibility. Thus it does not reflect the unknown
number of those whose debt to income ratio is so high that they don't expect to ever afford a
home. As Forbes
noted in 2019, "no matter how many possible solutions are tossed around Washington and
beyond on reducing the crushing burden of student loan debt, it remains one of the top reasons
millennials are putting off buying a home."
Historically, home mortgages defined middle-class debt. Yet due to pre-existing debt,
student loan borrowers face difficulty qualifying for a mortgage. In tandem with rising housing
prices, and stringent mortgage qualification requirements adopted in the wake of the 2008
economic crisis, those with already exorbitant levels of student debt face a near-perfect storm
for obtaining a mortgage: placing a key component of the 'American dream' out of reach for
millions of young Americans.
A
2018 study by Summer and Student Debt Crisis found that 56% of respondents reported that
student loan debt made it more difficult to buy a home. That figure excludes those who consider
homeownership so unattainable that they have preemptively "given up." The same study notes that
58% of those surveyed experienced a decline in their credit score as a direct result of their
student debt. Credit scores, based on past payment habits as well as debt-to-income ratios, are
pivotal to mortgage qualification. Even borrowers who haven't yet considered buying a home are
keenly aware that their student-debt-burdened credit scores have put a mortgage out of
reach.
Fewer Marriages
I have put off having children, marrying, or purchasing a home due to the high costs of
student debt repayment. Regularly, I contemplate selling everything and living in my car to
help free up money to pay off the debt sooner.
(Melissa – Granbury, Texas)
Homeownership is not the only dream deferred, or abandoned altogether, because of crushing
student loan debt.
One theme in the stories we've collected – and in our studies – is that student
debt is an overwhelming factor in declining marriage and birth rates. Millennial borrowers like
Melissa, regularly told us that there were three central dreams that debt had put out of reach:
buying a home, getting married, and having children.
In 1990, 26% of adults under 65 were never married – by 2018, that number rose to 36%.
Today, only one in five adults are married before the age of 30 – and the average age of
first marriage has risen by more than six years since 1960. There are a host of factors that
have driven the marriage rate to record lows – and we do not suggest that student debt is
the sole (or even primary) driver of delayed marriage. Evolving and elevated expectations for
romantic partnership, economic shifts, greater equality for women and increased acceptance of
premarital sex all play critical roles in changing marriage habits. One cause of social
transformation however, doesn't negate the impact of another.
Student loan debt delays marriage in several ways. One way is through a sheer
misunderstanding of the law regarding debt. Several borrowers told us they were reluctant to
marry and "make my spouse responsible for my debt." Though the laws concerning spousal
responsibility vary by state, the fears of saddling a partner with one's debts are not
unfounded. Similarly, if a spouse with pre-existing debt returns to school after marriage, both
the debt incurred before and during marriage gets lumped together as a shared liability.
Practically, the legal responsibility for the liability is a nominal matter. Most couples
cannot simply isolate one partner's debt. The money spent each month on student loans could be
collectively used for other essentials, like rent, car repairs, or childcare.
A study
released in June 2019 by the think-tank Demos showed that those who start college after age
twenty (or go back to college following a break) have a particularly hard time paying off
loans. Twelve years after leaving school, the average borrower (who started college after the
age of twenty) will have paid off only 5% of their student debt. If a borrower is
determined not to bring their student debt into a marriage, research suggest that they will
have to wait a very long before they wed.
Media coverage tends to ignore that finances, rather than changing social mores, are the
primary driver of diminishing marriage rates. For every young person who "never wants to
marry", statistics suggest there are far more who would like to wed someday but can't imagine
ever being able to afford to do so. A
Pew Organization study in 2017 found that nearly six out of ten unmarried American adults
hope to marry someday. That same report noted that unmarried Millennials cited "not being
financially stable" as one of the chief reasons why they haven't yet wed. 41% of those
unmarried cited financial instability as a primary reason for remaining single, while 28%
described it as a "secondary" reason. (By comparison, only 24% of young adults named "not being
ready to settle down" as the primary explanation for not being married.)
The research is clear: the primary reason why Americans delay wedlock, or forego it
altogether, is financial insecurity. Debt is reshaping our most intimate relationships, putting
a profound source of happiness further and further out of reach.
Falling Birthrates
My wife and I have been married 3 years and she desperately wants kids. But paying out
$350 a month to pay off my 45k in loans has shattered our dreams of family. We both work but
it's not enough. I've paid my loans since 2004 and I'm not getting ahead.
(James – Kansas City, Missouri)
With less homeownership, along with fewer marriages – it's hardly surprising that the
most debt-laden generation in history is also having far fewer babies than their parents and
grandparents. Millennials are on track to have a lower birth rate than any generation in
American history. In 2018, the overall birth rate in the United States fell to 59 births per
1000 women, the lowest on record and a 2% drop from the previous year.
The birth rate has fallen steadily since the start of the Great Recession in 2008. Yet even
after the recovery, the birth-rate continued to decline.
There's a disagreement as to whether the birthrate decline can be attributed to women
wanting fewer babies (or wanting them later), versus women being unable to afford children. Yet
the survey data is fairly compelling: most young people have had (or expect to have) fewer
children than they consider ideal. In a
2018 New York Times/Morning Consult survey , four of the top five reasons respondents cited
for not having as many children as they wanted focused on financial concerns:
Child care
is too expensive (64% of respondents)Want more time for the children I have (54%)Worried about the economy (49%)Can't afford more children (44%)Waited
because of financial instability (43%)
Furthermore, a 2015 study by the National Institutes of
Health examined the impact of debt on the decision to have children. The results were
stunning. While mortgage holders were more likely than renters to have children, and
credit-card debt had no impact among debtors, the study found that "holding student loans more
significantly affects fertility at higher levels of indebtedness." Low levels of student loan
debt reduced fertility only slightly; high levels of student debt sharply reduced the chances
of having a baby.
Every generation reassesses priorities. Some pundits look at the lives of Millennials and
conclude that they're simply less interested in homeownership, simply more suspicious of
enduring monogamy, simply less interested in having children. The evidence shows that's a false
narrative.
The research in fact reveals that a high percentage of Millennials want homeownership,
marriage, and children. The chief obstacle is not the timeless problem of finding the right
person, but financial insecurity. Student loan debt is a central driver behind this precarity
– affecting the fundamental milestones of our lives.
I hear the phrase "student loan forgiveness " quite often these days. "Forgiveness" for
being a victim of financial predators and a failed leadership class? No, that's not
forgiveness. That's justice. Forgiveness comes from the victims, not the perpetrators.
Personally, I'm not forgiving anybody involved. Politicians, schools, the "financial
industry", etc. These are the folks that should be begging for forgiveness from the
borrowers, not the other way around. These policies have destroyed lives. They then try to
frame any corrective action as doing the victims a favor, "forgiveness", rescuing the
borrowers from their own failures and poor choices. Right. This is basically a war on the
poor. I wonder if it isn't a way to curb greenhouse emissions without inconveniencing the
wealthy.
Excellent comment -- thank you! Let us never let our fellow Americans forget Joe Biden's
central role in killing bankruptcy protection for student debtors.
I also think your final point is very important, as I am increasingly convinced that
"environmental footprint reduction" is likely to be used as a pretext for further austerity
for the working class. Environmentalism has always been a mostly elite and middle class
phenomena, and working class interests are often unmindfully ignored or disregarded. In fact,
I don't think it's unduly paranoid to anticipate ostensibly radical environmentalists
(Extinction Rebellion and the like) being used as cat's paws to extend Overclass policies of
extraction and control.
It's already happened in France – the Gilets Jaunes movement was a direct result of
the radical neoliberal Macron government putting higher taxes on diesel – a regressive
tax on the poor and rural working class.
No, penury and exploitation as a result of educational debt is not a way to cut greenhouse
gas emissions without inconveniencing the wealthy. It's just another example of Americans
being suckered by their own delusions and ignorance, just another example of wealthy
Americans, many of whom are rich without being educated, ripping off poorer Americans, many
of whom ernestly believe that going into long-term crippling debt in order to pay for a
college degree is a good way to get up and out of living from week to week with maxed out
credit cards.
The typical American university/college student has drunk the kool-aid. She believes that
higher education is a personal choice, freely made, to invest in earning potential. The
possibility that this is not necessarily the case apparently does not occur to her. She
genuinely believes, or sometimes she is compelled to believe, that it makes sense to take on
for example 100k in educational debt because the degree that should follow will allow her to
earn a hopefully large multiple of that number. Such students and their parents are
apparently blind to the fact that a country that struggles to defend a primitive form of
democracy is doomed to dystopic horrors without an educated population. Education, including
higher education, is not a personal choice alone – much more it is a national mission
that compels the government to provide instruction to qualified candidates at a minimal cost
to candidates. This is a not a utopian vision – this is reality in democracies that are
not as primitive as the American.
The attempt to associate the diesel tax with French educational policy needs
clarification: The French have free public higher education. Their free public higher
education consists of institutions that are selective, some highly selective, as well as
institutions that are not selective. The selective institutions are intended to provide a
nominally meritocratic elite-building function at the service of both public and private
beneficieries. Public transport infrasturcture is weak in the country, and the Gilets Jaunes
(GJ) argue that that's becasue administrators and mangers, many of whom are graduates of
tuition-free elite universities, have not only failed to improve it: they threw salt in GJ
wounds by attempting to impose a diesel tax. Though for many the tax is a tax-deductable
expense, there are enough economically non-rural residents of rural areas in France to make
the salt really sting. The GJ should more aggressively criticize the meritocratic fallacy of
(highly) selective public institutions and bring attention to the phenomenon of economically
non-rural residents of rural areas. They are relatively heavy polluters (lots of driving,
single-family homes). I wonder if public transport infrastructure in rural areas could be
expanded or if economically non-rural residents of rural areas could be compelled to live in
less isolation.
The most repressive and draconian indebtedness has been thrust upon the youth of America
by its government. I say 'youth' because many of those suffering under this burden were young
once but have struggled long enough to be middle aged and even beyond in the search for a
quality education, not only so they could have a good job but also in order to develop their
minds. This was not a foolish pursuit – – until it was.
Something has to be done about this. And if it has to be done, it will be done, to
paraphrase what Professor Hudson has said: if a debt can't be paid it won't be paid. And also
lest we forget, these neoliberal shenanigans came about as financiers figured they could
layer everything into juicy offerings for the players on Wall Street. Tranches or trenches as
with mortgages – you know, like layers of filo dough with yummy stuff sandwiched in
between. (Hah, my spellcheck doesn't like the word 'neoliberal'. Phooey on you, spellcheck;
it's a word!)
Hasn't been thrust upon the youth of America by its government – the student debt
crisis is a result of predatory financial interests consorting with ignorant, anti-government
ideologues to corrupt the wise support of state and federal governments for public education.
Private non-profit as well as private for-profit "educators" have lobbied lobbied lobbied for
example to expand government lending facilities for students while doing little to regulate
the "institutions" that were convincing candidates to use the facilities to borrow funds to
pay for the questionable degrees that the "institutions" were awarding. There should have
been a major cultural effort to convince Americans that we need public education including
virtually free higher education and to contradict the delusion that an investment in higher
education was essentially an investment in earning potential. Free public education including
effectively free public higher education is essential for the success of democracy. Sadly
many Americans have forgotten a fundamental aspect of the American Way of Life.
Brother in law couldn't make the payments, went underground and worked for cash, then
ultimately committed suicide in his 50's. Not saying he wasn't unstable to begin with, but
will say that having a mountain of debt he was never going to be able to get out from under
certainly was a major factor.
With an 81% increase adjusted for inflation in under a decade, why aren't schools being
penalized? Why not stop writing any and all loans for those schools?
That's an excellent point. I had burdensome student loans and eventually paid them off,
but I support student loan forgiveness. However, from a political standpoint, I understand
why some people are angry about the concept. They think they were smart and chose not to go
to college because of the financial danger, and if loans are forgiven, they're being
"punished" in the housing and job market for being "responsible."
Your "justice" framing could address both of these interest groups. Instead of just
looking at the student loans alone, we'd consider all the ways in which the loans and the
degrees have influenced people's lives. Maybe everyone could have access to "educational
credit," which could be used to directly pay off existing loans, allow people to enroll in a
degree program now, or be credited towards a new or existing mortgage. The program becomes a
universal benefit, and depending upon one's situation, the money could be used in different,
socially beneficial ways.
The main point is I like the "justice" framing, and it should be used to create a program
that benefits everyone. Then the messaging is more about rectifying a dysfunctional system,
then bailing out irresponsible spendthrifts (I don't believe this is true, but that is how
loan forgiveness is framed).
How about the government takes over all consumer debt and charges only the Fed rate in
interest? And writes down any amount considered unpayable? Would anyone not connected to the
financial industry be opposed?
The arguments against student loan forgiveness on the basis of "I paid mine off, why can't
you?" are short-sighted and ultimately injure the person making them.
Everyone is harmed by the toxic environment of debt that we're living in -- even those of
us who never had student loans and those of you who paid them off. We are all suffering under
a regime that has paralyzed people economically. The act of debt cancellation, as those whose
incomes were locked up now get a little piece of it back to spend on other things, would have
a stimulative effect on the economy.
I work with a lady who's only child entered college last year, and was exposed at work to
her discussions with her daughter over the phone and with co workers what is on the list she
choose for her student loans. Things like room and board/rent, etc. This lady has a killer
personality that works smashingly well in corporate offices – only positive things may
be talked about and she juggles her aging, ailing mom, her daughter off to college, and work
quite well.
It wasn't my place to offer advice, but I got a bad feeling listening to the load up of
student loan debt. Then I overhead her advice to her mother regarding what package from
Comcast to get. She recommended the package for seniors with insurance that protects seniors
from phishing and that sort of thing. I don't recall the fee, but she also has insurance for
her smart phone screen.
The $$$ signs of how I could manager their budget and save them some money where dancing
in my head.
I guess they call that being a Financial Advisor today. It used to be called common
sense.
When I was with my former, much younger partner, I told him he would live free with me on
condition he cut back his 60+hrs/week working at multiple Dunkin Donuts and go to school,
take NO school debt and pay everything with his paycheck. He did, and got tax credits on top
of that. He choose medical billing and coding at a school that has since gone bankrupt. But
it got him in the door. He is now supervisor in the billing department at Boston Children's
Hospital and they told him they are sending him to management training at their expense.
He too has a killer personality. Perfect for Facebook where only positive things are said.
He will do well but I worry he will later be not so well off because he doesn't save, he
spends everything he has.
My first year at University of Chicago undergrad was $4,000. Second year $5,000. Then I
moved to Boston and my employer paid most of my school expense while I finished up at
Northeastern University. Peanuts compared to today.
I would never pay for College education at todays prices. I'd take that same money and buy
a house.
And I say that as someone who just dropped a smartphone face-down on a hardwood floor.
I'm here to say that my screen protector, which cost something like 30 bucks, did its job.
It took one for the Arizona Slim team and cracked in several places. The screen was intact.
Hooray!
However, the replacement protector doesn't stick, so back to the phone repair shop I go.
While I'm there, I think I'll strike up a conversation about the right to repair. Hey, I
might just be able to turn another person on to Naked Capitalism.
I'd say that a robust course in home economics would be valuable in public schools. But
I'm guessing our owners would heavily attack that effort.
Fact is, if you want to have any professional career, an education is mandatory. I don't
want my nurse practitioner or doctor to be the likes of the Trump children simply because
they're the only ones who will be able to afford the education, same as all economics,
political science, law etc. workers to only be the ones who can afford it. Sort of insures
that our future leaders won't have any clue whatsoever about the lives of the 90% they'll be
claiming to support. A crappy situation made even worse.
The author claims that college costs (that term is not defined) rose 80% from 2001 to
2009. That is far higher than any figure I have seen. According to National Center for Education
Satistics, the figure for tuition+fees is closer to 30% which is still outrageous. If the
descrepancy means that aid is being cut back more or non-tuition/fee costs are increasing
faster, that would be good to know. Defenders of high prices claim that aid is increasing (I
doubt that but do not have figures).
Good discussion topic. Permit me to share a little tale from the Arizona Slim file:
As mentioned here before, I am learning the Russian language. After completing all 30
lessons in Mark Thompson's "Russian Made Easy" video series on YouTube, I decided that it was
time for some classroom training.
So, off to look at the University of Arizona website. I couldn't easily find any
information about enrolling as a non-degree student, so I sent an email to the department
where I'd be taking an intro Russian class.
Reply: In order to become a UA non-degree student, I would have to complete an online
application. And pay a $45 application fee.
Nyet.
Instead of paying the UA 45 bucks just to apply, I could spend that same money on a
vocabulary builder course, which is taught by a native Russian speaker. From her home in
Moscow, she has built a global business as a language teacher. So, look out, Real Russian
Club, here I come. Link:
Arizona Slim, take a look at the free Russian language courses on Coursera.org. I've taken
excellent Italian courses on EdX, but Coursera looks better now for conversational Russian.
(EdX has a couple of classes on Russian for scientific work.) With foreign languages, the
more practice and exposure, the better, so maybe Coursera could be useful in addition to your
vocabulary builder course.
I was wondering about the kids and parents who pay full freight for college. Can that cost
ever be recouped? Even for top colleges? For instance, financial aid at Harvard maxes out at
$110K in household income. So a high income family will have to pay full sticker price every
year. Tuition and living expenses could be $70K per year or more. So a four year education
could cost $280K to $350K. It's like buying a house in many parts of the country without
buying a house. Yet the median salary for a Harvard graduate is $90K ten years after entering
school (six years after graduation). If college costs are paid back in ten years, the college
graduate will have to pay back $30K every year, on top of everything else. Not much left for
savings, retirement, or a house. Even for Harvard College graduates.
I love these articles. At no point is it ever questioned or addressed why cost of college
has gone exponential relative to the real economy (taking out real estate and healthcare)
since the late 1970s,
It is because "financial aid", especially loans, spends the same as cash. The colleges
will charge what the market will bear, Econ 101,taking account the new money those loans
bring into the picture, driving up the price. Colleges have no skin in the game for repayment
/ default of loans.
Sorry, but I am cool with the whole system collapsing into itself and my bank account
sitting this one out.
Please spare me the club med, lazy river, climbing wall stories. FULL DISCLOSURE: I went
to Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, a garden spot of the city between 31st and
35th and State Street off the Dan Ryan Expressway in the late 70s. The place is a bigger dump
now when I went there, full salute to the Mies Van Der Rohe flat roof glass shoe boxes and
the post WWII housing project-like dorms.
A friend invited me to lunch at the cafeteria in the university dorm building. Lunch was
$11 50, but all-you-can-eat with a gourmet style, nice China tableware. I had pizza,
hamburger , pasta al fredo, pudding, cookies, salad, soft drinks. Great opportunity to gain
weight & spend $$$!
well also probably due to both the decimation of the non-college job market, and
credential inflation (a degree now being required for jobs it didn't use to be). of course
college grads are now overproduced relative to demand as well.
Here's an educational experiance one can endeavor : Enter your local thrift/antique
establishment/yard sale/dump, etc. and pick an item – any item .. and figure out how to
rebuild/repair/make serviceable said item. Presto ! THERE'S your future, waiting in the wings
of regression !
Not a bad place to be actually .. beats high penury, no ?
My paleo-conservative dad likes to point out that student loans existed before the
government started backing them. He took out a very large loan in 1950 to attend MIT in got
his Masters there, PhD at SUNY Buffalo in 1970. He paid it off in 1985. Back then lending
standards were based on reality and job market projections. When I went to school, all you
had to do was fog a mirror Then in the 1990s prices started doubling and tripling, etcetc .
Answer is to ban the government from backing loans, full stop.
I have a bunch of hoops to jump through for that!
Here's what my hoops look like:
One of them cancels $50,000 in student loan debt for every person with household income under
$100,000.
Another hoop provides substantial debt cancellation for every person with household income
between $100,000 and $250,000. The $50,000 cancellation amount phases out by $1 for every $3
in income above $100,000, so, for example, a person with household income of $130,000 gets
$40,000 in cancellation, while a person with household income of $160,000 gets $30,000 in
cancellation. Pick you hoop!
I also have a non-hoop, hoop that offers no debt cancellation to people with household income
above $250,000 (the top 5%).
For most Americans, cancellation will take place automatically using data already available
to the federal government about income and outstanding student loan debt.
We also have a moving hoop private student loan debt is also eligible for cancellation, and
the federal government will work with borrowers and the holders of this debt to provide
relief.
And our final hoop. Canceled debt will not be taxed as income.
E. Warren (the Hoop Queen)
Well unless full room and board is paid for, that's how it ends up being though? I mean
free tuition is simply not going to solve this, because how to pay for a roof over one's head
while going to school?
1) live at the parents home and go to a nearby school, sure a bit infantalizing 2) get the
bank of mom and dad to foot the dorm costs again mom and dad paying 3) take out debt for
living expenses.
Haha, no you usually can't afford housing on or off campus (renting a room) with some low
wage job!!! And if you had the capacity to get a well paying job without a degree (or other
training) you might not be pursuing one anyway. Since a large number of students are homeless
(actually true here, shocking numbers), I guess that's also an option.
I'm surprised, this being NC, that no one has mentioned this yet – student debt is a
modern form of indentured servitude.
While it does not directly tie the indebted (former) student to a single employer, it
provides potential employers with leverage in regard to wages & working conditions. Quite
simply, someone with a large debt hanging over their head is more likely to accept a job with
lower pay, fewer raises and/or benefits than some someone who is debt-free and therefore can
afford to be more picky, more demanding to be paid & treated decently.
Get 'em in more debt at an earlier age so they will be more docile and accepting of
neoliberal crapification.
At the same time it has become vastly more expensive a college degree has also become
watered down and of less value. That is the true injustice. Many jobs that once required only
a high school education now require a college degree. This is not because the job
requirements have changed. This is due to the simple fact that many more people possess
college diplomas, so employers now demand them for a greater number of occupations. However,
the pay for these occupations has not risen to be commensurate with the additional costs
incurred to gain the newly required credentials. Now these holders of costly credentials find
themselves in a real bind. The author of this article offered no solutions.
"... As Curtis notes, full-time salaries are only one part of the faculty salary picture. Curtis' own research for the AAUP (published as an appendix to my Equality for Contingent Faculty documents that only twenty-five percent of professors now teach on the tenure-track, and only sixteen percent have tenure. Seventy-five percent of all college professors, one million in total, teach off the tenure-track, with fifty percent of all professors teaching part-time. ..."
"... While "free trade" agreements encouraged the closing of American factories and the loss of millions of American jobs, colleges and universities instituted their own brand of wage theft called by adjunct Ron Swift "inside-outsourcing." Even though the number of students was increasing, the colleges staunched the number of well-paid, secure, full-time tenure-track positions. They met rising enrollments by staffing classrooms with "contingent" faculty who teach off the tenure-track without the protections for free speech afforded their tenured brothers and sisters. ..."
"... The colleges save money by refusing to pay these contingent professors a living wage, in flagrant violation of the principle of equal pay for equal work. They are paid on a completely separate and lower pay scale than their full-time counterparts are paid for teaching the very same courses; they are paid on average only about fifty percent of what a full-timer would earn for teaching the same number of courses. See my " The Wal-Martization of Higher Education: How Young Professors Are Getting Screwed "). ..."
"... In " The Ph.D. Now Comes with Food Stamps ," the Chronicle of Higher Education has documented hundreds of thousands of people with graduate degrees receiving some form of public assistance, many of them contingent faculty. ..."
So are the Democrats right to try and solve the equality problem
by making college more affordable, with tuition perhaps free? Or are these proposals simply the
current version of the Herbert Hoover's 1928 Presidential campaign where he literally offered
voters "
A chicken for every pot."
But before we go spending trillions of dollars on college tuition and eliminating student
debt, shouldn't we ask: What has been driving up the cost of attending college over the past
few decades leading to the current lack of affordable college options?
In his run for re-election as Vice President in 2012, Joe Biden made clear that he blamed
college professors' high salaries for the skyrocketing costs of tuition. This was an
astonishing charge, especially given that his wife has long been a college professor. He was
immediately admonished by faculty groups around the country. "
Faculty Groups Try to Educate Biden on Salaries ".
John Curtis, former Director of Research for the American Association of University
Professors, wrote a rebuttal to Biden on January 18, 2012. He took issue with Biden's claim,
pointing out that full-time faculty salaries have been stagnant for a number of years. He noted
that tuition rates, in contrast, had risen "between three and fourteen times as fast as
full-time faculty salaries." (underlining added)
As Curtis notes, full-time salaries are only one part of the faculty salary picture. Curtis'
own research for the AAUP (published as an appendix to my Equality for
Contingent Faculty documents that only twenty-five percent of professors now teach on
the tenure-track, and only sixteen percent have tenure. Seventy-five percent of all college
professors, one million in total, teach off the tenure-track, with fifty percent of all
professors teaching part-time.
While "free trade" agreements encouraged the closing of American factories and the loss of
millions of American jobs, colleges and universities instituted their own brand of wage theft
called by adjunct Ron Swift "inside-outsourcing." Even though the number of students was
increasing, the colleges staunched the number of well-paid, secure, full-time tenure-track
positions. They met rising enrollments by staffing classrooms with "contingent" faculty who
teach off the tenure-track without the protections for free speech afforded their tenured
brothers and sisters.
The colleges save money by refusing to pay these contingent professors a living wage, in
flagrant violation of the principle of equal pay for equal work. They are paid on a completely
separate and lower pay scale than their full-time counterparts are paid for teaching the very
same courses; they are paid on average only about fifty percent of what a full-timer would earn
for teaching the same number of courses. See my "
The Wal-Martization of Higher Education: How Young Professors Are Getting Screwed ").
In other words, though women are still paid only 82% percent of what men earn for doing the
same work, with black men earning only 73% and Hispanics only 69%, most adjunct professors are
paid at most 50% of what tenure-track faculty earn for teaching the same course.
Though possessing Master's and Doctorates and tens of thousands of dollars in student loans,
these college professors are not being paid for all of the hours they work outside of class
preparing lectures, grading tests, and meeting with students. They often do not even have
offices. Their work schedule is capped below full-time so they will not qualify for tenure.
Their work varies from quarter to quarter and they are often denied unemployment when they are
in fact unemployed. The adjuncts and other contingent professors usually do not have any health
insurance or retirement benefits
In " The Ph.D. Now Comes with
Food Stamps ," the Chronicle of Higher Education has documented hundreds of
thousands of people with graduate degrees receiving some form of public assistance, many of
them contingent faculty.
The treatment between the two tiers is so disparate that I have called it "faculty
apartheid" because the tenure-track few control and dominate the contingent many. Indeed, the
tenured faculty often serve as the direct supervisors of the contingents. I have called the
kind of discrimination that exists in higher education "tenurism," the baseless but widespread
stereotype that the tenured faculty are superior and warrant higher pay and better treatment
and than the non-tenure-track faculty. (see my " Against Tenurism ").
In an interview with Shankar Vedantam on the NPR show "The Hidden Brain," Raj Chetty, a
Harvard economist who has done research on inequality in education, says the best solution is
to have "the best teachers in American classrooms."
But we are far from that solution, with the majority of the U.S. higher education teaching
force earning much less than the vaunted $15 an hour minimum wage recommended by nearly all of
the Democratic candidates. These contingent faculty are "apprentices to nowhere" with little
realistic hope of escaping the academic ghetto as the contingents far outnumber the dwindling
number of tenure-track professors.
But don't' the Democrats have a tight relation with the faculty unions (American Association
of University Professors, American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education
Association)? Yes, they do. But the unions themselves have collectively bargained the
contingents into poverty and income insecurity. The two-tier system exists within the unions
too, which have long been run by and for the tenure-track faculty; these unions clearly have
not apprised the Democrats of these inequalities, let alone insist they solve them.
Will the Democrats insist that these unions, upon whom they are so dependent for money and
campaign workers, treat all of their members equally? Or will they continue to look the other
way in order to keep union money flowing into their campaign coffers.
Will the Democrats insist that these colleges, upon whom they wish to build an equal
society, treat their professors equally and offer them the same opportunities for a better life
that they are offering their students?
If politicians are going to solve a problem, they must first have a clear diagnosis before
offering a treatment. Before the Democrats spend tax money on free tuition and paying off
student loans, they need to acknowledge the income disparity among the professoriate and make
solving it an equal priority.
"... When administrators make budget cuts, it isn't for recreational facilities and their own salaries -- it's the classics and history departments, and it's to faculty, with poorly paid part-time adjuncts teaching an unconscionable share of courses. ..."
"... So universities have been exacerbating the same unequal division between the people who actually do the work (faculty) and the people who allocate salaries (administrators) -- so too as in the business world, as you say. ..."
I don't think that's entirely accurate, and even if true, leaving students to the
predations of private lenders isn't the answer. Although I'm willing to entertain your
thesis, soaring tuition has also been the way to make up for the underfunding of state
universities by state legislatures.
At the same time, there's been an increase since the 70s in de luxe facilities and bloated
administrator salaries. When administrators make budget cuts, it isn't for recreational
facilities and their own salaries -- it's the classics and history departments, and it's to
faculty, with poorly paid part-time adjuncts teaching an unconscionable share of
courses.
So universities have been exacerbating the same unequal division between the people
who actually do the work (faculty) and the people who allocate salaries (administrators) --
so too as in the business world, as you say.
Schools are teaching to the test. As someone who recently retrained as a secondary science
teacher - after nearly 30 years as a journalist - I know this to be true.
Education is a prime example of where neoliberalism has had a negative effect. It worked well
when labour was pumping billions into it and they invested in early intervention schemes such
as sure start and nursery expansion. Unfortunately under the tories we have had those
progressive policies scaled right back. Children with SEND and/or in care are commodities
bought and sold by local authorities. I've been working in a PRU which is a private company
and it does good things, but I can't help but think if that was in the public sector that it
would be in a purpose built building rather than some scruffy office with no playground.
The facilities aren't what you would expect in this day in age. If we had a proper
functioning government with a plan then what happens with vulnerable children would be
properly organised rather than a reactive shit show.
"Schools teach to the test, depriving children of a rounded and useful education."
Boy do they. I work in Business/IT training and as the years have rolled on I and every
colleague I can think of have noticed more and more people coming to courses that they are
unfit for. Not because they are stupid, but because they have been taught to be stupid. So
used to being taught to the test that they are afraid to ask questions. Increasingly I get
asked "what's the right way to do...", usually referring to situation in which there is no
right way, just a right way for your business, at a specific point in time.
I had the great pleasure of watching our new MD describe his first customer-facing project,
which was a disaster, but they "learned" from it. I had to point out to him that I teach the
two disciplines involved - businesss analysis and project management - and if he or his team
had attended any of the courses - all of which are free to them - they would have learned
about the issues they would face, because (astonishingly) they are well-known.
I fear that these incurious adult children are at the bottom of Brexit, Trump and many of the
other ills that afflict us. Learning how to do things is difficult and sometimes boring. Much
better to wander in with zero idea of what has already been done and repeat the mistakes of
the past. I see the future as a treadmill where the same mistakes are made repetitively and
greeted with as much surprise as if they had never happened before. We have always been at
war with Eastasia...
The term Casializatin was repced by more correct term "neoliberalization" for clarity.
Notable quotes:
"... Neoliberalization, a word that says much in, and of, itself, is seen as analogue of broader outsourcing initiatives. Militaries do it, governments do it, and the university does it. Services long held to be the domain of the state, itself an animation of the social contract, the spirit of the people, have now become the incentive of the corporate mind, and, it follows, its associated vices. The entire scope of what has come to be known as outsourcing is itself a creature of propaganda, cheered on as an opportunity drawing benefits rather than an ill encouraging a brutish, tenuous life. ..."
"... Practitioners and policy makers within the education industry have become devotees of the amoral dictates of supply and demand, underpinned by an insatiable management class. Central to their program of university mismanagement is the neoliberal academic, a creature both embraced and maligned in the tertiary sectors of the globe. ..."
"... The neoliberal academic is meant to be an underpaid miracle worker, whose divining acts rescue often lax academics from discharging their duties. (These duties are outlined in that deceptive and unreliable document known as a "workplan", as tedious as it is fictional.) The neoliberal academic grades papers, lectures, tutors and coordinates subjects. The neoliberal provides cover, a shield, and an excuse for a certain class of academic manager who prefers the calling of pretence to the realities of work. ..."
"... Often, these neoliberal academics are students undertaking a postgraduate degree and subject to inordinate degrees of stress in an environment of perennial uncertainty. ..."
"... A representative sample of PhD students studying in Flanders, Belgium found that one in two experienced psychological distress, with one in three at risk of a common psychiatric disorder. Mental health problems tended to be higher in PhD students "than in the highly educated general population, highly education employees and higher education students." ..."
"... Neoliberalization can be seen alongside a host of other ills. If the instructor is disposable and vulnerable, then so are the manifestations of learning. Libraries and research collections, for instance, are being regarded as deadening, inanimate burdens on the modern, vibrant university environment. Some institutions make a regular habit of culling their supply of texts and references: we are all e-people now, bound to prefer screens to paper, the bleary-eyed session of online engagement to the tactile session with a book. ..."
Any sentient being should be offended. Eventually,
the Neoliberalization of the academic workforce was bound to find lazy enthusiasts who neither
teach, nor understand the value of a tenured position dedicated to that musty,
soon-to-be-forgotten vocation of the pedagogue. It shows in the designs of certain universities
who confuse frothy trendiness with tangible depth: the pedagogue banished from the podium, with
rooms lacking a centre, or a focal point for the instructor. Not chic, not cool, we are told,
often by learning and teaching committees that perform neither task. Keep it modern; do not
sound too bright and hide the learning: we are all equal in the classroom, inspiringly even and
scrubbed of knowledge. The result is what was always to be expected: profound laziness on the
part of instructors and students, dedicated mediocrity, and a rejection of all things
intellectually taxing.
Neoliberalization, a word that says much in, and of, itself, is seen as analogue of broader
outsourcing initiatives. Militaries do it, governments do it, and the university does it.
Services long held to be the domain of the state, itself an animation of the social contract,
the spirit of the people, have now become the incentive of the corporate mind, and, it follows,
its associated vices. The entire scope of what has come to be known as outsourcing is itself a
creature of propaganda, cheered on as an opportunity drawing benefits rather than an ill
encouraging a brutish, tenuous life.
One such text is Douglas Brown and Scott Wilson's The
Black Book of Outsourcing . Plaudits for it resemble worshippers at a shrine planning
kisses upon icons and holy relics. "Brown & Wilson deliver on the best, most innovative,
new practices all aimed at helping one and all survive, manage and lead in this new economy,"
praises
Joann Martin, Vice President of Pitney Bowes Management Services. Brown and Wilson take aim at
a fundamental "myth": that "Outsourcing is bad for America." They cite work sponsored by the
Information Technology Association of America (of course) that "the practice of outsourcing is
good for the US economy and its workers."
Practitioners and policy makers within the education industry have become devotees of the
amoral dictates of supply and demand, underpinned by an insatiable management class. Central to
their program of university mismanagement is the neoliberal academic, a creature both embraced and
maligned in the tertiary sectors of the globe.
The neoliberal academic is meant to be an underpaid miracle worker, whose divining acts rescue
often lax academics from discharging their duties. (These duties are outlined in that deceptive
and unreliable document known as a "workplan", as tedious as it is fictional.) The neoliberal
academic grades papers, lectures, tutors and coordinates subjects. The neoliberal provides cover, a
shield, and an excuse for a certain class of academic manager who prefers the calling of
pretence to the realities of work.
Often, these neoliberal academics are students undertaking a postgraduate degree and subject to
inordinate degrees of stress in an environment of perennial uncertainty. The stresses
associated with such students are documented in the Guardian's Academics
Anonymous series and have also been the subject of research
in the journal Research Policy . A representative sample of PhD students studying in
Flanders, Belgium found that one in two experienced psychological distress, with one in three
at risk of a common psychiatric disorder. Mental health problems tended to be higher in PhD
students "than in the highly educated general population, highly education employees and higher
education students."
This is hardly helped by the prospects faced by those PhDs for future permanent employment,
given what the authors of the Research Policy article describe
as the "unfavourable shift in the labour-supply demand balance, a growing popularity of
short-term contracts, budget cuts and increased competition for research sources".
There have been a few pompom holders encouraging the Neoliberalization mania, suggesting that it
is good for the academic sector. The explanations are never more than structural: a neoliberal
workforce, for instance, copes with fluctuating enrolments and reduces labour costs. "Using
neoliberal academics brings benefits and challenges," we find Dorothy Wardale, Julia Richardson and
Yuliani Suseno
telling us in The Conversation . This, in truth, is much like suggesting that
syphilis and irritable bowel syndrome is necessary to keep you on your toes, sharp and
streamlined. The mindset of the academic-administrator is to assume that such things are such
(Neoliberalization, the authors insist, is not going way, so embrace) and adopt a prostrate
position in the face of funding cuts from the public purse.
Neoliberalization can be seen alongside a host of other ills. If the instructor is disposable
and vulnerable, then so are the manifestations of learning. Libraries and research collections,
for instance, are being regarded as deadening, inanimate burdens on the modern, vibrant
university environment. Some institutions make a regular habit of culling their supply of texts
and references: we are all e-people now, bound to prefer screens to paper, the bleary-eyed
session of online engagement to the tactile session with a book.
The neoliberal, sessional academic also has, for company, the "hot-desk", a spot for temporary,
and all too fleeting occupation. The hot-desk has replaced the work desk; the partitions of the
office are giving way to the intrusions of the open plan. The hot-desker, like coitus, is
temporary and brief. The neoliberal academic epitomises that unstable reality; there is little need
to give such workers more than temporary, precarious space. As a result, confidentiality is
impaired, and privacy all but negated. Despite extensive research
showing the negative costs of "hot-desking" and open plan settings, university management
remains crusade bound to implement such daft ideas in the name of efficiency.
Neoliberalization also compounds fraudulence in the academy. It supplies the bejewelled short
cut route, the bypass, the evasion of the rigorous things in learning. Academics may reek like
piddling middle class spongers avoiding the issues while pretending to deal with them, but the
good ones at least make some effort to teach their brood decently and marshal their thoughts in
a way that resembles, at the very least, a sound whiff of knowledge. This ancient code, tested
and tried, is worth keeping, but it is something that modern management types, along with their
parasitic cognates, ignore. In Australia, this is particularly problematic, given suggestions that up to 80
percent of undergraduate courses in certain higher learning institutions are taught by neoliberal
academics.
The union between the spread sheet manager and the uninterested academic who sees promotion
through the management channel rather than scholarship, throws up a terrible hybrid, one
vicious enough to degrade all in its pathway. This sort of hybrid hack resorts to skiving and
getting neoliberals to do the work he or she ought to be doing. Such people co-ordinate courses but
make sure they get the wallahs and helpers desperate for cash to do it. Manipulation is
guaranteed, exploitation is assured.
The economy of desperation is cashed in like a reliable blue-chip stock: the skiver with an
ongoing position knows that a neoliberal academic desperate to earn some cash cannot dissent, will
do little to rock the misdirected boat, and will have to go along with utterly dotty notions.
There are no additional benefits from work, no ongoing income, no insurance, and, importantly,
inflated hours that rarely take into account the amount of preparation required for the
task.
The ultimate nature of the Neoliberalization catastrophe is its diminution of the entire
academic sector. Neoliberals suffer, but so do students. The result is not mere sloth but
misrepresentation of the worst kind: the university keen to advertise a particular service it
cannot provide sufficiently. This, in time, is normalised: what would students, who in many
instances may not even know the grader of their paper, expect? The remunerated, secure
academic-manager, being in the castle, can raise the drawbridge and throw the neoliberals to the
vengeful crowd, an employment environment made safe for hypocrisy.
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT
University, Melbourne and can be reached at: [email protected] . Read other articles by Binoy .
"... Sherman found that her interviewees, all in the top 1-2 percent of income or wealth or both, had thoroughly imbibed the narrative of meritocracy to rationalize their affluence and immense privileges. That is, they believed they deserved all their money because of hard work and individual effort. Most identified themselves as socially and political liberal and took pains to distinguish themselves from "bad" rich people who flaunt their wealth. ..."
"... Finally, meritocracy is the classic American foundation myth and provides the basis for an entire array of other fairy tales. Foremost, this illusion serves to justify policies that foster economic inequality and hinder the development of social movements. After so many decades of neoliberal ideology, this lie is now firmly lodged in the public's collective consciousness but I'm convinced that with effort and relying on the evidence, it can be expunged. ..."
In 2017,
Sociology Professor Rachel Sherman wrote Uneasy Street: The Anxiety of Affluence , a
book which drew upon 50 in-depth interviews with Uber-wealthy New Yorkers in order to obtain a
picture of just how they perceived their status.
Sherman found that her interviewees, all in the top 1-2 percent of income or wealth or both,
had thoroughly imbibed the narrative of meritocracy to rationalize their affluence and immense
privileges. That is, they believed they deserved all their money because of hard work and
individual effort. Most identified themselves as socially and political liberal and took pains
to distinguish themselves from "bad" rich people who flaunt their wealth. Although one
unselfconsciously acknowledged "I used to say I was going to be a revolutionary but then I had
my first massage."
One striking characteristic was that these folks never talk about money and obsess over the
"stigma of privilege." One typical respondent whose wealth exceeded $50 million told Sherman,
"There's nobody who knows how much money we spend. You're the only person I've ever said the
numbers to out-loud." Another couple who had inherited $50 million and lived in a penthouse had
the post office change their mailing address to the floor number because PH sounded "elite and
snobby." Another common trait was removing the price tags from items entering the house so the
housekeeper and and staff didn't see them. As if the nanny didn't know
Her subjects (who remained anonymous) readily acknowledged being extremely advantaged but
remained "good people, normal people," who work hard, are careful about ostentatious
consumption, and above all, "give back." They spend considerable time trying to legitimate
inequality and Sherman concludes they've largely succeeded in feeling "morally worthy."
As a follow-up to this study, Prof. Sherman has been conducting similar in-depth interviews
with young people whose parents or ancestors accumulated sizable fortunes, wealth they now have
or will soon inherit. Sherman's recent piece, "The Rich Kid Revolution," ( The New York
Times , 4/28/19) reveals a stark contrast in self-perception from her earlier findings.
First, her interviewees totally "get" the lie of meritocracy as they ruefully skewer family
myths about individual effort, scrimping and saving and the origins of wealth. One young woman
who's in line to inherit a considerable fortune told Sherman, "My dad has always been a CEO,
and it was clear to me that he spent a lot of time at work, but it has never been clear to me
that he worked a lot harder than a domestic worker, for example. I will never believe
that."
Sherman discovered that whether the immense fortunes came from "the direct dispossession of
indigenous people, enslavement of African-Americans, production of fossil fuels or obvious
exploitation of workers, they often express especially acute guilt." One response has been that
some wealthy people under age 35 have formed organizations to fund social justice
initiatives.
Second, many of her respondents have read about racialized capitalism and harbor no
illusions about their own success. From access to the "right" schools and acquiring cultural
capital to social networking and good, high paying jobs, they readily acknowledged that it's
all derived from their class (and race) privilege. Third, they are convinced the economic
system is "immoral," equality of opportunity does not exist and their wealth and privileges are
absolutely "unearned." Finally, they grasp, often from personal observation, that traditional
philanthropy is primarily about keeping those at the top in place, obtaining generous tax
breaks and treating symptoms while ignoring the causes rooted in the very social structures
from which they benefit.
Beyond the article's hyperbolic title and a certain vagueness about where this new
consciousness may lead, the piece -- whether intentionally or not -- does raise issues that
demand much wider public discussion.
First, a note about philanthro-capitalism or as Peter Buffet (Warren Buffet's son) terms it,
"conscience laundering." In Chris Rock's pithy phrase, "Behind every fortune is a great crime"
and given what we know about the sources of great wealth -- the collectivity -- these monies
should be supporting public needs that are democratically determined not the cherry-picked, pet
projects of billionaires. And this reveals another motive behind private charity: the desire to
stifle any enthusiasm for an activist government responsible to the public will.
I should add that whenever I hear a philanthropist piously proclaim, "I just wanted to give
something back," my first impulse is to shout "Why not give it all back?" That is, I've always
been partial to the moral injunction, "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be
required" (Luke 12:48). And although I won't attempt to improve on scripture, I might suggest
"From whom much is taken, much is owed."
Second, one might ask about the case where a person of modest means succeeds at something
and accumulates a fortune? We've all heard or read ad infinitum, someone exclaim, "Damn it!
Nobody even handed me anything. I did it all on my own. I'm entirely self-made." Isn't that
evidence of individual merit? No. For starters, as Chuck Collins, heir to the Oscar Mayer
fortune, once put it, "Where would wealthy entrepreneurs be without taxpayer investments in the
Internet, transportation, public education, the legal system, the human genome project and so
on?" Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize winner in Economics, has calculated the societal contribution
at ninety percent of what people earn in Northwest Europe and the United States.
In addition to the sources mentioned above, just off the top of my head I can list many
other factors that belie this powerfully seductive but wholly fictional narrative, one that's
also touted to and embraced by many members of the working class: Child labor, Chinese and
Irish immigrant labor (railroads), eminent domain, massacres of striking workers, state
repression of unions, Immigration Act of 1864, public land grabs, corporate welfare, installing
foreign dictators to guarantee cheap labor and resources, inheritance laws, public schools and
universities, public expense mail systems, property and contract laws, government tax breaks
incentives to business, Securities and Exchange Commission to ensure trust in the stock market,
the U.S. military, and a police state to keep the rabble from picking up pitchforks. Another
factor that almost merits its own paragraphs is pure luck. By any objective criteria, we can
conclude that absent this arrangement there would be no accumulation of private wealth.
Finally, meritocracy is the classic American foundation myth and provides the basis for an
entire array of other fairy tales. Foremost, this illusion serves to justify policies that
foster economic inequality and hinder the development of social movements. After so many
decades of neoliberal ideology, this lie is now firmly lodged in the public's collective
consciousness but I'm convinced that with effort and relying on the evidence, it can be
expunged.
How universities, banks and the government turned student debt into America's next financial black hole...
On a wind-swept, frigid night in February 2009, a 37-year-old schoolteacher named Scott Nailor parked his rusted '92 Toyota Tercel
in the parking lot of a Fireside Inn in Auburn, Maine. He picked this spot to have a final reckoning with himself. He was going to
end his life.
Beaten down after more than a decade of struggle with student debt, after years of taking false doors and slipping into various
puddles of bureaucratic quicksand, he was giving up the fight. "This is it, I'm done," he remembers thinking. "I sat there and just
sort of felt like I'm going to take my life. I'm going to find a way to park this car in the garage, with it running or whatever."
Nailor's problems began at 19 years old, when he borrowed for tuition so that he could pursue a bachelor's degree at the University
of Southern Maine. He graduated summa cum laude four years later and immediately got a job in his field, as an English teacher.
Bu t he graduated with $35,000 in debt, a big hill to climb on a part-time teacher's $18,000 salary. He struggled with payments,
and he and his wife then consolidated their student debt, which soon totaled more than $50,000. They declared bankruptcy and defaulted
on the loans. From there he found himself in a loan "rehabilitation" program that added to his overall balance. "That's when the
noose began to tighten," he says.
The collectors called day and night, at work and at home. "In the middle of class too, while I was teaching," he says. He ended
up in another rehabilitation program that put him on a road toward an essentially endless cycle of rising payments. Today, he pays
$471 a month toward "rehabilitation," and, like countless other borrowers, he pays nothing at all toward his real debt, which he
now calculates would cost more than $100,000 to extinguish. "Not one dollar of it goes to principal," says Nailor. "I will never
be able to pay it off. My only hope to escape from this crushing debt is to die."
After repeated phone calls with lending agencies about his ever-rising interest payments, Nailor now believes things will only
get worse with time. "At this rate, I may easily break $1 million in debt before I retire from teaching," he says.
Nailor had more than once reached the stage in his thoughts where he was thinking about how to physically pull off his suicide.
"I'd been there before, that just was the worst of it," he says. "It scared me, bad."
He had a young son and a younger daughter, but Nailor had been so broken by the experience of financial failure that he managed
to convince himself they would be better off without him. What saved him is that he called his wife to say goodbye. "I don't know
why I called my wife. I'm glad I did," he says. "I just wanted her or someone to tell me to pick it up, keep fighting, it's going
to be all right. And she did."
From that moment, Nailor managed to focus on his family. Still, the core problem – the spiraling debt that has taken over his
life, as it has for millions of other Americans – remains.
Horror stories about student debt are nothing new. But this school year marks a considerable worsening of a tale that ought to
have been a national emergency years ago. The government in charge of regulating this mess is now filled with predatory monsters
who have extensive ties to the exploitative for-profit education industry – from Donald Trump himself to Education Secretary Betsy
DeVos, who sets much of the federal loan policy, to Julian Schmoke, onetime dean of the infamous DeVry University, whom Trump appointed
to police fraud in education.
Americans don't understand the student-loan crisis because they've been trained to view the issue in terms of a series of separate,
unrelated problems.
They will read in one place that as of the summer of 2017, a record 8.5 million Americans are in default on their student debt,
with about $1.3 trillion in loans still outstanding.
In another place, voters will read that the cost of higher education is skyrocketing, soaring in a seemingly market-defying arc
that for nearly a decade now has run almost double the rate of inflation. Tuition for a halfway decent school now frequently surpasses
$50,000 a year. How, the average newsreader wonders, can any child not born in a yacht afford to go to school these days?
In a third place, that same reader will see some heartless monster, usually a Republican, threatening to cut federal student lending.
The current bogeyman is Trump, who is threatening to slash the Pell Grant program by $3.9 billion, which would seem to put higher
education even further out of reach for poor and middle-income families. This too seems appalling, and triggers a different kind
of response, encouraging progressive voters to lobby for increased availability for educational lending.
But the separateness of these stories clouds the unifying issue underneath: The education industry as a whole is a con. In fact,
since the mortgage business blew up in 2008, education and student debt is probably our reigning unexposed nation-wide scam.
It's a multiparty affair, what shakedown artists call a "big store scheme," like in the movie The Sting : a complex deception
requiring a big cast to string the mark along every step of the way. In higher education, every party you meet, from the moment you
first set foot on campus, is in on the game.
America as a country has evolved in recent decades into a confederacy of widescale industrial scams. The biggest slices of our
economic pie – sectors like health care, military production, banking, even commercial and residential real estate – have become
crude income-redistribution schemes, often untethered from the market by subsidies or bailouts, with the richest companies benefiting
from gamed or denuded regulatory systems that make profits almost as assured as taxes. Guaranteed-profit scams – that's the last
thing America makes with any level of consistent competence. In that light, Trump, among other things, the former head of a schlock
diploma mill called Trump University, is a perfect president for these times. He's the scammer-in-chief in the Great American Ripoff
Age, a time in which fleecing students is one of our signature achievements.
It starts with the sales pitch colleges make to kids. The thrust of it is usually that people who go to college make lots more
money than the unfortunate dunces who don't. "A bachelor's degree is worth $2.8 million on average over a lifetime" is how Georgetown
University put it. The Census Bureau tells us similarly that a master's degree is worth on average about $1.3 million more than a
high school diploma.
But these stats say more about the increasing uselessness of a high school degree than they do about the value of a college diploma.
Moreover, since virtually everyone at the very highest strata of society has a college degree, the stats are skewed by a handful
of financial titans. A college degree has become a minimal status marker as much as anything else. "I'm sure people who take polo
lessons or sailing lessons earn a lot more on average too," says Alan Collinge of Student Loan Justice, which advocates for debt
forgiveness and other reforms. "Does that mean you should send your kids to sailing school?"
But the pitch works on everyone these days, especially since good jobs for Trump's beloved "poorly educated" are scarce to nonexistent.
Going to college doesn't guarantee a good job, far from it, but the data show that not going dooms most young people to an increasingly
shallow pool of the very crappiest, lowest-paying jobs. There's a lot of stick, but not much carrot, in the education game.
It's a vicious cycle. Since everyone feels obligated to go to college, most everyone who can go, does, creating a glut of graduates.
And as that glut of degree recipients grows, the squeeze on the un-degreed grows tighter, increasing further that original negative
incentive: Don't go to college, and you'll be standing on soup lines by age 25.
With that inducement in place, colleges can charge almost any amount, and kids will pay – so long as they can get the money. And
here we run into problem number two: It's too easy to find that money.
Parents, not wanting their kids to fall behind, will pay every dollar they have. But if they don't have the cash, there is a virtually
unlimited amount of credit available to young people. Proposed cuts to Pell Grants aside, the landscape is filled with public and
private lending, and students gobble it up. Kids who walk into financial-aid offices are often not told what signing their names
on the various aid forms will mean down the line. A lot of kids don't even understand the concept of interest or amortization tables
– they think if they're borrowing $8,000, they're paying back $8,000.
Nailor certainly was unaware of what he was getting into when he was 19. "I had no idea [about interest]," he says. "I just remember
thinking, 'I don't have to worry about it right now. I want to go to school.' " He pauses in disgust. "It's unsettling to remember
how it was like, 'Here, just sign this and you're all set.' I wish I could take the time machine back and slap myself in the face."
The average amount of debt for a student leaving school is skyrocketing even faster than the rate of tuition increase.
In 2016, for instance, the average amount of debt for an exiting college graduate was a staggering $37,172. That's a rise of six
percent over just the previous year. With the average undergraduate interest rate at about 3.7 percent, the interest alone costs
around $115 per month, meaning anyone who can't afford to pay into the principal faces the prospect of $69,000 in payments over 50
years.
So here's the con so far.
You must go to college because you're screwed if you don't.
Costs are outrageously high, but you pay them because you have to, and because the system makes it easy to borrow massive amounts
of money
The third part of the con is the worst: You can't get out of the debt.
Since government lenders in particular have virtually unlimited power to collect on student debt – preying on everything from
salary to income-tax returns – even running is not an option. And since most young people find themselves unable to make their full
payments early on, they often find themselves perpetually paying down interest only, never touching the principal. Our billionaire
president can declare bankruptcy four times, but students are the one class of citizen that may not do it even once.
October 2017 was supposed to represent the first glimmer of light at the end of this tunnel. This month marks the 10th anniversary
of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, one of the few avenues for wiping out student debt. The idea, launched by George
W. Bush, was pretty simple: Students could pledge to work 10 years for the government or a nonprofit and have their debt forgiven.
In order to qualify, borrowers had to make payments for 10 years using a complex formula. This month, then, was to start the first
mass wipeouts of debt in the history of American student lending. But more than half of the 700,000 enrollees have already been expunged
from the program for, among other things, failing to certify their incomes on time, one of many bureaucratic tricks employed to limit
forgiveness eligibility. To date, fewer than 500 participants are scheduled to receive loan forgiveness in this first round.
Moreover, Trump has called for the program's elimination by 2018, meaning that any relief that begins this month is likely only
temporary. The only thing that is guaranteed to remain real for the immediate future are the massive profits being generated on the
backs of young people, who before long become old people who, all too often, remain ensnared until their last days in one of the
country's most brilliant and devious moneymaking schemes.
Everybody wins in this madness, except students. Even though many of the loans are originated by the state, most of them are serviced
by private or quasi-private companies like Navient – which until 2014 was the student-loan arm of Sallie Mae – or Nelnet, companies
that reported a combined profit of around $1 billion last year (the U.S. government made a profit of $1.6 billion in 2016!). Debt-collector
companies like Performant (which generated $141.4 million in revenues; the family of Betsy DeVos is a major investor), and most particularly
the colleges and universities, get to prey on the desperation and terror of parents and young people, and in the process rake in
vast sums virtually without fear of market consequence.
About that: Universities, especially public institutions, have successfully defended rising tuition in recent years by blaming
the hikes on reduced support from states. But this explanation was blown to bits in large part due to a bizarre slip-up in the middle
of a controversy over state support of the University of Wisconsin system a few years ago.
In that incident, UW raised tuition by 5.5 percent six years in a row after 2007. The school blamed stresses from the financial
crisis and decreased state aid. But when pressed during a state committee hearing in 2013 about the university's finances, UW system
president Kevin Reilly admitted they held $648 million in reserve, including $414 million in tuition payments. This was excess hidey-hole
cash the school was sitting on, separate and distinct from, say, an endowment fund.
After the university was showered with criticism for hoarding cash at a time when it was gouging students with huge price increases
every year, the school responded by saying, essentially, it only did what all the other kids were doing. UW released data showing
that other major state-school systems across the country were similarly stashing huge amounts of cash. While Wisconsin's surplus
was only 25 percent of its operating budget, for instance, Minnesota's was 29 percent, and Illinois maintained a whopping 34 percent
reserve.
When Collinge, of Student Loan Justice, looked into it, he found that the phenomenon wasn't confined to state schools. Private
schools, too, have been hoarding cash even as they plead poverty and jack up tuition fees. "They're all doing it," he says.
While universities sit on their stockpiles of cash and the loan industry generates record profits, the pain of living in debilitating
debt for many lasts into retirement. Take Veronica Martish. She's a 68-year-old veteran, having served in the armed forces in the
Vietnam era. She's also a grandmother who's never been in trouble and consid?ers herself a patriot. "The thing is, I tried to do
everything right in my life," she says. "But this ruined my life."
This is an $8,000 student loan she took out in 1989, through Sallie Mae. She borrowed the money so she could take courses at Quinebaug
Valley Community College in Connecticut. Five years later, after deaths in her family, she fell behind on her payments and entered
a loan-rehabilitation program. "That's when my nightmare began," she says.
In rehabilitation, Martish's $8,000 loan, with fees and interest, ballooned into a $27,000 debt, which she has been carrying ever
since. She says she's paid more than $63,000 to date and is nowhere near discharging the principal. "By the time I die," she says,
"I will probably pay more than $200,000 toward an $8,000 loan." She pauses. "It's a scam, you see. Nothing ever comes off the loan.
It's all interest and fees. And they chase you until you're old, like me. They never stop. Ever."
And that's the other thing about lending to students: It's the safest grift around.
There's probably no better symbol of the bankruptcy of the education industry than Trump University. The half-literate president's
effort at higher learning drew in suckers with pathetic promises of great real-estate insights (for instance, that Trump "hand-picked"
the instructors) and then charged them truckfuls of cash for get-rich-quick tutorials that students and faculty later described as
"almost completely worthless" and a "total lie." That Trump got to settle a lawsuit on this matter for $25 million and still managed
to be elected president is, ironically, a remarkable testament to the failure of our education system. About the only example that
might be worse is DeVry University, which told students that 90 percent of graduates seeking jobs found them in their fields within
six months of graduation. The FTC found those claims "false and unsubstantiated," and ordered $100 million in refunds and debt relief,
but that was in 2016 – before Trump put DeVry chief Schmoke, of all people, in charge of rooting out education fraud. Like a lot
of things connected to politics lately, it would be funny if it weren't somehow actually happening.?"Yeah, it's the fox guarding
the henhouse," says Collinge. "You could probably find a worse analogy."
But the real problem with the student-loan story is that it's so poorly understood by people not living the nightmare. There's
so much propaganda that blames the borrowers for taking on the debt in the first place that there's often little sympathy for people
in hopeless situations. To make matters worse, band-aid programs that supposedly offer help hypnotize the public into thinking there
are ways out, when the "help" is usually just another trick to add to the balance.
"That's part of the problem with the narrative," says Nailor, the schoolteacher. "People think that there's help, so what are
you complaining about? All you got to do is apply for help."
But the help, he says, coming from a for-profit predatory system, often just makes things worse. "It did for me," he says. "It
does for a lot of people."
The real flaw is associating "higher" education with value. Get a job. Earn an income. Find an interest for your free time.
Raise a family. Spare the four years of wasted time and money.
If you want to take the risk of going into debt to attend college, you better come out with skills that are in high demand.
Otherwise you are much better off going into the military, or going to trade school. BTW, thank the Clintons for making it
impossible to get out of student debt through bankruptcy.
If you want to give out loans to kids then you should accept the risk that they might default on that debt and leave you
with the tab. Let's stop the coddling the banker bullshit. They lobbied to make this loans extremely difficult to discharge
in bankruptcy. They wanted all the profit and none of the risk. Let them assume risk and they'll stop handing out loans to
unqualified borrowers.
Amen! If the money for an "education" is more difficult to obtain, that ought to be a clue as to the value of the information
/ training one is purchasing. The fact it's so easy to get is all one needs to know about the worth of what's being spewed
by those dispensing their so-called knowledge / truth.
Allow the lawful discharge through bankruptcy and punish every single financial institution, (and especially their individual
persons who oversaw the process), that has profited off of ballooning "principle" amounts that even come close to doubling
an original amount with ties to any government official that voted to place these kind of loans in such a category.
This is madness! "Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees,..." Isaiah 10:1
Finally at least one person gets it. The inability to discharge student loan debt through the taint of bankruptcy is one
of the greatest financial crimes of the last century. Entirely unAmerican. America used to be all about fresh starts. That
is one reason our business life is more vibrant than say many places in Europe with less benign laws. Same goes for individuals.
If you go through the pain of bankruptcy there is no reason you shouldnt get that debt discharged. Whomever voted for that
law, whether Clintons or others should be beaten to death.
Hobart's 38-week combo welder program costs $16,625. A trained kid willing to travel and work in the field would make more
than an engineering graduate who paid a quarter-million for his degree.
No mention made of the rats nest Social Justice program$ infesting college and university campuses across the country, at
untold cost, worthless sullshit.
Not that the student loan thing isn't another banker scam, but the lead story doesn't make sense.
Firstly, educators get
loan forgiveness after a decade or two of public service. And there are income contingent repayment plans. And lawyers have,
in fact, been able to get these things discharged. None of this changes the scam that is giving out high interest loans to
kids to pursue an education. But you might want to start with a sob story that makes more sense. How about a pediatrician with
400k in loans and making 100k a year living in a coastal city? Or how about the art history majors at private liberal arts
schools with 200k in debt making $10/hour as a barista? But teachers are one of the few groups that has an actual federal out.
Maybe. My wife is a teacher in a Title I, low income school, and had been for 13 years..... She also has about 13K remaining in student loans, originally federal direct and Perkins loans. With her over 10 years in title I schools, she should be able to get them forgiven, except that she consolidated these loans
before I met her, and now they are "serviced" by AES, a private lender, and they are no longer eligible for discharge. This I call the "Consolidation Scam."
Pay off debt before you have children. There is no law that you must have children, if the debt makes it impossible. I would
have liked a lot of tings but could not afford them.
Taibbi has some gall to blame Trump, DeVos and others for the student debt explosion, but not one word about Obama or the
government's takeover of the student loan market as part of Obamacare? The student loan market was folded into the ACA as part
of the fake accounting to make the ACA numbers "work". Every market the govenrment insinuates itself into - housing, health
care, college tuition, etc. - gets distorted and costs explode. Taibbi's yet another dishonest liberal.
Yikes- is this factual? If so fuck him. All name, no cattle.
Obama began his turn as destroyer in chief at the height of the Great Recession, everyone & their brother was running into
the safety of college & student loans to pay the bills. I recall watching the local parking lots swell. :) So there's that.
But numbers are off the charts every year because younger millennials expect the govt to forgive all those loans at some
point. That's how many thought 20 years ago & it's worse today.
"The nexus between the student loan program and ObamaCare is purely opportunistic. As the Affordable Care Act was passing
through Congress, its wheels greased by the wholly fraudulent assertion that it didn't need 60 votes to pass the Senate, the
administration decided to put in a provision eliminating the private student loan industry, fully federalizing the program.
What was not widely understood at the time was that it hoped to raid the funds paid by students to provide money for the bottomless
pit known as ObamaCare"
In 1980, the states subsidized 70% of the cost per student. Today it is less than 30% and the amount of grants and scholarships
has likewise declined. Tax cuts for rich people and conservative hatred for education are the biggest problem.
Notable quotes:
"... "easy" student loans are a subsidy to colleges, ..."
"... 1965 median family income was $6900, more than 200% of the cost of a year at NU. Current median family income is about 75% of a year at NU. ..."
"... Allowing young adults to avoid challenging and uncomfortable and difficult subjects under the guise of compassion is the enemy of meritocracy. Financial illiteracy is the enemy of meritocracy. ..."
"... The specific market dynamics of health care expenditures are obviously different, but as categories of expenses they have some things in common. First, both are very expensive relative to most other household expenditures. Second, unlike consumer merchandise, neither lends itself very well to cost reduction via offshoring or automation. So in an economy where many consumer prices are held down through a corresponding suppression of real wage growth, they consume a correspondingly larger chunk of the household budget. ..."
"... JUST HAD AN IDEA THAT MIGHT LIMIT THE DAMAGE OF THESE PHONEY ONLINE COLLEGES (pardon shouting, but I think it's justified): ..."
"... of-paying) IF a built for that purpose government agency APPROVES said loan. What do you think? ..."
"... Kaplan Ed is among the worst of the worst of internet federal loan and grant sucking diploma mills. ..."
"... Because every event in today's economy is the wish of the wealthy. Do you see why they suddenly wish to deeply educate the proles? ..."
Thomas Piketty on a theme I've been hammering lately, student debt is too damn high!:
Student Loan Debt Is the Enemy
of Meritocracy in the US: ...the amount of household debt and even more recently of student debt in the U.S. is something
that is really troublesome and it reflects the very large rise in tuition in the U.S. a very large inequality in access to education.
I think if we really want to promote more equal opportunity and redistribute chances in access to education we should do something
about student debt. And it's not possible to have such a large group of the population entering the labor force with such a big
debt behind them. This exemplifies a particular problem with inequality in the United States, which is very high inequality and
access to higher education. So in other countries in the developed world you don't have such massive student debt because you
have more public support to higher education. I think the plan that was proposed earlier this year in 2015 by President Obama
to increase public funding to public universities and community college is exactly justified.
This is really the key for higher growth in the future and also for a more equitable growth..., you have the official discourse
about meritocracy, equal opportunity and mobility, and then you have the reality. And the gap between the two can be quite troublesome.
So this is like you have a problem like this and there's a lot of hypocrisy about meritocracy in every country, not only in the
U.S., but there is evidence suggesting that this has become particularly extreme in the United States. ... So this is a situation
that is very troublesome and should rank very highly in the policy agenda in the future in the U.S.
DrDick -> Jeff R Carter:
"college is heavily subsidized"
Bwahahahahahahaha! *gasp*
In 1980, the states subsidized 70% of the cost per student. Today it is less than 30% and the amount of grants and scholarships
has likewise declined. Tax cuts for rich people and conservative hatred for education are the biggest problem.
cm -> to DrDick...
I don't know what Jeff meant, but "easy" student loans are a subsidy to colleges, don't you think? Subsidies don't
have to be paid directly to the recipient. The people who are getting the student loans don't get to keep the money (but they
do get to keep the debt).
DrDick -> to cm...
No I do not agree. If anything, they are a subsidy to the finance industry (since you cannot default on them). More basically,
they do not make college more affordable or accessible (his point).
cm -> to DrDick...
Well, what is a subsidy? Most economic entities don't get to keep the money they receive, but it ends up with somebody else
or circulates. If I run a business and somebody sends people with money my way (or pays me by customer served), that looks like
a subsidy to me - even though I don't get to keep the money, much of it paid for operational expenses not to forget salaries and
other perks.
Just because it is not prearranged and no-strings (?) funding doesn't mean it cannot be a subsidy.
The financial system is involved, and benefits, whenever money is sloshing around.
Pinkybum -> to cm...
I think DrDick has this the right way around. Surely one should think of subsidies as to who the payment is directly helping.
Subsidies to students would lower the barrier of entry into college. Subsidies to colleges help colleges hire better professors,
offer more classes, reduce the cost of classes etc. Student loans are no subsidy at all except to the finance industry because
they cannot be defaulted on and even then some may never be paid back because of bankruptcies.
However, that is always the risk of doing business as a loan provider. It might be interesting to assess the return on student
loans compared to other loan instruments.
mrrunangun -> to Jeff R Carter...
The cost of higher education has risen relative to the earning power of the student and/or the student's family unless that
family is in the top 10-20% wealth or income groups.
50 years ago it was possible for a lower middle class student to pay all expenses for Northwestern University with his/her
own earnings. Tuition was $1500 and room + board c $1000/year. The State of Illinois had a scholarship grant program and all you
needed was a 28 or 29 on the ACT to qualify for a grant that paid 80% of that tuition. A male student could make $2000 in a summer
construction job, such as were plentiful during those booming 60s. That plus a low wage job waiting tables, night security, work-study
etc could cover the remaining tuition and expense burden.
The annual nut now is in excess of $40,000 at NU and not much outside the $40,000-50,000 range at other second tier or elite
schools.
The state schools used to produce the bedrock educated upper middle class of business and professional people in most states
west of the seaboard. Tuition there 50 years ago was about $1200/year and room and board about $600-800 here in the midwest. Again
you could put yourself through college waiting tables part-time. It wasn't easy but it was possible.
No way a kid who doesn't already possess an education can make the tuition and expenses of a private school today. I don't
know what the median annual family income was in 1965 but I feel confident that it was well above the annual nut for a private
college. Now it's about equal to it.
mrrunangun -> to mrrunangun...
1965 median family income was $6900, more than 200% of the cost of a year at NU. Current median family income is about
75% of a year at NU.
This allows a reader to understand how the graph was constructed and to work with the graph.
ilsm:
The US spends half the money the entire world spends on war, that is success!
Massive student debt, huge doses poverty, scores of thousands [of annual neglect related] deaths from the wretched health care
system etc are not failure!
tew:
Poor education is the enemy of meritocracy. Costly, bloated administrations full of non-educators there to pamper and pander
to every possible complaint and special interest - that is the enemy of meritocracy.
Convincing kids to simple "follow their dreams" regardless of education cost and career potential is the enemy of meritocracy.
Allowing young adults to avoid challenging and uncomfortable and difficult subjects under the guise of compassion is the enemy
of meritocracy. Financial illiteracy is the enemy of meritocracy.
Manageable student debt is no great enemy of meritocracy.
cm -> to tew...
This misses the point, aside frm the victim blaming. Few people embark on college degrees to "follow their dream", unless the
dream is getting admission to the middle class job market.
When I was in elementary/middle school, the admonitions were of the sort "if you are not good in school you will end up sweeping
streets" - from a generation who still saw street cleaning as manual labor, in my days it was already mechanized.
I estimate that about 15% or so of every cohort went to high school and then college, most went to a combined vocational/high
school track, and some of those then later also went college, often from work.
This was before the big automation and globalization waves, when there were still enough jobs for everybody, and there was
no pretense that you needed a fancy title to do standard issue work or as a social signal of some sort.
Richard H. Serlin:
Student loans and college get the bulk of the education inequality attention, and it's not nearly enough attention, but it's
so much more. The early years are so crucial, as Nobel economist James Heckman has shown so well. Some children get no schooling
or educational/developmental day care until almost age 6, when it should start in the first year, with preschool starting at 3.
Others get high quality Montessori, and have had 3 years of it by the time they enter kindergarten, when others have had zero
of any kind of education when they enter kindergarten.
Some children spend summers in high quality summer school and educational programs; others spend three months digressing and
learning nothing. Some children get SAT prep programs costing thousands, and high end educational afterschool programs; others
get nothing after school.
All these things should be available in high quality to any child; it's not 1810 anymore Republicans, the good old days of
life expectancy in the 30s and dirt poverty for the vast majority. We need just a little more education in the modern world. But
this also makes for hugely unequal opportunity.
One needs to differentiate between costs (total dollars spent per student credit hour or degree, or whatever the appropriate
metric is) and price (what fraction of the cost is allocated to the the end-user student).
Note that the level of state funding impacts price, not cost; that discussion is usually about cost shifting, not cost reduction.
I'd say that the rate of increase in costs is, more or less, independent of the percent of costs borne by the state. You can
indeed see this in the increase in private schools, the state funding is small/nil (particularly in schools without material endowments,
where actual annual fees (prices) must closely actual match annual costs). Price discounts and federal funding may both complicate
this analysis.
I think much more effort should be spent on understanding and controlling costs. As with health care, just saying "spend more
money" is probably not the wise or even sustainable path in the long term.
Costs were discussed at some length here a year(?) or so ago. There is at least one fairly comprehensive published analysis
of higher education costs drivers. IIRC, their conclusion was that there were a number of drivers - its not just food courts or
more administrators. Sorry, don't recall the link.
Syaloch -> to cm...
Actually for my first job out of college at BLS, I basically was hired for my "rounded personality" combined with a general
understanding of economic principles, not for any specific job-related skills. I had no prior experience working with Laspeyres
price indexes, those skills were acquired through on-the-job training. Similarly in software development there is no degree that
can make you a qualified professional developer; the best a degree can do is to show you are somewhat literate in X development
language and that you have a good understanding of general software development principles. Most of the specific skills you'll
need to be effective will be learned on the job.
The problem is that employers increasingly want to avoid any responsibility for training and mentoring, and to shift this burden
onto schools. These institutions respond by jettisoning courses in areas deemed unnecessary for short-term vocational purposes,
even though what you learn in many of these courses is probably more valuable and durable in the long run than the skills obtained
through job-specific training, which often have a remarkably short shelf-life. (How valuable to you now is all that COBOL training
you had back in the day?)
I guess the question then is, is the sole purpose of higher education to provide people with entry-level job skills for some
narrowly-defined job description which may not even exist in a decade? A lot of people these days seem to feel that way. But I
believe that in the long run it's a recipe for disaster at both the individual and the societal level.
Richard H. Serlin -> to Observer...
"Observer"
The research is just not on you side, as Heckman has shown very well. Early education and development makes a huge difference,
and at age 5-7 (kindergarten) children are much better off with more schooling than morning to noon. This is why educated parents
who can afford it pay a lot of money for a full day -- with afterschool and weekened programs on top.
Yes, we're more educated than 1810, but I use 1810 because that's the kind of small government, little spending on education
(you want your children educated you pay for it.) that the Republican Party would love to return us to if they thought they could
get away with it. And we've become little more educated in the last 50 years even though the world has become much more technologically
advanced.
Judging both from comments on this blog and from some of my mail, a significant number of Americans believe that the answer
to our health care problems - indeed, the only answer - is to rely on the free market. Quite a few seem to believe that this view
reflects the lessons of economic theory.
Not so. One of the most influential economic papers of the postwar era was Kenneth Arrow's "Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics
of Health Care," * which demonstrated - decisively, I and many others believe - that health care can't be marketed like bread
or TVs. Let me offer my own version of Arrow's argument.
There are two strongly distinctive aspects of health care. One is that you don't know when or whether you'll need care - but
if you do, the care can be extremely expensive. The big bucks are in triple coronary bypass surgery, not routine visits to the
doctor's office; and very, very few people can afford to pay major medical costs out of pocket.
This tells you right away that health care can't be sold like bread. It must be largely paid for by some kind of insurance.
And this in turn means that someone other than the patient ends up making decisions about what to buy. Consumer choice is nonsense
when it comes to health care. And you can't just trust insurance companies either - they're not in business for their health,
or yours.
This problem is made worse by the fact that actually paying for your health care is a loss from an insurers' point of view
- they actually refer to it as "medical costs." This means both that insurers try to deny as many claims as possible, and that
they try to avoid covering people who are actually likely to need care. Both of these strategies use a lot of resources, which
is why private insurance has much higher administrative costs than single-payer systems. And since there's a widespread sense
that our fellow citizens should get the care we need - not everyone agrees, but most do - this means that private insurance basically
spends a lot of money on socially destructive activities.
The second thing about health care is that it's complicated, and you can't rely on experience or comparison shopping. ("I hear
they've got a real deal on stents over at St. Mary's!") That's why doctors are supposed to follow an ethical code, why we expect
more from them than from bakers or grocery store owners.
You could rely on a health maintenance organization to make the hard choices and do the cost management, and to some extent
we do. But HMOs have been highly limited in their ability to achieve cost-effectiveness because people don't trust them - they're
profit-making institutions, and your treatment is their cost.
Between those two factors, health care just doesn't work as a standard market story.
All of this doesn't necessarily mean that socialized medicine, or even single-payer, is the only way to go. There are a number
of successful healthcare systems, at least as measured by pretty good care much cheaper than here, and they are quite different
from each other. There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one
simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn't work. And people who say that the market is the answer are flying
in the face of both theory and overwhelming evidence.
I believe so, as I noted above. The specific market dynamics of health care expenditures are obviously different, but as categories
of expenses they have some things in common. First, both are very expensive relative to most other household expenditures. Second,
unlike consumer merchandise, neither lends itself very well to cost reduction via offshoring or automation. So in an economy where
many consumer prices are held down through a corresponding suppression of real wage growth, they consume a correspondingly larger
chunk of the household budget.
Another interesting feature of both health care and college education is that there are many proffered explanations as to why
their cost is rising so much relative to other areas, but a surprising lack of a really authoritative explanation based on solid
evidence.
anne -> to Syaloch...
Another interesting feature of both health care and college education is that there are many proffered explanations as to why
their cost is rising so much relative to other areas, but a surprising lack of a really authoritative explanation based on solid
evidence.
[ Look to the paper by Kenneth Arrow, which I cannot copy, for what is to me a convincing explanation as to the market defeating
factors of healthcare. However, I have no proper explanation about education costs and am only speculating or looking for an analogy.
]
anne -> to Syaloch...
The specific market dynamics of health care expenditures are obviously different, but as categories of expenses they have
some things in common. First, both are very expensive relative to most other household expenditures. Second, unlike consumer merchandise,
neither lends itself very well to cost reduction via offshoring or automation. So in an economy where many consumer prices are
held down through a corresponding suppression of real wage growth, they consume a correspondingly larger chunk of the household
budget.
[ Nicely expressed. ]
Peter K. -> to anne...
"As to increasing college costs, would there be an analogy to healthcare costs?"
Yes, exactly. They aren't normal markets. There should be heavy government regulation.
Denis Drew:
JUST HAD AN IDEA THAT MIGHT LIMIT THE DAMAGE OF THESE PHONEY ONLINE COLLEGES (pardon shouting, but I think it's justified):
Only allow government guaranteed loans (and the accompanying you-can-never-get-out-of-paying) IF a built for that purpose
government agency APPROVES said loan. What do you think?
Denis Drew -> to cm...
A big reason we had the real estate bubble was actually the mad Republican relaxation of loan requirements -- relying on the
"free market." So, thanks for coming up with a good comparison.
By definition, for the most part, people taking out student loans are shall we say new to the world and more vulnerable to
the pirates.
* * * * * * * * * *
[cut and paste from my comment on AB]
Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post.
According to an article in the Huffington Post At Kaplan University, 'Guerrilla Registration' Leaves Students Deep In Debt,
Kaplan Ed is among the worst of the worst of internet federal loan and grant sucking diploma mills. Going so far as to
falsely pad bills $5000 or so dollars at diploma time - pay up immediately or you will never get your sheepskin; you wasted your
time. No gov agency will act.
According to a lovely graph which I wish I could patch in here the Post may actually be currently be kept afloat only by purloined
cash from Kaplan:
earnings before corporate overhead
2002 - Kaplan ed, $10 mil; Kaplan test prep, $45 mil: WaPo, $100 mil
2005 - Kaplan ed, $55 mil; Kaplan test prep, $100 mil; WaPo, $105 mil
2009 - Kaplan ed, $255 mil; Kaplan test prep, $5 mil; WaPo negative $175 mil
Wonder if billionaire Bezos will reach out to make Kaplan Ed victims whole. Will he really continue to use Kaplan's pirated
money to keep WaPo whole -- if that is what is going on?
Johannes Y O Highness:
"theme I've been hammering lately, student debt is too damn high!: "
Too damn high
but why?
Because! Because every event in today's economy is the wish of the wealthy. Do you see why they suddenly wish to deeply
educate the proles?
Opportunity cost! The burden of the intelligentsia, the brain work can by carried by robots or humans. Choice of the wealthy?
Humans, hands down. Can you see the historical background?
Railroad was the first robot. According to Devon's Paradox, it was overused because of its increment of efficiency. Later,
excessive roadbeds were disassembled. Rails were sold as scrap.
The new robots are not heavy lifters. New robots are there to do the work of the brain trust. As first robots replaced lower
caste jokers, so shall new robots replace upper caste jokers. Do you see the fear developing inside the huddle of high rollers?
Rollers now calling the play?
High rollers plan to educate small time hoods to do the work of the new robots, then kill the new robots before the newbie
'bot discovers how to kill the wealthy, to kill, to replace them forever.
Terrifying fear
strikes
Observer:
Good bit of data on education costs here
http://centerforcollegeaffordability.org/
This chart shows state spending per student and tuition ...
" overall perhaps the best description of the data is something along the lines of "sometimes state appropriations go up and
sometimes they go down, but tuition always goes up." "
Navient, spun off from Sallie Mae, has thrived as student loan debt spirals across the US.
Its story reveals how, instead of fighting inequality, the education industry is reinforcing
it
Nathan Hornes: 'Navient hasn't done a thing to help me. They just want their money. And
they want it now.' Photograph: Fusion
A mong the 44 million Americans who have amassed our nation's
whopping $1.4tn in student loan debt, a call from Navient can produce shivers of dread.
Navient is the primary point of contact, or the "servicer", for more student loans in the
United States than any other company, handling 12 million borrowers and $300bn in debt. The
company flourished as student loan debt exploded under the Obama administration, and its stock
rose sharply after the election of Donald Trump.
But Navient also has more complaints per borrower than any other servicer, according to a
Fusion analysis of data. And these mounting complaints repeatedly allege that
the company has failed to live up to the terms of its federal contracts, and that it
illegally harasses consumers . Navient says most of the ire stems from structural issues
surrounding college finance – like the terms of the loans, which the federal government
and private banks are responsible for – not about Navient customer service.
Navient has positioned itself to dominate the lucrative student loan industry in the midst
of this crisis, flexing its muscles in Washington and increasingly across the states. The story
of Navient's emerging power is also the story of how an industry built around the idea that
education can break down inequities is reinforcing them.The tension at the center of the
current controversy around student loans is simple: should borrowers be treated like any other
consumers, or do they merit special service because education is considered a public good?
Often, the
most vulnerable borrowers are not those with the largest debt, but low-income students,
first-generation students, and students of color – especially those who may attend less
prestigious schools and are less likely to quickly earn enough
to repay their loans, if they graduate at all.
Last year, Navient received 23 complaints per 100,000 borrowers, more than twice that of the
nearest competitor, according to Fusion's analysis. And from January 2014 to December 2016,
Navient was named as a defendant in 530 federal lawsuits. The vast majority were aimed at the
company's student loans servicing operations. (Nelnet and Great Lakes, the two other biggest
companies in the student loans market, were sued 32 and 14 times over the same period,
respectively.)
Many of the complaints and lawsuits aimed at the company relate to its standard practice of
auto-dialing borrowers to solicit payments.
Shelby Hubbard says she has long been on the receiving end of these calls as she has
struggled to pay down her debt. Hubbard racked up over $60,000 in public and private student
loans by the time she graduated from Eastern Kentucky University with a basic
healthcare-related degree.
"It consumes my every day," Hubbard said of the constant calls. "Every day, every hour,
starting at 8 o'clock in the morning." Unlike mortgages, and most other debt, student loans
can't be wiped away with bankruptcy.
These days, Hubbard, 26, works in Ohio as a logistics coordinator for traveling nurses.
She's made some loan payments, but her take-home pay is about $850 every two weeks. With her
monthly student loan bill at about $700, roughly half her income would go to paying the loans
back, forcing her to lean more heavily on her fiancé. "He pays for all of our utilities,
all of our bills. Because at the end of the day, I don't have anything else to give him," she
said. The shadow of her debt hangs over every discussion about their wedding, mortgage
payments, and becoming parents.
The power and reach of the student loan industry stacks the odds against borrowers. Navient
doesn't just service federal loans, it has a hand in nearly every aspect of the student loan
system. It has bought up private student loans, both servicing them and earning interest off of
them. And it has purchased billions of dollars worth of the older taxpayer-backed loans, again
earning interest, as well as servicing that debt. The company also owns controversial
subsidiary companies such as Pioneer Credit Recovery that
stand to profit from collecting the debt of loans that go into default.
label="How the Trump administration is undermining students of color | Mark Huelsman and
Vijay Das"
href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/15/trump-administration-students-color-debt">
And just as banks have done with mortgages, Navient packages many of the private and
pre-2010 federal loans and sells them on Wall Street as asset-backed securities. Meanwhile,
it's in the running to oversee the Department of Education's entire student debt web portal,
which would open even more avenues for the company to profit from – and expand its
influence over – Americans' access to higher education.
The federal government is the biggest lender of American student loans, meaning that
taxpayers are currently on the hook for more than
$1tn . For years, much of this money was managed by private banks and loan companies like
Sallie Mae. Then in 2010, Congress cut out the middlemen and their lending fees, and Sallie Mae
spun off its servicing arm into the publicly traded company Navient.
Led by former Sallie Mae executives, Navient describes itself as "a leading provider of
asset management and business processing solutions for education, healthcare, and government
clients." But it is best known for being among a handful of companies that have won coveted
federal contracts to make sure students repay their loans. And critics say that in pursuit of
getting that money back, the Department of Education has allowed these companies to all but run
free at the expense of borrowers.
"The problem is that these servicers are too big to fail," said Persis Yu, director of the
National Consumer Law Center's Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project. "We have no place to
put the millions of borrowers whom they are servicing, even if they are not doing the servicing
job that we want them to do."
In its last years, the Obama administration tried to rein in the student loan industry and
promoted more options for reduced repayment plans for federal loans. Since then, Donald Trump's
education secretary, Betsy
DeVos , has reversed or
put on hold changes the former education secretary John B King's office proposed
and appears bent on further loosening the reins on the student loan
industry , leaving individual students little recourse amid bad service.
In late August, DeVos's office announced
that it would stop sharing information about student loan servicer oversight with the federal
consumer watchdog agency known as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB.
Earlier this year, as complaints grew, the CFPB
sued Navient for allegedly misleading borrowers about the repayment options it is legally
obligated to provide.
A central allegation is that Navient, rather than offering income-based repayment plans,
pushed some people into a temporary payment freeze called forbearance. Getting placed into
forbearance is a good Band-Aid but can be a terrible longer-term plan. When an account gets
placed in forbearance, its interest keeps accumulating, and that interest can be added to the
principal, meaning the loans only grow.
Lynn Sabulski, who worked in Navient's Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, call center for five
months starting in 2012, said she experienced first-hand the pressure to drive borrowers into
forbearance.
"Performing well meant keeping calls to seven minutes or under," said Sabulski. "If you only
have seven minutes, the easiest option to put a borrower in, first and foremost, is a
forbearance." Sabulski said if she didn't keep the call times short, she could be written up or
lose her job.
Navient denies the allegations, and a spokeswoman told Fusion via email seven and a half
minutes was the average call time, not a target. The company maintains "caller satisfaction and
customer experience" are a significant part of call center representatives' ratings.
But in a 24 March motion it filed in federal court for the CFPB's lawsuit, the company also
said: "There is no expectation that the servicer will act in the interest of the consumer."
Rather, it argued, Navient's job was to look out for the interest of the federal government and
taxpayers.
Navient does get more per account when the servicer is up to date on payments, but getting
borrowers into a repayment plan also has a cost because of the time required to go over the
complex options.
The same day the CFPB filed its lawsuit, Illinois and Washington filed suits in state
courts. The offices of attorneys general in nine other states confirmed to Fusion that they are
investigating the company.
At a recent hearing in the Washington state case, the company defended its service: "The
State's claim is not, you didn't help at all, which is what you said you would do. It's that,
you could've helped them more." Navient insists it has forcefully advocated in Washington to
streamline the federal loan system and make the repayment process easier to navigate for
borrowers.
And it's true, Navient, and the broader industry, have stepped up efforts in recent years to
influence decision makers. Since 2014, Navient executives have given nearly $75,000 to the
company's political action committee, which has pumped money mostly into Republican campaigns,
but also some Democratic ones. Over the same timespan, the company has spent more than $10.1m
lobbying Congress, with $4.2m of that spending coming since 2016. About $400,000 of it targeted
the CFPB, which many Republican lawmakers want to do away with.
Among the 22 former federal officials who lobby for Navient is the former US representative
Denny Rehberg, a Republican, who once criticized
federal aid for students as the welfare of the 21st century. His fellow lobbyist and former GOP
representative Vin Weber sits on a board that has aired attack ads against the CFPB, as well as
on the board of the
for-profit college ITT Tech , which shuttered its
campuses in 2016 after Barack Obama's Department of Education accused it of predatory
recruitment and lending.
In response to what they see as a lack of federal oversight, California, Connecticut,
Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia recently required student loan servicers to get
licenses in their states. Not surprisingly, Fusion found a sharp increase in Navient's spending
in states considering such regulations, with the majority of the $300,000 in Navient state
lobbying allocated since 2016.
In Maine and Illinois, the legislatures were flooded with Navient and other industry
lobbyists earlier this year, after lawmakers proposed their own versions of the license bills.
The Maine proposal failed after Navient argued the issue should be left to the federal
government. The Illinois bill passed the legislature, but the Republican governor, Bruce
Rauner, vetoed it in August following lobbying from an
industry trade group . Rauner
said the bill encroached on the federal government's authority.
Researchers argue more data would help them understand how to improve the student loan
process and prevent more people from being overwhelmed by debt. In 2008, Congress made it
illegal for the Department of Education to make the data public, arguing that it was a risk for
student privacy. Private colleges and universities
lobbied to restrict the data. So, too,
did Navient's predecessor, Sallie Mae, and other student loan servicing companies.
Today, companies like Navient have compiled mountains of data about graduations, debt and
financial outcomes – which they consider proprietary information. The lack of
school-specific data about student outcomes can be life-altering, leading students to pick
schools they never would have picked. Nathan Hornes, a 27-year-old Missouri native, racked up
$70,000 in student loans going to Everest College, an unaccredited school, before he
graduated.
"Navient hasn't done a thing to help me," Hornes told Fusion. "They just want their money.
And they want it now."
label="The US cities luring millennials with promises to pay off their student debts"
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/10/the-us-cities-luring-millennials-with-promises-to-pay-off-their-student-debts">
Hornes' loans were recently forgiven following state investigations into Everest's parent
company Corinthian. But many other borrowers still await relief.
Better educating teens about financial literacy before they apply to college will help
reduce their dependence on student loans, but that doesn't change how the deck is stacked for
those who need them. A few states have made
community colleges free , reducing the need for student loan servicers.
But until the Department of Education holds industry leaders like Navient more accountable,
individual states can fix only so much, insists Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of the industry's
most outspoken critics on Capitol Hill.
"Navient's view is, hey, I'm just going to take this money from the Department of Education
and maximize Navient's profits, rather than serving the students," Warren said. "I hold Navient
responsible for that. But I also hold the Department of Education responsible for that. They
act as our agent, the agent of the US taxpayers, the agent of the people of the United States.
And they should demand that Navient does better."
Laura Juncadella, a production assistant for The Naked Truth also contributed to this
article
The Naked Truth: Debt Trap airs on Fusion TV 10 September at 9pm ET. Find out where to
watch here
A fresh story at Bloomberg, which includes new analysis, shows the ugly student debt picture is getting uglier. The driver is
that higher education costs keep rising, often in excess of the likely wages for graduates. The article's grim conclusion: "The next
generation of graduates will include more borrowers who may never be able to repay."
Student debt is now the second biggest type of consumer debt in the US. At $1.5 trillion, is is second only to the mortgage market,
and is also bigger than the subprime market before the crisis, which was generally pegged at $1.3 trillion. 1 Bloomberg
also points out that unlike other categories of personal debt, student debt balances has shown consistent, or one might say persistent,
growth since the crisis.
From the article:
Student loans are being issued at unprecedented rates as more American students
pursue higher education . But the
cost of
tuition at both private and public institutions is touching
all-time
highs , while interest rates on student loans are also rising. Students are spending more time
working instead of studying . (Some 85 percent of current students now work
paid jobs while enrolled.) Experts and analysts worry that the next generation of graduates could default on their loans at
even higher rates than in the immediate wake of the financial crisis.
The last sentence is alarming. As graduates of the class of 2009 like UserFriendly can attest, the job market was desperate. And
for the next few years, the unemployment rate of new college graduates was higher than that of recent high school graduates. One
of the corollaries of that is that more college graduates than before were taking work that didn't require a college degree; this
is still a significant trend today. And on top of that, studies have found that early career earnings have a significant impact on
lifetime earnings. While there are always exceptions, generally speaking, pay levels key off one's earlier compensation, so starting
out at a lower income level is likely to crimp future compensation.
And on top of that, interest costs are rising. The rate for direct undergraduate loans is 5% and for graduate and professional
schools, 6.6%. So student debt costs will also go up even before factoring in inflating school costs. So the ugly picture of delinquencies
and defaults is destined to get worse.
Students attending for-profit universities and community colleges represented almost half of all borrowers leaving school and
beginning to repay loans in 2011. They also accounted for 70 percent of all defaults. As a result, delinquencies skyrocketed in
the 2011-12 academic year, reaching 11.73 percent.
Today, the student loan delinquency rate remains almost as high, which Scott-Clayton attributes to social and institutional
factors, rather than average debt levels. "Delinquency is at crisis levels for borrowers, particularly for borrowers of color,
borrowers who have gone to a for-profit and borrowers who didn't ultimately obtain a degree," she said, highlighting that each
cohort is more likely to miss repayments on their loans than other public and private college students.
Those most at risk of delinquency tend to be, counterintuitively, those who've incurred smaller amounts of debt, explained
Kali McFadden, senior research analyst at LendingTree. Graduates who leave school with six-figure degrees that are valued in the
marketplace -- such as post-graduate law or medical degrees -- usually see a good return on their investment.
I'm a little leery of cheerful generalizations like "big ticket borrowers for professional degrees do better." "Better" may still
not be that good. Recall that law school and in the last year, business school enrollments have fallen because candidates question
whether the hard costs and loss of income while in school will pay off. And there are some degrees, like veterinary medicine, that
are so pricey it's hard to see how they could possibly make economic sense.
What is distressing about this ugly picture is the lack of effective activism by the victims. I am sure some are trying, but in
addition to the burden of being so overwhelmed by the debt burden as to lack the time and energy to do anything beyond cope, is the
fact that being in debt is stigmatized in our society, and borrowers may not want to deal with condescension and criticism. Another
obstacle to organizing is that most of the victims are lower income and/or from minority groups, which means Team Dem can ignore
them on the usual assumption that they have nowhere else to go. It is also harder to create an effective coalition across disparate
economic, geographic, and age groups
But the experience of the post-Civil War South says things could get a lot worse. From Matt Stoller in 2010:
A lot of people forget that
having debt you can't pay
back really sucks. Debt is not just a credit instrument, it is an instrument of political and economic control.
It's actually baked into our culture. The phrase 'the man', as in 'fight the man', referred originally to creditors. 'The man'
in the 19th century stood for 'furnishing man', the merchant that sold 19th century sharecroppers and Southern farmers their supplies
for the year, usually on credit. Farmers, often illiterate and certainly unable to understand the arrangements into which they
were entering, were charged interest rates of 80-100 percent a year, with a lien places on their crops. When approaching a furnishing
agent, who could grant them credit for seeds, equipment, even food itself, a farmer would meekly look down nervously as his debts
were marked down in a notebook. At the end of a year, due to deflation and usury, farmers usually owed more than they started
the year owing. Their land was often forfeit, and eventually most of them became tenant farmers.
They were in hock to the man, and eventually became slaves to him. This structure, of sharecropping and usury, held together
by political violence, continued into the 1960s in some areas of the South. As late as the 1960s, Kennedy would see rural poverty
in Arkansas and pronounce it 'shocking'. These were the fruits of usury, a society built on unsustainable debt peonage.
Sanders has made an issue of student debt, but politicians who want big bucks from financiers and members of the higher education
complex pointedly ignore this issue. As we've pointed out, top bankruptcy scholar Elizabeth Warren won't even endorse a basic reform,
that of making student debt dischargable in bankruptcy. So it may take student debtors becoming a bigger percentage of voters for
this issue to get the political traction it warrants.
______
1 Higher estimates typically included near subprime mortgages then called "Alt A".
There are many, many passages in this obscure old book called The Bible speaking of usury as a grave sin. So many it is actually
one of the most clear and condemned sins in the entire book. Maybe we could see if any of our Congress persons have ever heard
of it? They could learn something from it regarding this topic.
That said, it's passages on gender equality and family structures are pretty outdated and abhorrent so I wouldn't want them to
get any bad ideas from this book on those subjects.
Indeed, all of the old "Iron Age religions" (Judaism, Early Christianity, and Islam) explicitly denounce usury.
The great irony of the Deep South in te USA is that they've been frequently banning Sharia law, even when Sharia law is one
of the few types of law in the world which explicitly bans charging interest.
It is always intriguing how many politicians are so eager to endorse a literalist fealty to the social structures of the bible
but ignore, or even vehemently rail against, the more balanced social restrictions on things like usury or the old idea of a debt
jubilee. But then Jesus himself railed (physically) against embedding money in religion and now we have "entrepreneurial churches"
who preach a "doctrine of prosperity" so I guess times have changed.
I graduated 10 years ago and the most frustrating part was everyone telling me it would be alright and ignoring thw whole you
never recover thing. I am still unable to find worthwhile employment and probably never will be able to.
You really can't listen to many of us over 40.. we really lived in complete my different conditions. When I got out of college
in the 90's they were basically hiring everyone with a pulse in tech. From what I have seen from recent graduates it's getting
easier, as I am seeing a lot more intershops turn into job offers. But for the generation that you are part of, it's an economic
hole that may never be recovered from simply because you were born at the wrong time.
Looking at that graph, notice how the only debt that is backstopped completely by the federal government is growing the fastest.
The no default on student loans rules have to be rescinded.
Extrapolating from these trends, then in a few years the only young people that would be able to afford higher education in
the United States would the the children of the ten per cent – plus a smattering of scholarships to talented individuals found
worthy of supporting. It follows then that as these educated people entered the workforce, that over time that the people that
would be running the country would be children of the elite in a sort of inbred system. It sounds a lot like 19th century class-based
Britain that if you ask me.
As for the country itself it would be disastrous. Going by present population levels, it would mean that instead of recruiting
the leaders and thinkers of the country from the present population of 325 million, that at most you would be recruiting them
from a base level of about 30-40 million. It is to be hoped that these people are not from the shallow end of the gene pool. You
can forget about any idea of an even-handed meritocracy and America would be competing against countries that might employ the
idea of a full meritocracy in the recruitment of their leaders. I wonder how that might work out.
"America would be competing against countries that might employ the idea of a full meritocracy in the recruitment of their
leaders. I wonder how that might work out"
Would the performance of U. S. men in international soccer competition be a similar situation?
The concept of student debt as it exists today would be repulsive to our Founders. Not just for the larger issue of our country
being on the trajectory of becoming an economic aristocracy, but specifically because the Federal government is profiting tremendously
from this crushing usury being applied to majority and the least among us.
Our Founders had no problem with the conquest and seizure of Native Americans land, and they fully respected the rights and claims
of other European countries to do the same. One of their strongest repudiations of the aristocracy was the expansion of private
property rights beyond what was known under any monarchy on the planet to that point in history. In the pre-industrial world the
vast majority of people lived in an agrarian society and economy. Owning land secured you with your livelihood, your living, and
much of your resources; it fully supported most families.
For its founding and for generation after generation the United States government gave land to countless men for military service,
government service, homesteds, etc. Expansions by the Louisiana Purchase and war and treaties with other European nations, quickly
resulting in making these lands available for settlement to our citizens and to immigrants.
The point is that for well over 100 years the government provided to its citizens a huge amount of what our citizens needed
to live their lifetimes through these grants of land. These land grants were then passed from generation to generation and formed
the economic foundations for millions of people, their children and their next generations.
Our Government did this.
The United States ceased to be a predominantly agrarian country in the mid 20th century. But they did not stop aiding our people
and their economic needs. Our government (Federal and states) did continue to provide to our population through public education
(very affordable college), the GI Bill that served millions with income, housing and educational benefits, Social Security, Medicare,
etc.
Since our country's very founding our government has recognized the benefit and need to facilitate the support of its citizens.
The American economy became the greatest on earth because of our land conquest heritage and our collective investments as a nation.
No one did it all on their own, and no one pretended they did.
Reagan killed this legacy. Reagan claimed that our nations success and our heritage was built on our history of rugged individualism
and that our government was the obstacle to returning to these roots. It was a lie; nothing could have been further from the truth.
Student debt, as it exists to day, is crippling the economic futures of the millions who have accrued this debt and the millions
to come, year after year, who will do the same. The student is debt is robbing our nation of the economic activity that historically
matriculated out from those passing from college to the world. That has come almost to an end. Worse yet, our government has positioned
itself to also profit off this debt, and to prevent the indebted from escaping this type of debt through the legal means available
for virtually all other forms of debt.
Our student debt is un-American. It is a cancer on our economy. It exists for the vast short term profit of the few at the
expense of our nations future.
I hope people keep in mind it was the Democrats, specifically Joe Biden, who made student debt even more crippling and heartless
by changing the bankruptcy laws so that creditors can garnish your Social Security benefits (assuming Mitch McConnell doesn't
gut them first).
Republicans are open about what they hope to accomplish, you have to clear the verbal BS that clouds what Democrats are after,
but at the end of the day they are both about enslavement and debt bondage over unwashed masses.
I'm sure it's often the parents that end up paying the debt, as my sister is doing. Parents have deep pockets and are desperate
to help their loved ones get a good start in life.
In my sister's case, they sent their girls to private high school, where they spent the money that could have paid for college.
Not a smart decision. But they love their children and really wanted to do give them the best.
Now the girls are struggling to make a living and my sister cannot afford to retire.
There are so many feedback loops, multipliers, and perverse incentives driving forward this bubble (and its calamitous social
and cultural effects) that it's hard to know where to begin.
As Goldman Sachs
have pointed
out , student-loan-based securities are increasingly "attractive" investments for speculators:
Although the "bubble" is getting bigger, it's not a risk to overall financial stability, Goldman's Marty Young and Lotfi
Karoui said in a recent note. In fact, there's one segment of the market that's emerging as an attractive investment.
It's the $190 billion of outstanding [student] loans that are held within asset-backed securities (ABS) refinanced by private
lenders such as SoFi.
With these securities, lenders pool loans that have similar risk profiles and sell them as instruments in the public markets.
Investors profit as graduates pay back their principal and interest.
So the more student debt there is, and the higher the interest rates are, the better, from that perspective.
It's undeniable, too, that high student loan burdens mean graduates are slower to form households and will probably have fewer
children than they would otherwise. Their diminished spending power, meanwhile, adds to the ongoing erosion of the "real economy,"
in favour of the financial one. Student loans therefore disrupt the basic means of social reproduction. The resulting declines
in fertility then demand high rates of immigration to compensate. A fact cheered on, inevitably, by the open borders crowd (a
substantial number of whom, oddly or not, seem to work in or for universities).
So we see yet another instance in which "right" neoliberalism and "left" identitarianism go hand in hand–forming, indeed, two
heads of the same beast. Student loans have enabled the enormous inflation in tuition costs that have plagued the Anglosphere
over the last couple of decades. This fees income feeds the academic beast (or at least its administrators and senior managers),
while driving the one economic and social crisis (mass migration and the resulting populist backlash) that "left neoliberals,"
centrists, and Clinton/Progress types appear to care about. It's a self-licking ice cream of catastrophic size and reach.
One specific example: hospital chaplains are facing a big retirement crisis. And yet the job requires (to be hoard certified):
an undergraduate degree & then a Master's of Divinity degree, plus a year-long residency. For a job that pays around $60,000 to
$70,000. At least one school, Princeton, funds almost all of their divinity students. But I don't think it's the norm. And then
you throw in the fact that such person ideally would be emotionally & spiritually mature, with enough life experience to meet
with a wide range of people, who are often facing financial hardship due to being sick (as well as existential concerns). I don't
even know how to begin reframing the job or the qualifications or the salary to fit America in 2020. There are a lot of other
angles, such as: what about well-qualified people who can't afford seminary? I know there needs to be a way to screen-out and
screen-in the best people (who won't proselytize), but is a Master's degree the right hurdle? But, I must say, the need for access
to interfaith Spiritual Care is only increasing, as times get tougher & other hospital staff (RNs) don't have time to sit and
listen. People are in pain, not only in their bodies. One thought leader in the field has speculated that the job will just go
away due to lack of advocacy & inability to evolve into a profit center.
It would be interesting to see that student loan debt chart superimposed over %adjuncts and number of administrators. Its pretty
easy to guess what that would look like, but seeing that would be decisive.
I think a little delineation is in order. I've been an adjunct professor and believe the increasing use of adjuncts at universities
has been very beneficial overall -- in terms of the quality of education students are getting. Unfortunately, as we know, that's
not why universities are hiring so many more adjuncts; they're being hired because schools can get away with paying them abysmally.
The situation is so embarrassing that, at the university where I was teaching five years ago, the full-time faculty passed
a resolution asking the administration to give the entire projected increase in teaching salaries entirely to the adjuncts, an
amazing act of selflessness.
The relevance to our discussion here, of course, is the insupportable increase in the annual cost of attending college even
as the schools radically reduce their overall expenditures on faculty salaries.
So how long before this leads to a mass "We Won't Pay" movement? I'm stuck on the dumb treadmill myself, but I wouldn't begrudge
an entire generation for just saying no. Sure, they can garnish wages and the like, but if 30 million people simultaneously say
'eff this', it's more than just a wrench in the works it's drastic enough to force action.
Why DO they keep paying? The debts are always bought by debt collectors who don't even have COPIES promissory notes. Let them
sue you and show up for the hearing and demand proof. They can still ruin your "credit" but if student loans haven't taught you
to eschew credit nothing will. If EVERYONE "walked away" what could they do?
Unfortunately that is never going to happen. This society has been trained to worship at the altar of the FICO score, and most
job seekers cannot afford to have a low score. Said score will be examined and potentially held against you when pursuing employment.
Also, employers frown upon employees who do not pay their bills and then have their wages garnished – at least the smaller
emlpoyers do. This creates extra work for the employer and makes the employee suspect, as in irresponsible.
This problem was created by the political class and is going to require a political solution, i.e. legislation to assist the
student loan borrower or a debt jubilee. Unfortunately, there's too much money being made off the student borrower – even if the
practice is killing the host. And the "I got mine" crowd will not allow a jubilee even if it is for the greater good of society.
Lastly, student loan borrowers coming from a different era (who have paid off their loans) will begrudge the forgiving of the
loans and consider them undeserved. In this case, perhaps the best resolution is to give everyone money toward their student loans
– whether they are currently paid or unpaid.
I cannot jeopardize my employment by joining in a "eff this" movement as much as I would like to. Instead, I will continue
on this treadmill called life, pay my bills and hope to escape as unscathed as possible.
I work for a company that contracts with department of Ed to get student loan borrowers out if default and back into the hands
of loan servicers. The amount of money sloshing around is stunning. I'm sure they've got well paid lobbyists telling legislators
that people will be unemployed if student loans are reformed. I owe well over six figures so the irony is not lost on me. Hiring
one half of the working class to debt collect from the other.
Who pays for diploma-mill educations, and why? I have always assumed that people attended cash-n-carry schools because they
did not qualify aptitude/grade-wise for entrance to a state school, OR a 3rd party like DOD or VA was footing the tab. Both assumptions
appear to be supported by data. Given the far-above-average drop/flunkout rate of diploma mills. I know from my military career
that enlisted members sign up for courses (local or online) at diploma mills to get extra points toward promotions – at Navy expense.
Personally, I would not pay to send my dog to such institutions to learn how to sit up and beg.
One thing is certain, collich kidz do not appear to spend nearly as much time researching where they go to $chool as they do
buying the car they drive.
Jumping into the conversation a little late, but my alma mater recently embarked on a major rethink of the college business
model, and cut tuition from around 50k to around 30k. We even got
a writeup from Frank Bruni
for it .
College officials (I'm relatively active as a fundraiser for my class) describe it as a shift to a "philanthropy model" of
funding. Which worries me for lots of reasons. But at least it's a conversation-starter.
It's also very much a school that is not for people looking to buy a future income flow, but rather an education.
"... Still this is a clear and provable case of racket. Academic racket but still a racket. ..."
"... But even minor prosecution of those academic rentiers is impossible under neoliberalism as regulators are captured and corrupted. ..."
"... And students mostly are too badly informed and too naïve to shop around and find a better price. Which is still possible. For example using community college for the first two years and then transferring credits to a state university. And if student is talented enough he always can get masters at Ivy League school later and it will cost less. ..."
"... 8% insurance policy, ..."
"... The explosion in administrative employment and the resulting bureaucratic bloat and costs is ridiculous and unsustainable, including the promised pension and benefit payouts in the years to come. ..."
"... Young people borrowing tens of thousands of dollars to attend private, for-profit colleges (???) or to study the humanities, social sciences, or business is a waste of time and money for the vast majority. ..."
"... Most urban/suburban high schools have evolved into what might be described as college preparatory girls schools where a large majority of males are marginalized as necessary nuisances and the vast majority of kids learn little that is practical to participating as gainfully employed and self-supporting adults. ..."
"... But that is not an accident, of course. Feminization and infantilization of the society and economy has been underway coincident with deindustrialization and financialization since the 1970s-80s. ..."
"... The cost containment of colleges is the same as what is needed for healthcare. The government should intervene since it is the principal financier in more ways than one. ..."
"... To my knowledge and experience with Federal Direct Loans, students can go into forbearance at any time. There is also a 3 year window of no interest accumulation. After the 3 years, interest accumulates. ..."
The private enterprise system is built to limit overborrowing by sharing risk between lenders and borrowers. ... They charge more
interest when they take on more risk. Because most loans can be discharged in bankruptcy, lenders share the cost of default. ...
But the federal student loan program doesn't work that way. Those ads that run on bus stop signs and on late-night television
- "No Cash? No Credit? No Problem!" - are essentially the Department of Education's official policy on student loans.
On the front end, the department is the world's nicest, most accommodating lender. Interest rates ... are lower than banks charge...
Borrowing for college is essentially an entitlement...
When the loan bill finally comes due, the federal government transforms into a heartless loan collector. You don't need burly
men with brass knuckles to enforce debts when you have the Internal Revenue Service..., which can and will follow you as long as
you live.
The government acts this way because the federal student loan program has been removed from the norms and values of prudent lending.
Because the Department of Education doesn't consider risk, it takes no responsibility. If life, luck and bad choices leave you ...
in the hole, it's all on you. ...
Most college students ... pay back their loans and enjoy the fruits of their degrees. But most pack-a-day smokers don't die of
lung cancer. And most people who bought cars with Takata airbags from 2002 to 2008 weren't killed by shrapnel from explosions. Nevertheless,
we still regard small risks of catastrophic outcomes as problems to be solved. ...
Just one quick comment. We need to solve the student loan problem for existing loans, but I wish talk about how to address this
problem going forward was more about how to provide adequate funding for colleges so that large loans aren't needed in the first
place rather than focusing on how to change the loan program itself.
The cost containment of colleges is the same as what is needed for healthcare. The government should intervene since it is the
principal financier in more ways than one.
=== end of quote ===
Very true. May be even the idea of the net of eligible providers (in network vs out of network) can be borrowed form healthcare.
As this is a public good, it should be severe punishment including jail terms for inflating the cost of education. For example
I think Mankiw should be at investigated using RICO act for the cost of his textbook. But I think that students who enroll into Mankiw
class are already second rate students because at this point they should do some research about who Mankiw really is and avoid his
classes like a plague.
Still this is a clear and provable case of racket. Academic racket but still a racket.
But even minor prosecution of those academic rentiers is impossible under neoliberalism as regulators are captured and corrupted.
And students mostly are too badly informed and too naïve to shop around and find a better price. Which is still possible. For
example using community college for the first two years and then transferring credits to a state university. And if student is talented
enough he always can get masters at Ivy League school later and it will cost less.
Please note that quality of university education is already very problematic. Switching to preparing "ready for jobmarket" graduates
backfired. I would say that quality now is dismal as student lacks fundamentals. They are now kind of "bug of tricks" degree holders.
So the idea of cost control of college education can't be refuted with the hypothesis that it will lower the quality of education.
Essentially what Ivy league college degree buys is the first place in a heap of resumes to major companies (some companies simply
discard resumes from applicant who do not have Ivy League education).
Now about subsidies. Neoliberal colleges are for profit business with academic sharks no different that sharks in chemical or
pharmaceutical companies. They do not care about education, only about lining this own pockets. As simple as that.
That means that in a current environment any "broad" subsidies will result in raising of the cost of education. I would make subsidies
more focused, subject to means test as well as passing a qualifying exam similar to GED. After all at this point the society invests
some money into student.
djb
so is he saying that we shouldn't give student loans unless a bank would loan the money
that's means many people who can now afford college wont be able to
and this:
"Most college students don't end up like Ms. Kelley. They pay back their loans and enjoy the fruits of their degrees. But most
pack-a-day smokers don't die of lung cancer. And most people who bought cars with Takata airbags from 2002 to 2008 weren't killed
by shrapnel from explosions. Nevertheless, we still regard small risks of catastrophic outcomes as problems to be solved."
is he kidding me??? My student loans required an 8% insurance policy, money I didn't even get to use, came out before
I could pay tuition room and board, but I still owed it. The fact that most people pay their student loans means the government doesn't
lose anything from student loans
Dan Berg
Rather than "provide adequate (more) funding (taxes)for colleges" - how about ways to reduce cost? Beginning with the absurd costs
of textbooks; administrative bloat; disparities between tenured and part-time teachers; etc
Here is where Greg Mankiw will tell you he needs to charge $300 a book for his text because he wants his kids to be rich.
A Thomas
And how does anyone propose to remedy monies being deducted from Social Security for delinquent student loans when the person
(victim) cannot make timely payments because of AGE DISCRIMINATION IN EMPLOYMENT. While illegal, it is practiced by a majority of
employers. Often the Soc Sec recipient is reduced to living at poverty level - even though they want to work and would if they could
find paying employment.
Or does anyone want to remedy this? Just let the "old folks" starve and become homeless!!!!!!
RGC
"As a senator from Delaware -- a corporate tax haven where the financial industry is one of the state's largest employers -- Biden
was one of the key proponents of the 2005 legislation that is now bearing down on students like Ryan. That bill effectively prevents
the $150 billion worth of private student debt from being discharged, rescheduled or renegotiated as other debt can be in bankruptcy
court.
Biden's efforts in 2005 were no anomaly. Though the vice president has long portrayed himself as a champion of the struggling
middle class -- a man who famously commutes on Amtrak and mixes enthusiastically with blue-collar workers -- the Delaware lawmaker
has played a consistent and pivotal role in the financial industry's four-decade campaign to make it harder for students to shield
themselves and their families from creditors, according to an IBT review of bankruptcy legislation going back to the 1970s."
80-85% of jobs today and in the future will not require post-secondary training or a university credential. If accelerating automation
and elimination of service employment (retail, health care, education, gov't, legal, etc.) continues apace as anticipated, including
middle- and upper-income employment, there will be still fewer jobs requiring post-secondary "education" that pay what was once perceived
as breadwinner compensation.
Universities all over the US have since the 1970s-80s become costly public jobs programs primarily for females at low or no productivity
and increasing cost to the private sector (as in the case of "health" care). The explosion in administrative employment and the
resulting bureaucratic bloat and costs is ridiculous and unsustainable, including the promised pension and benefit payouts in the
years to come.
Young people borrowing tens of thousands of dollars to attend private, for-profit colleges (???) or to study the humanities,
social sciences, or business is a waste of time and money for the vast majority.
Most urban/suburban high schools have evolved into what might be described as college preparatory girls schools where a large
majority of males are marginalized as necessary nuisances and the vast majority of kids learn little that is practical to participating
as gainfully employed and self-supporting adults.
But that is not an accident, of course. Feminization and infantilization of the society and economy has been underway coincident
with deindustrialization and financialization since the 1970s-80s.
there should be a subsidy for college, because otherwise people tend to underinvest in education. Individuals are often liquidity
constrained or just short sighted.
But IMO we are doing the subsidies all wrong. We are offering subsidized loans and tax deductions. We should instead be using
plain old grants more often. That's how you ensure access to people who would otherwise lack it.
But the grants should be relatively small. They should just be sufficient to coverage get of a public university education, without
a little t of extra amenities. The critics of higher ed who say that subsidies are driving up the costs are half right. It's really
consumer preferences, for the most part. But that doesn't mean government should contribute to that problem, of that taxpayers should
pay limitless amounts. Some price pressure should still be left to exist.
The cost containment of colleges is the same as what is needed for healthcare. The government should intervene since it is the
principal financier in more ways than one.
There is a movement afoot from the Jason Delisles, Matt Chingos, and the Beth Akers of both the New America Foundation and Brookings
who advocate interest rates do not matter, higher interest rates make sense for advanced degrees, and student loans should be risk
sensitive using Fair Market Valuation techniques.
Getting a student loan is like checking into a Roach Motel. You can sign in via your signature; but, you can never check out without
paying it off. If you default, it gets worst for you as stated in the story. So the risk to the Federal Gov and taxpayers is minimal.
Indeed some would tell you, the Gov makes more money in default than in payoff. I also think there is more to the story than being
revealed.
The highest default rate is with those who have student loans of < $10,000 [~39% of them have loans of less than $10,000 (NY Fed)]
and are the result of Community Colleges. Potentially these are people attempting to improve their status in life. Student loan borrowers
with $100,000 of debt had a default rate of 18% and are also the higher earners after graduation.
To my knowledge and experience with Federal Direct Loans, students can go into forbearance at any time. There is also a 3 year
window of no interest accumulation. After the 3 years, interest accumulates. The 3 year window of no interest accumulation needs
to be expanded to cover what we experienced since 2008 and perhaps go as long as 10 years. The 20-25 life time of IBR should be shortened
to 10 - 15 years. This is not like students ordered up a 2008 recession, they were penalized unknowingly and were encouraged to seek
a college education of sorts. The same holds true for those returning to college to better themselves.
Not only does student debt hurt the student, it is also playing out in the overall economy as I reported using NY Fed information
at AB. Households with Student Loan Debt are a higher risk than those without Student Loan Debt. They are buying fewer homes and
autos than households without Student Loan debt.
State financing has decreased. In Michigan it has gone from ~60% to ~30% with families picking up the load through various sources.
Perhaps expanding the public service to erase college debt after 10 years would make more sense than doing so with strings attached.
Colleges do not appear to be cost sensitive to what the market may bear. There has always been a need for them and like healthcare
colleges are allowed to increase as needed in cost without question. If you can not pay it upfront, you can always borrow it seems
to rule. The new programs was supposed to hold colleges accountable for default rates. From the get-go, the administration let some
of them off the hook.
According
to a
brand new Pew survey, approximately 7 out of every 10 Americans believe that "debt is a necessity
in their lives", and approximately 8 out of every 10 Americans actually have debt right now.
Most of us like to think that "someday" we will get out of the hole and quit being debt slaves, but
very few of us ever actually accomplish this.
That is because the entire system is
designed to trap us in debt before we even get out into the "real world" and keep us in debt until
we die. Sadly, most Americans don't even realize what is being done to them.
In America today, debt is considered to be just part of normal life. We go
into debt to go to college, we go into debt to buy a vehicle, we go into debt to buy a home, and
we are constantly using our credit cards to buy the things that we think we need.
As a result, this generation of Americans is absolutely swimming in debt. The
following are some of the findings of
the Pew survey that I mentioned above
*"8 in 10 Americans have debt, with mortgages the most common liability."
*"Although younger generations of Americans are the most likely to have debt (89 percent of
Gen Xers and 86 percent of millennials do), older generations are increasingly carrying debt into
retirement."
*"7 in 10 Americans said debt is a necessity in their lives, even though they prefer not to
have it."
Most of us wish that we didn't have any debt, but we have bought into the lie that it
is a necessary part of life in America in the 21st century.
It has been estimated that 43 percent of all American households spend more money than they make
each month, and U.S. households are
more than 11 trillion dollars in debt at this point.
When it comes to government debt, that is easy for us to blame on someone else, but all of this
household debt is undoubtedly something that we have done to ourselves.
It all starts at a very early age for most of us. When we are still in
high school, we are endlessly told about how important a college education is. All of the authority
figures in our lives insist that we should just try to get into the best school that we possibly
can and to not even worry about how much it will cost.
So many of us go into staggering amounts of debt before we even get out into the working world.
We had faith that the "good jobs" that were being promised to us would be there when we graduated.
Unfortunately, in this day and age those "good jobs" end up being a mirage more often than not.
But whether or not we can find a good job, we still have to pay off all that debt.
According to new data that was recently released, the total amount of student loan debt in the
United States has risen to a grand total 1.2 trillion dollars. If you can believe it, that
total has
more than doubled over the past decade.
Right now, there are approximately
40 million Americans that are paying off student loan debt. For many of them, they will
keep making payments on this debt until they are senior citizens.
Another way that they get you while you are still in school is with credit card debt.
I got my first credit card while I was in college, and nobody ever taught me about the potential
dangers.
Today, the average U.S. household that has at least one credit card has approximately
$15,950 in credit card debt.
So let's say that you have that much credit card debt and you are paying an annual interest rate
of 17 percent. If you only pay the minimum payment each month, it will take you 229 months
to pay your credit card off, and during that time you will have paid $13,505.82 in interest charges.
In other words, you will almost have paid twice as much for everything that you originally bought
with your credit card by the time it is all said and done.
This is why banks love to give you credit cards. If they can get back nearly twice as much
money as they originally give you, they get rich and you get poor.
Most of us get loaded down with even more debt when we go to buy a vehicle. Instead of saving
up and getting what we can afford, many of us end up getting the largest loans that we can qualify
for.
In a
previous article, I discussed the fact that the average auto loan at signing in America
today is
approximately $27,000. In order to get the monthly payments down to a level where we can
afford them, many of these auto loans are now being stretched out for six or seven years.
In fact, the number of auto loans that exceed 72 months
has hit at an all-time high of 29.5 percent.
It is the same thing with home loans.
In the old days, it was extremely rare for a mortgage to be stretched over 30 years, but today
that is pretty much the standard.
Sadly, most people don't understand how much money this is costing them.
If you take out a $300,000 mortgage at 3.92 percent and stretch it over 30 years, you will end
up paying back a grand total of $510,640.
In other words, you will pay for two houses by the time you are done.
Yes, we all need somewhere to live, and there are definitely negatives to renting as well.
But it is very important that we all understand what is being done to us.
And I haven't even discussed one of the most insidious forms of debt yet.
Have you noticed that most doctors and most hospitals will never tell you how much something is
going to cost in advance?
They get us when we are at our most vulnerable. When there is something wrong with us physically,
we are often desperate to get help. So we don't ask too many questions and we just go along
with whatever they say.
But then later we get the bill and we are often
completely shocked by what they have charged us.
If you are completely unethical, it is a great business model. People that are extremely
desperate and needy come to you and you don't even have to tell them how much your services are going
to cost. And then once they leave, you send them an absolutely outrageous bill for whatever
you feel like charging.
Frankly, I don't know how a lot of people working in the medical field live with themselves.
In their extreme greed, they are ruining the lives of millions of ordinary American families.
One very disturbing study found that
approximately 41 percent of all working age Americans either currently have medical bill problems
or are paying off medical debt. And collection agencies seek to collect unpaid medical bills
from about 30 million of us each and every year.
Most of us will spend our entire lives paying off debt.
That is why we are called debt slaves – our hard work makes others extremely wealthy.
ebworthen
All by design. The great lie is that you should "work hard and be responsible".
Yeah? Why? Because it feeds the beast in Wall Street and Washington? The bailouts and free money
for the banks/corporations/insurers wiped that idea off the slate.
Give me sound money and start producing again while offering me interest on my savings and we
can start talking about responsibility. The example set by Wall Street and Washington is that
debt is good, so what the fuck do they expect regular folks to do, keep carrying their bags?
Fuck you assholes, to Hell and back on a bed of nails.
European American
I must confess. I declared bankruptcy back in the late 80's. Not proud of that time in my life
but it was legal and it literally saved me. Since then, "If I can't buy that product/service with
the cash in my wallet, then I wasn't suppose to have it." has been my philosophy for the last
25 years, and even though the State stills owns my real estate, more or less (various taxes),
I'm basically free. Debt is a killer of ones mental, physical and emotional immune system. I highly
recommend avoiding IT at all costs. Debit card is the only plastic money in my wallet, along with
some fiat currency. My bank is the color of Gold and SIlver.
Welcome to the club. Been a member for about that long myself.
I knew I'd like the financial freedom. I knew I'd like how much money it saved me.
What it took a few years debt-free to understand was that in a world measured in debt, I
would become invisible. I can not be viewed using their technology any more. I'm
a steath bomber with glider wings and a zero coefficient of drag.
If the 100th monkey effect applies here, we will be part of an awakened populace that watches
the ctrl+alt+del of USD and the resultant house of cards.
As we know debt is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it is worth becoming an indentured
servent for a payout later.
We take out a loan, or at least most of us, for a house. This helps us build up equity
instead of wasting it all on rent every month. By retirement people should own their
home outright and not have to pay rent during their retirement. Most smart people are
even able to downsize and stick some money in their savings.
A large percentage of people take out a loan for school. We have all read articled
of idiots getting a 4 year degree in women's studies at a fancy private school, having a loan
of $120,000, and never being able to pay it off. But the smart people who go to school
maybe a state school, for a degree that is marketable do better than those without a degree.
A reliable car can help us save time, thus money, getting to and from work and other places.
The key buying something basic and reliable and not a brand new sports car.
I'm glad we have the ability to borrow money. It has helped me immensily in my own
personal life. And I would say, I would be worse off without it.
Ugh. You all know my screen name, what it stands for and my opinions on debt. Posting
up on this subject borders on the tedious for me, but for those who haven't heard it yet, here
it is....
If you have a valid financial reason for going into debt, that is to say you have a well-considered
goal for your debt exposure, debt is not necessarily bad. For instance, if you are going
to be a professional photographer you might need to buy some cameras and photography equipment
that will be necessary for you to exist in that world. You are INVESTING in yourself.
Nothing wrong with using debt for that if you can't pay as you go straight out of pocket.
Further down the totem pole is something like buying a house. A collateralized obligation.
One you have the USE of the asset while you pay it off. I'm less enthusiastic about this
sort of stuff but if it's a necessity (like having a place to live) I can't fault you for
doing it. BUT IT WILL NEVER MAKE YOU MORE PRODUCTIVE OR INCREASE YOUR EARNING POWER.
You feeling me on this? The key here is to pay that bitch down as fast as possible and minimize
your interest expense because it's a pure dead-weight loss to you.
ANYTHING else, you don't need to go into debt over. So just don't. Better to do
without than go into debt over anything beyond this point.
There really are very few exceptions to these simple rules (unless you are a government in
which case everything is an excuse to go into debt since you're just spending other people's money).
We should object to the neoliberal complete "instumentalization" of education: education became just a mean to get nicely paid job.
And even this hope is mostly an illusion for all but the top 5% of students...
And while students share their own part of responsibility for accumulating the debt the predatory behaviour of neoliberal universities
is an important factor that should not be discounted and perpetrators should be held responsible. Especially dirty tricks of ballooning
its size and pushing students into "hopeless" specialties, which would be fine, if they were sons or daughters of well to do and parent
still support then financially.
Actually neoliberalism justifies predatory behaviour and as such is a doomed social system as without solidarity some members of
financial oligarchy that rules the country sooner or later might hand from the lampposts.
Notable quotes:
"... It also never ceases to amaze me the number of anti-educational opinions which flare up when the discussion of student loan default arises. There are always those who will prophesize there is no need to attain a higher level of education as anyone could be something else and be successful and not require a higher level of education. Or they come forth with the explanation on how young 18 year-olds and those already struggling should be able to ascertain the risk of higher debt when the cards are already stacked against them legally. ..."
"... There does not appear to be much movement on the part of Congress to reconcile the issues in favor of students as opposed to the non-profit and for profit institutes. ..."
"... It's easy to explain, really. According to the Department of Education ( https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/repay-loans/understand/plans ) you're going to be paying off that loan at minimum payments for 25 years. Assuming your average bachelor's degree is about $30k if you go all-loans ( http://collegecost.ed.gov/catc/ ) and the average student loan interest rate is a generous 5% ( http://www.direct.ed.gov/calc.html ), you're going to be paying $175 a month for a sizable chunk of your adult life. ..."
"... Majoring in IT or Computer Science would have a been a great move in the late 1990's; however, if you graduated around 2000, you likely would have found yourself facing a tough job market.. Likewise, majoring in petroleum engineering or petroleum geology would have seemed like a good move a couple of years ago; however, now that oil prices are crashing, it's presumably a much tougher job market. ..."
"... To confuse going to college with vocational education is to commit a major category error. I think bright, ambitious high school graduates– who are looking for upward social mobility– would be far better served by a plumbing or carpentry apprenticeship program. A good plumber can earn enough money to send his or her children to Yale to study Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer. ..."
"... A bright working class kid who goes off to New Haven, to study medieval lit, will need tremendous luck to overcome the enormous class prejudice she will face in trying to establish herself as a tenure-track academic. If she really loves medieval literature for its own sake, then to study it deeply will be "worth it" even if she finds herself working as a barista or store-clerk. ..."
"... As a middle-aged doctoral student in the humanities you should not even be thinking much about your loans. Write the most brilliant thesis that you can, get a book or some decent articles published from it– and swim carefully in the shark-infested waters of academia until you reach the beautiful island of tenured full-professorship. If that island turns out to be an ever-receding mirage, sell your soul to our corporate overlords and pay back your loans! Alternatively, tune in, drop out, and use your finely tuned research and rhetorical skills to help us overthrow the kleptocratic regime that oppresses us all!! ..."
"... Genuine education should provide one with profound contentment, grateful for the journey taken, and a deep appreciation of life. ..."
"... Instead many of us are left confused – confusing career training (redundant and excessive, as it turned out, unfortunate for the student, though not necessarily bad for those on the supply side, one must begrudgingly admit – oops, there goes one's serenity) with enlightenment. ..."
"... We all should be against Big Educational-Complex and its certificates-producing factory education that does not put the student's health and happiness up there with co-existing peacefully with Nature. ..."
"... Remember DINKs? Dual Income No Kids. Dual Debt Bad Job No House No Kids doesn't work well for acronyms. Better for an abbreviated hash tag? ..."
"... I graduated law school with $100k+ in debt inclusive of undergrad. I've never missed a loan payment and my credit score is 830. my income has never reached $100k. my payments started out at over $1000 a month and through aggressive payment and refinancing, I've managed to reduce the payments to $500 a month. I come from a lower middle class background and my parents offered what I call 'negative help' throughout college. ..."
"... my unfortunate situation is unique and I wouldn't wish my debt on anyone. it's basically indentured servitude. it's awful, it's affects my life and health in ways no one should have to live, I have all sorts of stress related illnesses. I'm basically 2 months away from default of everything. my savings is negligible and my net worth is still negative 10 years after graduating. ..."
"... My story is very similar to yours, although I haven't had as much success whittling down my loan balances. But yes, it's made me a socialist as well; makes me wonder how many of us, i.e. ppl radicalized by student loans, are out there. Perhaps the elites' grand plan to make us all debt slaves will eventually backfire in more ways than via the obvious economic issues? ..."
It also never ceases to amaze me the number of anti-educational opinions which flare up when the discussion of student loan
default arises. There are always those who will prophesize there is no need to attain a higher level of education as anyone could
be something else and be successful and not require a higher level of education. Or they come forth with the explanation on how young
18 year-olds and those already struggling should be able to ascertain the risk of higher debt when the cards are already stacked
against them legally. In any case during a poor economy, those with more education appear to be employed at a higher rate than
those with less education. The issue for those pursuing an education is the ever increasing burden and danger of student loans and
associated interest rates which prevent younger people from moving into the economy successfully after graduation, the failure of
the government to support higher education and protect students from for-profit fraud, the increased risk of default and becoming
indentured to the government, and the increased cost of an education which has surpassed healthcare in rising costs.
There does not appear to be much movement on the part of Congress to reconcile the issues in favor of students as opposed
to the non-profit and for profit institutes.
Ranger Rick, November 9, 2015 at 11:34 am
It's easy to explain, really. According to the Department of Education (
https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/repay-loans/understand/plans
) you're going to be paying off that loan at minimum payments for 25 years. Assuming your average bachelor's degree is about $30k
if you go all-loans ( http://collegecost.ed.gov/catc/ ) and the
average student loan interest rate is a generous 5% ( http://www.direct.ed.gov/calc.html
), you're going to be paying $175 a month for a sizable chunk of your adult life.
If you're merely hitting the median income of a bachelor's degree after graduation, $55k (http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=77
), and good luck with that in this economy, you're still paying ~31.5% of that in taxes (http://www.oecd.org/ctp/tax-policy/taxing-wages-20725124.htm
) you're left with $35.5k before any other costs. Out of that, you're going to have to come up with the down payment to buy a
house and a car after spending more money than you have left (http://www.bls.gov/cex/csxann13.pdf).
Louis, November 9, 2015 at 12:33 pm
The last paragraph sums it up perfectly, especially the predictable counterarguments. Accurately assessing what job in demand
several years down the road is very difficult, if not impossible.
Majoring in IT or Computer Science would have a been a great move in the late 1990's; however, if you graduated around
2000, you likely would have found yourself facing a tough job market.. Likewise, majoring in petroleum engineering or petroleum
geology would have seemed like a good move a couple of years ago; however, now that oil prices are crashing, it's presumably a
much tougher job market.
Do we blame the computer science majors graduating in 2000 or the graduates struggling to break into the energy industry, now
that oil prices have dropped, for majoring in "useless" degrees? It's much easier to create a strawman about useless degrees that
accept the fact that there is a element of chance in terms of what the job market will look like upon graduation.
The cost of higher education is absurd and there simply aren't enough good jobs to go around-there are people out there who
majored in the "right" fields and have found themselves underemployed or unemployed-so I'm not unsympathetic to the plight of
many people in my generation.
At the same time, I do believe in personal responsibility-I'm wary of creating a moral hazard if people can discharge loans
in bankruptcy. I've been paying off my student loans (grad school) for a couple of years-I kept the level debt below any realistic
starting salary-and will eventually have the loans paid off, though it may be a few more years.
I am really conflicted between believing in personal responsibility but also seeing how this generation has gotten screwed.
I really don't know what the right answer is.
Ulysses, November 9, 2015 at 1:47 pm
"The cost of higher education is absurd and there simply aren't enough good jobs to go around-there are people out there who
majored in the "right" fields and have found themselves underemployed or unemployed-so I'm not unsympathetic to the plight of
many people in my generation."
To confuse going to college with vocational education is to commit a major category error. I think bright, ambitious high
school graduates– who are looking for upward social mobility– would be far better served by a plumbing or carpentry apprenticeship
program. A good plumber can earn enough money to send his or her children to Yale to study Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer.
A bright working class kid who goes off to New Haven, to study medieval lit, will need tremendous luck to overcome the
enormous class prejudice she will face in trying to establish herself as a tenure-track academic. If she really loves medieval
literature for its own sake, then to study it deeply will be "worth it" even if she finds herself working as a barista or store-clerk.
None of this, of course, excuses the outrageously high tuition charges, administrative salaries, etc. at the "top schools."
They are indeed institutions that reinforce class boundaries. My point is that strictly career education is best begun at a less
expensive community college. After working in the IT field, for example, a talented associate's degree-holder might well find
that her employer will subsidize study at an elite school with an excellent computer science program.
My utopian dream would be a society where all sorts of studies are open to everyone– for free. Everyone would have a basic
Job or Income guarantee and could study as little, or as much, as they like!
Ulysses, November 9, 2015 at 2:05 pm
As a middle-aged doctoral student in the humanities you should not even be thinking much about your loans. Write the most
brilliant thesis that you can, get a book or some decent articles published from it– and swim carefully in the shark-infested
waters of academia until you reach the beautiful island of tenured full-professorship.
If that island turns out to be an ever-receding mirage, sell your soul to our corporate overlords and pay back your loans!
Alternatively, tune in, drop out, and use your finely tuned research and rhetorical skills to help us overthrow the kleptocratic
regime that oppresses us all!!
subgenius, November 9, 2015 at 3:07 pm
except (in my experience) the corporate overlords want young meat.
I have 2 masters degrees 2 undergraduate degrees and a host of random diplomas – but at 45, I am variously too old, too qualified,
or lacking sufficient recent corporate experience in the field to get hired
Trying to get enough cash to get a contractor license seems my best chance at anything other than random day work.
MyLessThanPrimeBeef, November 9, 2015 at 3:41 pm
Genuine education should provide one with profound contentment, grateful for the journey taken, and a deep appreciation
of life.
Instead many of us are left confused – confusing career training (redundant and excessive, as it turned out, unfortunate
for the student, though not necessarily bad for those on the supply side, one must begrudgingly admit – oops, there goes one's
serenity) with enlightenment.
"I would spend another 12 soul-nourishing years pursuing those non-profit degrees' vs 'I can't feed my family with those paper
certificates.'
jrs, November 9, 2015 at 2:55 pm
I am anti-education as the solution to our economic woes. We need jobs or a guaranteed income. And we need to stop outsourcing
the jobs that exist. And we need a much higher minimum wage. And maybe we need work sharing. I am also against using screwdrivers
to pound in a nail. But why are you so anti screwdriver anyway?
And I see calls for more and more education used to make it seem ok to pay people without much education less than a living
wage. Because they deserve it for being whatever drop outs. And it's not ok.
I don't actually have anything against the professors (except their overall political cowardice in times demanding radicalism!).
Now the administrators, yea I can see the bloat and the waste there. But mostly, I have issues with more and more education being
preached as the answer to a jobs and wages crisis.
MyLessThanPrimeBeef -> jrs, November 9, 2015 at 3:50 pm
We all should be against Big Educational-Complex and its certificates-producing factory education that does not put the
student's health and happiness up there with co-existing peacefully with Nature.
"You must be lazy – you're not educated."
"Sorry, you are too stupid for our elite university to admit, just as your brother was too poor for our rich club to let
in."
"I am going to kill you intellectually. I will annihilate you intellectually. My idea will destroy you and I don't have
to feel sorry at all."
Kris Alman, November 9, 2015 at 11:11 am
Remember DINKs? Dual Income No Kids. Dual Debt Bad Job No House No Kids doesn't work well for acronyms. Better for an abbreviated
hash tag?
debitor serf, November 9, 2015 at 7:17 pm
I graduated law school with $100k+ in debt inclusive of undergrad. I've never missed a loan payment and my credit score
is 830. my income has never reached $100k. my payments started out at over $1000 a month and through aggressive payment and refinancing,
I've managed to reduce the payments to $500 a month. I come from a lower middle class background and my parents offered what I
call 'negative help' throughout college.
my unfortunate situation is unique and I wouldn't wish my debt on anyone. it's basically indentured servitude. it's awful,
it's affects my life and health in ways no one should have to live, I have all sorts of stress related illnesses. I'm basically
2 months away from default of everything. my savings is negligible and my net worth is still negative 10 years after graduating.
student loans, combined with a rigged system, turned me into a closeted socialist. I am smart, hard working and resourceful.
if I can't make it in this world, heck, then who can? few, because the system is rigged!
I have no problems at all taking all the wealth of the oligarchs and redistributing it. people look at me like I'm crazy. confiscate
it all I say, and reset the system from scratch. let them try to make their billions in a system where things are fair and not
rigged...
Ramoth, November 9, 2015 at 9:23 pm
My story is very similar to yours, although I haven't had as much success whittling down my loan balances. But yes, it's
made me a socialist as well; makes me wonder how many of us, i.e. ppl radicalized by student loans, are out there. Perhaps the
elites' grand plan to make us all debt slaves will eventually backfire in more ways than via the obvious economic issues?
"... Well, we all know thats ********. The real unemployment rate is 21.2% (shadow stats). ..."
"... Fields of occupation that do make money are saturated. You get your foot in the door via 2 ways: sheer luck or you know someone in that field. ..."
"... Most jobs offered are at minimum wage. Another big secret that is never told. The average hours worked in the US is 34.5. Part time. Also, missing here is what kind of degree students in the study are graduating with. So I assume this is bachelor degrees. Something looked upon today as increasingly like an associate's degree, meaning if you really want to risk more debt & RISK that you MIGHT find a job when you graduate, you will need a Masters or a doctorate. This increases your loan burden to 60,000 for your average masters or more. 100,000+ for a doctorate. ..."
"... Student loans and the increasing need for a Masters degree is a major scam to accrue more debt slavery. A Masters DOES NOT increase your chances Today of a job in your field of study. Ten years ago my daughter graduated with 8 friends and only 2 got jobs in their chosen fields of study, one a teacher who doesn't make much at 37,000 a year and the other went on to get a doctorate and did get a job in her chosen field of study at great pay but with nearly 200,000 in student loan debt ..."
"... Parents need to get involved in all facets of determining aptitude and major selection that can pay dividends in the job market. Too many kids just go to college as an extension of high school with the "I'll figure it out later" attitude. These are also the ones you see working as cashiers ..."
American students carry an aggregate pile of student loan debt equivalent to roughly $1.5 trillion,
a
generational burden
that has helped contribute to plunging birth rates, lower home-ownership rates among young
people, and even lower rates of stock ownership, as more young people dedicate more financial resources to paying down
debt.
But to gauge
exactly
how much a students' finances factor into their decisions
about which school to attend and which majors to choose,
MidAmerica Nazarene University surveyed 2,000 recent graduates from around the country to learn more about how they
financed their degrees, and how much they will owe after graduation.
Given the cost of higher education in the US, the majority of students answered that post-grad job prospects influenced the
major they selected (those who answered 'no' either really enjoy studying STEM, or majored in gender studies).
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It might seem surprising given the financial stakes, but the survey also showed that more than 60% of recent grads didn't
have jobs lined up when they received their diplomas.
For those who did choose their careers based on financial considerations, a majority said they would have picked another
line of work if finances weren't a consideration (but hey, we can't all be artists).
Once upon a time, there wasn't as much of a correlation between a students' field of study and their eventual chosen career
(investment bankers who studied English at Middlebury College wound up on Wall Street thanks to 'Uncle Jim's' connections).
But as the world of higher education becomes increasingly costly and cut throat, situations like this are becoming
increasingly rare.
One of the more telling data points in the study was the gauge of graduates' feelings about the job market.
Even
with unemployment at multi-decade lows, a majority of graduates had a negative outlook on the job market.
PhD Millionaire who called Dotcom crash, housing bust, and market's surge since '09 is now predicting a 'cash
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Sponsored By Stansberry Research
The overwhelming majority of students took out loans to pay for some or all of college, with 71% taking out loans and the
average amount borrowed equivalent to just over $25,000.
In addition to taking on loans, most college students receive at least some help from family members or other sources, as
only one-quarter of respondents said they completely self-financed their degree.
On average, students expect to pay off their loans in 9.5 years, meaning that most of these students will be in their
mid-30s when they finally reach a zero balance.
Imagine what that number would be if students had no help from their families?
Even with unemployment at multi-decade lows, a majority of
graduates had a negative outlook on the job market."
Well, we
all know thats ********. The real unemployment rate is 21.2% (shadow
stats).
There is a gap here as to why these graduates don't have jobs
lined up when they graduate, which is not mentioned in the article.
1. Fields of occupation that do make money are saturated. You get
your foot in the door via 2 ways: sheer luck or you know someone in
that field.
2. Most jobs offered are at minimum wage. Another big secret that
is never told. The average hours worked in the US is 34.5. Part time.
Also, missing here is what kind of degree students in the study are
graduating with. So I assume this is bachelor degrees. Something
looked upon today as increasingly like an associate's degree, meaning
if you really want to risk more debt & RISK that you MIGHT find a job
when you graduate, you will need a Masters or a doctorate. This
increases your loan burden to 60,000 for your average masters or
more. 100,000+ for a doctorate.
3. Student loans and the increasing need for a Masters degree is a
major scam to accrue more debt slavery. A Masters DOES NOT increase
your chances Today of a job in your field of study. Ten years ago my
daughter graduated with 8 friends and only 2 got jobs in their chosen
fields of study, one a teacher who doesn't make much at 37,000 a year
and the other went on to get a doctorate and did get a job in her
chosen field of study at great pay but with nearly 200,000 in student
loan debt.
Before offshoring Americans not cut out for college went to work
at the local plants like their parents did. The propaganda ever since
has been you're a nobody and has been, only to attend college
accruing tens of thousands of debt, to wind up in some **** minimum
wage job because you can't find one in YOUR field of study or you can
and learn that starting pay is minimum wage but you take whatever is
offered because if you don't you're in trouble when loans come due 6
months later.
And that right there turns promising young people into debt
slaves. Just as is planned by *** oligarchs at the FED RESERVE.
Parents need to get involved in all facets of determining aptitude
and major selection that can pay dividends in the job market. Too
many kids just go to college as an extension of high school with the
"I'll figure it out later" attitude. These are also the ones you see
working as cashiers who damn near have a **** hemorrhage when they
have to make change without the help of the register. Do your kids a
solid and work with them in their career quests and by all means, get
involved with their education and most important, read to them when
they're young. It is ******* criminal to charge tremendous
tuition and graduate students ill prepared for the challenges of
life. Then again if you got the cash, you can probably buy a degree
from some Cuck in the Dean's office!
when I graduated College (Cumlaude btw) nobody lined up to hand me
decent job with nice salary. AND we didn't have Lyft or Uber back
then. so what's changed besides the fact that we have Uber and
Lyft?
Here in shitinois, there is harper college, which is free if you pay
your real estate taxes and maintain good grades. Why the **** would
anyone pay for a university to bend you over.
Because the economy never recovered from 2008-2009. The only thing
that came out of that crisis is cheaper and easier debt.
People
bash millennials but then neglect to acknowledge the generation that
raised them. This **** storm started with the Baby Boomers and has
only gotten worse.
Here's things most millennials weren't doing in 2008/2009:
1.) Buying more house than they could afford with those great
teaser rates
2.) Selling mortgages for houses people couldn't afford.
3.) Running TBTF banks.
4.) Using derivatives to hedge derivatives to hedge derivatives.
5.) Working in Washington, voting to bail out said TBTF banks,
even though we operate in a "capitalist" country.
I'm not making up excuses for my situation because I'm not saddled
with loan debt, have a good job, and am self-supporting. But let's
lay the blame where it should be. On the Boomers. The generation
that had it the easiest out of all of them and basically contributed
nothing positive to society other than piling up debt.
What should be pointed out imo, is that a major amounts of Graduates
have just went thru 4-6 years of a Liberal Borg.
They are
un-hire-able, brain washed, worthless air breathing parasites.
Those who have interned or worked at firms within their chosen
profession, built relationship's, showed ability to perform and
contribute, will be hired if not already.
Those Libtard Borg stooges will have to go back to Mom's Basement
for further instruction..............
very wrong. american engineers and computer science graduates stay
jobless while corps hire from india and china. look at youtube
vids of google staff meetings...
Not wrong at all, I have worked with freshly graduated
Mechanical and Electrical Engineers. For years they were
actually put with me once per month for a full 5 days. 3 at a
time usually for training.
Everything I stated above is 100
% spot on, Fact. They usually are complete idiots. Not worth
having around, at all.
There is nothing more useless than a newly graduated
engineer. I was useless when I graduated with my BSCHE 40+
years ago. It takes around five to ten years before an
engineer is really contributing.
I actually had a few but each and everyone of them grew
up within family trades, or worked at a trade so they had
great hands on experience way prior to going to College.
Most put their way through school or contributed at
similar trades to sharpen their skills.
I was very
similar and was lucky to have some guide me in the
correct direction at that age imo. It did help, a
lot...........
So social justice gender studies doesn't have a real job? Well No
****!!!!
These universities aren't teaching these kids ANYTHING of
any use for the real world and employers know that! Within the next
few years, a liberal degree in whatever will be completely useless.
Enjoying payback your loans dumbasses
The next generation better be taking notes and looking at a trade
for high school!
I have a a job for a fresh college grad. If you are cute, haven't
slept with all the college athletes, have a non-land-whale decent
body and can cook a meal that doesn't taste like crap.
Reply to my comment here and I have an opening for a sugar bay - aka
sexy college girl wifey ;)
In return I will provide you with a free place to live, feed you,
take care of you and this will be a temporary arrangement until you
can prove that you won't leave me with 50% of my life savings by
going to court.
Roomate prenup shall be signed electronically before you move in with
me.
They don't have jobs lined up because the want ads aren't hiring
300lb, green and purple haired, nose ring wearing, transgendered
justice warrior promoting, half-vegan, pedo, ***, basket weavers for
their company.
I didn't either. Took the whole summer off to party. Sometime
around September I started looking for a job. Not one God damned job
offered for an economist (that was my major). What a rip, I
thought. So I ended up where everyone else ends up- sales. It was
at that job I actually got an education.
Most college grads had no buisness going to college in the first
place.
Some of the dumbest people got into these colleges. Then
they took out loans so they could get a job to pay off their student
loan debt. Congratulations, you played yourselves.
Out of high school they would have had the ability to dig
ditches. But after 4 years of liberal arts and feminism
training, they aren't even capable of stringing together a
coherent sentence.
How about showing WHICH majors these idiots went for and then
correlate that to the jobs and salaries that are ACTUALLY available
for those majors......a major in Art History WON"T FIND A JOB... .a
Engineering major is ALREADY GETTING OFFERS, their junior year. QUIT
WASTING MONEY ON WORTHLESS DEGREES. That alone solves EVERY problem
in this article
In this article, we explore commodities and consumption , two concepts that
are central to critiques of the neoliberal university. By engaging with these concepts, we
explore the limits of neoliberal logic. We ground this conceptual entanglement in Marxist and
post-Marxist traditions given our understanding of neoliberalism both as an extension of and as
a meaningfully different form of capitalism. As colleges and universities enact neoliberal
economic assumptions by focusing on revenue generation, understanding students as customers,
and construing their faculty as temporary service providers, the terms commodity and
consumption have become commonplace in critical higher education literature. When
critiques concerning the commodification and consumption of higher education are connected with
these theoretical and conceptual foundations, they not only become more effective but also
provide a more meaningful guide upon which current and future scholars can build.
"... The solution is the privatization of everything (hence the slogan "let's get governments off our backs"), which would include social security, health care, K-12 education, the ownership and maintenance of toll–roads, railways, airlines, energy production, communication systems and the flow of money. (This list, far from exhaustive, should alert us to the extent to which the neoliberal agenda has already succeeded.) ..."
"... The assumption is that if free enterprise is allowed to make its way into every corner of human existence, the results will be better overall for everyone, even for those who are temporarily disadvantaged, let's say by being deprived of their fish. ..."
"... the passage from a state in which actions are guided by an overarching notion of the public good to a state in which individual entrepreneurs "freely" pursue their private goods, values like morality, justice, fairness, empathy, nobility and love are either abandoned or redefined in market terms. ..."
"... Neoliberalism, David Harvey explains, delivers a "world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting but hollow at its core." ("A Brief History of Neoliberalism.") ..."
"... Harvey and the other critics of neoliberalism explain that once neoliberal goals and priorities become embedded in a culture's way of thinking, institutions that don't regard themselves as neoliberal will nevertheless engage in practices that mime and extend neoliberal principles -- privatization, untrammeled competition, the retreat from social engineering, the proliferation of markets. These are exactly the principles and practices these critics find in the 21st century university, where (according to Henry Giroux) the "historical legacy" of the university conceived "as a crucial public sphere" has given way to a university "that now narrates itself in terms that are more instrumental, commercial and practical." ("Academic Unfreedom in America," in Works and Days.) ..."
"... This new narrative has been produced (and necessitated) by the withdrawal of the state from the funding of its so-called public universities. If the percentage of a state's contribution to a college's operating expenses falls from 80 to 10 and less (this has been the relentless trajectory of the past 40 years) and if, at the same time, demand for the "product" of higher education rises and the cost of delivering that product (the cost of supplies, personnel, information systems, maintenance, construction, insurance, security) skyrockets, a huge gap opens up that will have to be filled somehow. ..."
"... Faced with this situation universities have responded by (1) raising tuition, in effect passing the burden of costs to the students who now become consumers and debt-holders rather than beneficiaries of enlightenment (2) entering into research partnerships with industry and thus courting the danger of turning the pursuit of truth into the pursuit of profits and (3) hiring a larger and larger number of short-term, part-time adjuncts who as members of a transient and disposable workforce are in no position to challenge the university's practices or agitate for an academy more committed to the realization of democratic rather than monetary goals. In short , universities have embraced neoliberalism. ..."
Here is an often cited definition by Paul Treanor: "Neoliberalism is a philosophy in which
the existence and operation of a market are valued in themselves, separately from any previous
relationship with the production of goods and services . . . and where the operation of a
market or market-like structure is seen as an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for
all human action, and substituting for all previously existing ethical beliefs."
("Neoliberalism: Origins, Theory, Definition.")
In a neoliberal world, for example, tort questions -- questions of negligence law -- are
thought of not as ethical questions of blame and restitution (who did the injury and how can
the injured party be made whole?), but as economic questions about the value to someone of an
injury-producing action relative to the cost to someone else adversely affected by that same
action. It may be the case that run-off from my factory kills the fish in your stream; but
rather than asking the government to stop my polluting activity (which would involve the loss
of jobs and the diminishing of the number of market transactions), why don't you and I sit down
and figure out if more wealth is created by my factory's operations than is lost as a
consequence of their effects?
As Ronald Coase put it in his classic article, "The Problem of Social Cost" (Journal of Law
and Economics, 1960): "The question to be decided is: is the value of the fish lost greater or
less than the value of the product which the contamination of the stream makes possible?" If
the answer is more value would be lost if my factory were closed, then the principle of the
maximization of wealth and efficiency directs us to a negotiated solution: you allow my factory
to continue to pollute your stream and I will compensate you or underwrite the costs of your
moving the stream elsewhere on your property, provided of course that the price I pay for the
right to pollute is not greater than the value produced by my being permitted to continue.
Notice that "value" in this example (which is an extremely simplified stand-in for
infinitely more complex transactions) is an economic, not an ethical word, or, rather, that in
the neoliberal universe, ethics reduces to calculations of wealth and productivity. Notice too
that if you and I proceed (as market ethics dictate) to work things out between us -- to come
to a private agreement -- there will be no need for action by either the government or the
courts, each of which is likely to muddy the waters (in which the fish will still be dying) by
introducing distracting moral or philosophical concerns, sometimes referred to as "market
distortions."
Whereas in other theories, the achieving of a better life for all requires a measure of
state intervention, in the polemics of neoliberalism (elaborated by Milton Friedman and
Friedrich von Hayek and put into practice by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher), state
interventions -- governmental policies of social engineering -- are "presented as the problem
rather than the solution" (Chris Harman, "Theorising Neoliberalism," International Socialism
Journal, December 2007).
The solution is the privatization of everything (hence the slogan "let's get governments off
our backs"), which would include social security, health care, K-12 education, the ownership
and maintenance of toll–roads, railways, airlines, energy production, communication
systems and the flow of money. (This list, far from exhaustive, should alert us to the extent
to which the neoliberal agenda has already succeeded.)
The assumption is that if free enterprise is allowed to make its way into every corner of
human existence, the results will be better overall for everyone, even for those who are
temporarily disadvantaged, let's say by being deprived of their fish.
The objection (which I am reporting, not making) is that in the passage from a state in
which actions are guided by an overarching notion of the public good to a state in which
individual entrepreneurs "freely" pursue their private goods, values like morality, justice,
fairness, empathy, nobility and love are either abandoned or redefined in market terms.
Short-term transactions-for-profit replace long-term planning designed to produce a more
just and equitable society. Everyone is always running around doing and acquiring things, but
the things done and acquired provide only momentary and empty pleasures (shopping, trophy
houses, designer clothing and jewelry), which in the end amount to nothing. Neoliberalism,
David Harvey explains, delivers a "world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting
but hollow at its core." ("A Brief History of Neoliberalism.")
Harvey and the other critics of neoliberalism explain that once neoliberal goals and
priorities become embedded in a culture's way of thinking, institutions that don't regard
themselves as neoliberal will nevertheless engage in practices that mime and extend neoliberal
principles -- privatization, untrammeled competition, the retreat from social engineering, the
proliferation of markets. These are exactly the principles and practices these critics find in
the 21st century university, where (according to Henry Giroux) the "historical legacy" of the
university conceived "as a crucial public sphere" has given way to a university "that now
narrates itself in terms that are more instrumental, commercial and practical." ("Academic
Unfreedom in America," in Works and Days.)
This new narrative has been produced (and necessitated) by the withdrawal of the state from
the funding of its so-called public universities. If the percentage of a state's contribution
to a college's operating expenses falls from 80 to 10 and less (this has been the relentless
trajectory of the past 40 years) and if, at the same time, demand for the "product" of higher
education rises and the cost of delivering that product (the cost of supplies, personnel,
information systems, maintenance, construction, insurance, security) skyrockets, a huge gap
opens up that will have to be filled somehow.
Faced with this situation universities have responded by (1) raising tuition, in effect
passing the burden of costs to the students who now become consumers and debt-holders rather
than beneficiaries of enlightenment (2) entering into research partnerships with industry and
thus courting the danger of turning the pursuit of truth into the pursuit of profits and (3)
hiring a larger and larger number of short-term, part-time adjuncts who as members of a
transient and disposable workforce are in no position to challenge the university's practices
or agitate for an academy more committed to the realization of democratic rather than monetary
goals. In short , universities have embraced neoliberalism.
Meanwhile, even those few faculty members with security of employment do their bit for
neoliberalism when they retire to their professional enclaves and churn out reams of
scholarship (their equivalent of capital) that is increasingly specialized and without a clear
connection to the public interest: "[F]aculty have progressively . . . favored professionalism
over social responsibility and have . . . refused to take positions on controversial issues";
as a result they have "become disconnected from political agency and thereby incapable of
taking a political stand" (McClennen, Works and Days).
... ... ...
Stanley Fish is a professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, in Miami. In the Fall of 2012,
he will be Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. He has also taught at the
University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Duke University and the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author
of 15 books, most recently “Versions of Antihumanism: Milton and Others”; “How to Write a Sentence”; “Save the World On Your Own
Time”; and “The Fugitive in Flight,” a study of the 1960s TV drama. “Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to
Revolution” will be published in 2014.
Not all specialties are created equal. It is clear that a person who take loan to became
obtain a degree in communications is deeply misguided as chances to get a well paying job with
this specially are close to zero. Many "humanitarian" specialties are similar -- unemployment is
almost guaranteed and if a person was misled we should prosecute greedy university administrators
and jail some of them. Such specialties should have a disclaimer: employment is difficult to
obtain. Unemployment is almost garanteed. Take the courses at your own risk.
At the same time for STEM degrees Warren proposal makes more sense as people who enrolled
into those specialties tried a more realistic approach, but probably job market turned bad or
level of talent is not enough or both. while people in this specialties are needed but their
chances for employment are crippled by the flow of H1B applicants so part of those costs should
be subsidized by fees for large H1B employers, such as Microsoft and Google. Or something like
that.
At the same time why we should forgive a person the debt if the particular person specialized
in, say, dance? What is the social value of oversupply of dancers? So probably subsidies should
be selective and limited to STEM specialties and selected "high social value" humanitarian
specialties.
So the loan forgiveness is a crippled, somewhat unfair but still a reasonable approach.
But the key problem is not loads but greed of neoliberal educational institutions. Cost of
tuition skyrocketed after 1980 and that's not accidental: this is drect result of neoliberalism
corruption of higher education. The ability of government to prosecute "too greedy" colleges is
important. Limits of salary of administrators and especially president and vice president and
deens are critical.
Notable quotes:
"... The total cost of Warren's plan would be $1.25 trillion over 10 years, with the debt forgiveness portion consisting of a one-time cost of $640 billion. Warren plans to pay for her plan by imposing an annual tax of 2 percent on all families that have $50 million or more in wealth. ..."
"... Warren is right to focus attention on the matter of student loans. This is a major issue for young people and experts have been warning of a crisis for years. ..."
"... After all, they are victims of a scam perpetrated by the education cartel and the federal government. ..."
"... Here's how it works: the education cartel sells the lie that only those with four-year college degrees can succeed in life. Then they steer everyone with a pulse towards a university. ..."
"... The government steps in and subsidizes student loans that allow almost anyone to go to college, regardless of their ability to pay the loans back. ..."
"... College is not for everyone and there's no reason to keep promoting that idea. ..."
"... Reduce the overabundance of administrators. The number has exploded since the 1990s. ..."
"... A lot of required courses are just padding to make the experience drag on for four years. That creates unneeded expenditures of time and money. ..."
"... several nations currently do offer virtually free college educations & I don’t believe their diplomas are of less value for it. ..."
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren recently jolted the Democratic presidential primary
race by tackling one of the most important issues of our time: student loans and the cost of
higher education. Warren called for
canceling up to $50,000 of student loan debt for every American making under $100,000 a
year. In addition, she would make two- and four-year public college tuitions free for all new
students.
The total cost of Warren's plan would be $1.25 trillion over 10 years, with the debt
forgiveness portion consisting of a one-time cost of $640 billion. Warren plans to pay for her
plan by imposing an annual tax of 2 percent on all families that have $50 million or more in
wealth.
Warren is right to focus attention on the matter of student loans. This is a major issue
for young people and experts have been warning of a crisis for
years.
But in most cases, it isn't right to blame student loan borrowers for their predicaments.
After all, they are victims of a scam perpetrated by the education cartel and the federal
government.
Here's how it works: the education cartel sells the lie that only those with four-year
college degrees can succeed in life. Then they steer everyone with a pulse towards a
university.
The government steps in and subsidizes student loans that allow almost anyone to go to
college, regardless of their ability to pay the loans back. These loans are a trap, and
not just with regard to their cost. The government, which
took over the student loan industry , forbids borrowers from discharging that debt in
bankruptcy proceedings.
How do such cheap and easy student loans affect universities? For starters, they have caused
a proliferation of degrees that offer poor returns on
investment . In addition, they have led to the dilution of the value of previously
marketable degrees such as those in the humanities and international relations, as more
students enter those programs than could ever hope to work in their respective fields. For
example, in 2013, half of all those who had graduated from college were working in jobs that
did not require degrees .
But worst of all, the easy access to student loans has destroyed the price mechanism, which
is so important for determining the real supply and demand of a product. Since government is
the ultimate payer, tuition has been pushed sky high. The rate of tuition increase has
actually
outpaced inflation threefold .
Is Elizabeth Warren's plan the solution? No! It will only make things worse.
For starters, the wealth tax that she would use to fund her plan is likely
unconstitutional . But even if it was upheld by the Supreme Court, it would still be bad
policy. Countries that have imposed wealth taxes like France and Sweden have found that the
rich simply
leave and take their assets with them rather than pay more.
As for the idea of universal student loan debt forgiveness, it is a bad policy on the
merits. For starters, it does not make economic sense to forgive the debts of those who will
earn at least $17,500 more a year than those who don't go to college.
Also, although the student loan bubble has been inflated by the actions of both the
education cartel and government, at the end of the day, loans are a contract. Those who are
able to pay them down should and not be bailed out.
... ... ...
Finally, we need to promote alternatives to college. There are many well-paying jobs out
there that
don't require degrees . There are also apprentice programs offered by organizations like
Praxis . We should encourage
entrepreneurship, which is how so many in this country have lifted themselves out of poverty.
College is not for everyone and there's no reason to keep promoting that idea.
Kevin Boyd is a freelance writer based in Louisiana. He is a contributor to The
Hayride, a southern news and politics site. He has also been published in , The Federalist, The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution , and The New York Observer among other publications.
How to make college cost effective. Two major reforms
1. Reduce the overabundance of administrators. The number has exploded since the
1990s.
2. Restructure college. Most programs don’t need to be four years long. Most can be
cut to 2 1/2 – 3 years. A chemistry student should be taking courses required for a
chemistry degree, nothing more (unless he/she wants to). A lot of required courses are just
padding to make the experience drag on for four years. That creates unneeded expenditures of
time and money.
After doing the above, then maybe we can talk about “free” college.
I personally believe that we should each pay our own way through life as much as possible,
but several nations currently do offer virtually free college educations & I don’t
believe their diplomas are of less value for it.
I agree with you that other avenues like trades should be encouraged. A four year degree
isn’t necessary for everyone.
"... Most student debt is held by people with balances on the lower end of the scale, with only 0.8 percent of the U.S. population owing more than $100,000, according to Deutsche Bank economists. They have labeled the issue as a "micro problem" for individuals, rather than a macro problem for the economy. ..."
"... Yet that still equates to 2.8 million people with around $495 billion in debt as of March, according to Department of Education data. Even more worrying is that it's an increase of almost $61 billion since the end of 2017. ..."
"... In the second scenario, loans are shown over a 20-year term with rates at 7 percent. Monthly payments are smaller but the overall burden is bigger, with total interest payments on $100,000 of debt rising above $86,000. ..."
The $1.6 trillion in U.S. student debt may not pose a direct threat to the economy, but it's causing anguish that goes far beyond
financial concerns for the people who owe it.
One in 15 borrowers has considered suicide due to their school loans, according to a survey of 829 people conducted last month
by Student Loan Planner, a debt advisory group.
Most student debt is held by people with balances on the lower end of the scale, with only 0.8 percent of the U.S. population
owing more than $100,000, according to Deutsche Bank economists. They have labeled the issue as a "micro problem" for individuals,
rather than a macro problem for the economy.
Yet that still equates to 2.8 million people with around $495 billion in debt as of March, according to Department of Education
data. Even more worrying is that it's an increase of almost $61 billion since the end of 2017.
Student loans are the second-biggest kind of debt in America behind home mortgages and often more expensive to service relative
to the amount owed because interest rates are generally higher. Not to mention that unlike buying a home, an education isn't a tangible
asset that can be sold.
It's also turning into a hot political issue as next year's presidential election approaches. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has proposed
a plan to cancel loans for many borrowers, while former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper addressed some of the knock-on effects for
the economy in a presentation at the Milken Institute conference earlier this week.
"Of course millennials would love to buy a house," Hickenlooper said April 30 in Los Angeles. But, "they're buried in debt!"
The following scenarios show the monthly costs associated with different levels of student debt. The first envisages a 10-year
loan at 6 percent. To put the figures into perspective, a 30-year mortgage of $400,000 at current interest rates would cost about
$2,000 per month.
In the second scenario, loans are shown over a 20-year term with rates at 7 percent. Monthly payments are smaller but the
overall burden is bigger, with total interest payments on $100,000 of debt rising above $86,000.
Lobbying and campaign finance are two forms of legalized bribery. Citizens United
legalized political corruption for corporations and showed the complete corruption of the
Supreme Court which decided it. Astroturfed political organizations, the manufacture of
"popular consent", are another form of corruption in politics. The hiding of contributors to
these and other groups gives cover to their corruption.
The media are corrupt, even a lot of the blogosphere is. It is all propaganda all the
time, just segmented and tailored to different audiences of rubes.
Universities are corrupt. They no longer fulfill an educational mission rather they are
purveyors of the status quo. They are corrupt in their corporate structure, in their
alliances with other corporations, and in their foisting of debt on to their
students.
Academia is corrupt. There is the whole publish or perish thing that results in most of
academia's research product being worthless and useless. This is even before we get to the
quack sciences like economics. Academic economics is completely corrupt. The dominant
politico-economic system of our times is kleptocracy. Yet almost no academic economist will
acknowledge it let alone make it central to their point of view.
The judicial system and the judiciary are corrupt. How else to explain our two-tiered
justice system? The great criminals of our times, the largest frauds in human history, are
not only not prosecuted, they are not even investigated. And how can anyone take the Supreme
Court to be anything but corrupt? This is an institution that except for a couple of decades
around the Warren Court has, for more than 200 years, always been on the side of the haves
against the have-nots, for the powerful, against the powerless, pro-slavery, pro-segregation,
and anti-worker. How can anyone take decisions like Bush v. Gore or Citizens United to be
anything other than corrupt, politics dressed up as legal thinking?
In a kleptocracy, all the institutions, at least those controlled by the rich and elites,
are put into the service of the kleptocrats to loot or justify and defend looting and the
looters. So corruption is endemic and systemic.
I know: who cares about the education of our kids as the redacted Mueller Report dominates the airwaves on CNN, MSNBC, and similar
cable "news" networks?
I care. I spent fifteen years as a history professor, teaching mostly undergraduates at technically-oriented colleges (the
Air Force Academy
; the Pennsylvania College of Technology). What I experienced was the slow death of education in America. The decline of the ideal
of fostering creative and critical
thinking ; the abandonment of the notion of developing and challenging young people to participate intelligently and passionately
in the American democratic experiment. Instead, education is often a form of
social control , or merely
a means to an end, purely
instrumental rather than inspirational.
Zombie education .
Nowadays, education in America is about training for a vocation, at least for some. It's about learning for the sake of earning,
i.e. developing so-called marketable skills that end (one hopes) in a respectable paycheck. At Penn College, I was encouraged to
meet my students "at their point of need." I was told they were my "customers" and I was their "
provider ." Education,
in sum, was transactional rather than transformational. Keep students in class (and paying tuition) and pray you can inspire them
to see that the humanities are something more than "filler" to their schedules -- and their lives.
As a college professor, I was lucky. I taught five classes a semester (a typical teaching load at community colleges), often in
two or three subjects. Class sizes averaged 25-30 students, so I got to know some of my students; I had the equivalent of tenure,
with good pay and decent benefits, unlike the adjunct professors of today who suffer from low pay and few if any benefits. I liked
my students and tried to challenge and inspire them to the best of my ability.
All this is a preface to Belle Chesler's stunning article at
TomDispatch.com , "Making American Schools Less Great Again: A Lesson in Educational Nihilism on a Grand Scale." A high school
visual arts teacher, Chesler writes from the heart about the chronic underfunding of education and how it is constricting democracy
in America. Here she talks about the frustrations of classes that are simply too big to teach:
[ Class sizes grew so large ] I couldn't remember my students' names, was unable to keep up with the usual grading and assessments
we're supposed to do, and was overwhelmed by stress and anxiety. Worst of all, I was unable to provide the emotional support I
normally try to give my students. I couldn't listen because there wasn't time.
On the drive to work, I was paralyzed by dread; on the drive home, cowed by feelings of failure. The experience of that year
was demoralizing and humiliating. My love for my students, my passion for the subjects I teach, and ultimately my professional
identity were all stripped from me. And what was lost for the students? Quality instruction and adult mentorship, as well as access
to vital resources -- not to mention a loss of faith in one of America's supposedly bedrock institutions, the public school
The truth of the matter is that a society that refuses to adequately invest in the education of its children is refusing to
invest in the future. Think of it as nihilism on a grand scale.
Nihilism, indeed. Why believe in anything? Talk about zombie education!
What America is witnessing, she writes, is nothing short of a national tragedy:
Public schools represent one of the bedrock institutions of American democracy. Yet as a society we've stood aside as the very
institutions that actually made America great were gutted and undermined by short-term thinking, corporate greed, and unconscionable
disrespect for our collective future.
The truth is that there is money for education, for schools, for teachers, and for students. We just don't choose to prioritize
education spending and so send a loud-and-clear message to students that education doesn't truly matter. And when you essentially
defund education for more than 40 years, you leave kids with
ever less faith in American
institutions, which is a genuine tragedy.
Please read all of her article here at
TomDispatch.com . And ask yourself, Why are we shortchanging our children's future? Why are we graduating gormless zombies rather
than mindful citizens?
Perhaps Trump does have some relevance to this article after all: "I love the poorly educated,"
sayeth Trump . Who says Trump always lies?
Now if these six words "gainful employment in a
recognized occupation" magically disappeared (psst and they did), what would it take for a
career
education program to lose its eligibility for federal student aid under DeVos? . . . a
for-profit institution could not lose its financial lifeline or federal student aid no matter
how poorly it performed its mission as spelled out in a statute to prepare students for
"gainful employment in a recognized occupation" resulting from that education as stipulated
previously.
One hundred percent of students could be dropped from their career program with all of them
deeply in debt, or perhaps no single graduate landing a job in their field of training, and
still . . . still the federal government would keep the pipeline of guaranteed federal student
loans and Pell Grants flowing in to the school.
With DeVos's reversal, the NYT surmised: "Executives in the for-profit education industry
would be sleeping better, secure in the knowledge that even the worst schools and programs were
no longer at risk of "magically" being thrown off the taxpayer-backed gravy train, no matter
how epically they failed and robbed their students." This AB author took liberty and added
words to make his point.
Under Obama, "the Job Training industry was on its heels. Under DeVos, they had been given a
magical new life, a second chance by the department," said Eileen Connor, the director of
litigation at Harvard Law School's Project on Predatory Student Lending.
Ms. DeVos, who invested in companies with ties to for-profit colleges before taking office,
has made it an agency priority to unfetter schools offering training in professional jobs and
trades by eliminating restrictions on them and also nonprofits. She also allowed a growing
number of for-profit schools to magically evade those loosened rules by converting to
nonprofits.
That is what the Los Angeles Pentecostal megachurch's affiliate Dream Center wanted to do in
2017 when it asked to buy the remains of Education Management Corporation . . . change it from
for-profit to nonprofit and use the profits to fund its other programs. One year after taking
over a chain of for-profit schools, dozens of Dream Center schools are near bankruptcy and
others have been sold with a hope they can survive.
Collectively
Argosy University, South University and the Art Institutes have ~26,000 students in
programs resulting in associate degrees in dental hygiene and doctoral programs in law and
psychology. Fourteen campuses of mostly Art Institute schools have a new owner after an
arranged transfer involving private equity. Another 40 or so others are now under the control
of a court-appointed receiver who has accused school officials of trying to keep the doors open
by taking millions of dollars earmarked for students to pay operating expenses.
Federal funding for Argosy ceased from the Department of Education when the court-appointed
receiver discovered school officials had taken about $13 million owed to students at 22
campuses and used it for payroll expenses, etc. Lauren Jackson seeking a doctorate at Argosy's
Illinois School of Professional Psychology in Chicago did not receive the $10,000 she was due
in January. She was paying expenses for herself and her 6-year-old daughter with borrowed money
and GoFundMe donations.
26,000 students being defrauded by schools offering programs meant to teach them a skill
leading to "gainful employment in a recognized occupation" is only a start to which DeVos has
failed to account for in the Department of Education. DeVos does profit by this failure due to
her own dabbling in areas feeding off of these failures. There is money to be made in preying
on defrauded students, so many of them, and larger than the baby boomer generation. The most
tragic consequence of conservatives'
abandonment of federal accountability of career programs is just that and the devastating
personal toll it will take on hundreds of thousands of hopelessly indebted students" for whom
there is no relief.
"... Administration bloat and academic decline is another prominent feature of the neoliberal university. University presidents now view themselves as CEO and want similar salaries. ..."
This book is the collection of more than dozen of essays of various authors, but even the
Introduction (Privatizing the Public University: Key Trends, Countertrends, and Alternatives)
is worth the price of the book
Trends in neo-liberalization of university education are not new. But recently they took a
more dangerous turn. And they are not easy to decipher, despite the fact that they are
greatly affect the life of each student or educator. In this sense this is really an
eyes-opening book.
In Europe previously higher education as assessable for free or almost free, but for
talented student only. Admission criteria were strict and checked via written and oral
entrance exams on key subjects. Now the tend is to view university as business that get
customers, charge them exorbitant fees and those customers get diploma as hamburgers in
McDonalds at the end for their money. Whether those degree are worth money charged, or not
and were suitable for the particular student of not (many are "fake" degrees with little or
no chances for getting employment) is not university business. On the contrary marketing is
used to attract as many students as possible and many of those student now remain in debt for
large part of their adult life.
In other words, the neoliberalization of the university in the USA creates new, now
dominant trend -- the conversion of the university into for-profit diploma mills, which are
essentially a new type of rent-seeking (and they even attract speculative financial capital
and open scamsters, like was in case of "Trump University" ). Even old universities with more
than a century history more and more resemble diploma mills.
This assault on academic freedom by neoliberalism justifies itself by calling for
"transparency" and "accountability" to the taxpayer and the public. But it operates used
utter perversion of those terms. In the Neoliberal context, they mean "total surveillance"
and "rampant rent-seeking."
Neoliberalism has converted education from a public good to a personal investment in the
future, a future conceived in terms of earning capacity. As this is about your future earning
potential, it is logical that for a chance to increase it you need to take a loan.
Significantly, in the same period per capita, spending on prisons increased by 126 percent
(Newfield 2008: 266). Between the 1970s and 1990s there was a 400 percent increase in charges
in tuition, room, and board in U.S. universities and tuition costs have grown at about ten
times the rate of family income (ibid.). What these instances highlight is not just the
state's retreat from direct funding of higher education but also a calculated initiative to
enable private companies to capture and profit from tax-funded student loans.
The other tendency is also alarming. Funds now are allocated to those institutions that
performed best in what has become a fetishistic quest for ever-higher ratings. That creates
the 'rankings arms-race.' It has very little or nothing to do with the quality of teaching of
students in a particular university. On the contrary, the curriculums were "streamlines" and
"ideologically charged courses" such as neoclassical economics are now required for
graduation even in STEM specialties.
In the neoliberal university professors are now under the iron heel of management and
various metrics were invented to measure the "quality of teaching." Most of them are very
perverted or can be perverted as when a measurement becomes a target; teachers start to focus
their resources and activities primarily on what 'counts' rather than on their wider
competencies, professional ethics and societal goals (see Kohn and Shore, this volume).
Administration bloat and academic decline is another prominent feature of the neoliberal
university. University presidents now view themselves as CEO and want similar salaries. The
same is true for the growing staff of university administrators. The recruitment of
administrators has far outpaced the growth in the number of faculty – or even students.
Meanwhile, universities claim to be struggling with budget crises that force to reduce
permanent academic posts, and widely use underpaid and overworked adjunct staff – the
'precariat' paid just a couple of thousand dollars per course and often existing on the edge
of poverty, or in real poverty.
Money now is the key objective and the mission changed from cultural to "for profit"
business including vast expenses on advancement of the prestige and competitiveness of the
university as an end in itself. Ability to get grants is now an important criteria of getting
the tenure.
Trigger warning: This post contains the discussion of depression and other mental
health issues, and suicide. If you or anyone you know needs help or support for a mental
health concern, please don't suffer in silence. Many countries have confidential phone
helplines (in Australia you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14, for example);this organisationprovides
worldwide support, whilethis websitecompiles a
number of helpline sites from around the world.
I am writing today from a place of anger; from a rage that sits, simmering on the surface of
a deep well of sadness. I didn't know Dr. Malcolm Anderson, the senior accountancy lecturer
from Cardiff University whose death, after falling from the roof of his university building,
was last week ruled
a suicide . I obviously have no way to know the complexity of his feelings or what sequence
of events led up to his decision to end his own life. However, according to the results of an
inquest, we can know what Dr. Anderson wanted his university to understand about his death
– that it was, at least in part, because of the pressures of his academic work.
The media reports that Dr. Anderson had recently been appointed to Deputy Head of his
department, significantly increasing his administrative load. Nonetheless, he was still
teaching 418 students and needed to mark their work within a 20-day turnaround. To meet that
deadline, he would have needed to work approximately 9 hours a day without food or toilet
breaks, for 20 days straight, and not do ANY other kind of work during that time (such as the
admin that comes with being a Deputy Head). Practically impossible, given he was also a human
being, with a home life, and physical needs like food, in addition to work
responsibilities.
His wife, Diane, has been quoted saying that Dr. Anderson worked very long hours and often
took marking to family events. She has said that although he was a passionate educator who won
teaching awards every year, he had been showing signs of stress and had spoken to his managers
about his difficulty meeting deadlines. A colleague told the inquest that he was given the same
response each time he asked for help, and staffing cuts had continued.
A Marked
Problem
... ... ...
And look, I get it. To someone outside the academy, I'm sure the perception
remains that academics sit in leather armchairs, gazing out the gilded windows of our ivory
towers, thinking all day.
That has not been my experience, nor that of anyone I know.
My colleagues and peers have, however , experienced levels of anxiety and
depression that are
six times higher than experienced in the general population (Evans et al. 2018). They
report
higher levels of workaholism , the kind that has a negative and unwanted effect on
relationships with loved ones (Torp et al. 2018). The picture is often even bleaker for
women
,
people of colour , and other non-White, non-middle-class, non-males. So whether you think
academics are 'delicate woeful souls' or not, it's difficult to deny that there is a real
problem to be tackled here.
Obviously, marking load is only one issue amongst many faced in universities the world over.
But it's not bad as an illustration, partly because it's quantifiable . It's somewhat
ironic that the neoliberal metrics that we rail against, the audit culture that causes these
kinds of examples to happen, could also help us describe to others why they are a problem for
us. So quantifiability brings us to neoliberalism. How did neoliberalism become so pervasive
that it's almost impossible to imagine how the world could look different?
Neoliberalism,
then and now
These last two weeks I've been working out of the Stockholm Centre for Organisational Research in Sweden,
which, by coincidence, is where Professor Cris Shore , anthropologist of
policy and the guest on our next podcast episode is
currently based. I was chatting to him the other day about the interview we recorded last
December, which centres around many of the ideas I'm discussing in this blog post. I had to
admit, I hadn't realised until we did that interview how angry many people still feel towards
the
Thatcher government for introducing neoliberal ideologies and practices into the public
sector. Despite doing a Ph.D. about modern university life, it hadn't fully registered for me
that events of the past , specifically the histories of politics and economics in 'the
West', were such active players in the theatre of higher education's present .
To understand today's neoliberal universities, let's explore a little history in the UK and
the US, two of the biggest influencers in the global higher education sector today. In 1979,
Margaret Thatcher rose to power on a platform of reviving the stagnant British economy by
introducing market-style competition into the public sector. This way, she claimed, she was
ensuring, that "the state's power [was] reduced and the power of the people, enhanced"
(Edwards,
2017) . For universities, this meant increased "accountability" and quality assurance
measures that would
drag universities out of their complacency .
Meanwhile, in the US, Ronald Reagan was also arriving at neoliberalism via a different path.
Americans historically don't trust central government (Roberts,
2007) , so in 1981, Reagan introduced tax cuts (especially for the rich) for the first time
in American history, therefore "protecting" the American people from the rapacious spending
habits of the state (Prasad,
2012) . In American universities, this manifested over the next 30 years in reduced public
spending on higher education, transferring the costs for tuition to student-consumers, and
encouraging partnerships with industry and endorsements from philanthropists (often with
agendas) to cover research costs (Shumway, 2017) .
Then in the 90s, there was a moral panic about the public sector caused by scandals such as
" the collapse of Barings
Bank in 1995 , the failures of the medical profession revealed by investigations into the
serial murders by Dr
Harold Shipman , and the numerous cases of child abuse
that have plagued the Catholic Church " (Shore, 2008) . Frankly, it
seems pretty understandable that people were looking for greater transparency, a bit of
accountability, and a whole lot less of, "leave it to the professionals, they seem like alright
blokes, don't they?" from their public sector.
The official rationale for [neoliberal ideologies and actions] appears benign and
incontestable: to improve efficiency and transparency and to make these institutions more
accountable to the taxpayer and public (and no reasonable person could seriously challenge
such commonsensical and progressive objectives). The problem, however, is that audit confuses
'accountability' with 'accountancy' so that 'being answerable to the public' is recast in
terms of measures of productivity, 'economic efficiency' and delivering 'value for money'
(VFM).
The trouble with neoliberalism and its offshoot, New Public Management , is that
much like the Newspeak of
Orwell's 1984 , the words that were used to sell it – quality, accountability,
transparency etc. – in practice, mean the opposite of what they appear to mean.
For example, as Chris Lorenz (2012) points out in an article that convincingly compares New Public
Management in universities to the outcomes of a Communist regime , there has been no
evidence, statistical or otherwise, that increasing 'quality control measures' in universities
has actually improved quality in universities by any objective criteria – and often just
the opposite.
What has "improved" in universities because of neoliberal practices is efficiency,
often through measures like restructures and reviews. Again, taking steps to save money and
time sounds like a positive. However, the problem with 'efficiency' is that, unlike its
counterpart 'effectiveness' (the ability to bring about a specific effect), 'efficiency' has no
end point – it is a goal unto itself. As Lorenz phrases it, "efficient, therefore, is
never efficient enough," (2012, p. 607).
Bringing this back, then, to issues of mental health and increasing workloads on campus. Liz
Morrish of Academic
Irregularities pointed out last week that when tragedies such as the death of Malcolm
Anderson occur in universities, the most common response is for said university to announce a
review. As anticipated, two days after the results of Dr. Anderson's inquest were first
reported in the media, Cardiff University
announced that they would be reviewing the 'support, information, advice and specialist
counselling' available to all staff, but also urged any academic "who has any concerns
regarding workload, to raise them with their line manager, in the first instance, so all
available advice and support can be offered."
This platitude has been taken by many online as exactly that – a platitude. Several commenters
on Twitter have pointed out that providing more mental health support doesn't actually
reduce workload, while others have noted that there has been no discussion by Cardiff U of
attempting to fix the underlying cause. I agree with them, and it's part of the reason I'm so
angry. Malcolm Anderson could easily be any one of us.
Yet, I have to admit, I'd also hate to be part of the executive team at Cardiff University
right now. Can you imagine the anguish of knowing that someone had taken their life, and held
you directly responsible? You'd have to feel so helpless, so powerless in the shadow of
neoliberal forces that permeate every last aspect of the global higher education sector. I
don't know, I haven't been a Vice Chancellor, maybe you wouldn't have to feel that way. But
it's easy to imagine how one could.
The path to neoliberal hell is paved with good
intentions
So, what's the answer? I wish I knew. What I do know is that anthropological thinking has a
lot to offer in the exploration of big immutable mobiles
2 like neoliberalism. As Sherry Ortner asks in her 2016 article " Dark anthropology and
its others: Theory since the eighties ", who better to question the power structures
inherent in 'dark' topics such as neoliberalisation or colonialism than anthropologists? Yet,
she urges an approach that also acknowledges the possibility of goodness in the world,
quoting from the opening to Michael Lambek's Ordinary Ethics as rationale:
Ethnographers commonly find that the people they encounter are trying to do what they
consider right or good, are being evaluated according to criteria of what is right and good,
or are in some debate about what constitutes the human good. Yet anthropological theory tends
to overlook all this in favor of analyses that emphasize structure, power, and interest.
(Lambeck, 2010, p. 1)
And this is where I have to deviate from the majority of the neoliberal university critiques
I've read. In these pieces, it's all too common to read criticisms of academic managers, or
administrators, or university 'service providers' as if they are The Reason that neoliberal
ideologies get enacted in university contexts. But usually, they're just human beings too, also
subject to KPIs and managerial demands and neoliberal ideologies.
Having worked at different times as an educator, a researcher, and a communications manager
in various universities for more than 10 years, and now having conducted fieldwork at a
university for my PhD, I have had the chance to observe and conduct research on at least nine
different university campuses, in at least five countries. Based on those experiences, I am in
complete agreement with Lambek: the majority
3 of non-academics that I have encountered, in every type of department, and at every
level of universities from Level 1 administrative officers to Presidents and Vice Chancellors,
"are trying to do what they consider right or good" (2010, p. 1).
They demonstrate, both through words and their actions, their beliefs that education is
valuable, and that students are important as human beings, not just as cash cows. They are
often working long hours themselves, trying to keep up with the demands that neoliberal
university life is placing on them. I just can't get on board with the idea that they are,
universally, the villains of the neoliberal horror story.
It seems much more likely, to me, that neoliberal ideologies continue to get enacted and
reinforced by academic managers because these practices have become the norm. Throughout and
because of the historical growth pattern neoliberalism has experienced, these ideologies have
put down roots, and these roots have become so entangled with other aspects of university life
as to be inseparable. For many working-aged people, neoliberalism is the water we were born
swimming in. Even presented with its inadequacies, it's difficult to imagine an
alternative.
What I can agree with the critics about, however, is that non-academics often don't
understand or appreciate – or perhaps remember (if they had worked in that capacity in
the past) – the demands of being an academic, just like academics don't tend to
understand or appreciate the demands that non-academics within the university are facing.
In their recently published book
Death of the Public University (2017), Susan Wright and Cris Shore refer to the idea of
'Faculty Land' – a place synonymous with 'La La Land', where non-academic employees of
universities think academics live. This really resonates with what I saw on fieldwork at
an international university in Vietnam, but not only from administrators – academics
too.
As I've said in a previous
post , all the actors in universities are trying to abrogate responsibility sideways or
upwards until they can only blame 'the neoliberal agenda', and once they get there, all they
can see is a towering, monolithic idea , and it becomes like trying to have a fist fight
with a cloud. Most people don't ever get to that point though, because the world feels more controllable if
we believe that there is another human to blame .
The thing is though, blaming others almost never works . It doesn't make things
better, it just creates a greater divide between groups, encourages isolationism and othering,
and decreases the likelihood that either side will ever want to work together to fix the
problem.
Dr Anderson's tragic death, and the similarly tragic statistics that tell us that the
collective mental health of our academics is in crisis, should be a wake up call to all
of us who work or study in universities, in any capacity. Whether it will be remains to be
seen.
Again: If you or anyone you know needs help or support for a mental health concern,
please don't suffer in silence . Sometimes talking about things with an objective
outsider can help.
If you work in a university with a counselling service, consider seeking them out.
Many have emergency sessions set aside each day.
Many countries have confidential phone helplines (in Australia you can call
Lifeline on 13 11 14, for example).
If you (or your department) have the financial means, psychologists who
specialise in working with HDR students and academics, such asDr Shari Walsh of Growth
Psychologysometimes offer Skype appointments. (I have had Skype sessions with
Shari myself; she's lovely. PS. I don't get anything out of plugging her services, I
just think what she offers is valuable.)
Yes, I know, this is a structural problem and we shouldn't have to take care of it as
individuals (see Grace Krause's moving
poem about this here ). But in the meantime, while we work on that, please seek help
if you need it .
"... Neoliberalism has transformed education from a social good into a production process where the final product is a reserve army of workers for the information economy. What David Harvey calls the "state-finance nexus" pushes universities to play the part by withholding state funds until they expand their enrollment and increase the number of college graduates entering the workforce.[13] In 2012, the Obama Administration identified increasing the number of undergraduate STEM degrees by one million over the next decade as a 'Cross-Agency Priority Goal' on the recommendation of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). ..."
"... The present relationship between the university and the state flows from the dynamics of financialization. As financialization transforms the role of the United States in the global economy, it appropriates higher education to suit the needs of finance capital. Compared to the ever-expanding administrative apparatus responsible for managing contracts and investments, programs outside of STEM and business fields are considered superfluous. Humanities programs are often downsized and tenure tracks closed to push professors into permanent part-time employment arrangements.[15] Meanwhile, schools like Northeastern and MIT are surrounded by high-tech and business firms that rely on students and research facilities for cheap labor and productive capital. ..."
"... The position of financial and credit institutions as the financiers of America's productive infrastructure has far-reaching consequences for social institutions like universities with the potential to absorb surplus capital in the form of credit or produce the 21st-century 'information' workforce. Students, and faculty at universities like Northeastern will struggle against market pressures on universities to attract outside investors while downsizing education for as long as the U.S. economy is dominated by finance. ..."
Last month at Northeastern University, the adjunct union reached a
tentative agreement with the university administration to avert a planned walkout after
more than a year of unsuccessful negotiations. Those familiar with the adjunct campaign know
that adjunct professors are contingent workers who comprise more than half of the teaching
staff at Northeastern and are paid a couple thousand dollars for each class that they teach.[1]
From a budgetary standpoint, contingent workers are economical because they are easily replaced
and therefore can be paid less. Still, at a school like Northeastern University with an
operating budget of more than $2.2 billion, it is hard to argue that more than half of all
professors need to earn poverty wages for the school to remain profitable.[2]
In today's neoliberal landscape -- a term which refers to the coordinated effort by capital
and financial interests after the 1980s to privatize public institutions and deregulate markets
-- Northeastern is not unusual in its treatment of adjunct professors. The neoliberal
university model of high tuitions, bloated administrative departments, and upscale student
facilities -- along with assaults on the job security and pay of professors -- is the new norm.
It is the image of a thoroughly financialized economy that has transformed the relationship
between universities and the state.
From the 19th century through the 1970s, the relationship between universities and the state
remained constant. There was an informal arrangement of mutual independence: Academics operated
autonomously with state funding on the understanding that they were willing to pursue research
in which the state had an interest, such as medicine or space exploration.[3] Underlying this
arrangement was the assumption that as a social good, education should drive public research
and development.
The story of how universities became neoliberalized begins with the economic crisis of the
1970s and the subsequent free-market discourse that invoked capitalism's insatiable need for
economic growth in order to equate the interests of working people with the interests of
financiers.
In the three decades after World War II, the U.S. established economic hegemony over the
global capitalist world. The Fordist
compromise between strong manufacturers and a strong, suburbanizing working class yielded
unprecedented wage growth.[4] However, the Fordist model could not last forever. As a general
rule, whenever compound economic growth falls below three percent, people
begin to get scared . In order to sustain three percent compound growth, there must be no
barriers to the continuous expansion and reinvestment of capital.
The suburbanization of postwar America did sustain high demand for American-made automobiles
and home products, but reinvestment in manufacturing eventually became difficult for capital
because a widely-unionized and militant working class created a labor shortage (i.e. near-full
employment) which drove up wages and hurt profitability.[5][6] To the extent that productivity
could be improved by technological innovations, organized labor insisted on "productivity
agreements" that ensured that machines would not be used to undermine wages or benefits. To
make matters worse for U.S. manufacturers, monopolies like the Big Three auto companies were
broken by foreign imports from a newly rebuilt Europe and Japan.[7]
In The Grundrisse , Karl Marx remarked that "every limit [to capital accumulation]
appears as a barrier to be overcome."[8] For Marx, sustained capital accumulation requires an
"industrial reserve army" to keep the cost of labor (i.e. wages) from impeding profitability.
To restore profits, American capital had to discipline labor by drawing from the global working
population. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 addressed U.S. labor scarcity by
abolishing immigration quotas based on nationality so that cheap labor would flood the market
and drive down wages.[9] However, it proved more effective for manufacturing capital to simply
relocate to countries with cheaper labor, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s capital did just
that -- first to South Korea and Thailand, and then to China as wages in those countries became
too high.[10]
"Globalization" entailed removing barriers to international capital relocation such as
tariffs and quotas in order to construct a global market where liquid money capital could flow
internationally to wherever it yielded the most profits. Of course, wage suppression eventually
lowers consumer demand. The neoliberal solution was for financial institutions to sustain
middle-class purchasing power through credit. In The Enigma of Capital , David Harvey
writes that "the demand problem was temporarily bridged with respect to housing by
debt-financing the developers as well as the buyers. The financial institutions collectively
controlled both the supply of, and demand for, housing!"[11]
The point of this history though, is that the financialization of the American economy,
through which financial markets came to dominate other forms of industrial and agricultural
capital, served as the backdrop for the transformation of higher education into what it is
today. Neoliberal ideology reframed the social value of higher education as a tool for building
the next workforce to serve the new "information economy" -- a term that emerged in the midst
of globalization to describe the role of U.S. suburban professionals in the global economy.
Simultaneously, finance capital repurposed universities as points of capital accumulation and
investment.
The discourse around the information economy sought to rationalize the offshoring of
manufacturing from the U.S. The idea was that due to globalization, America has reached a stage
of development where its participation in the global economy is as a white-collar work force,
specializing in technology and the spread of information.[12] In this telling, there is nothing
to critique about the deindustrialization of the American economy because it was inevitable. It
was then simple to realign the social goals of universities with the economic goals of Wall
Street because the state repression of radical civil rights movements on the Left and the
emergent free-market discourse of the Right formed a widespread perception of the state as
inherently
problematic . State research and development at universities was easily dismissed as
inefficient, which cleared space for a neoliberal redefinition of higher education.
Neoliberalism has transformed education from a social good into a production process
where the final product is a reserve army of workers for the information economy. What David
Harvey calls the "state-finance nexus" pushes universities to play the part by withholding
state funds until they expand their enrollment and increase the number of college graduates
entering the workforce.[13] In 2012, the Obama Administration identified increasing the number
of undergraduate STEM degrees by one million over the next decade as a 'Cross-Agency Priority
Goal' on the
recommendation of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
(PCAST).
At the same time that neoliberalism transforms education into a production process for
high-tech workers, it transforms the university itself into a site for surplus capital
absorption through the construction of new labs, facilities, and houses to draw wealthy
students and faculty capable of attracting federal grants. In December 2015, Northeastern filed
a letter of intent with the Boston Redevelopment Authority to propose building a residence hall
for approximately 800 students. The Boston Globe
reported that the project is currently under review by American Campus Communities, the
largest developer of private student housing in the U.S. To an economizing university
administrator, private developers are very appealing because they assume the debt generated by
construction projects. The circular process whereby a large university endowment comprised of
financial assets is used to contract a debt-financed independent developer reveals how
neoliberalism integrates universities into the circulatory system of capital as circuits of
accumulation and investment.[14]
The present relationship between the university and the state flows from the dynamics of
financialization. As financialization transforms the role of the United States in the global
economy, it appropriates higher education to suit the needs of finance capital. Compared to the
ever-expanding
administrative apparatus responsible for managing contracts and investments, programs
outside of STEM and business fields are considered superfluous. Humanities programs are
often
downsized and tenure tracks closed to push professors into permanent part-time employment
arrangements.[15] Meanwhile, schools like Northeastern and MIT are surrounded by high-tech and
business firms that rely on students and research facilities for cheap labor and productive
capital.
The position of financial and credit institutions as the financiers of America's
productive infrastructure has far-reaching consequences for social institutions like
universities with the potential to absorb surplus capital in the form of credit or produce the
21st-century 'information' workforce. Students, and faculty at universities like Northeastern
will struggle against market pressures on universities to attract outside investors while
downsizing education for as long as the U.S. economy is dominated by finance.
IMHO there is no economics, only "political economy" and mathiness and "cult of measurement" especially with all those some
fuzzy metrics currently in use, are just a part of the ideological smokescreen over "naked neoliberalism." Like shaman dances
around the fire. Impressive and useless simultaneously.
In other words, many current practitioners of neoliberal economic theories (including but not limited to neoclassical
economics) are practicing pseudoscience and are, directly or indirectly, bought and paid by financial oligarchy. That does not
exclude possibility of some, occasional, useful insight.
Notable quotes:
"... The counterargument that I will elaborate here, is that neoliberalism and social democracy should be treated as two distinct and internally consistent thought and value systems. The integrity of the two ideologies must neither be reduced to practices/policies, which occasionally may overlap, nor to individual representatives, who, over the course of a lifetime, can move from one pole to the other. ..."
"... Robbins Report ..."
"... Underpinning this analysis is a bleak diagnosis of what purpose the university system and its employees serve. It is a diagnosis that Fuller, by his own admission, has gleaned from the Virginia-style neoliberal Gordon Tullock. ..."
"... The task assigned to the university, i.e. to certify bodies of trustworthy knowledge, is not called for by any intrinsic property of that knowledge (it being true, safe etc.), but is rather a form of rent-seeking. The rent is extracted from the university's state-induced monopoly over the access rights to future employment opportunities. Rent-seeking is the raison-d'être of the university's claim to be the royal road to knowledge. ..."
"... Granted, the cynical reading of the university system as a rent-seeking diploma-mill has a ring of truth to it when we, for instance, think of how students are asked to pay higher and higher tuition fees, while the curriculum is successively being hollowed-out. ..."
"... this is the result of the consecutive waves of university reforms since the 1990s to ground knowledge production on market principles. If university employees behave like self-interested rent-seekers, it is because they are forced to do so by the incentive structures that have been imposed on them. ..."
"... Thirty years of neoliberal politics have created the conditions under which categories such as "human capital" and "rent-seeking" start to make good sense... ..."
The counterargument that I will elaborate here, is that neoliberalism and social democracy
should be treated as two distinct and internally consistent thought and value systems. The
integrity of the two ideologies must neither be reduced to practices/policies, which
occasionally may overlap, nor to individual representatives, who, over the course of a
lifetime, can move from one pole to the other.
Neoliberalism and the university system
Fuller's argument pivots on the mixed legacy of Lionel Robbins. On the one hand, Robbins'
credentials as a neoliberal are firmly established by his decision to recruit Friedrich Hayek
to the LSE. On the other hand, Robbins authored the government report whereby many regional
universities in the UK were founded, in keeping with a classic social democratic agenda of
enrolling more students from the working class. This encourages Fuller to draw an arc from the
1963 Robbins
Report to university reforms of a more recent date (and with a more distinct,
neoliberal flavour).
The common denominator of all the reforms, Fuller says, is the ambition to enhance human
capital. Alas, the enhancement of human capital is blocked on all sides by incumbent traditions
and rent-seeking monopolies. From this problem description – which Fuller attributes to
the neoliberals, but which is also his own – follows the solution: to increase the
competition between knowledge providers. Just as the monopoly that Oxbridge held over higher
education was offset by the creation of regional universities in the 1960s, so is the current
university system's monopoly over knowledge acquisition sidelined by reforms to multiply and
diversify the paths to learning.
Underpinning this analysis is a bleak diagnosis of what purpose the university system and
its employees serve. It is a diagnosis that Fuller, by his own admission, has gleaned from the
Virginia-style neoliberal Gordon Tullock.
The task assigned to the university, i.e. to certify
bodies of trustworthy knowledge, is not called for by any intrinsic property of that knowledge
(it being true, safe etc.), but is rather a form of rent-seeking. The rent is extracted from
the university's state-induced monopoly over the access rights to future employment
opportunities. Rent-seeking is the raison-d'être of the university's claim to be the
royal road to knowledge.
In this acid bath of cynicism, the notions of truth and falsehood are dissolved into the
basic element that Tullock's world is made up of – self-interest. This reasoning lines up
with a 19 th century, free market epistemology, according to which the evolutionary
process will sift out the propositions that swim from those that sink. With a theory of
knowledge like that, university-certified experts have no rationale for being. Their knowledge
claims are just so many excuses for lifting a salary on the taxpayers' expense. It bears to
stress that this argument can easily be given a leftist spin, by emphasising the pluralism of
this epistemology. This resonates with statements that Steve Fuller has made elsewhere , concerning the
claimants of alternative facts.
Granted, the cynical reading of the university system as a rent-seeking diploma-mill has a
ring of truth to it when we, for instance, think of how students are asked to pay higher and
higher tuition fees, while the curriculum is successively being hollowed-out. However, as was
pointed out to Fuller by many in the audience in Lancaster, this is the result of the consecutive waves of university
reforms since the 1990s to ground knowledge production on market principles. If university employees behave like self-interested
rent-seekers, it is because they are forced to do so by the incentive structures that have been imposed on them.
Thirty years of neoliberal politics have created the conditions under which categories such
as "human capital" and "rent-seeking" start to make good sense...
... ... ...
The author would like to thank Adam Netzén, Karolina Enquist Källgren and
Eric Deibel for feedback given on early drafts of this blog post, and especially Steve Fuller,
for having invited a response to his argument.
"... Higher education was being made to conform to the norms of efficiency, value for money, customer service, audit and performance targets. One of the consequences of this was the substitution of the authority of the academic, which is based on his or her professional knowledge of the discipline, for the authority of the line manager. ..."
"... I don't think that there has been a more sinister assault on academic freedom than this colonisation of higher education by neoliberalism. It justifies itself by calling for "transparency" and "accountability" to the taxpayer and the public. But it operates with a perverted sense of these words (since what it really means is "discipline and surveillance" and "value for money"). ..."
"... Let me explain. One of the central aspects of neoliberalism is the disappearance of the distinction between the worker and the capitalist. In the neoliberal setting, the worker is not a partner of exchange with the capitalist. She does not sell her labour-power for a wage. ..."
"... The labourer's ability to work, her skill, is an income stream. It is an investment on which she receives a return in the form of wages. The worker is capital for herself. She is a source of future earnings. In the neoliberal market, as Michel Foucault remarks, everyone is a capitalist. ..."
"... Neoliberalism has converted education from a public good to a personal investment in the future, a future conceived in terms of earning capacity. ..."
Many
of the students I have taught in Britain and South Africa see higher education as a place where
they "invest" in themselves in the financial sense of the word. "Going to university," one
student said, was a way of "increasing" his "value" or employability in the labour market.
This perception of the university has not arisen by chance.
Capitalism entered a new phase with the Thatcher and Reagan governments in Britain and the
United States during the 1980s. The managerial practices used to run businesses were applied to
the public sector, in particular to education and healthcare.
This reform of the public sector (called "new public management")
introduced a new way of thinking about the university.
Higher education was being made to conform to the norms of efficiency, value for money,
customer service, audit and performance targets. One of the consequences of this was the
substitution of the authority of the academic, which is based on his or her professional
knowledge of the discipline, for the authority of the line manager.
Since then, everything has come to depend on audits and metric standards of so-called
quality assessment (student satisfaction, pass rates, league tables, et cetera). Academics have
little, if any, say on whether departments should continue to exist, what degrees and courses
should be on offer and even what kind of assessment methods should be used.
I don't think that there has been a more sinister assault on academic freedom than this
colonisation of higher education by neoliberalism. It justifies itself by calling for
"transparency" and "accountability" to the taxpayer and the public. But it operates with a
perverted sense of these words (since what it really means is "discipline and surveillance" and
"value for money").
Its effect, if not its aim, has been to commodify higher education and produce a new kind of
social identity. This is the identity of the self as entrepreneur.
Let me explain. One of the central aspects of neoliberalism is the disappearance of the
distinction between the worker and the capitalist. In the neoliberal setting, the worker is not
a partner of exchange with the capitalist. She does not sell her labour-power for a wage.
The labourer's ability to work, her skill, is an income stream. It is an investment on which
she receives a return in the form of wages. The worker is capital for herself. She is a source
of future earnings. In the neoliberal market, as Michel Foucault remarks, everyone is a
capitalist.
Neoliberalism has converted education from a public good to a personal investment in the
future, a future conceived in terms of earning capacity.
How did we get to this situation?
The modern university came into existence at the start of the 19th century as an extension
of the state. The aim of the state during the colonial and imperial age was to constitute the
identity of the national subject. As a public institution, the university was designed to teach students to see their life in
a specific way. They would learn to see that it is only as members of a national community and
culture that their individual life has a meaning and worth. This was the aim of the educational programme that German philosophers such as Wilhelm von
Humboldt and Johann Gottlieb Fichte envisaged for the University of Berlin. For them, science
was in the service of the moral and intellectual education of the nation.
Established in 1810, the University of Berlin was the first modern university. It was
founded on the principles of academic freedom, the unity of research and teaching, and the
primacy of research over vocational training. It functioned as the prototype for universities in both the United States and Europe during
the second half of the 19th century.
Once transnational corporations started to control more capital than nation-states in the
1980s, the university ceased to be one of its principal organs. It lost its ideological mission
and entered the market as a corporation. It started to encourage students to think of
themselves as customers rather than as members of a nation. This history shows that the university is today the site of two competing social
identities.
On the one hand, because of globalisation, the student who enters university sees herself as
someone who is there to increase her human capital, as an enterprise to invest in.
It must be remarked that, for the entrepreneur (taken as a social figure) who invests in
herself, differences of class, religion, ethnicity or race are phantasms of a bygone age. The
differences in the name of which wars were waged and social movements organised in the past
have no more meaning in her eyes than cheap advertising.
There is, for her, something improper or inauthentic about them, as Giorgio Agamben says of
the new petty bourgeoisie in The Coming Community. Like Britain's former prime minister, David
Cameron, she is sceptical of multiculturalism.
On the other hand, the university has not ceased to draw on its modern role as a producer,
protector and inculcator of national identity and culture. Much of what is going on today in
South African universities under the name of decolonisation and Africanisation draws on this
heritage and understanding of the modern university, even if tacitly. That is why students will
politicise themselves by identifying with an ethnicity or nationality.
Nationalism was an emancipatory political project during the anti-colonial struggles of the
second half of the 20th century. It was not tribalist or communalist.
According to Eric Hobsbawm in Nations and Nationalism since 1780, its aim was to extend the
size of the social, cultural and political group. It was not to restrict it or to separate it
from others. Nationalism was a political programme divorced from ethnicity.
Is this political nationalism a viable way of resisting neoliberalism today? Can it gainsay
the primacy of economic rationality and the culture of narcissist consumerism, and restore
meaning to the political question concerning the common good? Or has nationalism irreversibly become an ethnic, separatist project? It is not easy to say. So far, we have witnessed one kind of response to the social
insecurities generated by the global spread of neoliberalism. This is a return to ethnicity and
religion as havens of safety and security.
When society fails us owing to job insecurity, and, concomitantly, with regard to housing
and healthcare, one tends to fall back on one's ethnicity or religious identity as an ultimate
guarantee.
Moreover, nationalism as a political programme depends on the idea of the state. It holds
that a group defined as a "nation" has the right to form a territorial state and exercise
sovereign power over it. But given the decline of the state, there are reasons to think that
political nationalism has withdrawn as a real possibility.
By the "decline of the state" I do not mean that it no longer exists. The state has never
been more present in the private life of individuals. It regulates the relations between men
and women. It regulates their birth and death, the rearing of children, the health of
individuals and so forth. The state is, today, ubiquitous.
What some people mean by the "decline of the state" is that, with the existence of
transnational corporations, it is no longer the most important site of the reproduction of
capital. The state has become managerial. Its function is to manage obstacles to liberalisation
and free trade.
Perhaps that is one of the challenges of the 21st century. How is a "nation" possible, a
"national community" that is not defined by ethnicity, on the one hand, and, on the other, that
forsakes the desire to exercise sovereign power in general and, in particular, over a
territorial state?
The university is perhaps the place where such a community can begin to be thought.
Rafael Winkler is an associate professor in the philosophy department at the University
of Johannesburg
RW: Well at this point I think it really depends on what indexes you're looking at. The
biggest thing that's kept this economy going in the last few years should make everybody
tremble. It's called debt, let me give you just a couple of examples.
Ten years ago, at the
height of the crash, the total debt carried by students in the United States was in the
neighborhood of $700 billion, an enormous sum.
What is it today? Over twice that,
one-and-a-half trillion dollars.
The reason part of our economy hasn't collapsed is that
students have taken up an enormous amount of debt that they cannot afford, in order to get
degrees which will let them get jobs whose incomes will not allow them to pay back the debts.
And forget about getting married, forget about having a family.
We have paid an enormous price in hobbling the generation of people who would have otherwise
lifted this economy and made us more productive. It is a disastrous mistake historically, and
if you face that, and if you add to it the increased debt of our businesses, and the increased
debt of our government, you see an economy that is held up by a monstrous increase in debt, not
in underlying productivity, not in more jobs that really produce anything, but in debt.
That should frighten us because it was the debt bubble that burst in 2008 and brought us the
crash. It is as if we cannot learn in our system to do other than we've always done and that's
taking us into another crash coming now.
LC: Yeah. This is the land of the free, but it seems like most of us are chained down by
debt peonage.
"... Neoliberalism's presence in higher education is making matters worse for students and the student debt crisis, not better. ..."
"... Cannan and Shumar (2008) focus their attention on resisting, transforming, and dismantling the neoliberal paradigm in higher education. They ask how can market-based reform serve as the solution to the problem neoliberal practices and policies have engineered? ..."
"... What got us to where we are (escalating tuition costs, declining state monies, and increasing neoliberal influence in higher education) cannot get us out of the SI.4 trillion problem. And yet this metaphor may, in fact, be more apropos than most of us on the right, left, or center are as yet seeing because we mistakenly assume the market we have is the only or best one possible. ..."
"... We only have to realize that the emperor has no clothes and reveal this reality. ..."
"... Indeed, the approach our money-dependent and money-driven legislators and policymakers have employed has been neoliberal in form and function, and it will continue to be so unless we help them to see the light or get out of the way. This book focuses on the $1.4+ trillion student debt crisis in the United States. It doesn't share hard and fast solutions per se. ..."
"... In 2011-2012, 50% of bachelor's degree recipients from for-profit institutions borrowed more than $40,000 and about 28% of associate degree recipients from for-profit institutions borrowed more than $30,000 (College Board, 2015a). ..."
Despite tthe fact that necoliberalism brings poor economic growth, inadequate availability
of jobs and career opportunities, and the concentration of economic and social rewards in the
hands of a privileged upper class resistance to it, espcially at universities, remain weak to
non-existant.
The first sign of high levels of dissatisfaction with neoliberalism was the election of
Trump (who, of course, betrayed all his elections promises, much like Obma before him). As a
result, the legitimation of neoliberalism based on references to the efficient
and effective functioning of the market (ideological legitimation) is
exhausted while wealth redistribution practices (material legitimation) are
not practiced and, in fact, considered unacceptable.
Despite these problems, resistance to neoliberalism remains weak.
Strategics and actions of opposition have been shifted from the sphere of
labor to that of the market creating a situation in which the idea of the
superiority and desirability of the market is shared by dominant and
oppositional groups alike. Even emancipatory movements such as women,
race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation have espoused individualistic,
competition-centered, and meritocratic views typical of ncolibcral dis-
courses. Moreover, corporate forces have colonized spaces and discourses
that have traditionally been employed by oppositional groups and move-
ments. However, as systemic instability' continues and capital accumulation
needs to be achieved, change is necessary. Given the weakness of opposi-
tion, this change is led by corporate forces that will continue to further
their interests but will also attempt to mitigate socio-economic contra-
dictions. The unavailability of ideological mechanisms to legitimize
ncolibcral arrangements will motivate dominant social actors to make
marginal concessions (material legitimation) to subordinate groups. These
changes, however, will not alter the corporate co-optation and distortion of
discourses that historically defined left-leaning opposition. As contradic-
tions continue, however, their unsustainability will represent a real, albeit
difficult, possibility for anti-neoliberal aggregation and substantive change.
Connolly (2016) reported that a poll shows that some graduated student loan borrowers
would willingly go to extremes to pay off outstanding student debt. Those extremes include
experiencing physical pain and suffering and even a reduced lifespan. For instance, 35% of
those polled would take one year off life expectancy and 6.5% would willingly cut off their
pinky finger if it meant ridding themselves of the student loan debt they currently held.
Neoliberalism's presence in higher education is making matters worse for students and
the student debt crisis, not better. In their book Structure and Agency in the
Neoliberal University, Cannan and Shumar (2008) focus their attention on resisting,
transforming, and dismantling the neoliberal paradigm in higher education. They ask how can
market-based reform serve as the solution to the problem neoliberal practices and policies
have engineered?
It is like an individual who loses his keys at night and who decides to look only beneath
the street light. This may be convenient because there is light, but it might not be where
the keys are located. This metaphorical example could relate to the student debt crisis.
What got us to where we are (escalating tuition costs, declining state monies, and
increasing neoliberal influence in higher education) cannot get us out of the SI.4 trillion
problem. And yet this metaphor may, in fact, be more apropos than most of us on the right,
left, or center are as yet seeing because we mistakenly assume the market we have is the only
or best one possible.
As Lucille (this volume) strives to expose, the systemic cause of our problem is "hidden
in plain sight," right there in the street light for all who look carefully enough to see.
We only have to realize that the emperor has no clothes and reveal this reality. If
and when a critical mass of us do, systemic change in our monetary exchange relations can
and, we hope, will become our funnel toward a sustainable and socially, economically, and
ecologically just future where public education and democracy can finally become realities
rather than merely ideals.
Indeed, the approach our money-dependent and money-driven legislators and policymakers
have employed has been neoliberal in form and function, and it will continue to be so unless
we help them to see the light or get out of the way. This book focuses on the $1.4+ trillion
student debt crisis in the United States. It doesn't share hard and fast solutions per
se. Rather, it addresses real questions (and their real consequences). Are collegians
overestimating the economic value of going to college?
What are we, they, and our so-called elected leaders failing or refusing to sec and why?
This critically minded, soul-searching volume shares territory with, yet pushes beyond, that
of Akers and Chingos (2016), Baum (2016), Goldrick-Rab (2016), Graebcr (2011), and Johannscn
(2016) in ways that we trust those critically minded authors -- and others concerned with our
mess of debts, public and private, and unfulfilled human potential -- will find enlightening
and even ground-breaking.
... ... ...
In the meantime, college costs have significantly increased over the past fifty years. The
average cost of tuition and fees (excluding room and board) for public four-year institutions
for a full year has increased from 52,387 (in 2015 dollars) for the 1975-1976 academic year,
to 59,410 for 2015-2016. The tuition for public two-year colleges averaged $1,079 in
1975-1976 (in 2015 dollars) and increased to $3,435 for 2015-2016. At private non-profit
four-year institutions, the average 1975-1976 cost of tuition and fees (excluding room and
board) was $10,088 (in 2015 dollars), which increased to $32,405 for 2015-2016 (College
Board, 2015b).
The purchasing power of Pell Grants has decreased. In fact, the maximum Pell Grants
coverage of public four-year tuition and fees decreased from 83% in 1995-1996 to 61% in
2015-2016. The maximum Pell Grants coverage of private non-profit four-year tuition and fees
decreased from 19% in 1995-1996 to 18% in 2015-2016 (College Board, 2015a).
... ... ....
... In 2013-2014, 61% of bachelor's degree recipients from public and private non-profit
four-year institutions graduated with an average debt of $16,300 per graduate. In
2011-2012, 50% of bachelor's degree recipients from for-profit institutions borrowed more
than $40,000 and about 28% of associate degree recipients from for-profit institutions
borrowed more than $30,000 (College Board, 2015a).
Rising student debt has become a key issue of higher education finance among many
policymakers and researchers. Recently, the government has implemented a series of measures
to address student debt. In 2005, the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act
(2005) was passed, which barred the discharge of all student loans through bankruptcy for
most borrowers (Collinge, 2009). This was the final nail in the bankruptcy coffin, which had
begun in 1976 with a five-year ban on student loan debt (SLD) bankruptcy and was extended to
seven years in 1990. Then in 1998, it became a permanent ban for all who could not clear a
relatively high bar of undue hardship (Best 6c Best, 2014).
By 2006, Sallie Mae had become the nation's largest private student loan lender, reporting
loan holdings of $123 billion. Its fee income collected from defaulted loans grew from $280
million in 2000 to $920 million in 2005 (Collinge, 2009). In 2007, in response to growing
student default rates, the College Cost Reduction Act was passed to provide loan forgiveness
for student loan borrowers who work full-time in a public service job. The Federal Direct
Loan will be forgiven after 120 payments were made. This Act also provided other benefits for
students to pay for their postsecondary education, such as lowering interest rates of GSL,
increasing the maximum amount of Pell Grant (though, as noted above, not sufficiently to meet
rising tuition rates), as well as reducing guarantor collection fees (Collinge, 2009).
In 2008, the Higher Education Opportunity Act (2008) was passed to increase transparency
and accountability. This Act required institutions that are participating in federal
financial aid programs to post a college price calculator on their websites in order to
provide better college cost information for students and families (U.S. Department of
Education |U.S. DoE|, 2015a). Due to the recession of 2008, the American Opportunity Tax
Credit of 2009 (AOTC) was passed to expand the Hope Tax Credit program, in which the amount
of tax credit increased to 100% for the first $2,000 of qualified educational expenses and
was reduced to 25% of the second $2,000 in college expenses. The total credit cap increased
from $1,500 to $2,500 per student. As a result, the federal spending on education tax
benefits had a large increase since then (Crandall-Hollick, 2014), benefits that, again, are
reaped only by those who file income taxes.
"... Student loans. Now there's a naked fleecing scam by the moneychangers. High interest, zero risk, no forgiveness. A great racket if you can get it, like Medical Insurance, profiteering guaranteed by Obamacare. ..."
Wonder the same about bankruptcy. IIRC, think the moneychangers' bankruptcy "reform" under
the Bush II regime turned it into a virtual debtors' prison, excluding several kinds of debt
from discharge, including student loans.
Student loans. Now there's a naked fleecing scam by the moneychangers. High interest,
zero risk, no forgiveness. A great racket if you can get it, like Medical Insurance,
profiteering guaranteed by Obamacare.
Hudson perceives things that should be but aren't obvious -- about money, power, and
freedom. The love of money may be the root of all evil, but it's ultimately a weapon wielded
in an insatiable lust for power, absolute, utterly corrupt power, the ownership and
enslavement of others. Inequality is not a flaw of rigged-market cannibalism; it's a feature,
a feature those at the top of the food chain have no intention of "fixing". The US empire,
imo, is the nadir of this evil, a kleptocracy dependent on perpetual mass-murder. The paradox
is, they may be more enslaved to their narcotic than anyone.
"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose." Janis Joplin
"... Every academic critique of neoliberalism is an unacknowledged memoir. We academics occupy a crucial node in the neoliberal system. Our institutions are foundational to neoliberalism's claim to be a meritocracy, insofar as we are tasked with discerning and certifying the merit that leads to the most powerful and desirable jobs. Yet at the same time, colleges and universities have suffered the fate of all public goods under the neoliberal order. We must therefore "do more with less," cutting costs while meeting ever-greater demands. The academic workforce faces increasing precarity and shrinking wages even as it is called on to teach and assess more students than ever before in human history -- and to demonstrate that we are doing so better than ever, via newly devised regimes of outcome-based assessment. In short, we academics live out the contradictions of neoliberalism every day. ..."
"... Whereas classical liberalism insisted that capitalism had to be allowed free rein within its sphere, under neoliberalism capitalism no longer has a set sphere. We are always "on the clock," always accruing (or squandering) various forms of financial and social capital. ..."
Every academic critique of neoliberalism is an unacknowledged memoir. We academics
occupy a crucial node in the neoliberal system. Our institutions are foundational to
neoliberalism's claim to be a meritocracy, insofar as we are tasked with discerning and
certifying the merit that leads to the most powerful and desirable jobs. Yet at the same time,
colleges and universities have suffered the fate of all public goods under the neoliberal
order. We must therefore "do more with less," cutting costs while meeting ever-greater demands.
The academic workforce faces increasing precarity and shrinking wages even as it is called on
to teach and assess more students than ever before in human history -- and to demonstrate that
we are doing so better than ever, via newly devised regimes of outcome-based assessment. In
short, we academics live out the contradictions of neoliberalism every day.
... ... ...
On a more personal level it reflects my upbringing in the suburbs of Flint, Michigan, a city
that has been utterly devastated by the transition to neoliberalism. As I lived through the
slow-motion disaster of the gradual withdrawal of the auto industry, I often heard Henry Ford s
dictum that a company could make more money if the workers were paid enough to be customers as
well, a principle that the major US automakers were inexplicably abandoning. Hence I find it
[Fordism -- NNB] to be an elegant way of capturing the postwar model's promise of creating
broadly shared prosperity by retooling capitalism to produce a consumer society characterized
by a growing middle class -- and of emphasizing the fact that that promise was ultimately
broken.
By the mid-1970s, the postwar Fordist order had begun to breakdown to varying degrees in the
major Western countries. While many powerful groups advocated a response to the crisis that
would strengthen the welfare state, the agenda that wound up carrying the day was
neoliberalism, which was most forcefully implemented in the United Kingdom by Margaret Thatcher
and in the United States by Ronald Reagan. And although this transformation was begun by the
conservative part)', in both countries the left-of-centcr or (in American usage) "liberal"party
wound up embracing neoliberal tenets under Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, ostensibly for the
purpose of directing them toward progressive ends.
With the context of current debates within the US Democratic Party, this means that Clinton
acolytes are correct to claim that "neoliberalism" just is liberalism but only to the extent
that, in the contemporary United States, the term liberalism is little more than a word for
whatever the policy agenda of the Democratic Party happens to be at any given time. Though
politicians of all stripes at times used libertarian rhetoric to sell their policies, the most
clear-eyed advocates of neoliberalism realized that there could be no simple question of a
"return" to the laissez-faire model.
Rather than simply getting the state "out of the way," they both deployed and transformed
state power, including the institutions of the welfare state, to reshape society in accordance
with market models. In some cases creating markets where none had previously existed, as in the
privatization of education and other public services. In others it took the form of a more
general spread of a competitive market ethos into ever more areas of life -- so that we are
encouraged to think of our reputation as a "brand," for instance, or our social contacts as
fodder for "networking." Whereas classical liberalism insisted that capitalism had to be
allowed free rein within its sphere, under neoliberalism capitalism no longer has a set sphere.
We are always "on the clock," always accruing (or squandering) various forms of financial and
social capital.
"... While I am generally not in favor of bankruptcy discrimination, the ineligibility of bankrupt colleges for taxpayer funding is eminently sensible ..."
The Bezzle: "For-profit college chain files (for receivership)" [
Credit Slips ].
"While I am generally not in favor of bankruptcy discrimination, the ineligibility of
bankrupt colleges for taxpayer funding is eminently sensible.
Given the weakness of
institutional gatekeeping and the political challenges to shutting down predatory schools, and
the for-profit college business model in which taxpayer grants and loans are used to prepay
tuitions for students who are frequently misled about career chances, we don't need bankruptcy
to give these failing schools a new lease on life." • Ouch.
"... Our US students have been taught since at least grade 6, but mostly since school began, that there are only certain acceptable ideas, and genuflecting to those ideas is what makes you the Top Student, the Front Row kid, the one who checks all the boxes to get into Brown or Oberlin or Yale. ..."
"... My brother is a biology professor at an elite liberal arts college in the Midwest. He uses no pronouns with his students, as the demands escalate and change daily. A whole cluster of young female students in the physics department have suddenly declared themselves trans. ..."
"... He says that it is impossible -- absolutely impossible -- to question what is happening in society concerning the abandonment of human biological facts or to have a rational debate about any of this on campus, either among the faculty or with the students. ..."
"... This is 100% correct and also the result of our K-12 education system doing what it was designed to do: engineer certain social outcomes. ..."
"... I grew in a period of suffocating conformity, the dregs of the Cold War hysteria that communists are hiding under your bed and in your anxiety closet to burst out and turn your local church into a museum pretending that a Russian invented the telephone. ..."
"... Somehow, quite a few of us found the means to stand up, to challenge, to question, to dismiss, to lampoon, and most of all, to turn back mindless adjectives accusing us of Thining The Wrong Way. I doubt that any generation coming up now is so mindlessly conformist as the writer insinuates. ..."
"... I also find it ironic that a piece called "Creating A-Plus Conformists" is published by the author of "The Benedict Option". I can't think of a greater force for creating conformity than religious orthodoxy. ..."
"... I have no idea who Alice is. But as a college professor, I find this to be (and this is being charitable) exaggerated nonsense. Has Alice actually ever stood in front of and talked to class of college freshman? ..."
Reader Alice comments on the hyperpoliticization of college students:
Understand: they *arrive at universities thinking this way*.
Our US students have been taught since at least grade 6, but mostly since school began,
that there are only certain acceptable ideas, and genuflecting to those ideas is what makes
you the Top Student, the Front Row kid, the one who checks all the boxes to get into Brown or
Oberlin or Yale.
The "best and brightest" accepted to these schools are kids who, consciously or
unconsciously, have learned to excel in places by accepting as true the acceptable ideas and
never bringing up the unacceptable. Some thoughts are just too dangerous to have.
Trajectories that are good for one's future to the Ivies don't allow you to engage these
unacceptable ideas. So in school and in other places where one deals with adults, these front
row kids learn to believe, or at least be comfortable with parroting, these acceptable ideas.
Just as there's a correct answer to a calculus question, there's a correct answer to
questions such as why one country is more successful than another, why there are measurable
differences in incarceration rates by race (even as there's also a contradictory answer to
the question of what is a race), what a nation owes non-citizens vs. citizens, how much
training can alter [ ], are sex differences on average innate, are there two sexes, etc.
Meanwhile, if you hear something unacceptable, you've also been equipped with the trump
card to demolish the argument: arguer is racist, sexist, bigot. So the Overton window is big
for trans rights and little for the role of, say, duty to ones' elders, big for
microaggression but little for the personality differences of men and women.
Whether they believe it or not at the beginning is irrelevant. They make the appropriate
verbal gestures, they get a reward. After 6-12 years of doing so, they're not capable of
engaging in debate or rhetoric, argument from evidence, even following a line of reasoning or
recognizing a fallacy. They've never done it, and anyone who tried was actively shut down
either calls of "my truth".
On the past, ignorance and obnoxious self regard were demolished by profs rather quickly.
What's changed is college profs no longer push back on this crap. They no longer demand
argument, reason, and counter argument. They simply are stunned that they share no overlap of
consciousness with the students they bequeathed to themselves. They are afraid of them and
afraid to stand up to the students or spineless weasel administrators.
I live on the east coast and can only tell you what we see. The public schools teach gender
identity ideology, starting in elementary. I didn't even know what that is until our autistic
daughter suddenly decided that she's "really a guy", along with a cluster of her school
friends, when she was 16. They are 19 now, and two of her friends have had irreversible
surgery which has made them sterile.
My brother is a biology professor at an elite liberal arts college in the Midwest. He uses
no pronouns with his students, as the demands escalate and change daily. A whole cluster of
young female students in the physics department have suddenly declared themselves trans. The
mantra of "supporting women in physics!" swiftly changed to "supporting transgender people in
physics!"
He says that it is impossible -- absolutely impossible -- to question what is
happening in society concerning the abandonment of human biological facts or to have a
rational debate about any of this on campus, either among the faculty or with the
students.
The unthinkable has happened. An ideology which would have been laughed at as ridiculous
on college campuses in the 1980s is now driving social, legal, and medical practice
throughout our entire country. If you haven't been affected by this yet, then you will be.
Soon.
This is 100% correct and also the result of our K-12 education system doing what it was
designed to do: engineer certain social outcomes.
Conservative calls to "de-fund college" over this are misplaced.
Also, the reason that college professors don't stand up to this is because they know that
the administration won't have their back if a student accuses them of being
racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic. And the administrator won't have their back due to the
desire to avoid bad press and students protesting on campus. Give the (vocal) students what
they want so everyone stays happy.
I could not disagree with this more strongly. This is the false argument of broad
generalization. The vast majority of schools are not en masses teaching radical SJW thought
control. They are doing their best to teach AT ALL given the federal over reach into state
public education and the excessive focus on testing and scores and the impact that has on
funding.
And certainly anecdote does not equal accumulative data but our personal experience of
high school
For our children is that there is zero indoctrination of SJW values coming from the teachers
of the institution. Certainly the peer group has SJW people and activities but I'm here to
declare that not one teacher or one principal in my district has for e fed my children any
SJW dogma. In fact I can list multiple examples of Tim's when I've wondered how teachers got
away with things like singing Christian or Jewish music at a choir concert or teaching the
Our Father prayer in German or studying the great schism and having my kids present the
Orthodox side of the story in World History.
Who knows. Maybe I live in an anomaly. But I wonder if the hyping of crazy SJW stories of
abuse in schools has created an image in people's minds that ALL schools are crazy SJW
hotbeds.
It's just not true. Public education IS in crisis due to ridiculous over testing and
funding that is abysmal. And the majority of people who work in public ed are really just
hanging on by their fingernails trying to do their best and make rent!!!
Sure there's a crazy teacher, waka-doodle principal or spineless superintendent that makes
the news. And certainly the NEA is an bastion of left leaning ideas, but to make this huge
sweep that the kids arriving at University were indoctrinated by their 1st grade teacher and
on up through their childhood is just absolutely not true.
A hundred years or so ago, I was in high school debate. One of the good things about that is
we had to learn how to argue either for or against the same thing with equal conviction.
Because we were young and inexperienced, i.e. stupid, most of us were pretty liberal, but the
idea that there was only one way to think about a problem was completely foreign.
Well, the writer of that comment paints a picture. But that assumes facts not in evidence. I
don't have a statistical overview of all the high schools in the country, but I know enough
about enough students at enough of them to question whether the above description is The
Truth About The Meaning Of Life And Everything.
I grew in a period of suffocating conformity, the dregs of the Cold War hysteria that
communists are hiding under your bed and in your anxiety closet to burst out and turn your
local church into a museum pretending that a Russian invented the telephone.
Somehow, quite a few of us found the means to stand up, to challenge, to question, to
dismiss, to lampoon, and most of all, to turn back mindless adjectives accusing us of Thining
The Wrong Way. I doubt that any generation coming up now is so mindlessly conformist as the
writer insinuates.
There are two answers to being reflexively called "racist, sexist, bigot."
1) So what?
2) Prove it.
I prefer the second option, but there are other adjectival nouns I would respond to with
the first.
This situation will not last. The Social Justice canon is too clearly false and modern people
are too rebellious to shoulder it for long. One of the characteristics of liquid modernity is
that the pendulum swings more freely than it ever has before. It will be interesting to see,
when the Social Justice narrative finally collapses, how much of our foundational mythology
goes along with it.
As far as I can tell, our modern dysfunction is a very consistent and rational result of
one simple foundational lie: "All men are created equal." The intent of this lie may have
been noble but it is self-evidently false. And the Social Justice narrative rests very
comfortably upon it. I can't see how it survives the collapse of Social Justice no matter how
badly we desire to maintain it.
P.S. I understand the reflexive anger and distrust that most readers will feel upon
reading this post. This is certainly a painful idea to grapple with. It is embedded deeply
into our many intersecting identities. But what would you say to someone claiming that all
pots are created equal? Would you posit that anyone denying this claim is a wok supremacist?
No. If two things are not interchangeable, then they are not equal. But this does not mean
that one is ultimately superior to the other. Human equality is a comfortable illusion. But
we can find better reasons to treat one another with the proper respect and kindness. And in
the process we might build a more perfect civilization.
The natural follow up for those in power to saying "Some men are more equal than others"
is to say "therefore the better men are the ones in power."
No. Being born poor makes it much, much harder to succeed. Having connections puts
incompetents and immoral people in power. We need to understand that the rich and powerful
*are* usually born with silver spoons in their mouths. Injustice is real. Face it.
College students today are the first generation in US history to have grown up with openly
gay friends and neighbors. They know, from lived experience, that there is nothing wrong with
gay people. They know it in their bones.
So, yah, they think differently than we do on sexual issues, and they tune us out when we say
things they know to be false.
"Kids, I don't know what's wrong with the kids these days".
So a reader send this in without citing any Support for her conclusions and you tack on a
headline about conformism and print it.
One could easily write a companion piece about homeschooled kids going off to some
evangelical college where they set aside all reason and accept creationism and the Bible as
the sole arbiter of truth. But those kids aren't going to get into "Brown or Oberlin or
Yale".
That's where Alice tips her hand. This has nothing to do with the brainwashing or
indoctrination of our youth, but that the Brown, Oberlin and Yale graduates are going to end
up running this country, while Alice doesn't get, and isn't in anyway entitled too, tell them
what to think.
Our US students have been taught since at least grade 6, but mostly since school began,
that there are only certain acceptable ideas, and genuflecting to those ideas is what makes
you the Top Student, the Front Row kid, the one who checks all the boxes to get into Brown or
Oberlin or Yale.
There has never been a time in history that this hasn't been true.
Rod, the comment is okay, but seems to lack an actual article written around it. Looks quite
incomplete both from a literary perspective and from the perspective of the idea.
This may sound mawkish, and it's based on just a few years teaching undergrads when I was in
grad school, but I think there are a lot of college students who want to be able to say or
write something more than the party line, but often they don't know how and have managed to
go through high school without having read anything. My students, of both sexes and all
races, included a good number of kids who, once I made it clear enough that I didn't want to
hear any canned "diversity is excellence" crap or whatever, seemed pretty happy that they
could try writing about something else for a change.
There are always the sycophantic
apple-polishers whose whole shtick is regurgitating the conventional wisdom at every
opportunity, but people hate that kind of person (see Hillary Clinton).
You could spend some time reading your kids' AP World History and AP US History textbooks
to discover the "analytical" grid that everything is rammed through. Good for you/your kids if your local teachers don't teach it in that manner, but trust me, the AP test
questions are geared toward certain ideological answers.
Also, when Alice mentioned "My truth" I wondered if she has also had a kid in an elite
college prep school. If so, it sure sounds like she and I have come to the same conclusions
from experience.
Working in IT I get to talk to a lot of young people coming out of college with a variety of
degrees. Most have no idea what Alice is talking about. Perhaps if you go for something like
a sociology or general liberal arts degree at the most liberal schools in the nation this is
true but real students are worried about their fields of study (business, software, UX
design, etc.) and the courses that might teach these types of things are fluff electives they
skate through and ignore as much as possible.
I also find it ironic that a piece called "Creating A-Plus Conformists" is published by
the author of "The Benedict Option". I can't think of a greater force for creating conformity
than religious orthodoxy.
This post is one big exercise in confirmation bias. There are no facts, just assertions
stated firmly enough to convince the already-convinced. I expect better from The American
Conservative.
The fact that it's supposedly an example of other peoples' conformity is just the
ironic icing on the non-self-aware cake.
"But what would you say to someone claiming that all pots are created equal?"
That pots are objects with objective value and none inherent, while people are subjects who
invest value in objects and possessed of inherent worth that is not objectively comparable,
so we shorthand render it "equality". You know, the reason conservatives are supposed to hate
'borshun.
Actual studies shows actually, what happens in college is professors move left-wing students
slightly to the right and right-wing students slightly to the left.
Hi Rod, sorry about the typos in the original! Thanks for the raising the comment. I hope
it's fruitful.
To some folks saying 'this is an overgeneralization', my comments were in the post re:
what's happening at the elite institutions, and so were directed to the set of kids on k-12
that intend to get to such institutions. Those elite univs are more likely to select students
with this SJW profile on the first place, yes. But again, the kids intending to go to such
places know this is the profile.
To those questioning whether every k-12 school is like this, I ask you to look at the
required courses in teaching colleges and master's programs that credential teachers. It's
SJWism everywhere all the time, in every single discipline. Math class is about racial
equity. Reading class is about gender equity. There's no other lens through which teachers
are taught, so this is the lens through which they teach. Read the journals in teaching and
see the articles.
To those questioning whether every college is like this, I suggest you look more closely
at your community college's bookstore.
I'm in a southern state that voted for Trump. The big city cc offers this required English
class,
ENG-111: Writing and Inquiry
'This course is designed to develop the ability to produce clear writing in a variety of
genres and formats using a recursive process. Emphasis includes inquiry, analysis, effective
use of rhetorical strategies, thesis development, audience awareness, and revision. Upon
completion, students should be able to produce unified, coherent, well-developed essays using
standard written English. This course will also introduce students to the skills needed to
produce a college-level research essay.'
Seems a reasonable course, right? Freshman English.
The Reader for the course in 2017:
Sex Ed
Family Values
Oh, Come On, Men Aren't Finished
Wonder Woman by Gloria Steinem
Sex, Lies and Conversation: why Is It So Hard to Talk to Each Other?
Again, you can claim I'm cherry picking, but you will find this in every city in every
state.
Or just listen to vacuous comments of middle school admins. Look at when districts give
days off to kids to bus them to anti Trump rallies, and ask yourself if such a place is real
pushing a socratic discussion about these points of view.
If you listen closely, you will understand this is everywhere.
Andrew in MD: "If two things are not interchangeable, then they are not equal." Is interchangeability the sole criteron of equality? Could a person argue that since all people are sinners/fallen, they are, therefore, equal?
Or are some more sinning or fallen?
The Buddha demonstrated that all people are empty of self – why cannot that suffice
for the establishment of equality?
Andrew in MD: some great American (John Randolph?) once said "I do not believe that all men
are equal, for the simple reason that it isn't true". So, nothing anger-producing in your
post. If giving up this noble lie is what is needed to consign SJWism to the ideological
trash bin along with other totalitarian ideologies like Maoism, then out it goes.
When I was, in my late college years through my first ten or so years in The Real World, I
was a doctrinaire conservative Republican, although not a member of any church or religion.
In a way, this did me some good, because I was attending some elite, some not-so-elite,
and all very leftish educational institutions. Often my grades suffered, but I had to learn
to marshal facts and formulate arguments that people did not want to hear. Often this was
pretty easy, because the people I was arguing with had never really thought about what they
believed or why, much less the unspoken assumptions underlying those beliefs, and they had
never heard them challenged.
Usually the response was sputtering outrage, but that's a poor substitute for logical
argument, especially when I am almost autistic in how little I care what other people think
of me. In fact, if you react by being even calmer and more logical, the other person will
dissolve into a spitting mad Donald Duck meltdown.
If I had simply gone with the flow, all that was necessary was to recite the correct
dogmas and platitudes with adequate conviction and I would have been greeted with
hosannas.
They say that a person becomes more conservative as they get older, but the opposite
happened to me. I suppose because I enjoy challenging my own beliefs, finding facts that
don't fit my own theories and then trying to make sense of them.
I learned that theory didn't always apply in real world conditions and pat answers don't
always translate into solutions. (Apply "markets in all the things" to healthcare, for
instance.)
They also say that a person becomes more conservative as they become more successful, but
that wasn't the case for me either. I suppose to a certain extent, I am successful because I
was lucky.
Honestly, what Shelley wrote sounds more accurate than what Alice did, although I think there
is at least a grain of truth in Alice's post, too. And the poster at another one of Rod's
pieces who put more of the blame on the Internet than on schools and teachers at any level
made sense, too.
As much as I find the content on AmCon to be generally thought provoking, the complaint
expressed by "Alice" is a recurring sentiment that I think "conservatives" use to cover up
shoddy arguments
"I have all these really great ideas and deep insights about race and gender, but every
time I try to express them, I get called a bigot, and I'm totally not a bigot, but those
dastardly liberals won't even let me make my argument because they are always shouting me
down and calling me a bigot, so me and the vast majority of ordinary folks who also agree
with me are effectively silenced a shrill few elites, which is totally unfair! Anyone else
feel this way? Sad!"
Point #1
Something doesn't jive about the general premise. Summarizing Alice's post as "All the kids
today are totally brainwashed by SJWs, and everyone mindlessly goes along with whatever the
PC police say". On a related note, last week's major news item was essentially "ordinary
Americans were recently polled and 92% of them don't support political correctness and they
are totally sick of identity politics and fed up with SJWs -- #WalkAway #RedWave #MAGA"
Am I missing something? Because those don't seem to make sense to be occurring in the same
place at the same time. "The kids are totally brainwashed by identity politics and are just a
bunch of useful idiots for the Left", BUT "they also see right through it, see that it's a
sham, and they thoroughly reject it". Also, "The ordinary folks are cowering in fear, there's
nothing they can do about it, the situation is beyond hopeless because the SJWs have
effectively silenced all dissent", BUT "there's a revolution about to burst forth because so
many ordinary people are mad as hell and not going to take it any more and in November they
are going to vote hardcore against all this identity stuff and kick these knuckleheads out of
power."
Doesn't make sense. It's one or the other, not both.
Point #2
I don't instinctively believe that all Republicans and Conservatives are bigots. I'm a
Conservative. I don't think I'm a bigot. But I do get a little skeptical of a particular
handful of my fellow conservatives who always seem to be running around complaining
"everyone's always calling me a bigot, everyone's always calling me a bigot, I'm totally not
a bigot, but everyone's always calling me a bigot when I express my ideas".
Well, okay, what exactly are these wonderful, totally not bigoted ideas that you have?
Would you like to share them with us?
For example, Alice (or anyone else), please illuminate us with the answer to one of the
questions that you raised in your post, one of those off-limits questions where people are
always unfairly saying that your answer is racist: why there are measurable differences in incarceration rates by race?
Help me to understand, in your own, totally not-bigoted words, what is the answer that we
all need the hear, the answer that the SJWs won't let us hear? I promise, promise, promise
that I will not call you a racist. This is a safe space for you.
I have no idea who Alice is. But as a college professor, I find this to be (and this is being
charitable) exaggerated nonsense. Has Alice actually ever stood in front of and talked to
class of college freshman?
The upside is that all the good little Maoists will starve, come some real crises in our
society. Good for them that they can make up micro aggressions out of nothing, not so good
for them that they won't be able to feed their soy faces when things begin to break down in
this nation.
I figured we'd already gone around the useless bend with these people years ago when I was
trapped someplace and MTV was playing. Some yoyo on the TV was talking about a show he was
producing and soooooo scared that it wasn't going to go right and freaking out and all this,
basically over nothing. I then noticed more and more of this type of behavior once I started
looking for it. Lots of younger and younger people living in fear of absolutely nothing just
fear for its own sake.
Learned fear and helplessness, nothing less or more. You have an increasingly large number
of kids who are raised up as sheltered as possible and who have no real will or ability to
take care of themselves. Couple that with the ideological vampires that roam higher education
these days and you wind up with people who don't really care about whatever cause they're
promoting, or what they're protesting, but it becomes all abut trying to drive out any
dissenting sound from a basis of fear.
The soy boys are wretched creatures at best, and the harpies who lead them about by the
nose are just as pitiful. Kinda dangerous, but only to a point, because all of them value
their own skin more than real confrontation or principles (this is kinda true of the
alt-right, too, which is why the media always suffers meltdowns at violence that wouldn't
even merit a mention in Freikorps-riddled Germany, where the Browns and Reds duke it out
regularly and Hitler brandished a pistol, not a Twitter hissy fit).
There's really no upside, just the irritation of living with these people on a daily basis
and trying to tune out their BS. Maybe the social credit system will get rolling here and
some point, which will be a clue to move to the sticks and learn how to raise organic produce
and enjoy the simpler things. Lord knows, none of them are going to want to risk getting mud
on their hipster work boots by being in the real country.
I'm sure Reader Alice is identifying a real phenomenon, but it's funny to see a traditional
Christian publishing it. Are we saying the other side is a haven of consistently
rational debate ?
I teach high school kids for a living. My school is in a high income area and nearly 100% of
the kids are college bound, many of them to very selective universities. My experience is
that our stronger students take challenging and reasonably balanced courses – they do
not arrive to college as leftist zombies. Our weaker students sometimes find a home with the
leftists and realize that they can be praised by adults and sometimes even given high grades
in politicized but low level classes. These are the ones I worry about. I have a good view of
the next generation, and from where I sit the most capable 17 year olds are for more
influenced by Lin Manuel Miranda than by Ta Nehisi Coates – and I find that fairly
encouraging.
I taught high school English in the California Bay Area and even there, I encountered only a
couple teachers who could be said to have any kind of liberal agenda and to have included it
in the classroom. My 3 kids have gone to California public schools (2 of them are currently
in high school), in the Bay Area and the Sacramento regions, and we haven't experienced any
of what the writer of this post describes. It's been my experience that kids get their
political leanings these days mostly from their peers, their media heroes and social media.
Now, college is another matter entirely, but I don't need to tell anyone here that.
I remember well the time I made the perfectly wise and rational statement in history class
that "might makes right," which of course it does. My poor teacher, at his usual loss for
words in dealing with my divine wisdom sputtered some foolishness to the effect that, "Hitler
had might. Was he right?'
To which I responded, as the Young Voice of God, "Hitler lost."
The look on the poor man's face was worth the price of admission for he had chosen exactly
the wrong example to use. He slumped back, defeated, for he had proven me right.
Fear not. The young will grow up and, as their compatriots in Christian schools will,
learn to see past the platitudes, knowing that the very idea of justice is a vile thing,
incompatible with their personal freedom, and they will end up despising it from their very
bones.
Jonathan Haidt has pointed out a key reason why we get such mixed messages about what is
really happening.
Millennials get blamed for a lot of this, but most of this stuff is actually the arrival
of the first of the immediate post-millennial generation at college, just within the last
couple of years.
He points out that this is the first generation to have gone through formative late
childhood/early adolescent years experiencing the destructive impact social media throughout
their development. (Previous generations encountered it after they were just that bit older
and more emotionally stable.)
I can look back at my kids, who were born smack-dab in the middle of the millennial
generation, and their high school experience wasn't remotely like anything described above.
Granted, they grew up in Old West country, but it was at a very large high school–and
as this blog repeatedly points out, nowhere is sheltered from the modern diseases. Their
teachers were certainly overwhelmingly liberal, as is true pretty much everywhere these days,
no matter how red the state.
If Haidt is right, the experience my millennial kids had (and the experiences that many
readers of this blog will be appealing to) is *completely* irrelevant. There is something
brand-new just arrived on the scene, and only in the last 2-3 years.
We can argue about whether teachers caused it, culture caused it, social media caused it,
parents caused it The question is what we are going to do about it.
I find this really, really hard to believe. Also, I think I can state (with some degree of
confidence) that Alice does, in fact, believe that there is only one answer to her questions
about incarceration, national success, etc.
The "best and brightest" come in a few different flavors. A lot of them are the kids who
do everything absolutely right, don't seem to rock any particular boats, and are often pretty
conservative in various ways, including politically.
Others are those fueled by a desire for justice and reforms, because they've been on the
receiving end of injustice, or they've witnessed it and felt sympathy/empathy. These are the
ones who often clash with administrators and/or the more entitled demographics among their
peers. They're the ones standing by their controversial school newspaper articles, the ones
organizing the gay-straight (etc.) alliances in the face of often serious threat, and so on.
This isn't happening because they've been indoctrinated, though they may have been inspired
by that one English or History teacher.
As others have said Rod, you've stumbled across the NPC meme. No doubt someone will be along
to tell you about how you are dehumanizing people, because having an NPC avatar will get you
banned from twitter but calling white people dogs will get you on the editorial board of the
NYT.
For those unfamiliar with it, NPC means Non-Player-Character. It comes from video games,
although I've read that it appeared in DnD before that. In any case it is mostly relevant to
RPG games here. In an RPG game, the player will encounter many NPCs who have a few scripted
responses that they will repeat whenever the player talks to them. The meme is that SJWs do
not think for themselves, and simply respond to everything with a few scripted responses to
any political debate, usually some variation of an 'ist' or an 'ism' or white privilege or
lived experience. It has been an effective meme for mocking the left, which is why twitter
moved so quickly to shut it down.
So the Overton window is big for trans rights and little for the role of, say, duty to
ones' elders, big for microaggression but little for the personality differences of men and
women.
This is exactly right, and is actually the reason why the experience of becoming
"red-pilled" can be so exhilarating and freeing for many people. Suddenly there are huge
areas of discussion and debate that you can explore. It is especially potent because often
these areas were once filed under "common sense" or "fairness". Examples include the
differences between men and women which are evident to most toddlers, or the intrinsic
unfairness of judging people guilty for crimes that were committed hundreds of years before
they were born.
The euphoria of this rediscovered freedom can lead people to over-correct, and go very far
into conspiracy theories in search of more "truths" which have been considered off-limits.
I've seen this in an acquaintance who went far down the rabbit-hole of holocaust denial
theories and neo-nazism. I think it became a rush for him to go where others fear to tread,
and I think it is somehow connected to the red-pill experience.
[NFR: I found the graphic when I typed "conformity" into Shutterstock's search engine.
-- RD]
Shelley, I don't mean this as an insult, but you are 100% completely out of touch on this
issue. My sense is that you don't want to know the truth. This is evidenced by statements
like this:
"For our children is that there is zero indoctrination of SJW values coming from the
teachers of the institution. Certainly the peer group has SJW people and activities but I'm
here to declare that not one teacher or one principal in my district has for e fed my
children any SJW dogma."
First of all, this is anecdotal. Secondly, I can ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEE you that your
absolutist statement is wrong. Your assertion that you know every single thing that
teachers/administrators have "fed" to your children shows how unserious you are about soberly
assessing/investigating the situation. You are operating on selective evidence and faith.
We are living in a time where our schools, the mainstream media, the entertainment
industry, high ed, and The Democratic party are united in a vitriolic, hysterical insistence
that citizens of all ages support The Narrative, OR ELSE.
I think your mindset is shared by many who simply can't accept the fact that what should
be the fringe rantings of the occasional "waka-doodle" has become the norm in the leftist
controlled institutions I listed above. I hope you all wake up, and see the extremist agenda
and actual violence that the left is supporting. If you don't, we will descend into actual
civil war. That probably sounds crazy to you, too. I wish you were right.
"This situation will not last. The Social Justice canon is too clearly false and modern
people are too rebellious to shoulder it for long."
Agree ..I would call it the social justice Koran though ..but unlike the Islamic Koran
(Qu'ran) it keeps changing all the time.
One day you're an "ally" the next day you find yourself a "nazi"
Seriously ..just go around campus today saying lines from Obama speeches back in 2008 ."I
believe marriage is between a man and a woman" and "immigration must be controlled and the
violence on the southern border must be stopped"
Thats now "hate speech"
At least the wahhabis tend to stick to one set of rules.
As someone who has spent most of my life in education and higher education, it is not my
experience that there is some sort of universal SJW indoctrination. In reality what basically
happens is this:
Certain professions at the commanding heights of the culture (journalism,
entertainment, academia etc ) are inherently cosmopolitan and tend to disproportionately
appeal to liberals/leftists.
Therefore, most college profs, students, and academic types end up being Nice Moderate
Liberals. Most are not dogmatic or hateful, and are willing to entertain rational
argumentation (to a point). Many–especially the students–are apolitical.
However, centrist liberal hegemony is largely defenseless against radical SJWs,
especially if they are ethnic minorities/women making accusations of racism/sexism, and the
Nice Moderate Liberals get bullied (sometimes quite literally) into going along with the SJW
agenda.
So, for instance, during the big SJW freakouts in places like Yale and Evergreen State,
the SJWs were not protesting and shutting down conservatives (too few of them to really
matter). They were protesting/assaulting/shutting down moderate liberals.
I was and still am a teacher (worked in public schools). Some teachers are liberal, some are
conservative. Personal politics does not come into the classroom unless a teacher brings it
in. However, standardized testing, funding, and infrastructure spending are all political
realities that affect teachers.
The idea that there are teachers indoctrinating your children is a conservative boogeyman.
There are a few bad teachers, but they are usually apathetic, not passionate. There are also
a few doctors who have sexually abused their clients, but that doesn't demonize the whole
health profession.
If parents are so concerned about transmitting values, they are free to homeschool, but it
would involve living on one income and re-prioritizing their finances. Many people are not
really that concerned about it, but it's easy to decry the fictional bad teachers they
imagine are stalking the schools. If public schools did not exist, all of these parents would
be forced to educate their own children, and they would realize a small sampling of what
teachers contend with on a daily basis.
Please stop painting a false picture of the profession. Public education is a genuine good
of democracy. If it disappears completely, people will one day realize what they have
lost.
I would like to echo reader G's sentiment – paraphrasing G, you've stated your
arguments in a detached way, without giving any samples of your own thinking. It's as if you
seek some implied consensus on conclusions you are, for some reason, unwilling to share. Your
arguments seem to be:
(a) Grade and high school age students are being indoctrinated into "certain acceptable
ideas", which they carry to the university;
(b) Universities confirm and deepen this indoctrination: "Some thoughts are just too
dangerous to have";
(c) Science and engineering fields lead to objectively correct, singular solutions to
given questions. The humanities try to mimic them, by insisting that there are singular
solutions to more complex questions as well;
(d) Here you do give us a few hints of these complex questions: some countries are more
successful than others, incarceration rates vary by race, what is the correct treatment of
non-citizens, the number of sexes, and possibly, a question on IQ;
If I've misunderstood any of your arguments, please correct me. I would also like to echo
G's invitation for you to provide a sample of your own thinking on any of these questions.
Should you respond, I too promise not to engage in polemics. To encourage you, Alice, for
what it's worth, these are my early thoughts on why "one country is more successful than
another":
At an individual's level, the basic idea of "success" is biological survival and
procreation. At the level of a country (and by that, I mean a nation which embodies a certain
culture), it is cultural survival, and handing down of its culture to succeeding generations
for preservation and improvement. Thus, at this basic level, the most successful countries
are those that faced adversity, even dissolution as states (some for several generations),
and still managed to preserve, improve, and pass on their culture till more favorable times.
This is one proof, perhaps the strongest, of cultural resilience;
Other measures of "success" are more ephemeral. All countries, if they survive long
enough, experience cycles of economic and military ups and downs, cultural rots and
regenerations, and demographic changes, to list a few examples. Thus, history decrees that in
these matters, no country can expect to be "number one" in perpetuity. In my mind, such
passing things are not good indicators of "success". For countries, success depends on those
cultural factors that are transmittable and willingly accepted (even embraced and cherished)
by succeeding generations. It also depends of each generation to have the wherewithal to
continuously adapt and improve them. The next question would be, what are these factors?
Has anyone considered that these kids (who are certainly no where close to a majority) might
be picking up these values at home? Leftwing people also have kids.
from where I sit the most capable 17 year olds are far more influenced by Lin Manuel
Miranda than by Ta Nehisi Coates – and I find that fairly encouraging.
Publicly standing up against the Bush administration was not the sort of thing that was an
unthinking default at the time. I don't think it was the way to get into the best
universities. I don't think it was a path prescribed by teachers and the corporate media
(though lots of conservatives claimed otherwise).
It represented a struggle for social justice, and an unpopular one at that.
"... The federal student loan system creates perverse incentives that enable bad actors to prey on students. Without adequate protections for students, these predatory corporations will continue to base their business models on the availability of these loans, with little commitment to providing quality education. ..."
"... These Obama-era protections and remedies were being blocked by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss rejected a request by for-profit college representatives to halt the regulations. Even with the win, the answer from the Department of Education is arrogant in response. Student loan servicers do not hesitate a moment to penalize a borrower with penalties and fees if the are late. ..."
"... DeVos and conservatives have said the Obama-era policies are unfair to colleges and too costly for taxpayers. She has proposed creating a stricter standard for fraud claims and eliminating the ban on mandatory arbitration agreements ..."
A
Federal Court cleared the way for students who have been defrauded by for-profit
institutions (I hesitate to call them schools).
"This court ruling is a major victory for thousands of students across the country who
were defrauded by predatory for-profit colleges taking advantage of our broken student loan
system. We commend Attorney General Maura Healey for her leadership fighting for students who
were left with thousands of dollars in debt after their for-profit colleges collapsed.
The federal student loan system creates perverse incentives that enable bad actors to
prey on students. Without adequate protections for students, these predatory corporations
will continue to base their business models on the availability of these loans, with little
commitment to providing quality education. "
These Obama-era protections and remedies were being blocked by Secretary of Education Betsy
DeVos. U.S. District Judge Randolph
Moss rejected a request by for-profit college representatives to halt the regulations. Even
with the win, the answer from the Department of Education is arrogant in response. Student loan
servicers do not hesitate a moment to penalize a borrower with penalties and fees if the are
late.
"DeVos and conservatives have said the Obama-era policies are unfair to colleges and too
costly for taxpayers. She has proposed creating a stricter standard for fraud claims and
eliminating the ban on mandatory arbitration agreements.
But DeVos' push to finalize those revised regulations has hit an unexpected snag that will
delay having a replacement policy on the books by another year. The Education Department said
it won't meet a key Nov. 1 regulatory deadline, meaning that the replacement regulations
aren't likely to take effect until July 2020 at the earliest."
Hopefully the State Attorneys and others can convince the Judge to hold Betsy DeVos in
contempt for not activating the court's requirements in a reasonable amount of time less than 2
years.
likbez , October 19, 2018 1:15 pm
Under neoliberalism any such victory is temporary and will be eventually rolled
back
Pervasive racketeering rules because we allow it to, especially in education and medicine. Both are self-destructing under the
weight of their own money-grubbing schemes.
Notable quotes:
"... Because of the loans' disgracefully high interest rates, my family and I have paid more or less the equivalent of my debt itself in the years since I graduated, making monthly payments in good faith -- even in times of unemployment and extreme duress -- to lenders like Citigroup, a bank that was among the largest recipients of federal bailout money in 2008 and that eventually sold off my debt to other lenders. This ruinous struggle has been essentially meaningless: I now owe more than what I started out owing, not unlike my parents with their mortgage . ..."
"... By Daniela Senderowicz. Originally published in Yes! Magazine ..."
"... Activists are building meaningful connections among borrowers to counter the taboo of admitting they can't pay their bills. ..."
"... Gamblers and reality TV stars can claim bankruptcy protections when in financial trouble, but 44 million student loan borrowers can't. Unemployed, underpaid, destitute, sick, or struggling borrowers simply aren't able to start anew. ..."
"... With a default rate approaching 40 percent , one would expect armies of distressed borrowers marching in the streets demanding relief from a system that has singled out their financial anguish. Distressed student debtors, however, seem to be terror-struck about coming forward to a society that, they say, ostracizes them for their inability to keep up with their finances. ..."
"... When we spoke to several student borrowers, almost none were willing to share their names. "I can't tell anyone how much I'm struggling," says a 39-year-old Oregon physician who went into student loan default after his wife's illness drained their finances. He is terrified of losing his patients and reputation if he speaks out about his financial problems. ..."
"... Debtors are isolated, anxious, and in the worst cases have taken their own lives . Simone confirms that she has "worked with debtors who were suicidal or had psychological breakdowns requiring psychiatric hospitalization." ..."
"... "Alienation impacts mental health issues," says New York mental health counselor Harriet Fraad. "As long as they blame themselves within the system, they're lost." ..."
"... A recent manifesto by activist and recent graduate Eli Campbell calls for radical unity among borrowers. "Young people live in constant fear that they'll never be able to pay off their debt. We're not buying houses or able to afford the hallmarks of the American dream," he explains. ..."
"... Do a little research on car selling and you will see the pressures on the dealer sales force to suck the vast majority of buyers into long term debt. Car loans are now five or six years, routinely. ..."
Yves
here. This article describes how the stigma of struggling to pay student debt is a burden in
and of itself. I wish this article had explained how little it take to trigger an escalation
into default interest rates and how punitive they are. The piece also stresses the value of
activism as a form of psychological relief, by connecting stressed student debt borrowers with
people similarly afflicted.
But the bigger issue is the way indebtedness is demonized in a society that makes it pretty
much impossible to avoid borrowing. One reader recounted how many (as in how few) weeks of
after tax wages it took to buy a car in the 1960s versus now. Dealers don't want to talk to
buyers who want to pay in full at the time of purchase. And if you don't have installment
credit or a mortgage, the consumer credit agencies ding you!
It goes without saying that the sense of shame is harder to endure due to how shallow most
people's social networks are, which is another product of neoliberalism.
In keeping, the New York Times today ran an op-ed by one of its editors on how student
debtors are also victims of the crisis, reprinted from a longer piece in The Baffler (hat tip Dan
K).
Key sections :
Because of the loans' disgracefully high interest rates, my family and I have paid
more or less the equivalent of my debt itself in the years since I graduated, making monthly
payments in good faith -- even in times of unemployment and extreme duress -- to lenders like
Citigroup, a bank that was among the largest recipients of federal bailout money in 2008 and
that eventually sold off my debt to other lenders. This ruinous struggle has been essentially
meaningless: I now owe more than what I started out owing, not unlike my parents with their
mortgage .
Many people have and will continue to condemn me personally for my tremendous but
unexceptional student debt, and the ways in which it has made the recession's effects linger
for my family. I've spent quite a lot of time in the past decade accepting this blame. The
recession may have compounded my family's economic insecurity, but I also made the conscious
decision to take out loans for a college I couldn't afford in order to become a journalist, a
profession with minimal financial returns. The amount of debt I owe in student loans -- about
$100,000 -- is more than I make in a given year. I am ashamed and embarrassed by this, but as
I grow older, I think it is time that those profiting from this country's broken economic
system share some of my guilt
[At my commencement in 2009] Mrs. Clinton then echoed a fantasy of boundless opportunity
that had helped guide the country into economic collapse, deceiving many of the parents in
attendance, including my own, into borrowing toward a future that they couldn't work hard
enough to afford. "There is no problem we face here in America or around the world that will
not yield to human effort," she said. "Our challenges are ones that summon the best of us,
and we will make the world better tomorrow than it is today." At the time, I wondered if this
was accurate. I now know how wrong she was.
By Daniela Senderowicz. Originally published in
Yes! Magazine
Activists are building meaningful connections among borrowers to counter the taboo of
admitting they can't pay their bills.
Gamblers and reality TV stars can claim bankruptcy protections when in financial
trouble, but 44 million student loan borrowers can't. Unemployed, underpaid, destitute, sick,
or struggling borrowers simply aren't able to start anew.
With a default rate approaching
40 percent , one would expect armies of distressed borrowers marching in the streets
demanding relief from a system that has singled out their financial anguish. Distressed student
debtors, however, seem to be terror-struck about coming forward to a society that, they say,
ostracizes them for their inability to keep up with their finances.
When we spoke to several student borrowers, almost none were willing to share their
names. "I can't tell anyone how much I'm struggling," says a 39-year-old Oregon physician who
went into student loan default after his wife's illness drained their finances. He is terrified
of losing his patients and reputation if he speaks out about his financial problems.
"If I shared this with anyone they will look down upon me as some kind of fool," explains a
North Carolina psychologist who is now beyond retirement age. He explains that his student debt
balance soared after losing a well-paying position during the financial crisis, and that he is
struggling to pay it back.
Financial shame alienates struggling borrowers. Debtors blame themselves and self-loathe
when they can't make their payments, explains Colette Simone, a Michigan psychologist. "There
is so much fear of sharing the reality of their financial situation and the devastation it is
causing in every facet of their lives," she says. "The consequences of coming forward can
result in social pushback and possible job -- related complications, which only deepen their
suffering."
Debtors are isolated, anxious, and in the worst cases have taken
their own lives . Simone confirms that she has "worked with debtors who were suicidal or
had psychological breakdowns requiring psychiatric hospitalization."
With an average debt of just over $37,000 per borrower for the
class of 2016 , and given that incomes have been flat since the 1970s , it's not
surprising that borrowers are struggling to pay. Student loans have a squeaky-clean reputation,
and society tends to view them as a noble symbol of the taxpayers' generosity to the working
poor. Fear of facing society's ostracism for failure to pay them back has left borrowers
alienated and trapped in a lending system that is engulfing them in debt bondage.
"Alienation impacts mental health issues," says New York mental health counselor Harriet
Fraad. "As long as they blame themselves within the system, they're lost."
Student debtors can counter despair by fighting back through activism and political
engagement, she says. "Connection is the antidote to alienation, and engaging in activism,
along with therapy, is a way to recovery."
Despite the fear of coming forward, some activists are building a social movement in which
meaningful connections among borrowers can counter the taboo of openly admitting financial
ruin.
Student Loan Justice, a national grassroots lobby group, is attempting to build this
movement by pushing for robust legislation to return
bankruptcy protections to borrowers. The group has active chapters in almost every state, with
members directly lobbying their local representatives to sign on as co-sponsors to HR 2366.
Activists are building a supportive community for struggling borrowers through political
agitation, local engagement, storytelling, and by spreading a courageous message of hope that
may embolden traumatized borrowers to come forward and unite.
Julie Margetaa Morgan
, a fellow at The Roosevelt Institute, recently noted that student debt servicers like Navient
have a powerful influence on lawmakers. "Student loan borrowers may not have millions to spend
on lobbying, but they have something equally, if not more, powerful: millions of voices," she
says.
A recent manifesto by activist
and recent graduate Eli Campbell calls for radical unity among borrowers. "Young people live in
constant fear that they'll never be able to pay off their debt. We're not buying houses or able
to afford the hallmarks of the American dream," he explains.
In his call for a unified national boycott of student loan payments, inevitably leading to a
mass default on this debt, Campbell hopes to expose this crisis and instigate radical change.
In a recent interview he
explained that the conditions for borrowers are so bad already that debtors may not join the
boycott willingly. Instead, participation may simply happen by default given the lack of proper
work opportunities that lead to borrowers' inability to pay.
While a large-scale default may not happen through willful and supportive collective action,
ending the secrecy of the crisis through massive national attention may destigmatize the shame
of financial defeat and finally bring debtors out of the isolation that causes them so much
despair.
Activists are calling for a significant conversation about the commodification of educating
our youth, shifting our focus toward investing into the promise of the young and able, rather
than the guarantee of their perpetual debt bondage. In calling for collective action they
soothe the hurt of so many alienated debtors, breaking the taboos that allow them to say, "Me,
too" and admit openly that in this financial climate we all need each other to move
forward.
How much are the interest rates on student loans there in the USA? Here in India its 11.5%
if you want to finance studies abroad. 8.5 for some select institutions.
I wonder if the media's obsession with "millenials" isn't primarily a way to try to divide
people with shared interests, above all around the topics of student debt and the job market
and to make the problems seem like they have shallower roots than they really do. The
individuals mentioned here are older than that 24-37 age cohort, one of them much older.
Dealers don't want to talk to buyers who want to pay in full at the time of
purchase.
Yes Yes. Car manufacturers are actually finance houses selling products manufactured by
subcontractors – such is the state of American industry – but their dream is to
move to a SaaS model where ownership, of anything, becomes a relic of the past (except for
the overlords and oligarchs).
This could not be possible without government corruption and revolving-door regulation.
Maybe these PAYG vehicles will contain built-in body scanners too; for our own security, of
course.
In his call for a unified national boycott of student loan payments, inevitably leading
to a mass default on this debt, Campbell hopes to expose this crisis and instigate radical
change.
Default, or radical change, would bring the economy to it's knees. But when there is
another economic downturn, this is going to happen anyway. Terrible situation; negative real
interest rates destroying the pensions of the elderly, student loan servitude destroying the
youth and the middle class being squeezed to oblivion. What can be done to fix it, I ask?
Yet they are doing God's work, are they? Well, this is not a God I choose to worship.
Well good for you. How many cars, of what age, have you bought, for your anecdote to rate
as anything vaguely resembling the wide reality, and how does your personal financial
situation let you just write checks for $30 or $70,000?
Do a little research on car selling and you will see the pressures on the dealer sales
force to suck the vast majority of buyers into long term debt. Car loans are now five or six
years, routinely.
And one wonders what the investment is in trying to impeach the points of this report, wth
such an unlikely and atypical claim.
Maybe a little traction, then, for the notion, and increasingly the inescapable reality, of
#juststoppaying on those "remember Joe Biden" virtually non-dischargeable, often fraudulently
induced, "student loan" debt shackles?
"Teaching to the test" is a perversion of education. Excessive quantification is bad. Both are primary features of neoliberal
education.
Notable quotes:
"... If we care about the prospects of democratic education, we must take neoliberalism's success seriously, for it is a philosophical framework in which freedom and democratic education are mutually exclusive. ..."
"... We must intentionally challenge the neoliberal notion of the value freedom and the usefulness of its associated philosophical assumptions. ..."
Goodlad, et al. (2002) rightly point out that a culture can either resist or support change.
Schein's (2010) model of culture indicates observable behaviors of a culture can be explained
by exposing underlying shared values and basic assumptions that give meaning to the
performance. Yet culture is many-faceted and complex. So Schein advised a clinical approach to
cultural analysis that calls for identifying a problem in order to focus the analysis on
relevant values and assumptions. This project starts with two assumptions:
The erosion of democratic education is a visible overt behavior of the current U.S.
macro-culture, and
This is a problem.
I intend to use this problem of the erosion of democratic education as a basis for a
cultural analysis. My essential question is: What are the deeper, collective, competing value
commitments and shared basic assumptions that hinder efforts for democratic education? The
purpose of this paper is to start a conversation about particular cultural limitations and
barriers we are working with as we move toward recapturing the civic mission of education.
... ... ...
Neoliberalism's success in infiltrating the national discourse shuts out alternative
discourses and appears to render them irrelevant in everyday American culture (R. Quantz,
personal communication, Summer 2006). If we care about the prospects of democratic education,
we must take neoliberalism's success seriously, for it is a philosophical framework in which
freedom and democratic education are mutually exclusive. Dewey (1993), in all his wisdom,
warned:
And let those who are struggling to replace the present economic system by a cooperative one
also remember that in struggling for a new system of social restraints and controls they are
also struggling for a more equal and equitable balance of powers that will enhance and
multiply the effective liberties of the mass of individuals. Let them not be jockeyed into
the position of supporting social control at the expense of liberty [emphasis added]. (p.
160)
Yet, that is exactly the situation in which we find ourselves today. Democratic education is
viewed as a social control policy, as an infringement on the supremacy of the [neoliberal] freedom. We
witness a lack of democratic citizenship, moral, and character education in our schools. We see
a lack of redistributing resources for equality of educational opportunity. We observe a lack
of talk about education's civic mission, roles, and goals. Democratic education is viewed as
tangential, secondary, and mutually exclusive from the prioritized value of "liberty." How can
we foster alternative notions of freedom, such as Lincoln's republican sense of liberty as
collectively inquiring and deciding how we rule ourselves?
We must intentionally challenge the
neoliberal notion of the value freedom and the usefulness of its associated philosophical
assumptions.
recently ruled
that under some circumstances employers can link their 401(k) matching contributions to the amount of an employee's student loan
repayments -- making it easier for recent graduates to take advantage of this employer benefit. But that's one spot of good news
in a sea of bad, according to one anonymous Slashdot reader: Two new articles
criticize America's
student loan policies (under both the Obama and Trump administrations). CNBC cites reports that within six years,
more than 15% of student borrowers had officially defaulted , while 10% more had stopped making payments and another 4.8% were
at least 90 days late. And for-profit colleges fared even worse, where nearly 25% of graduates defaulted, and a total of 44% faced
"some form of loan distress."
These trends were masked by Department of Education reports which stopped tracking repayment rates after just three years (reporting
defaults rates of just 10%), according to Ben Miller, senior director for post-secondary education at the left-leaning Center for
American Progress. "Official statistics present a relatively rosy picture of student debt. But looking at outcomes over more time
and in greater detail shows that hundreds of thousands more borrowers from each cohort face troubles repaying."
"... "The USHA was empowered to advance loans amounting to 90% of project costs, at low-interest and on 60-year terms. By the end of 1940, over 500 USHA projects were in progress or had been completed, with loan contracts of $691 million. The goal was to make the program self-sustainable through the collection of rents: one-half of rent from the tenants themselves, one-third paid by contributions from the Federal government; and one-sixth paid by annual contributions made by the localities themselves." ..."
The first thing that popped into my head for whatever reason was a little bit in Roald
Dahl's Dickensian little childhood autobiography, Boy .
"At Prep School in those days, a parcel of tuck was sent once a week by anxious mothers
to their ravenous little sons, and an average tuck-box would probably contain, at almost
any time, half a home-made currant cake, a packet of squashed-fly biscuits, a couple of
oranges, an apple, a banana, a pot of strawberry jam or Marmite, a bar of chocolate, a bag
of Liquorice Allsorts, and a tin of Bassett's lemonade powder. An English school in those
days was purely a money-making business owned and operated by the Headmaster. It suited
him, therefore, to give the boys as little food as possible himself and to encourage the
parents in various cunning ways to feed their offspring by parcel post from home.
'By all means, my dear Mrs Dahl, do send your boy some little treats now and
again,' he would say. 'Perhaps a few oranges and apples once a week' – fruit was very
expensive – 'and a nice currant cake, a large currant cake perhaps because
small boys have large appetites, do they not, ha-ha-ha Yes, yes, as often as you
like. More than once a week if you wish Of course he'll be getting plenty
of good food here, the best there is, but it never tastes quite the same as home
cooking, does it? I'm sure you wouldn't want him to be the only one who doesn't get a
lovely parcel from home every week."
It won't fix homelessness. 1 in 5 Los Angeles community college students is homeless and 1
in 10 Cal State students are homeless.
The thing is though not necessarily free community college is cheap anyway about $200 a
class, and Cal State about 7k a year. One might be able to afford housing if they didn't have
this expense? ONLY if they could pay for housing with student loans. In other words Houston
we might have much bigger problems.
Here's my question: When?
When will the overworked, distracted, and misinformed denizens of this great nation declare
they have had enough?
That the richest society on Earth adds to the coffers of its billionaires, let's its
corporations run offshore and tax-free, supplies unlimited munificence on its military death
machine while its students starve, its populace moves further and further to financial
precarity, its water and highway systems grind to a halt, its health care system generates
infant mortality worse than Bulgaria.
What exactly is the tipping point?
Say hello to my little friend, "United States Housing Authority" ??? ;-)
All I'm saying is that we have the power to fix everything , and we can look back
to many things that were part of FDR's New Deal as guide posts to bigger and better solutions
that are desperately needed today.
"The USHA was empowered to advance loans amounting to 90% of project costs, at
low-interest and on 60-year terms. By the end of 1940, over 500 USHA projects were in
progress or had been completed, with loan contracts of $691 million. The goal was to make the
program self-sustainable through the collection of rents: one-half of rent from the tenants
themselves, one-third paid by contributions from the Federal government; and one-sixth paid
by annual contributions made by the localities themselves."
This where I believe Basic Income in tandem with a JG could provide a symbiotic
relationship. You can give students a BI to (help) cover expenses beyond free tuition so they
(and/or their families) could get affordable housing or subsidized university housing.
I'd call this person* a "raging regressive leftist" instead of a centrist: the latter
tends to do excessive navel-gazing while the former blames those racist white people for
anything and everything.
Then again, I was born in Europe, live in Europe, engage in live "politicking" in Europe, so
my experiences with American politics come mostly from the internet.
On topic: getting your first degree in my country is mostly free in state-funded colleges
and universities. Mostly, because 1: the applicant needs to meet a minimum point** threshold,
2: the applicant needs to meet the institutions's own threshold*** for that given department,
3: the applicant needs to rank high enough compared to the rest, because admissions are
limited by nature, 4: the applicant needs to maintain a high enough GPA to stay in a state
funded slot for their given department, and lastly, 5: there are some departments that
receive no funding at all, and choosing one of those means paying by default.
During my university years, I've never met anyone who had to starve, not even the poorest
students. There were, and are, several different scholarship programs aside from the usual
"get a real high GPA and you'll receive a free price if you're lucky" ones. Students can
usually get a student job in our larger cities, and depending on the department, there are
some other ways to earn some money: engineering and IT students often get picked by larger
firms in their sophomore or senior year, and even if they don't, there's always someone in
need of some help with those killer assignments.
The problem here is housing. Dorm spaces are limited, and renting a room is relatively
expensive costing somewhere around $500 USD per month in a country with a $22000 USD yearly
median income (estimate by OECD). Getting a degree was widely regarded as a means of upward
mobility by my father's generation, but the years after the destruction of the Iron Curtain
proved them wrong. And of course, they knew nothing about the Free Western States.
*While I see a woman, these are the people who'd bite my face off for misgendering them.
No such thing in continental Europe, for now.
**There's a minimum threshold of 260 points. Base points are calculated from high school
grades, third and fourth year, and the high school diploma's grades. Bonus points are awarded
for state accredited language certificates, high placements on certain students'
competitions, and other degrees.
***Institutions apply their own thresholds based on the quantity and quality of their
applicants.
When I was a graduate student at UCLA the food on campus was pretty cheap and the salads
were sold by the size of the bowl, not by weight. We all became expert at piling those bowls
high.
When I taught at CU Boulder, the food on campus was expensive and the salads were weighed.
A healthy salad could easily cost you eleven bucks, so I stopped eating campus food and took
sandwiches to work instead.
The increase in food prices seems to have parallelled the increase in fees over those
forty years.
However, I would make another observation: many young people, in my experience, when they
are stressed or working hard, tend to forget to eat – irrespective of how well-off they
are. And many of the students I taught had been addicted at high school to "attention
deficit" drugs like Ritalin and Adderol, which, being forms of speed, are
appetite-suppressants.
Two of my daughters graduated from a university in a university town in Nova Scotia in the
late1990s. That university set up its own food bank many years ago, to supplement the food
banks set up by two churches and the town and county. Housing was still available (small
town, student, faculty and school money spent locally), from shared apartments to rooming
houses. In any sizable city in Canada or the US, those options for students may not now be
available at all, because of greedy landlords, gentrification, and Air B'nb.
On the other hand, during the 1930s, my father-in-law was living in Vancouver, a teenager.
He frequently told us stories of the many poor students who lived on or just off the beaches
in the western part of the city, in shanties of driftwood and scraps while attending
university. Try that now, in any city.
So, you see, today's undergraduates are in many ways even worse off than "great
depression" students. Their possible makeshift accommodations have been legislated away.
Robbing the future of our nation to pay the fatcats. What a wonderful way to run a
country! If We the People- loosely defined as the other 90%- don't step up and take our
country back, we won't have one to speak of in another decade.
The Opportunity Dodge, The American Prospect: We think of America
as the land of opportunity, but the United States actually has low rates of upward mobility relative to other advanced nations...
Creating more opportunity is therefore a worthy goal. However, when the goal of more opportunity is offered instead of addressing
income inequality, it's a dodge and an empty promise-because opportunity does not thrive amid great inequalities. ...
The opportunity dodgers .... ignore that income inequality and intergenerational mobility are closely linked..., one
of the most robust and long-standing social science research findings is that ... the circumstances in which children grow up
... greatly shapes educational advancement. So, promoting education solutions to mobility without addressing income inequality
is ultimately playing pretend. We can't substantially change opportunity without changing the actual lived circumstances of
disadvantaged and working-class youth. ...
Acknowledging that income inequality and poverty greatly affect schooling success means we need to improve the circumstances
of poor children's lives by providing stable, adequate housing and healthy, safe environments. Decent income for their parents
is essential. ...
Last, it is important to recognize that some people are always going to end up on the bottom and middle rungs since ... somebody
has to be below average. Economic policy must also be concerned that low- and moderate-income families have decent incomes,
health care, and retirement. The opportunity dodgers are really saying they do not care how low- and middle-income families
actually live.
djb
this is especially true when you see what a farce it is that ivy leagues and other top rated colleges are always trying to
find "worthy" poor kids to come to their school
and how little that actually happens
the little that it does is good
but it is mostly not really happening
because to get the qualifications you really need to go to a rich school with all sorts of supports and training on standardized
tests etc
DrDick
Indeed equal opportunity cannot exist in the presence of high inequality. It is a lie designed to divert the blame from the
rapacious rich to the supposed (and largely nonexistent) faults of the poor.
"... First, we need to accept that there is no such thing as "value-free" analysis of the economy. As I've explained, neoclassical economics pretends to be ethically neutral while smuggling in an individualistic, anti-social ethos " – Howard Reed ..."
"... Fundamentally, economics is a religion, with priests, high priests, creed, dogma, punishment for heretics, and all the other trappings of a religion. But the pay is good, so Clive's rule for middle class jobs applies. ..."
Economics conducted
a curriculum review of 174 modules at 7 Russell Group universities -- rightly or wrongly
considered the 'top' universities in the UK -- and we found that the uncritical acceptance of
one type of economics begins with education. Under 10% of modules even mentioned anything other
than mainstream or 'neoclassical' economics; in econometrics, over 90% of modules devoted more
than two-thirds of their lectures to linear regression. Only 24% of exam questions required
critical or independent thinking (i.e. were open-ended); this dropped to 8% if you only counted
the compulsory macro and micro modules that form the core of economics education.
We have
previously called this 'indoctrination', and while this may seem dramatic the dictionary
definition of indoctrination is to "teach a person or set of people to accept a set of beliefs
uncritically", which we think adequately characterises the results of the review, as well as
our own experience and many widely used economics textbooks. Given this education, it is no
wonder that economists remain wedded to the fundamental precepts of choice models and linear
regression no matter where they turn their attention. By putting the method first, the implicit
assumption becomes that answering a question using this framework is prima facie
interesting, and critical evaluation of these tools against others is made unthinkable.
For nearly thirty years after the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) became received gospel
in the mid-1960s, the claim that stock prices exhibited momentum (which shouldn't be true in
a perfectly efficient market) was roundly mocked by mainstream economists.
Then in 1993, Jegadeesh and Titman published a paper titled "Returns to Buying Winners and
Selling Losers: Implications for Stock Market Efficiency" in the Journal of Finance .
Its evidence for a momentum effect was impossible to refute.
So economists bolted en masse to the opposite side of the boat. Today there are
thousands of papers on momentum, often presenting some fairly trivial arithmetic that
home-based amateurs have long used. But it's formulated into equations with Greek letters,
and a [totally boring] statistical panel appears in the Appendix to prove some statistical
significance.
A few professors actually exploited their discoveries to get rich. Cliff Asness, a U of
Chicago PhD (but a practitioner, not a professor) offers some light-hearted commentary on his
mentor Eugene Fama:
Of course the book The Fama Portfolio also contains contributions by other
authors (or how the heck did I get in there?) that reflect, directly or indirectly, on
Gene's work.
Being able to read Gene's originals and some of the major papers by others that explore
his work in one volume is both a treat and incredibly useful (these contributors, unlike
John Liew and myself, are themselves serious academic luminaries!).
OK, enough shilling. If you love finance and don't immediately pine for this book, I
can't help you any further☺
Where the police were call off their pursuit, when within a finger nail of – helping
– their subject. Because the economic perimeters their models produced, with the help of
computational machines, gave a ridged defined view of the operation. Seems the subject was
operating outside the econometric perimeters due to mental illness – was a patient whom
escaped at the time.
Alas we never get to see what he saw when he popped out on the surface, save a blinding
orb.
In retrospect did they do the underground thingy to better control, could nature itself be a
threat to the model, hence the need to control every aspect of environment for behavioral
reasons.
Anywho I'll just leave this on my way to work:
"If we accept that we need fundamental reform, what should the new economics --
"de-conomics" as I'm calling it -- look like?
First, we need to accept that there is no such thing as "value-free" analysis of the
economy. As I've explained, neoclassical economics pretends to be ethically neutral while
smuggling in an individualistic, anti-social ethos " – Howard Reed
Linear regression is economists' preferred empirical technique
That's really a powerful tool in a world which is chaotic.
The trouble with embracing chaos and catastrophe theory is the "chaos" part of predicting
the future. But economists, being human and liking their paychecks, are not interested in any
predictions which do not cater, or pander, to the needs of their bosses or paymasters.
Why, that might suggest the boss is wrong! Such heresy leads to a quick execution!
Fundamentally, economics is a religion, with priests, high priests, creed, dogma,
punishment for heretics, and all the other trappings of a religion. But the pay is good, so
Clive's rule for middle class jobs applies.
Disclaimer: My view of Religion is similar: Why?
1. You'll get your reward in the afterlife, after you are dead!
2. We know this is true, because we've never had a complaint.
Linear regression certainly is a powerful tool for examining linear distributions, but it
essential to first confirm that the distribution is linear, and to remember that on occasion,
samples drawn from random (unrelated) distributions can show a spurious correlation.
but it essential to first confirm that the distribution is linear
Very true, but how is this proven? In nature and economics are there any linear
distributions? If so over what range?
I notice a preponderance of using straight lines instead of growth curves. I also notice
chaos, or noise, in behaviors, coupled with a complete non-understanding of entropy.
In nature linear behavior is unlikely. If it were linear we'd see straight branches on
trees, rainfall evenly distributed and the wind would always blow at constant speed, with
predictable eddies.
I suppose a rock dropped would exhibit linear behaviors until it hits the ground, and at
that point in time the "dropping rock" system become decidedly chaotic, from stuck in the mud,
to bouncing in a random direction, to bursting into pieces, pieces who's destiny is completely
uncertain.
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one
takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability,
they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man."
Nassim, I think covers all this better than anyone else. Would love to hear of
similarly comprehensive works.
Stumbling and Mumbling has a good riff on this topic:
". Economics, for me, is not about armchair theorizing. It should begin with the facts, and
especially the big ones. The facts are that share buy-backs do usually matter, so thought
experiments that say otherwise are wrong from the off. Similarly, the fact that wage
inflation has been low for years (pdf) is much more significant than any theorizing about
Phillips curves."
The comments are good as well:
"That's a category error: you don't define "Economics", tenure committees define it, and they
award tenure to people who have a long record of publishing "internally consistent"
("armchair theorizing") papers."
"I found myself sitting next to a very likable young middle-aged academic tenured at an elite
British university, whom henceforth I will refer to as Doctor X and whose field is closely
associated with this blog. Every year I publish papers in the top journals and they're pure
shit." Doctor X, who by now had had a glass or two, felt bad about this, not least because
"students these days are so idealistic and eager to learn; they're really wonderful."
Furthermore Doctor X could and would like "to write serious papers but what would be the
point?" "
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2018/04/facts-vs-hand-waving-in-economics.html#comments
Yeah. I'm inclined to think the author needs to curb his enthusiasms and take up dejected
drinking.
The nub of his presentation was a model in which consumers, due to cognitive
limitations, were unable to fully examine every single product they purchased. The result
was that regulations guaranteeing a certain standard of safety, quality and the like could
improve competition by giving people more time to shop around instead of having to devote
so much time to investigate specific products. Thus, regulation would improve markets and
competition
This is Nobel-level work? It amounts to finding a way to pitch a product to
anti-regulation dogmatists. I'm sure that you could find similar arguments being made during
the Progressive era regulatory push. Only they would have been framed more as "people will
have more time to shop around if they're not killed by previous ingestion of the
product."
What I mean by 'mathemagics' is the misuse of mathematics –even simple
mathematics -- to create the illusion that 'utility' or 'indifference curves' actually
pertain to real concepts. In reality, they 'mathematize' gobbledygook passed off as coherent
concepts. There is nothing so conceptually barren as 'utility' or 'indifference curve'
analytics. The notion that one can derive any coherent 'demand' analysis for any one consumer
that is individual human being (or life form of any kind) for any product, or that one can
aggregate these up is mathematical junk.
The Classical Economists used the broader political economy rather than today's narrow
economics.
The Washington Consensus dreamed of a world run by the laws of economics.
The laws of economics worked in China's favour and the Western economies got hollowed
out.
Disposable income = wages – (taxes + the cost of living)
Maximising profit required minimising wages.
The minimum wage is set when disposable income equals zero.
The minimum wage = taxes + the cost of living
China had it made and the West had tilted the playing field against itself.
The US eventually woke up the geopolitical consequences of a world governed by the laws of
economics that had worked in China's favour.
Trump has just made things worse with his tax cuts.
Theory:
If we reduce taxes on the wealthy they will create more jobs and wages.
Reality:
If we reduce taxes on the wealthy they will create more jobs and wages in Asia where they can
make more profit. They can then ship the stuff back here increasing Western trade
deficits.
res ipsa loquitur although as one wag said, this news tidbit does seem to disprove the claim that young people aren't
risk takers. But it may establish that they are innumerate or more specifically, bad at statistics.
One of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's
recommendations about investing boils down to "Be paranoid" and "Don't be greedy" and leveraged cryptocurrency speculation is the
opposite of that.
This sort of thing does not help the image of student borrowers, although it does strengthen the case for regulating cryptocurrencies
far more strictly. Given the decline in the status of cab drivers, who historically have been indicators of market peaks (when cab
drivers talk about their stocks, it's usually sign of a bubble), this finding may also be a proof of Peak Cryptocurrency.
According to a study by The Student Loan Report, over one-fifth of current university students with student loan debt indicated
that they used their student loan money to invest in digital currency such as bitcoin.
The student loan news and information website found that 21.2% of the 1,000 students they surveyed indicated that they used
their borrowed cash to gamble on the highly volatile digital currency market. While school administrators may look down upon the
practice of using borrowed funds for non-school expenses, Student Loan Report indicates that there are currently no rules against
it. College students are able to use loans for "living expenses," a flexible category that covers a wide range of potential necessities.
Given that 70% of retail investors in futures lose money, there's not a strong reason for thinking that latecomers to the cryptocurrency
party would be stellar traders. I wonder how many students who lose so much money on bad cryptocurrency wagers that it undermines
their ability to finish their course of study (presumably they really did need at least some of that "living expense" money for bona
fide living expenses) will be willing to 'fess up to that fact.
I guess that means that almost 4/5ths of students did NOT use "loan" proceeds (which are part of the whole Casino enterprise,
after all) to gamble invest "expose themselves to market risk" by moving those bits representing "money" into
the block chain spurt
And I also guess that means that the Puritans among us, and the mopes who want to make sure everyone else gets as screwed by
"the system" as they have been by so diligently paying off those student loans/debt millstones, will now have a new line of argument
about why the Banksters and the scum among the legislators and "loan servicers" and kickback-collecting higher-education administrators
should be fully armed to go after mope students and graduates-without-portfolios-but-with-lots-of-"credentials" and their parents
and other "guarantors" to extract that last full measure of blood from the turnipheads who signed on the dotted line without much
of a clue that the "contract" was drafted by some Shylock named "Mephistopheles "
Say it loud, say it clear -- "#juststoppaying. No other way to end the game, is there? And yes, there will be blood, economically
speaking, in the Street
But think how it helped stimulate the economy. Except that unlike other Fed Gov spending, the Fed Gov wants this money back.
D'oh! And as we know, it's very difficult to discharge student loans through bankruptcy (which at least gives the economy more
slack for other debt to be paid off).
So ultimately it doesn't stimulate the economy. It just feeds various maws: the education industry and its bubble, the corporations
and their inflated requirements for hiring for jobs. Edit: And the cryptocurrency bubble who knew? While subtracting from other
maws: housing starts, family starts, etc.
I doubt you could find 20% of college students who even know where to buy crypto. Maybe, maybe you could find
20% who are more aware than "heard about it on the news".
"... The other problem is systemic. This is the vicious, capitalist devaluation of academic labor. Anyone who holds some asinine fantasy about the "logic" of the market solving the adjunctification of the academy needs to shut up. ..."
"... Whether "meant" to be a career or not, adjuncting is a career for many--and our institutions have made it that way by refusing to hire enough full-time professors to cover the courses offered. Adjuncts are being exploited by institutions across the country. THAT is what we need to focus on, not individual career choices. ..."
"... I don't know if neoliberal professors are increasing in numbers or if they just have greater access to publish. I imagine it's the latter. The take on the situation from those off the tenure track is quite the opposite, obviously. This is what we need to reiterate: "Adjuncts are being exploited by institutions across the country. THAT is what we need to focus on" ..."
"... I'm a career advisor and every once and a while an adjunct faculty person will come visit career services for assistance. They are generally completely absent of career management skills. They tend to be people who were very good at college, so they went to grad school sort of assuming they'd be able to get a job that way. ..."
Angry About Adjuncting? The radical move might be to quit, writes Claire B. Potter.
150 Comments
Recently I stumbled across an article in
The New York Times about my favorite topic: online academic rage -- and whether it spikes
among those frustrated by the struggle to find a tenure-stream job. "Is there something about adjunct
faculty members that makes them prone to outrageous political outbursts?" Colby College sociologist
Neil Gross asked.
Citing recent examples in which the most vulnerable among us have been fired for an impolitic
tweet or Facebook post, Gross argues that full-time faculty members are not the "tenured radicals"
that American conservatives have feared since the 1990s. Instead, he proposes, the vast majority
of full-timers are "tamed" by the prospects, or long-term comforts, of tenure. Research accounts,
regular raises, the orderliness of being able to plan our lives and the satisfaction of promises
kept inevitably sutures most of us to civility in all its forms.
But what incentives do workers who are already vulnerable in so many ways have to be polite? Although
many people with humanities Ph.D.s do other jobs, this stubborn belief that they have trained for
one thing, and one thing only, keeps many adjuncts on the hamster wheel long past a time when frustration
and sorrow have turned to rage. Aside from the stress of trying to piece together a career one course
at a time, the adjunct army -- permanently contingent, underemployed, overworked and underpaid faculty
members -- has every reason to demand radical change.
But do these conditions produce a truly political radicalism, or are they simply radical
utterances that get contingent faculty into trouble and leave a system that relies on a reserve army
of labor unchanged? And since people with doctorates aren't tied to a particular factory or industry,
would the radical solution be to stop teaching as a per-course adjunct?
There are two types of problems here. One concerns the individual misfortunes that plague adjuncts.
Adjuncts' problems are lamentable, even if solvable, and it would be nice to see people in our
society have some compassion rather than excuse their own apathy with callous blaming of people
in unfortunate circumstances.
The other problem is systemic. This is the vicious, capitalist devaluation of academic labor.
Anyone who holds some asinine fantasy about the "logic" of the market solving the adjunctification
of the academy needs to shut up. You do terrible damage to our society. The simplest and most
obvious solution to a lack of PhDs to work as adjuncts is to hire MAs.
Universities are already
hiring undergrads to do some of the academic work. You are off your gourd if you think the people
who want to siphon profits to the top will not try to further degrade academic labor, or, haven't
you been paying attention to the hoopla around MOOCs? The only solution to the precariate is unionization
and a demand for all academic labor to provide middle-class standards of living.
That means that
the cowardly and lazy tenured faculty will finally have to do their jobs and guard the academy.
I agree with most of what you say, except that my experience says that administrations would
rather hire MAs than PhDs because PhDs demand the salaries that align with their higher education;
and, because PhDs are generally more experienced in academe, they are less agreeable than MAs
to accepting administrative initiatives that are tangential to faculty teaching and research.
"The simplest and most obvious solution to a lack of PhDs to work as adjuncts is to hire MAs."
This is already occurring, even outside of the humanities. I know some great instructors without
their doctorate, but hiring a large number of instructors without a terminal degree does seem
to go against the ideal that a professor teaches undergraduates, keeps up with the latest in his
or her field, and produces knowledge in that field.
While in a master's program at a large research institute, I was given my own classes, even
though I only had a bachelor's degree. I was happy to get the experience, but with my background,
I probably should not have been teaching those students
Actually, if you look at 50-60 year old faculty lists a fair number of faculty had masters.
Masters were originally meant to be a teaching qualification, PhDs were a research qualification.
The masters as a teaching qualification got squeezed out because of too many PhDs between 2 and
3 generations back.
Adjuncting is not now, and was never meant to be, a career. We can complain about working conditions,
lack of benefits/stability, and the stress of cobbling together enough courses to pay the rent
all we want (and we do) but the bottom line is this: If you haven't landed a FT teaching gig within
three years of earning your Ph.D., bail out and choose another career. The person who can't eat
after 20 years of adjunct work has no one to blame but themselves. Keep fighting, but take care
of yourself, too.
Whether "meant" to be a career or not, adjuncting is a career for many--and our institutions
have made it that way by refusing to hire enough full-time professors to cover the courses offered.
Adjuncts are being exploited by institutions across the country. THAT is what we need to focus
on, not individual career choices.
I agree. Blaming adjuncts for being adjuncts, wishing they would not have enrolled in PhD programs,
and encouraging them to take jobs in fields for which they did not study (alt-ac), is a very ugly
game.
This is compounded by the fact that people of color and women are far less likely to be on
the tenure line. None of this seems to bother the rising tide of neoliberal academics, who almost
without exception have never worked off the tenure track, and maintain pushing people toward careers
they do not want to do, are not educated to do, and could do with out a PhD, is a way to solve
the problem.
I don't know if neoliberal professors are increasing in numbers or if they just have greater
access to publish. I imagine it's the latter. The take on the situation from those off the tenure
track is quite the opposite, obviously. This is what we need to reiterate: "Adjuncts are being
exploited by institutions across the country. THAT is what we need to focus on"
There is no reason the job has to be set up the way it is. Most colleges & universities use
far more adjuncts than fluctuation in enrollment and funding would account for.
The "too many Ph.D's" argument falls apart when you think about how easy it is to get an adjunct
job. Two of the four districts I've worked in didn't even do a formal interview. I just met with
the department chair to discuss when I was available. I work more than the equivalent of full
time at two different districts every semester, so theoretically, one full time job could exist
for me.
My wife is a K-12 public school teacher, and her first year teaching, she made as much as I
did after ten years as an adjunct with a master's (except she didn't have to work summers and
did get health insurance for our whole family).
We could probably fix it in a cost neutral way if administrative positions and salaries weren't
growing faster than the number of full time teaching positions.
As an academic you should know that the way things are wasn't handed down by god, and isn't
an immutable law of nature. Someone made it this way and it can be unmade too.
Frankly, I feel sorry for you as I do for the administrators and full time faculty who look
down on their adjunct colleagues. You have been a subject in a real life Milgram or Stanford Prison
experiment and took the bait
Fair warning, what I'm about to say is completely anecdotal. I'm a career advisor and every
once and a while an adjunct faculty person will come visit career services for assistance. They
are generally completely absent of career management skills. They tend to be people who were very
good at college, so they went to grad school sort of assuming they'd be able to get a job that
way.
They continued to do no meaningful career planning while in grad school, and after completing
were able to use their familiarity with college systems to piece together some adjunct work. When
asked simple questions such as "what types of careers outside of academia have you explored?"
they are unable to answer.
They lack the ability to identify and describe their transferable skills, have only shallow
understanding of what career paths are available, and struggle to engage in even simple job search
tasks. These are extremely intelligent people with a huge gap in their career competencies.
I think a major reason we don't see more adjuncts quit and move to other industries or even
other roles on campus is because they simply do not know how.
On the flip side of this though is the fact that those with a lot of applied (in terms of non
academic aspects) work in their field often do not fair as well in FT searches. Those from working
class backgrounds or who worked throughout grad school are often seen as less desirable in searches
even though they are the ones who are most likely to know how to advise students on realistic
career paths. I finished my PhD with 10 years of industry experience in the non profit, consulting,
and governmental sectors but even at undergraduate serving institutions this often had less cache
then the handful of publications I had produced.
Yeah it's a catch 22 for grad students. If they take the time to get industry experience, that
will help them volumes in alt ac careers, but ding them in academic ones.
All that your comment shows is that adjuncts are easy targets, even for career advisors. The
fact that you recognize your comment as anecdotal does not exempt you from giving information
about how many cases your negative generalizations were made from, at what type of higher education
institution you encountered them, and so on. I have not noted any defects of the type you claim
in career skills, and I have known scores of adjuncts, but I would be far more cautious than you
are about generalizing either way. I would go so far as to say that the ones I have known compare
favorably to law students and the many job applicants I worked with as a job-placement specialist
at an employment agency in Manhattan some years ago. I worked as an adjunct myself for some time,
and found few jobs that so hone one's survival skills, in the employment market and elsewhere.
"... The elite schools, and I have taught as a visiting professor at a few of them, such as Princeton and Columbia, replicate the structure and goals of corporations. If you want to even get through a doctoral committee, much less a tenure committee, you must play it really, really safe. You must not challenge the corporate-friendly stance that permeates the institution and is imposed through corporate donations and the dictates of wealthy alumni. Half of the members of most of these trustee boards should be in prison! ..."
"... Speculation in the 17th century in Britain was a crime. Speculators were hanged. And today they run the economy and the country. They have used the capturing of wealth to destroy the intellectual, cultural and artistic life in the country and snuff out our democracy. There is a word for these people: traitors. ..."
...The elite schools,
and I have taught as a visiting professor at a few of them, such as Princeton and Columbia, replicate
the structure and goals of corporations. If you want to even get through a doctoral committee, much
less a tenure committee, you must play it really, really safe. You must not challenge the corporate-friendly
stance that permeates the institution and is imposed through corporate donations and the dictates
of wealthy alumni. Half of the members of most of these trustee boards should be in prison!
Speculation in the 17th century in Britain was a crime. Speculators were hanged. And today they
run the economy and the country. They have used the capturing of wealth to destroy the intellectual,
cultural and artistic life in the country and snuff out our democracy. There is a word for these
people: traitors.
Her income from teaching comes to $40,000 a year. Thats significantly more than most
adjuncts: a 2014 survey
found that the median income for adjuncts is only $22,041 a year, whereas for full-time faculty
it is $47,500. We take a kind of vow of poverty
Recentreports have revealed the
extent of poverty among professors, but the issue is longstanding. Several years ago, it was
thrust into the headlines in dramatic fashion when Mary-Faith Cerasoli, an adjunct professor of
Romance languages in her 50s, revealed she was homeless and protested outside the New York
state education department.
We take a kind of vow of poverty to continue practicing our profession, Debra Leigh Scott,
who is working on a documentary about
adjuncts , said in an email. We do it because we are dedicated to scholarship, to learning,
to our students and to our disciplines.
ass="inline-quote inline-icon inline-tone-fill">
A quarter of part-time college academics are said to be enrolled in public assistance
programs
Adjuncting has grown as funding for public universities has fallen by more
than a quarter between 1990 and 2009. Private institutions also recognize the allure of
part-time professors: generally they are cheaper than full-time staff, dont receive benefits or
support for their personal research, and their hours can be carefully limited so they do not
teach enough to qualify for health insurance.
This is why adjuncts have been called
the fast-food workers of the academic world : among labor experts adjuncting is defined as
precarious employment, a growing category that includes temping and sharing-economy gigs such
as driving for Uber. An American Sociological Association taskforce focusing on precarious
academic jobs, meanwhile, has suggested that faculty
employment is no longer a stable middle-class career .
... ... ...
If she were to lose her home her only hope, she says, would be
government-subsidized housing.
Most of my colleagues are unjustifiably ashamed, she said. They take this personally, as if
theyve failed, and Im always telling them, you havent failed, the system has failed
you."
A precarious situation
Even more desperate are those adjuncts in substandard living spaces who cannot afford to fix
them. Mindy Percival, 61, a lecturer with a doctorate from Columbia, teaches history at a state
college in Florida and, in her words, lives in a shack which is in the woods in middle of
nowhere.
"... Weinstein argues that the GUI agenda (inspired by Reaganomics) sought to prevent these salary increases. He contends that the legislation that enabled this oversupply was the Immigration Act of 1990 that expanded the H-1B nonimmigrant visa program and instituted employment-based immigration preferences. ..."
"... As I show in my book Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy? , the beginning of the end of CWOC was the transformation of IBM, the world's leading computer company, from OEBM to NEBM from 1990 to 1994. In 1990, with 374,000 employees, IBM still bragged about its adherence to the CWOC norm (calling it "lifelong employment"), claiming that the company had not laid off anyone involuntarily since 1921. By 1994 IBM had 220,000 employees, and, with senior executives under CEO Louis Gerstner themselves getting fired for not laying off employees fast enough, CWOC was history. Over the course of the 1990s and into the 2000s, other major Old Economy companies followed IBM's example, throwing out of work older employees, many of them highly educated and with accumulated experience that had previously been highly valued by the companies. ..."
"... The salaries of S&E employees tended to increase with years of experience with the company, with a defined-benefit pension (based on years of service and highest salary levels) in retirement. These types of secure employment relations, and the high and rising pay levels associated with them, were the norm among established high-tech companies in the mid-1980s, but, as exemplified by IBM's transformation, started to become undone in the early 1990s, and were virtually extinct a decade later, as Old Economy companies either made the transition to the NEBM, or disappeared.8 The culprit in the weakening in the demand for, and earnings of, S&E PhDs from the early 1990s was the demise of CWOC-a phenomenon that Weinstein (and Teitelbaum) entirely ignore. ..."
"... As exemplified by IBM in the 1990s and beyond, a company's stock price could be raised by laying off expensive older workers and using the resultant "free" cash flow (as the purveyors of MSV called it) to do stock buybacks. 12 ..."
"... "But the company is "returning" capital to shareholders who never gave the company anything in the first place; the only time in its history that Apple has ever raised funds on the public stock market was $97 million in its 1980 IPO." ..."
"... During that period, the only job market for native PhD STEM students became the American Defense and Intelligence agencies, because they required security clearances and US Citizenship. I found myself driven in those directions too. ..."
"... Technology for the most part is just increasing complexity and increasing complexity has diminishing returns. With energy becoming less available, we probably need a lot less complexity. ..."
"... I wouldn't say that there is a lack of R&D - it just isn't done in-house any more. Gone are the Bell Labs and the Xerox PARCs; welcome to the brave new world of university partnerships and non-profit R&D shops (most famous: the Southwest Research Institute). ..."
"... Basically the rich are waging class war. That's the problem no matter how you slice and dice this one. This whole "New Economy" has been one big war on wages. I mean look at the collusion too between Google, Apple, and Intel to keep wages low. ..."
"... Basically it comes down to, the rich are really greedy. The issue right now for the rich is that they are desperate to keep the looting from happening, while people are increasingly aware that the system is against them. Bernie Sanders got a lot of support in the Valley and while it is a very Democratic leaning area, I cannot imagine that Trump's anti-H1B and L1B stance would have been opposed by the average employee. I think that the rich are not going to concede anything and that there needs to be some sort of solidarity union amongst all workers. ..."
"... Is there a single person here who has worked on Wall Street (writ large) who can convince us that his job or his company had an overall positive effect on the US and/or world economy over five years, ten years, or twenty-five years? ..."
"... Its not just PhDs. I know several Engineers who advise their children to do something else. It's just not worth the amount of effort that is required to be put into it and there is no future hope of a turn around. As bad as it is for graduates today, it's only going to get worse. ..."
"... They're catching up with us arts and humanities majors. Sad! ..."
"... I am a civil engineer and one of my daughters is studying to become a structural engineer. I would not have advised her to go into engineering because of the problem with the H-1B visas. ..."
"... But who am I to advise? Who can know the future? The world is just changing too fast now to really be able to advise our children on what careers to take. Besides, one of the advantages of studying engineering as you can work anywhere in the world. ..."
"... Post WWII labor overplayed its hand by the 1970's. Corporations and their decided they had had it. Corps and management proceeded to change the rules of the game on everything -- courts, trade, taxation and regulation. These countermeasures have had disastrous long term consequences. Corporations now run the country in a fascist manner. Government capture has created myriad problems beyond financialization, only one tool in the corporate quiver. Oligopolies across most to all industries comes to mind. Rail, air, health insurance, banking, defense, telecom, entertainment . ..."
"... Not sure about the labor part overplaying their hand. They just wanted an even wage and productivity rise. It is capital IMO that has overplayed its hand and the rise of neoliberal economics which has led to declines in public R&D spending. There isn't anything like the Space Race anymore. ..."
"... Frankly, labour underplayed its hand. At one point it had capital by the throat, and should have finished it off then. If peace is not an option, you should utterly and permanently destroy your enemy. ..."
"... Labor did NOT overplay its hand after WW2 - Taft-Hartley was a HUGE smack-down to labor after the privations of the Depression followed by the war effort. The decent wages during the post-war period were part of a concerted effort to convince workers that they didn't need unions and to be complacent. ..."
"... Labor leadership certainly became corrupt from all the money sloshing around without global competition due to war devastation of Europe and Japan, the Cold War, and the death throes of colonialism, but this was not due to "overplaying" their hand. ..."
"... Contrary to popular belief, in aggregate U.S. corporations fund the stock market, not vice versa. Note that almost all of the buybacks in the decade 1976-1985 occurred in 1984 and 1985 after in November 1982 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission adopted Rule 10b-18 that gave license to massive buybacks, in essence legalizing systemic stock-price manipulation and the looting of the U.S. business corporation. ..."
"... Actually though, watching the train wreck that is the outlook for the youngest generation today, provides some grim amusement. For instance noting that the "bubble-driven" economy composed of companies desperate to prevent their stock becoming "badly diluted" by having fire sales on capitol and expertise that probably took their predecessors decades to build can really only have one outcome. Depression, misery, socialism. Maybe we skip the Mao route this time, maybe not. ..."
"... Gregory Peck: "The Robber Barons of old at least left something tangible in their wake - a coal mine, a railroad, banks. THIS MAN LEAVES NOTHING. HE CREATES NOTHING. HE BUILDS NOTHING. HE RUNS NOTHING. And in his wake lies nothing but a blizzard of paper to cover the pain. Oh, if he said, "I know how to run your business better than you," that would be something worth talking about. But he's not saying that. He's saying, "I'm going to kill you because at this particular moment in time, you're worth more dead than alive." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJRhrow3Jws ..."
"... IBM. Poster child of everything wrong at the executive-level and the shareholder-level. ..."
"... Yes, the IBM reference is interesting.The author gives an ordinal lead to IBM as a mover from the OEBM to NEBM. I ask myself if, from a mere one large corporation managing perspective, this was IBM's 11th hour response to the by then devastating rise of its competitors like Apple & Microsoft. ..."
"... Also the irony that it did not help IBM at least in the midterm. So, IBM was the prime mover to initiate some aspects of a model change -change which every major player adhered to- in response to a new technological disadvantage vs. competitors, and in turned did not seem to do much for IBM in the immediate years. Although, if I recall well, IBM was immersed in many political battles and internal problems, legal and otherwise. Nevertheless, I doubt there was a historic inevitability on IBM's ordinal force. Outstanding work by Lazonick ..."
"... "IBM is the poster child for shenanigans. Last month, IBM reported its 20th quarter in a row of declining year over year revenues .. a 13% drop in earnings, profit margins that declined in every business segment ( much worse than expected ), free cash flow that plummeted over 50% year over year and an earnings "beat" of 3 cents per share. How could this "beat" happen? .. a negative tax rate of -23% . This is why they pay the CEO Rometti the big bucks ( estimated at $50 to $65 million last year)." ..."
"... And this is one of the Bluest of the Blue Chip companies in the world. ..."
"... Amazon has lost money every fucking quarter for the last 20 fucking years, and that Bezos motherfucker is the king. ..."
"... In addition, the rise of 401(k) based investing, in which workers are tax-incentivized to buy in to the corporate stock scheming, but lack the normal shareholder voice in corporate governance, has taken the chains off the looters as well. ..."
"... The impact on the Grads was secondary a byproduct of a larger agenda which included the transfer offshore and consolidation of "IP" of the entire American, EU and Asian industrial economies along with the withdrawl of capital, while at the same time intentionally sabotaging future innovations with the handicap of diversity. Who got the loot and capital? Usual suspects. ..."
At the outset of his paper, Weinstein argues that:
Long term labor shortages do not happen naturally in market economies. That is not to say that
they don't exist. They are created when employers or government agencies tamper with the natural
functioning of the wage mechanism.
The contention, written from the perspective of the late 1990s, is that in the first half of the
1990s an oversupply ("a glut") of science and engineering (S&E) labor that depressed the wages of
PhD scientists and engineers was primarily the result of the promotion of a government-university-industry
(GUI) agenda, coordinated by the National Science Foundation under the leadership of Erich Bloch,
head of the NSF from 1984 to 1990. Beginning in 1985, the NSF predicted a shortfall of 675,000 S&E
personnel in the U.S. economy over the next two decades. According to a study by the NSF's Policy
Research and Analysis (PRA) division, quoted by Weinstein, salary data show that real PhD-level pay
began to rise after 1982, moving from $52,000 to $64,000 in 1987 (measured in 1984 dollars). One
set of salary projections show that real pay will reach $75,000 in 1996 and approach $100,000 shortly
beyond the year 2000.
Weinstein argues that the GUI agenda (inspired by Reaganomics) sought to prevent these salary
increases. He contends that the legislation that enabled this oversupply was the Immigration Act
of 1990 that expanded the H-1B nonimmigrant visa program and instituted employment-based immigration
preferences. Given that most of these foreigners came from lower-wage (Asian) nations, it is
assumed that they were attracted to work in the United States by what for them were high wages, whereas
Americans with S&E PhDs began to shun S&E careers as the salaries became less attractive.1
There is a lot missing from Weinstein's perspective, which is also the perspective of demographer
Michael Teitelbaum, who Weinstein cites extensively and who was at the Sloan Foundation from 1983
to 2013, rising to Vice-President in 2006. Weinstein and Teitelbaum view the salaries of scientists
and engineers as being determined by supply and demand on the labor market ("the natural wage rate"
and "the natural functioning of the labor market"). From this (neoclassical) perspective, they completely
ignore the "marketization" of employment relations for S&E workers that occurred in the U.S. business
sector from the mid-1980s as well as the concomitant "financialization" of the U.S. business corporation
that remains, in my view, the most damaging economic problem facing the United States. This transformation
of employment relations put out of work large numbers of PhD scientists and engineers who previously
had secure employment and who enjoyed high incomes and benefits as well as creative corporate careers.
The marketization of employment relations brought to an end of the norm of a career with one company
(CWOC)-an employment norm that was pervasive in U.S. business corporations from the 1950s to the
1980s, but that has since disappeared. 2 The "financialization" of the corporation, manifested by
massive distributions to shareholders in the forms of cash dividends and stock buybacks, undermined
the opportunities for business-sector S&E careers.
The major cause of marketization was the rise of the "New Economy business model" (NEBM) in which
high-tech startups, primarily in information-and-communication technology (ICT) and biotechnology,
lured S&E personnel away from established companies, which offered CWOC under the "Old Economy business
model" (OEBM). As startups with uncertain futures, the New Economy companies could not realistically
offer CWOC, but instead enticed S&E personnel away from CWOC at Old Economy companies by offering
these employees stock options on top of their salaries (which were typically lower than those at
the Old Economy companies). The stock options could become extremely valuable if and when the startup
did an initial public offering (IPO) or a merger-and-acquisition (M&A) deal with an established publicly-listed
company.
The rise in S&E PhD salaries from 1982 to 1987, identified in the NSF study that Weinstein quotes,
was the result of increased demand for S&E personnel by New Economy companies, with some of the increase
taking the form of stock-based pay, which in the Census data drawn from tax returns is lumped in
with salaries.3 Competing with companies for S&E personnel, the rise of the NEBM in turn put pressure
on salaries at Old Economy companies as they tried to use CWOC to attract and retain S&E labor in
the face of the stock-based alternative. By the last half of the 1980s, this New Economy competition
for talent was eroding the learning capabilities of the corporate research labs that, in many cases
from the early twentieth century, had been a characteristic feature of Old Economy companies in a
wide range of knowledge-intensive industries. 4
The CWOC norm under OEBM had provided employment security and rising wages from years-of-service
with the company and internal promotion of S&E personnel (significant proportions of whom in science-
based companies had PhDs). As I show in my book Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy?
, the beginning of the end of CWOC was the transformation of IBM, the world's leading computer
company, from OEBM to NEBM from 1990 to 1994. In 1990, with 374,000 employees, IBM still bragged
about its adherence to the CWOC norm (calling it "lifelong employment"), claiming that the company
had not laid off anyone involuntarily since 1921. By 1994 IBM had 220,000 employees, and, with senior
executives under CEO Louis Gerstner themselves getting fired for not laying off employees fast enough,
CWOC was history. Over the course of the 1990s and into the 2000s, other major Old Economy companies
followed IBM's example, throwing out of work older employees, many of them highly educated and with
accumulated experience that had previously been highly valued by the companies.
Already in the early 1990s, the marketization of employment relations was responsible for a precipitous
decline of employment at the corporate research labs that had underpinned the twentieth-century growth
of Old Economy high-tech companies, of which IBM was an exemplar. In 1993, a conference held at Harvard
Business School decried the "end of an era" in industrial research, with papers from the conference
appearing in a volume Engines of Innovation , published in 1996.5 In the introductory chapter,
entitled "Technology's Vanishing Wellspring," conference organizers and volume editors Richard Rosenbloom
and William Spencer argued that industrial research (as distinct from product development) of the
type that had been carried out by corporate labs in the "golden era" of the post- World War II decades
"expands the base of knowledge on which existing industries depend and generates new knowledge that
leads to new technologies and the birth of new industries." In the more competitive environment of
the 1980s and 1990s, however, in the new industries of "biotechnology, exotic materials, and information
products (and services based on them)", Rosenbloom and Spencer observed that it was more difficult
for companies "to keep new technologies fully proprietary", and hence "research activities have been
downsized, redirected, and restructured in recent years within most of the firms that once were among
the largest sponsors of industrial research." 6
There is little doubt that S&E PhDs were major victims of this transformation. But the problem
that they, along with most other members of the U.S. labor force, have faced is not simply the marketization
of employment relations. For reasons that I have fully described in my publications cited above,
the transition from OEBM to NEBM was accompanied by the "financialization" of the U.S. business corporation
as, from the last half of the 1980s, U.S. boardrooms and business schools embraced the ideology that,
for the sake of superior economic performance, a business enterprise should be run to "maximize shareholder
value" (MSV). Instead of retaining employees and reinvesting in their productive capabilities, as
had been the case when CWOC had prevailed, MSV advocated and legitimized the downsizing of the company's
labor force and the distribution of corporate revenues to shareholders in the forms of both cash
dividends and stock repurchases. 7
With the demise of CWOC, older employees were the most vulnerable, not only because they tended
to have the highest salaries, but also because the shift from OEBM to NEBM was a shift from proprietary
technology systems, in which employees with long years of experience were highly valued, to open
technology systems that favored younger workers with the latest computer-related skills (often acquired
by working at other companies). Under CWOC, older employees were more expensive not because of a
"natural wage rate" that was the result of supply and demand on the S&E labor market, but because
of the internal job ladders that are integral to a "retain-and-reinvest" resource-allocation regime.
The salaries of S&E employees tended to increase with years of experience with the company, with
a defined-benefit pension (based on years of service and highest salary levels) in retirement. These
types of secure employment relations, and the high and rising pay levels associated with them, were
the norm among established high-tech companies in the mid-1980s, but, as exemplified by IBM's transformation,
started to become undone in the early 1990s, and were virtually extinct a decade later, as Old Economy
companies either made the transition to the NEBM, or disappeared.8 The culprit in the weakening in
the demand for, and earnings of, S&E PhDs from the early 1990s was the demise of CWOC-a phenomenon
that Weinstein (and Teitelbaum) entirely ignore.
With the rise of NEBM, companies wanted employees who were younger and cheaper , and that
was the major reason why at the end of the 1980s the ICT industry pushed for an expansion of H-1B
nonimmigrant visas and employment-based immigration visas. It is not at all clear that an influx
of PhDs from foreign countries via these programs was undermining the earnings of S&E PhDs in the
early 1990s. Most H-1B visa holders had Bachelor's degrees when they entered the United States. At
the same time, large numbers of non-immigrant visa holders entered the United States on student visas
to do Master's and PhD degrees, and then looked to employment on H-1B visas to enable them to stay
in the United States for extended periods (up to seven years).9 It was in response to the availability
of advanced- degree graduates of U.S. universities that in 2005 an additional 20,000 H-1B visas were
added to the normal cap of 65,000. Without the influx of foreign students into U.S. S&E Master's
and PhD programs, many of these programs would not have survived. Through this route, the H-1B visa
program has made more foreign-born PhDs available to corporations for employment in the United States.
But I posit that it has been the demise of OEBM and rise of the NEBM, not an increased supply of
foreign-born PhDs, that has placed downward pressure on the career earnings of the most highly educated
members of the U.S. labor force.
Besides giving employers access to an expanded supply of younger and cheaper high-tech labor in
the United States, the H-1B visa along with the L-1 visa for people who had previously worked for
the employer for at least one year outside the United States have another valuable attribute for
employers: the person on the visa is immobile on the labor market-he or she can't change jobs-whereas
under NEBM the most valued high-tech workers are those who are highly mobile. This mobility of labor
can boost the worker's pay package but is highly problematic for a company that needs these employees
to be engaged in the collective and cumulative learning processes that are the essence of generating
competitive products. Under OEBM, CWOC was the central employment institution for college-educated
workers precisely because of the need for collective and cumulative learning. But it was the rise
of NEBM, not the Immigration Act of 1990, that undermined CWOC. The growing dominance of NEBM with
its open systems architectures then led employers to make increased use of H-1 and L-1 visas in the
1980s, prompting them to get behind an expanded cap for H-1B visas in the Immigration Act of 1990.
10
Once OEBM was attacked by NEBM, with its offer of stock-based pay, these corporations became fertile
territory for the adoption of the ideology that a company should be run to "maximize shareholder
value" (MSV). This momentous transformation in U.S. corporate governance occurred from the late 1980s,
legitimizing the transition from a "retain-and-reinvest" to a "downsize-and-distribute" corporate-
governance regime. In the 1990s and beyond, this corporate-governance transformation laid waste to
CWOC across corporate America, knowledge-intensive companies included. 11 With corporate research
eroding as high-tech personnel responded to the lure of stock-based pay from NEBM companies- including
not only startups but also those such as Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and Cisco Systems
that during the 1990s grew to employ tens of thousands of people, most of them with stock- based
pay-senior executives at the Old Economy high-tech companies began to see their company's stock price
as not only key to the size of their own stock-based pay packages but also as an instrument to compete
for a broad-based of high-tech personnel. As exemplified by IBM in the 1990s and beyond, a company's
stock price could be raised by laying off expensive older workers and using the resultant "free"
cash flow (as the purveyors of MSV called it) to do stock buybacks. 12
As I have documented in detail, over the past three decades this legalized looting of the U.S.
business corporation has only gotten worse. As shown Table 1, driven by stock buybacks, net equity
issues by U.S. nonfinancial corporations were, in 2015 dollars, minus $4.5 trillion over the
decade 2006-2015. In 2016 net equity issues were minus $586 billion. Net equity issues are new stock
issues by companies (in this case nonfinancial corporations) minus stock retired from the market
as the result of stock repurchases and M&A deals. The massively negative numbers in recent decades
are the result of stock buybacks. I have calculated net equity issues as a percent of GDP by decade
to provide a measure of the value of buybacks done relative to the size of the U.S. economy. In both
absolute inflation-adjusted dollars and as a percent of GDP, buybacks have become a prime mode of
corporate resource allocation in the U.S. economy. Contrary to popular belief, in aggregate U.S.
corporations fund the stock market, not vice versa. Note that almost all of the buybacks in the decade
1976-1985 occurred in 1984 and 1985 after in November 1982 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
adopted Rule 10b-18 that gave license to massive buybacks, in essence legalizing systemic stock-price
manipulation and the looting of the U.S. business corporation.
Table 1: Net equity issues of nonfinancial corporations in the United States, 1946-2015, by
decade, in 2015 dollars, and as a percent of GDP
Decade
Net Equity Issues,
2015$ billions
Net Equity Issues
as % of GDP
1946-1955
143.2
0.56
1956-1965
110.9
0.30
1966-1975
316.0
0.58
1976-1985
-290.9
-0.40
1986-1995
-1,002.5
-1.00
1996-2005
-1,524.4
-1.09
2006-2015
-4,466.6
-2.65
Source: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Federal Reserve Statistical Release
Z.1, "Financial Accounts of the United States: Flow of Funds, Balance Sheets, and Integrated Macroeconomic
Accounts," Table F-223: Corporate Equities, March 9, 2017, at
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/current/
.
Over the years 2006-2015, the 459 companies in the S&P 500 Index in January 2016 that were publicly
listed over the ten-year period expended $3.9 trillion on stock buybacks, representing 53.6 percent
of net income, plus another 36.7 percent of net income on dividends. Much of the remaining 9.7 percent
of profits was held abroad, sheltered from U.S. taxes. Mean buybacks for these 459 companies ranged
from $291 million in 2009, when the stock markets had collapsed, to $1,205 million in 2007, when
the stock market peaked before the Great Financial Crisis. In 2015, with the stock market booming,
mean buybacks for these companies were $1,173 million. Meanwhile, dividends declined moderately in
2009, but over the period 2006-2015 they trended up in real terms.
Among the largest repurchasers are America's premier high-tech companies. Table 2 shows the top
25 repurchasers over the decade 2006-2015. Among the companies that one would expect to employ large
numbers of S&E PhDs are Exxon Mobil, Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard, Pfizer,
Oracle, Intel, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips. We do not know the
historical numbers of S&E PhDs at these companies, but I hypothesize that numbers would be much higher
than they are if the companies were not financialized. Many of America's largest corporations
routinely distribute more than 100 percent of net income to shareholders, generating the extra
cash by reducing cash reserves, selling off assets, taking on debt, or laying off employees.13 As
I have shown, the only logical explanation for this buyback activity is that the stock-based pay
that represents the vast majority of the remuneration of senior corporate executives incentivizes
them to manipulate their companies' stock prices, leaving most Americans worse off. 14
Table 2: The 25 largest stock repurchasers among U.S.-based corporations, 2006-2015, showing
net income (NI) stock buybacks (BB), and cash dividends (DV)
Source: Calculated from data downloaded from Standard & Poor's Compustat database.
The Weinstein-Teitelbaum focus on a GUI design to expand the supply of S&E PhDs ignores the
transformations of corporate governance and employment relations that have decimated career employment
for this group of workers over the past three decades. At the same time, the channeling of trillions
of dollars of value created in U.S. nonfinancial corporations to the financial sector has opened
up jobs on Wall Street that can provide quick income bonanzas for highly-educated members of the
U.S. labor force, many of whom might have otherwise pursued S&E careers. Among the wealthiest
of these Wall Street players are corporate predators-euphemistically known as "hedge-fund activists"-who
have billions of dollars in assets under management with which they can attack companies to pump
up their stock prices through the implementation of "downsize-and-distribute" allocation regimes
and, even if it takes a few years, dump the stock for huge gains.15
In the case of Apple, we have shown how Carl Icahn used his wealth, visibility, hype, and influence
to take $2 billion in stock-market gains by buying $3.6 billion of Apple shares in the summer of
2013 and selling them in the winter of 2016, even though he contributed absolutely nothing of any
kind to Apple as a value-creating company.16 Apple CEO Tim Cook and his board (which includes former
U.S. Vice President Al Gore) helped Icahn turn his accumulated fortune into an even bigger one by
having Apple repurchase $45 billion in shares in 2014 and $36 billion in 2015-by far the two largest
one-year stock buybacks of any company in history. Imagine the corporate research capabilities in
which Apple could have invested, and the S&E PhDs the company could have employed, had it looked
for productive ways to use even a fraction of the almost unimaginable sums that it wasted on buybacks.17
From 2011 through the first quarter of 2017, Apple spent $144 billion on buybacks and $51 billion
on dividends under what it calls its "Capital Return" program. But the company is "returning" capital
to shareholders who never gave the company anything in the first place; the only time in its history
that Apple has ever raised funds on the public stock market was $97 million in its 1980 IPO. 18
A number of "hedge-fund activists"-Nelson Peltz of Trian, Daniel Loeb of Third Point, and William
Ackman of Pershing Square are among the most prominent-have been able to put up one or two billion
dollars to purchase small stakes in major high-tech companies, and, with the proxy votes of pension
funds, mutual funds and endowments, have been able put pressure on companies, often by placing their
representatives on the boards of directors, to implement "downsize-and-distribute" regimes for the
sake of "maximizing shareholder value."19 In the summer of 2013, Nelson Peltz's Trian Fund Management
bought DuPont stock worth $1.3 billion, representing 2.2% of shares outstanding. In May 2015 Peltz
lost a proxy fight to put four of his nominees on the DuPont board, but in October 2015 DuPont CEO
Ellen Kullman, who had opposed Peltz, resigned, and the new management began to implement Peltz's
plans to cut costs and hit financial targets, to be done in the context of a merger with Dow Chemical,
which had fallen into the hands of another corporate predator Daniel Loeb. Meanwhile, in October
2015, Peltz bought 0.8 percent of the shares of General Electric (GE), and began to pressure another
iconic high-tech company to cut costs and increase its stock price. GE was already a financialized
company that had done $52 billion in buybacks in the decade 2006-2015 (see Table 2)-a massive amount
of money for the purpose of manipulating its stock price. Undoubtedly responding to additional pressure
from Peltz, during 2016, GE, with profits of $8.0 billion, paid out $8.5 billion in dividends and
spent another $22.0 billion on buybacks. This financialization of U.S. high-tech corporations undermines,
among other things, the employment of S&E PhDs.
We need research on this subject to quantify its impacts. I submit, however, that such a research
agenda must focus on transformations of regimes of corporate governance and employment relations.
Relying on the neoclassical economist's notion of a "natural wage rate" determined by the interaction
of supply and demand, Weinstein, a mathematician, and Teitelbaum, a demographer, missed the transformations
in corporate governance and employment relations that marked the late 1980s and early 1990s-and beyond-and
as result, in my view, failed to understand the changing fortunes of S&E PhDs in the marketized,
globalized, and financialized New Economy. Given the dominance of what I have called "the myth of
the market economy"20 in the thought processes of economists, Weinstein and Teitelbaum were by no
means alone in erroneously focusing on supply and demand on the PhD labor market while failing to
recognize the centrality of corporate governance and employment relations in determining the earnings
and career prospects of S&E PhDs. It is time for new economic thinking on these critical questions.
Footnotes
1 The Weinstein paper appears to have been published prior to the adoption of the American
Competitiveness and Workforce
2 William Lazonick, Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy? Business Organization and High-Tech
Employment in the United States, W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 2009; ; William
Lazonick, "The New Economy Business Model and the Crisis of US Capitalism," Capitalism and Society,
4, 2, 2009: article 4; William Lazonick, Philip Moss, Hal Salzman, and Öner Tulum, "Skill Development
and Sustainable Prosperity: Collective and Cumulative Careers versus Skill-Biased Technical Change,"
Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Group on the Political Economy of Distribution Working
Paper No. 7, December 2014, at
https://www.ineteconomics.org/ideas-papers/research-papers/skill-development-and-sustainable-prosperity-cumulative-and-collective-careers-versus-skill-biased-technical-change
; William Lazonick, "Labor in the Twenty- First Century: The Top 0.1% and the Disappearing
Middle Class," in Christian E. Weller, ed., Inequality, Uncertainty, and Opportunity: The Varied
and Growing Role of Finance in Labor Relations, Cornell University Press, 2015: 143-192.
3 Almost all gains from exercising employee stock options and the vesting of employee stock
awards are taxed at the ordinary income-tax rate, not at the capital-gains tax rate, with taxes
withheld by the employer at the time that options are exercised or awards vest. Hence these stock-based
gains are reported as part of "wages, tips, other compensation" on IRS Form 1040.
5 Rosenbloom and Spencer, Engines of Innovation . Richard Rosenbloom was David Sarnoff
Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, while William Spencer was CEO
of SEMATECH.
6 Ibid., pp. 2-3.
7 William Lazonick, "Profits Without Prosperity: Stock Buybacks Manipulate the Market and
Leave Most Americans Worse Off," Harvard Business Review , September 2014, 46-55; William
Lazonick, "Stock Buybacks: From Retain-and-Reinvest to Downsize-and-Distribute," Center for Effective
Public Management, Brookings Institution, April 2015 at
http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2015/04/17-stock-buybacks-lazonick.
8 Lazonick, Sustainable Prosperity , ch. 3. For an important case study that includes
the fate of the once renowned Bell Labs, see William Lazonick and Edward March, "The Rise and
Demise of Lucent Technologies," Journal of Strategic Management Education , 7, 4, 2011.
9 Lazonick, Sustainable Prosperity , ch. 5.
10 Ibid., ch. 2. Note that the H-1 visa for workers in specialty occupations was renamed the
H-1B visa in 1990 after the H-1A visa was created specifically for nurses.
11 Lazonick, "Stock Buybacks"; Lazonick, "Labor in the Twenty-First Century."
12 Lazonick, "Profits Without Prosperity"; Lazonick, "Stock Buybacks."
13 Lazonick, "Labor in the Twenty-First Century": William Lazonick, "How Stock Buybacks Make
Americans Vulnerable to Globalization," Paper presented at the Workshop on Mega-Regionalism: New
Challenges for Trade and Innovation, East-West Center, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, January
20-21, 2016, at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2745387
14 Lazonick, "Profits Without Prosperity."
15 Rachel Butt, "Here are some of the 10 biggest activist money managers and some of their
most impressive bets," Business Insider , June 17, 2016, at
http://www.businessinsider.com/top-10-biggest-activist-investors-2016-6. Matt Hopkins, William
Lazonick, and Jang-Sup Shin are engaged in research on the methods and gains of these predatory
value extractors.
19 With Matt Hopkins and Jang-Sup Shin, I am involved in project on how the U. S. SEC has
accommodated and even encouraged the corporate value extractors who call themselves "shareholder
activists" or "hedge-fund activists."
20 William Lazonick, Business Organization and the Myth of the Market Economy , Cambridge
University Press, 1991
It was indeed a tough article to read to the end, but this nugget near the end was worth it:
"But the company is "returning" capital to shareholders who never gave the company anything
in the first place; the only time in its history that Apple has ever raised funds on the public
stock market was $97 million in its 1980 IPO."
As one who actually lived this process, I can tell you that the premise of this article must
be basically true.
Back in the early '90s I set out to fill in the gaps of my own computer science background
(I'm actually an astrophysicist). And my classes were filled entirely by people from Asia, except
for myself and one other Anglo. Job ads in the journals were already beginning to ask for PhD
level CompSci with emphasis on, e.g., voice recognition, for a pay rate of $26K (1992 !). That
was definitely appealing to the foreign students and unappealing to American STEM students.
During that period, the only job market for native PhD STEM students became the American
Defense and Intelligence agencies, because they required security clearances and US Citizenship.
I found myself driven in those directions too.
Now, after many years doing my own thing, I look around at the STEM marketplace and I am shocked
to find large numbers of compatriots being pressured into the GIG Economy, and pay rates are appalling
by former standards. There is a serious lack of expenditure on research and development today.
There is a serious lack of expenditure on research and development today.
From another perspective this is just over investment in education. Technology for the
most part is just increasing complexity and increasing complexity has diminishing returns. With
energy becoming less available, we probably need a lot less complexity.
"American Defense". hmmm, wonder if sending the jobs and know-how to China and India in the
belief both will always be the US's willing subcontractors is such a good idea (from a US national
defense point of view).
I wouldn't say that there is a lack of R&D - it just isn't done in-house any more.
Gone are the Bell Labs and the Xerox PARCs; welcome to the brave new world of university partnerships
and non-profit R&D shops (most famous: the Southwest Research Institute).
Basically the rich are waging class war. That's the problem no matter how you slice and
dice this one. This whole "New Economy" has been one big war on wages. I mean look at the collusion
too between Google, Apple, and Intel to keep wages low.
Considering how slap on the wrist this was, what incentive is there to not do it again? They
know they can get away with this. Not to mention, this H1B and L1B program has become a way to
keep wages low in the technology sector. In many sectors, there really isn't a "shortage" of Americans.
Oh and for all the talk of these companies being "innovative", if they are prioritizing money
on stock buybacks over R&D, that's not really innovative as much as it is trying to boost salaries
by capitalizing on the huge cash reserves they get for being the dominant companies in their sector.
Same could be said about Exxon. Not much being spent on R&D means that they are more about rent
seeking rather than innovation. Perhaps not yet as blatant as those patent trolls, which are little
more than shell companies that sue other companies over patents, but that is their ideal business
model.
I think that at the end of the day, even though many engineers in the tech companies are in
the top 10% in terms of income percentile, their interests are closer aligned with working class
people. The other issue is that I bet when many of these engineers turn into their 40s, they are
going to witness first hand the very real age discrimination that exists in the technology industry.
Basically it comes down to, the rich are really greedy. The issue right now for the rich
is that they are desperate to keep the looting from happening, while people are increasingly aware
that the system is against them. Bernie Sanders got a lot of support in the Valley and while it
is a very Democratic leaning area, I cannot imagine that Trump's anti-H1B and L1B stance would
have been opposed by the average employee. I think that the rich are not going to concede anything
and that there needs to be some sort of solidarity union amongst all workers.
Is there a single person here who has worked on Wall Street (writ large) who can convince
us that his job or his company had an overall positive effect on the US and/or world economy over
five years, ten years, or twenty-five years?
I'll go first: three investment banks under my belt and one was a giant financial and moral
sucking machine called Citi. The other two were wannabe's but certainly did not add value.
While "maximizing shareholder value" is the huge problem wrecking our economy, having watched
the genesis of New Economic Paradigm through the experiences my wife and most of my friends going
through the Silicon Valley start-up Tulip-mania from the mid-'80's through the first decade of
th e 2000's, the author is hitting important points while over-simplifying and missing other equally
important points, such as the role of the "Peace Dividend" in the collapse of aerospace and research
funding, and the role of the Reagan and Clinton "tax reforms" in driving stock-based compensation
systems.
Early on, the use of stock-based compensation drove down wage-based compensation and increased
the role of financial speculators. Today, the speculators get the stock, but wages remain suppressed
and only foreign workers will accept them. The author is correct: the causes are complicated,
but the result drove down wages and job security for STEM workers.
I got my Ph.D. in biology in 2000. It was absolutely the worst decision in my life. In fact,
it actually destroyed my life, reducing me to near homelessness and starvation because-GASP--regular
employers (like office jobs, retail etc.) will not hire Ph.D.s. There there is the lovely student
debt that has grown exponentially, as my wages could not make the smallest dent. Convicted felons
make more that I do. So to make a long story short, I started a small on-line business 9 years
ago and got the FFFFF OUT of the rotten POS United States and moved to Ecuador, one of the most
progressive countries in the world. I cannot believe how the US abuses its national treasures-is
is truly a POS and I do not miss it for one day. I hope the US crashes and rots in hell.
Its not just PhDs. I know several Engineers who advise their children to do something else.
It's just not worth the amount of effort that is required to be put into it and there is no future
hope of a turn around. As bad as it is for graduates today, it's only going to get worse.
I am a civil engineer and one of my daughters is studying to become a structural engineer.
I would not have advised her to go into engineering because of the problem with the H-1B visas.
But who am I to advise? Who can know the future? The world is just changing too fast now
to really be able to advise our children on what careers to take. Besides, one of the advantages
of studying engineering as you can work anywhere in the world.
I bought houses for each of my children and told them if they wanted to go to college they
could trade the house in for the education. I personally think they should have considered keeping
the house and working minimum wage jobs that they enjoy. But both of them are pursuing educations,
my son to be history teacher!
Post WWII labor overplayed its hand by the 1970's. Corporations and their decided they
had had it. Corps and management proceeded to change the rules of the game on everything -- courts,
trade, taxation and regulation. These countermeasures have had disastrous long term consequences.
Corporations now run the country in a fascist manner. Government capture has created myriad problems
beyond financialization, only one tool in the corporate quiver. Oligopolies across most to all
industries comes to mind. Rail, air, health insurance, banking, defense, telecom, entertainment
.
But this paper is also lamenting a lack of business capex, which is directly correlated to
public investment. When you decided to offshore manufacturing and fail to invest in infrastructure
you get a double whammy that hits business capex. Increasing regulation and taxation on small
and midsize companies has lead to consolidation. Approximately 5000 public companies have likely
been consolidated. Sarbanes-Oxley added millions to compliance costs making it highly uneconomical
to be a public company with less than $300 million in revenue. Dodd-Frank has created increases
in cost for financial firms that had nothing to do with the crisis. In fact, the big banks have
benefited enormously from implementation of this legislation.
Not sure about the labor part overplaying their hand. They just wanted an even wage and
productivity rise. It is capital IMO that has overplayed its hand and the rise of neoliberal economics
which has led to declines in public R&D spending. There isn't anything like the Space Race anymore.
Frankly, labour underplayed its hand. At one point it had capital by the throat, and should
have finished it off then. If peace is not an option, you should utterly and permanently destroy
your enemy.
Labor did NOT overplay its hand after WW2 - Taft-Hartley was a HUGE smack-down to labor
after the privations of the Depression followed by the war effort. The decent wages during the
post-war period were part of a concerted effort to convince workers that they didn't need unions
and to be complacent.
Labor leadership certainly became corrupt from all the money sloshing around without global
competition due to war devastation of Europe and Japan, the Cold War, and the death throes of
colonialism, but this was not due to "overplaying" their hand.
The trends described in the post predate by decades the communist tyranny [/s] imposed by those
bills.
The wholesale closing or offshoring of corporate research labs already started in the 1980s,
driven in part by corporate raiders like Milken, Pickens and Icahn.
IBM, GM, Kodak, Xerox, GE they all had labs that provided jobs to STEM graduates
and a stream of discoveries and inventions to generate more jobs.
Now these are largely gone or substantially off-shored.
What has happened to corporate R&D shouldn't be used as an excuse to make life easier
for the Wall Street culture largely responsible for it.
Yes, any burdens imposed by Sarbanes Oxley are the fault of numerous unethical business executives
over recent decades, and not the fault of people in government.
When I was a student in IT, the shining stars at the firmament of industrial computer science
and engineering R&D were Xerox PARC, DEC SRC, ATT Bell Labs and IBM Yorktown Heights.
Contrary to popular belief, in aggregate U.S. corporations fund the stock market, not
vice versa. Note that almost all of the buybacks in the decade 1976-1985 occurred in 1984 and
1985 after in November 1982 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission adopted Rule 10b-18
that gave license to massive buybacks, in essence legalizing systemic stock-price manipulation
and the looting of the U.S. business corporation.
See Lazonick's footnoted paper for many loving particulars. Especially note the details of
how Rule 10b-18 offers no protection from abuse and (no news to NC readers) is a pillar of general
corporate asset-stripping .
Engineering long-term career arc has been an issue since at least my father's generation (those
born during WWI). Longer tenure (mid to late mid career) engineers were being eased out for young
grads. When I was in a ChemE program in the 70s, advice was to follow the engineering degree with
either law or a business degree because the odds of a long career doing engineering was not great.
No one advised going for a PhD in engineering.
When I asked him why he got the degree, which didn't seem necessary for someone who spent much
of his career in industrial R&D, he said, "I'm like Mallory climbing Mount Everest. I got that
degree because it is there."
So, there you have it. My old man getting that degree because he wanted to. And because my
mother was willing to support both of them while he worked on it.
"Many of America's largest corporations routinely distribute more than 100 percent of net income
to shareholders, generating the extra cash by reducing cash reserves, selling off assets, taking
on debt, or laying off employees the only logical explanation for this buyback activity is that
the stock-based pay that represents the vast majority of the remuneration of senior corporate
executives incentivizes them to manipulate their companies' stock prices "
This not only applies to the STEM sector, but nearly every large corp. in America. "Earnings
quality" (i.e stock price) takes precedence over everything else leading to the crapification
of products & services and devaluation of employees.
Thank gawd this type of thinking wasn't around when Jonas Salk was working on the polio vaccine.
" In November 1982 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission adopted Rule 10b-18 that
gave license to massive buybacks, in essence legalizing systemic stock-price manipulation and
the looting of the U.S. business corporation. "
How can you have "looting" without lootees? The stockholders aren't complaining. If any party
is being disadvantaged by borrowing to fund stock buybacks, it's existing bondholders. As David
Swensen describes in an extended example in Pioneering Portfolio Management , managers
compensated by stock options tend to treat corporate debt holders quite shabbily by piling on
more debt, compromising the interest coverage ratio.
High tech companies use stock buybacks to offset their widespread granting of stock options
which - absent Rule 10b-18 - would badly dilute existing stock holders over time.
Trying to paint the well-disclosed practice of stock buybacks as "looting" is histrionic ax
grinding on Lazonick's part. Over-leveraged companies are going to regret it in the next recession.
But that's a lamentable social phenomenon in a bubble-driven economy. Those who disagree with
it are free to sell short over-leveraged stocks - perhaps a more meaningful way of expressing
dissent than scribbling academic screeds.
Well Jim, ponzi schemes work pretty well for those at the top. I suppose we shouldn't worry
about it until we start getting complaints..
Actually though, watching the train wreck that is the outlook for the youngest generation
today, provides some grim amusement. For instance noting that the "bubble-driven" economy composed
of companies desperate to prevent their stock becoming "badly diluted" by having fire sales on
capitol and expertise that probably took their predecessors decades to build can really only have
one outcome. Depression, misery, socialism. Maybe we skip the Mao route this time, maybe not.
Here's some related "histrionics" of your channeling D.D . an excerpt of a debate about "creative
destruction" (emphasis mine) from 1991(context), chronologically, roughly following the tandem
of Ronnie and Maggie.
Gregory Peck: "The Robber Barons of old at least left something tangible in their wake
- a coal mine, a railroad, banks. THIS MAN LEAVES NOTHING. HE CREATES NOTHING. HE BUILDS NOTHING.
HE RUNS NOTHING. And in his wake lies nothing but a blizzard of paper to cover the pain. Oh, if
he said, "I know how to run your business better than you," that would be something worth talking
about. But he's not saying that. He's saying, "I'm going to kill you because at this particular
moment in time, you're worth more dead than alive."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJRhrow3Jws
Danny Devito: "Let's have the intelligence, let's have the decency to sign the death certificate,
collect the insurance, and invest in something with a future "Ah, but we can't," goes the prayer.
"We can't because we have responsibility, a responsibility to our employees, to our community.
What will happen to them?" I got two words for that: WHO CARES? Care about them? Why? They didn't
care about you. They sucked you dry. You have no responsibility to them. For the last ten years
this company bled your money. Did this community ever say, "We know times are tough. We'll lower
taxes, reduce water and sewer." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62kxPyNZF3Q
Yes, the IBM reference is interesting.The author gives an ordinal lead to IBM as a mover
from the OEBM to NEBM. I ask myself if, from a mere one large corporation managing perspective,
this was IBM's 11th hour response to the by then devastating rise of its competitors like Apple
& Microsoft.
Also the irony that it did not help IBM at least in the midterm. So, IBM was the prime
mover to initiate some aspects of a model change -change which every major player adhered to-
in response to a new technological disadvantage vs. competitors, and in turned did not seem to
do much for IBM in the immediate years. Although, if I recall well, IBM was immersed in many political
battles and internal problems, legal and otherwise. Nevertheless, I doubt there was a historic
inevitability on IBM's ordinal force. Outstanding work by Lazonick
"IBM is the poster child for shenanigans. Last month, IBM reported its 20th quarter in
a row of declining year over year revenues .. a 13% drop in earnings, profit margins that declined
in every business segment ( much worse than expected ), free cash flow that plummeted over 50%
year over year and an earnings "beat" of 3 cents per share. How could this "beat" happen? .. a
negative tax rate of -23% . This is why they pay the CEO Rometti the big bucks ( estimated at
$50 to $65 million last year)."
And this is one of the Bluest of the Blue Chip companies in the world.
I read IBM spent a fortune at that time defending itself against monopolistic claims litigation.
This was happening while Microsoft and Apple were clearly consolidating their oligopolistic empires.
I read reports stating Oracle initial breakthroughs were taken from IBM's research work.
Not sure if anyone watches "Silicon Valley", but here is a quote that seems fitting:
Season 2 – Bad Money
Richard: Once we get a few customers and start a subscription-revenue model.
Russ: What? Revenue? No, no, no, no, no. No. If you show revenue, people will ask "How much?"
And it will never be enough, but if you have no revenue, you can say you're pre-revenue. You're
a potential pure play. It's not about how much you earn, it's about what you're worth. And
who's worth the most? Companies that lose money. Pinterest, Snap chat No revenue. Amazon
has lost money every fucking quarter for the last 20 fucking years, and that Bezos motherfucker
is the king.
Just wanted to point out that there is one more link in the chain to be followed: the financiers
would not have such an easy time playing Nero with our economy, if the banking sector were still
properly constrained by a gold standard (=limited supply of printed credit), the risk of bank
runs by outraged consumers, the Glass-Steagall separation of commercial from investment banking,
personal rather than corporate punishment for fraud and abuse, antitrust enforcement, etc.
In addition, the rise of 401(k) based investing, in which workers are tax-incentivized
to buy in to the corporate stock scheming, but lack the normal shareholder voice in corporate
governance, has taken the chains off the looters as well.
It's time to end the impunity. The government has been corrupted by the corporations, so only
a populist uprising will produce reform. The uprising will require sacrifices of time, income,
security. It will require boycotts of products that people like, but whose producers and vendors
are evil. The products will not disappear while demand persists – but the producers and vendors
must be brought to heel.
Consider the following inductees into the Corporate Hall of Shame:
Wells Fargo – customer abuse
United Airlines – customer abuse
UBER – employee abuse; legal system abuse
Mylan (Epi Pens) – Monopolistic price abuse
Hewlett Packard (spyware on laptops) – customer abuse
pick an industry, you'll find a Hall of Shame candidate. Hit them all in the wallet until they
reform.
The impact on the Grads was secondary a byproduct of a larger agenda which included the
transfer offshore and consolidation of "IP" of the entire American, EU and Asian industrial economies
along with the withdrawl of capital, while at the same time intentionally sabotaging future innovations
with the handicap of diversity. Who got the loot and capital? Usual suspects.
"... As with any major reform movement, the corporate backlash was predictable. In Neo-classical Economics, Gaffney reveals that this backlash took two main forms. The first was the Red Scare (1919-1989), overseen by J Edgar Hoover as Assistant Attorney General and later as FBI director. ..."
"... The second was more insidious and involved the deliberate reframing of the classical economic theory developed by Adam Smith, Locke, Hume, and Ricardo as so-called neoclassical economics. ..."
Why do American children study Karl Marx, the villain we love to hate, in school? Yet Henry George,
whose views on land and tax reform gave rise to the Progressive and Populist movements of the
1900s, is totally absent from US history books.
During the 1890s George, author of the 1879 bestseller Progress and Poverty, was the third
most famous American, after Mark Twain and Thomas Edison. In 1896 he outpolled Teddy Roosevelt
and was nearly elected mayor of New York.
In Neo-classical Economics as a Stratagem Against Henry George (2007), University of California
economist Mason Gaffney argues that George and his Land Value Tax pose a far greater threat than
Marx to America's corporate elite.
America's enormous concentration of wealth has always depended on the inherent right of the
wealthy elite to seize and monopolize vast quantities of land and natural resources (oil, gas,
forests, water, minerals, etc) for personal profit.
Adopting an LVT, which is far easier than launching a violent revolution, would essentially
negate that right. What's more, every jurisdiction that has ever implemented an LVT finds it works
exactly the way George predicted it would. Productivity, prosperity, and social wellbeing flourish,
while inflation, wealth inequality, and boom and bust recessions and depressions virtually vanish.
When Progress and Poverty first came out in 1879, it started a worldwide reform movement that
in the US manifested in the fiercely anti-corporate Populist Movement in the 1880s and later the
Progressive Movement (1900-1920). Many important anti-corporate reforms came out of this period,
including the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), a constitutional amendment allowing Americans to elect
the Senate by popular vote (prior to 1913 the Senate was appointed by state legislators), and
the country's first state-owned bank, The Bank of North Dakota (1919).
The Corporate Elite Strikes Back
As with any major reform movement, the corporate backlash was predictable. In Neo-classical
Economics, Gaffney reveals that this backlash took two main forms. The first was the Red Scare
(1919-1989), overseen by J Edgar Hoover as Assistant Attorney General and later as FBI director.
The second was more insidious and involved the deliberate reframing of the classical economic
theory developed by Adam Smith, Locke, Hume, and Ricardo as so-called neoclassical economics.
The latter totally negates Adam Smith's basic differentiation between "land", a limited, non-producible
resource. and "capital", a reproducible result of past human production. Smith, Locke, Hume, and
Ricardo all held that individuals have no right to seize and monopolize scarce natural resources,
such as land, minerals, water, and forests. They believed that because these resources are both
limited and essential for human survival, they should belong to the public.
Neoclassical economics, which first developed in the 1890s, was based on the premise that growth
and development can only occur if a handful of rent-seekers are allowed to monopolize scarce land
and natural resources for their personal profit. Henry George, who publicly debated the early
pioneers of neoclassical economics, claimed the science of economics was being deliberately distorted
to discredit him. Gaffney agrees. Because George's proposal to replace income and sales tax with
single land value taxed is based on logical concepts of land, capital, labor, and rent advanced
by Adam Smith, Locke, Hume, and Ricardo, they all had to be discredited.
Gaffney believes neoclassical economic theory undermines George's arguments for a single Land
Value Tax in two basic ways: 1) by claiming that land is no different from other capital (ironically
Marx made the identical argument) and 2) by portraying the science of economics as a series of
hard choices and sacrifices that low and middle income people must make. Some examples:
If we want efficiency, we must sacrifice equity.
To attract business, we must lower taxes and shut libraries and defund schools.
To prevent inflation, we must keep a large number of Americans unemployed.
To create jobs, we must destroy the environment and pollute the air, water, and food chain.
To raise productivity, we must fire people.
Gaffney's book traces the phenomenal public support Georgism enjoyed before the tenets of neoclassical
economics took hold in American universities. In addition to inspiring the Populist and Progressive
movements, an LVT to fund irrigation projects in California's Central Valley made California the
top producing farm state. In 1916 the first federal income tax law was introduced by Georgist
members of Congress (Henry George Jr and Warren Bailey) and included virtually no tax on wages.
In 1934 Georgist Upton Sinclair was almost elected governor of California.
Gaffney also identifies the robber barons whose fortunes financed the economics departments of
the major universities who went on to substitute neooclassical economics for classical economic
theory. At the top of this list were
Ezra Cornell (owner of both Western Union and Associated Press) – founder of Cornell University
John D Rockefeller – helped fund the University of Chicago and installed his cronies in its
economics department.
J. P Morgan – investment banker and early funder of Columbia University
B&O Railroad – John Hopkins University
Southern Pacific Railroad – Stanford University
The final section of Gaffney's book lays out the tragic economic, political, and social consequences
of allowing the Red Scare and neoclassical economics to stifle America's movement for a single
Land Value Tax:
Economic Consequences
The corporate elite has privatized, or is privatizing, most of the public domain (including
fisheries, the public airwaves, water, offshore oil and gas, and the right to clean air) without
compensation to the public.
The rate of saving and capital formation continues to fall rapidly. This is the main reason
there is no recovery.
Although profits soar, corporations have no incentive to invest in expansion and jobs. Instead
they invest their profits in real estate, derivatives, and commodities speculation.
American capital is decayed and obsolete. The US has lost much of its steel and auto industries.
Power plants and oil refineries are ancient and polluting. Most public capital (infrastructure)
is old and crumbling.
The number of American farms has fallen from 6 million in 1920 to 1 million in 2007.
The USA, once so self-sufficient, has grown dangerously dependent on importing raw materials
and foreign manufacturers.
The US financial system is a shambles, supported only by loading trillions of dollars of bad
debts onto the taxpayers.
Real wage rates have continued to fall since 1975,
Unemployment has risen to chronically high levels.
Inequality in wealth and income continues to increase rapidly.
Political Consequences
The corporate elite has nullified all the Progressive Era electoral reforms by pouring money
into politics and "deep lobbying," at all levels of government, including our institutions of
higher learning and our public schools.
The corporate elite continue to pour ever more of our tax money into prisons.
Social Consequences
Homelessness has risen to new heights, in spite of decades of subsidies to home-building and,
favorable tax treatment of owner-occupied homes
Hunger is rampant.
Street begging, once rare, is everywhere
Americans have experienced a sharp loss of community, honor, duty, loyalty and patriotism.
In the shadow world between crime and business there is now the vast, gray underground economy
that includes tax evasion, tax avoidance, and drug-dealing.
The US which once led the world in nearly every endeavor, has fallen far behind in infant survival,
in longevity, in literacy, in numeracy, in mental health.
American education no longer leads the world. Privatized education in the form of commercial
TV has largely superseded public education.
Received a "new academic programs" missive from my alma mater in today's
mail, containing the following:
How to Make Innovation Happen in Your Organization
The Certified Professional Innovator (CPI) program is intended to develop
the competency of high potential leaders in the theory and practice of
innovation. It is rooted on the principle that innovation can only be
learned by doing and through many short bursts of experimentation.
The certification is comprised of a 12-week curriculum with specific
syllabus and assignments for each week, including videos, workbook
assignments, and reports. During the program, participants, functioning as a
cohort, communicate and collaborate with each other and faculty through a
series of webinars and discussions. The program culminates in project
pitches.
"It is rooted on [sic] the principle that innovation can only be learned by
doing and through many short bursts of experimentation" - OK, fine there, but
it is also rooted in the notion that such creativity can be taught in a formal
academic setting, here monetized and condensed into a 12-week program. As for
me, I'm gonna hold out for the following surely-in-development mini-courses:
o Certified Professional Serial Disruptor (CPD)
o Certified Professional Innovative Thought Leader (CPCTL)
o Certified Professional Smart Creative (CPSC)
I love the smell of money-greased credentialism in the morning.
Dismal Voucher Results Surprise Researchers as DeVos Era
Begins
By Kevin Carey
The confirmation of Betsy DeVos as secretary of education
was a signal moment for the school choice movement. For the
first time, the nation's highest education official is
someone fully committed to making school vouchers and other
market-oriented policies the centerpiece of education reform.
But even as school choice is poised to go national, a wave
of new research has emerged suggesting that private school
vouchers may harm students who receive them. The results are
startling - the worst in the history of the field,
researchers say.
While many policy ideas have murky origins, vouchers
emerged fully formed from a single, brilliant essay *
published in 1955 by Milton Friedman, the free-market
godfather later to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics.
Because "a stable and democratic society is impossible
without widespread acceptance of some common set of values
and without a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge on the
part of most citizens," Mr. Friedman wrote, the government
should pay for all children to go to school.
But, he argued, that doesn't mean the government should
run all the schools. Instead, it could give parents vouchers
to pay for "approved educational services" provided by
private schools, with the government's role limited to
"ensuring that the schools met certain minimum standards."
The voucher idea sat dormant for years before taking root
in a few places, most notably Milwaukee. Yet even as many of
Mr. Friedman's other ideas became Republican Party orthodoxy,
most national G.O.P. leaders committed themselves to a
different theory of educational improvement: standards,
testing and accountability. That movement reached an apex
when the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 brought a new focus
on tests and standards to nearly every public school
nationwide. The law left voucher supporters with crumbs: a
small demonstration project in Washington, D.C.
But broad political support for No Child Left Behind
proved short-lived. Teachers unions opposed the reforms from
the left, while libertarians and states-rights conservatives
denounced it from the right. When Republicans took control of
more governor's mansions and state legislatures in the 2000s,
they expanded vouchers to an unprecedented degree. Three of
the largest programs sprang up in Indiana, Louisiana and
Ohio, which collectively enroll more than a third of the
178,000 voucher students nationwide.
Most of the new programs heeded Mr. Friedman's original
call for the government to enforce "minimum standards" by
requiring private schools that accept vouchers to administer
standardized state tests. Researchers have used this data to
compare voucher students with similar children who took the
same tests in public school. Many of the results were
released over the last 18 months, while Donald J. Trump was
advocating school choice on the campaign trail.
The Role of Government in Education
By Milton Friedman
The general trend in our times toward increasing
intervention by the state in economic affairs has led to a
concentration of attention and dispute on the areas where new
intervention is proposed and to an acceptance of whatever
intervention has so far occurred as natural and unchangeable.
The current pause, perhaps reversal, in the trend toward
collectivism offers an opportunity to reexamine the existing
activities of government and to make a fresh assessment of
the activities that are and those that are not justified.
This paper attempts such a re-examination for education.
Education is today largely paid for and almost entirely
administered by governmental bodies or non-profit
institutions. This situation has developed gradually and is
now taken so much for granted that little explicit attention
is any longer directed to the reasons for the special
treatment of education even in countries that are
predominantly free enterprise in organization and philosophy.
The result has been an indiscriminate extension of
governmental responsibility.
The role assigned to government in any particular field
depends, of course, on the principles accepted for the
organization of society in general. In what follows, I shall
assume a society that takes freedom of the individual, or
more realistically the family, as its ultimate objective, and
seeks to further this objective by relying primarily on
voluntary exchange among individuals for the organization of
economic activity. In such a free private enterprise exchange
economy, government's primary role is to preserve the rules
of the game by enforcing contracts, preventing coercion, and
keeping markets free. Beyond this, there are only three major
grounds on which government intervention is to be justified.
One is "natural monopoly" or similar market imperfection
which makes effective competition (and therefore thoroughly
voluntary ex change) impossible. A second is the existence of
substantial "neighborhood effects," i.e., the action of one
individual imposes significant costs on other individuals for
which it is not feasible to make him compensate them or
yields significant gains to them for which it is not feasible
to make them compensate him-- circumstances that again make
voluntary exchange impossible. The third derives from an
ambiguity in the ultimate objective rather than from the
difficulty of achieving it by voluntary exchange, namely,
paternalistic concern for children and other irresponsible
individuals. The belief in freedom is for "responsible"
units, among whom we include neither children nor insane
people. In general, this problem is avoided by regarding the
family as the basic unit and therefore parents as responsible
for their children; in considerable measure, however, such a
procedure rests on expediency rather than principle. The
problem of drawing a reasonable line between action justified
on these paternalistic grounds and action that conflicts with
the freedom of responsible individuals is clearly one to
which no satisfactory answer can be given.
In applying these general principles to education, we
shall find it helpful to deal separately with (1) general
education for citizen ship, and (2) specialized vocational
education, although it may be difficult to draw a sharp line
between them in practice. The grounds for government
intervention are widely different in these two areas and
justify very different types of action....
"... By Henry Heller, a professor of history at the University of Manitoba, Canada and the author of The Capitalist University. Cross posted from Alternet ..."
"... The following is an excerpt from the new book ..."
"... by Henry Heller (Pluto Press, December 2016): ..."
"... Inside Higher Education ..."
"... The University, State and Market: The Political Economy of Globalization in the Americas ..."
"... New Left Review ..."
"... The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature ..."
"... Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher ..."
"... Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America ..."
"... Marxism is still regarded with suspicion in the United States. ..."
"... As if on cue, sociology, psychology, literature, political science, and anthropology all took sides by explicitly rejecting Marxism and putting forward viewpoints opposed to it. History itself stressed American exceptionalism, justified U.S. expansionism, minimized class conflict, and warned against revolution. ..."
How Universities Are Increasingly Choosing Capitalism Over Education
Posted on
February 7, 2017
by
Yves Smith
Yves here. Some further observations. First, the author neglects to mention
the role of MBAs in the reorientation of higher education institutions. When
I went to school, the administrative layer of universities was lean and not
all that well paid. Those roles were typically inhabited by alumni who
enjoyed the prestige and being able to hang around the campus. But t
he
growth of MBAs
has meant they've all had to find jobs, and colonizing
not-for-profits like universities has helped keep them off the street.
Second, this post focuses on non-elite universities, but the same general
pattern is in play, although the specific outcomes are different.
Universities with large endowments are increasingly hedge funds with an
educational unit attached.
By Henry Heller, a professor of history at the University of
Manitoba, Canada and the author of The Capitalist University. Cross posted
from
Alternet
The fact that today there are over 4,000 colleges and universities in the
United States represents an unparalleled educational, scientific, and
cultural endowment. These institutions occupy a central place in American
economic and cultural life. Certification from one of them is critical to
the career hopes of most young people in the United States. The research
produced in these establishments is likewise crucial to the economic and
political future of the American state. Institutions of higher learning are
of course of varying quality, with only 600 offering master's degrees and
only 260 classified as research institutions. Of these only 87 account for
the majority of the 56,000 doctoral degrees granted annually. Moreover, the
number of really top-notch institutions based on the quality of their
faculty and the size of their endowments is no more than 20 or 30. But
still, the existence of thousands of universities and colleges offering
humanistic, scientific, and vocational education, to say nothing of
religious training, represents a considerable achievement. Moreover, the
breakthroughs in research that have taken place during the last two
generations in the humanities and social sciences, not to speak of the
natural sciences, have been spectacular.
But the future of these institutions is today imperiled. Except for a
relatively few well-endowed universities, most are in serious financial
difficulty. A notable reason for this has been the decline in public
financial support for higher education since the 1980s, a decline due to a
crisis in federal and state finances but also to the triumph of right-wing
politics based on continuing austerity toward public institutions. The
response of most colleges and universities has been to dramatically increase
tuition fees, forcing students to take on heavy debt and putting into
question access to higher education for young people from low- and
middle-income families. This situation casts a shadow on the implicit
post-war contract between families and the state which promised upward
mobility for their children based on higher education. This impasse is but
part of the general predicament of the majority of the American population,
which has seen its income fall and its employment opportunities shrink since
the Reagan era. These problems have intensified since the financial collapse
of 2008 and the onset of depression or the start of a generalized capitalist
crisis.
Mounting student debt and fading job prospects are reflected in
stagnating enrollments in higher education, intensifying the financial
difficulties of universities and indeed exacerbating the overall economic
malaise.[1] The growing cost of universities has led recently to the
emergence of Massive Online Open Courses whose upfront costs to students are
nil, which further puts into doubt the future of traditional colleges and
universities. These so-called MOOCs, delivered via the internet, hold out
the possibility, or embody the threat, of doing away with much of the
expensive labor and fixed capital costs embodied in existing university
campuses. Clearly the future of higher education hangs in the balance with
important implications for both American politics and economic life.
The deteriorating situation of the universities has its own internal
logic as well. In response to the decline in funding, but also to the
prevalence of neoliberal ideology, universities-or rather the presidents,
administrators, and boards of trustees who control them-are increasingly
moving away from their ostensible mission of serving the public good to that
of becoming as far as possible like private enterprises. In doing so, most
of the teachers in these universities are being reduced to the status of
wage labor, and indeed precarious wage labor. The wages of the non-tenured
faculty who now constitute the majority of teachers in higher education are
low, they have no job security and receive few benefits. Although salaried
and historically enjoying a certain autonomy, tenured faculty are losing the
vestiges of their independence as well. Similarly, the influence of students
in university affairs-a result of concessions made by administrators during
the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s-has effectively been neutered. These
changes reflect a decisive shift of power toward university managers whose
numbers and remuneration have expanded prodigiously. The objective of these
bureaucrats is to transform universities as much as possible to approximate
private and profit-making corporations, regarded as models of efficient
organization based on the discipline of the market. Indeed, scores of
universities, Phoenix University for example, have been created explicitly
as for-profit businesses and currently enroll millions of students.
Modern universities have always had a close relationship with private
business, but whereas in the past faculty labor served capital by producing
educated managers, highly skilled workers, and new knowledge as a largely
free good, strenuous efforts are now underway to transform academic
employment into directly productive, i.e., profitable, labor. The knowledge
engendered by academic work is accordingly being privatized as a commodity
through patenting, licensing, and copyrighting to the immediate benefit of
universities and the private businesses to which universities are
increasingly linked. Meanwhile, through the imposition of administrative
standards laid down in accord with neoliberal principles, faculty are being
subjected to unprecedented scrutiny through continuous quantified evaluation
of teaching and research in which the ability to generate outside funding
has become the ultimate measure of scholarly worth. At the same time,
universities have become part of global ranking systems like the Shanghai
Index or the Times Higher Education World University Rankings in which their
standing in the hierarchy has become all important to their prestige and
funding.
Several intertwined questions emerge from this state of affairs. In the
first place, given the rising expense and debt that attendance at university
imposes and declining employment prospects especially for young people, will
there continue to be a mass market for higher education? Is the model of the
university or college traditionally centered on the humanities and the
sciences with a commitment to the pursuit of truth compatible with the
movement toward converting the universities into quasi- or fully private
business corporations? Finally, what are the implications of changes in the
neoliberal direction for the future production of objective knowledge, not
to speak of critical understanding?
Universities during the Cold War produced an impressive amount of new
positive knowledge, not only in the sciences, engineering, and agriculture
but also in the social sciences and humanities. In the case of the
humanities and social sciences such knowledge, however real, was largely
instrumental or tainted by ideological rationalizations. It was not
sufficiently critical in the sense of getting to the root of the matter,
especially on questions of social class or on the motives of American
foreign policy. Too much of it was used to control and manipulate ordinary
people within and without the United States in behalf of the American state
and the maintenance of the capitalist order. There were scholars who
continued to search for critical understanding even at the height of the
Cold War, but they largely labored in obscurity. This state of affairs was
disrupted in the 1960s with the sudden burgeoning of Marxist scholarship
made possible by the upsurge of campus radicalism attendant on the anti-war,
civil rights, and black liberation struggles. But the decline of radicalism
in the 1970s saw the onset of postmodernism, neoliberalism, and the cultural
turn. Postmodernism represented an unwarranted and untenable skepticism,
while neoliberal economics was a crude and overstated scientism. The
cultural turn deserves more respect, but whatever intellectual interest
there may be in it there is little doubt that the net effect of all three
was to delink the humanities and social sciences from the revolutionary
politics that marked the 1960s. The ongoing presence in many universities of
radicals who took refuge in academe under Nixon and Reagan ensured the
survival of Marxist ideas if only in an academic guise. Be that as it may,
the crisis in American society and the concomitant crisis of the
universities has become extremely grave over the last decade. It is a
central contention of this work that, as a result of the crisis,
universities will likely prove to be a key location for ideological and
class struggle, signaled already by the growing interest in unionization of
faculty both tenured and non-tenured, the revival of Marxist scholarship,
the Occupy Movement, the growing importance of the Boycott, Divestment, and
Sanctions movement, and heightening conflicts over academic freedom and the
corporatization of university governance.
The approach of this work is to examine the recent history of American
universities from the perspective of Marxism, a method which can be used to
study these institutions critically as part of the capitalist economic and
political system. Despite ongoing apologetics that view universities as
sites for the pursuit of disinterested truth, we contend that a critical
perspective involving an understanding of universities as institutions based
on the contradictions of class inequality, the ultimate unity of the
disciplines rooted in the master narrative of historical materialism, and a
consciousness of history makes more sense as a method of analysis. All the
more so, this mode of investigation is justified by the increasing and
explicit promotion of academic capitalism by university managers trying to
turn universities into for-profit corporations. In response to these
policies scholars have in fact begun to move toward the reintegration of
political economy with the study of higher education. This represents a turn
away from the previous dominance in this field of postmodernism and cultural
studies and, indeed, represents a break from the hegemonic outlook of
neoliberalism.[2] On the other hand, most of this new scholarship is
orientated toward studying the effects of neoliberalism on the contemporary
university, whereas the present work takes a longer view. Marxist political
economy demands a historical perspective in which the present condition of
universities emerged from the crystallization of certain previous trends. It
therefore looks at the evolution of the university from the beginning of the
twentieth century, sketching its evolution from a preserve of the
upper-middle class in which research played almost no role into a site of
mass education and burgeoning research, and, by the 1960s, a vital element
in the political economy of the United States.
In contrast to their original commitment to independence with respect to
the state up to World War II, most if by no means all universities and
colleges defined their post-war goals in terms of the pursuit of the public
good and were partially absorbed into the state apparatus by becoming
financially dependent on government. But from start to finish
twentieth-century higher education also had an intimate and ongoing
relationship with private business. In the neoliberal period universities
are taking this a step further, aspiring to turn themselves into quasi- or
actual business corporations. But this represents the conclusion of a
long-evolving process. The encroachment of private business into the
university is in fact but part of the penetration of the state by private
enterprise and the partial privatization of the state. On the surface this
invasion of the public sphere by the market may appear beneficial to private
business. We regard it, on the contrary, as a symptom of economic weakness
and a weakening of civil society.
The American system of higher education, with its prestigious private
institutions, great public universities, private colleges and junior
colleges, was a major achievement of a triumphant American republic. It
provided the U.S. state with the intellectual, scientific, and technical
means to strengthen significantly its post-1945 power. The current
neoliberal phase reflects an America struggling economically and politically
to adapt to the growing challenges to its global dominance and to the crisis
of capitalism itself. The shift of universities toward the private corporate
model is part of this struggle. Capitalism in its strongest periods not only
separated the state from the private sector, it kept the private sector at
arm's length from the state. The role of the state in ensuring a level
playing field and providing support for the market was clearly understood.
The current attempt by universities to mimic the private sector is a form of
economic and ideological desperation on the part of short-sighted and
opportunistic university administrators as well as politicians and
businessmen. In our view, this aping of the private sector is misguided,
full of contradictions, and ultimately vain if not disastrous. Indeed, it is
a symptom of crisis and decline.
The current overwhelming influence of private business on universities
grew out of pre-existing tendencies. There is already an existing corporate
nature of university governance both private and public, as well as an
influence of business on universities in the first part of the twentieth
century. In reaction there developed the concept of academic freedom as well
as the establishment of the system of tenure and the development of a rather
timid faculty trade unionism. This underscores the importance of private
foundations in controlling the development of the curriculum and research in
both the sciences and humanities. In their teaching, universities were
mainly purveyors of the dominant capitalist ideology. Humanities and social
science professors imparted mainly liberal ideology and taught laissez-faire
economics which justified the political and economic status quo. The
development of specialized departments reinforced the fragmentation of
knowledge and discouraged the emergence of a systemic overview and critique
of American culture and society. There were, as noted earlier, a few Marxist
scholars, some of considerable distinction, who became prominent
particularly in the wake of the Depression, the development of the influence
of the Communist Party, and the brief period of Soviet-American cooperation
during World War II. But the teaching of Marxism was frowned upon and
attacked even prior to the Cold War.
The post-1945 university was a creation of the Cold War. Its expansion,
which sprang directly out of war, was based on the idea of education as a
vehicle of social mobility, which was seen as an alternative to the equality
and democracy promoted by the populism of the New Deal. Its elitist and
technocratic style of governance was patterned after that of the large
private corporation and the American federal state during the 1950s. Its
enormously successful research programs were mainly underwritten by
appropriations from the military and the CIA. The CIA itself was largely
created by recruiting patriotic faculty from the universities. Much of the
research in the social sciences was directed at fighting Soviet and
revolutionary influence and advancing American imperialism abroad. Marxist
professors and teaching programs were purged from the campuses.
Dating from medieval times, the curriculum of the universities was based
on a common set of subjects including language, philosophy, and natural
science premised on the idea of a unitary truth. Although the subject matter
changed over the centuries higher education continued to impart the
hegemonic ideology of the times. Of course the notion of unitary truth was
fraying at the seams by the beginning of the twentieth century with the
development of departmental specialization and the increasingly contested
nature of truth, especially in the social sciences in the face of growing
class struggle in America. However, the notion of the idea of the unity of
knowledge as purveyed by the university was still ideologically important as
a rationale for the existence of universities. Moreover, as we shall
demonstrate, it was remarkable how similarly, despite differences in subject
matter and method, the main disciplines in the humanities and social
sciences responded to the challenge of Marxism during the Cold War. They all
developed paradigms which opposed or offered alternatives to Marxism while
rationalizing continued loyalty to liberalism and capitalism. As if on cue,
sociology, psychology, literature, political science, and anthropology all
took sides by explicitly rejecting Marxism and putting forward viewpoints
opposed to it. History itself stressed American exceptionalism, justified
U.S. expansionism, minimized class conflict, and warned against revolution.
Indeed, this work will focus on these disciplines because they defended the
capitalist status quo at a deeper cultural and intellectual level than the
ubiquitous mass media. As Louis Althusser pointed out, the teaching received
by students from professors at universities was the strategic focal point
for the ideological defense of the dominant class system. That was as true
of the United States as it was of France, where institutions of higher
learning trained those who would later train or manage labor. Criticizing
the recent history of these disciplines is thus an indispensable step to
developing an alternative knowledge and indeed culture that will help to
undermine liberal capitalist hegemony.[3]
The approach of this work is to critically analyze these core academic
subjects from a perspective informed by Pierre Bourdieu and Karl Marx.
Bourdieu points out that the deep involvement of the social sciences (and
the humanities) with powerful social interests makes it difficult to free
their study from ideological presuppositions and thereby achieve a truly
socially and psychologically reflexive understanding.[4] But such reflexive
knowledge was precisely what Marx had in mind more than a century earlier.
Leaving a Germany still under the thrall of feudalism and absolutism for
Paris in 1843, the young Marx wrote to his friend Arnold Ruge that
reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form but,
if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not
our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at
present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists,
ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives
at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the
powers that be.[5]
His task as he saw it was to criticize the existing body of knowledge so
as to make it as reasonable as possible, i.e., to undermine its illusory and
ideological character and substitute knowledge which was both true and
helped advance communism. Such a project entailed deconstructing the
existing body of knowledge through rational criticism, exposing its
ideological foundations and advancing an alternative based on a sense of
contradiction, social totality, and a historical and materialist
understanding. It is our ambition in surveying and studying the humanities
and social sciences in the period after 1945 to pursue our investigation in
the same spirit. Indeed, it is our view that a self-reflexive approach to
contemporary knowledge, while woefully lacking, is an indispensable
complement to the development of a serious ideological critique of the
crisis-ridden capitalist society of today.
Marxism is still regarded with suspicion in the United States. As a
matter of fact, anti-Marxism in American universities was not merely a
defensive response to McCarthyism as some allege. Anti-communism was bred in
the bone of many Americans and was one of the strongest forces that affected
U.S. society in the twentieth century, including the faculty members of its
universities. An
idée fixe
rather than an articulated ideology, it
was compounded out of deeply embedded albeit parochial notions of
Americanism, American exceptionalism and anti-radicalism.[6] The latter was
rooted in the bitter resistance of the still large American middle or
capitalist class to the industrial unrest which marked the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries and which had a strong bed of support among
the immigrant working class. Nativism then was an important tool in the
hands of this class in fighting a militant if ethnically divided working
class. Moreover, the anti-intellectual prejudices of American society in
general and the provincialism of its universities were ideal terrain for
fending off subversive ideas from abroad like Marxism. Later, this
anti-communism and hostility to Marxism became the rationale for the
extension of American imperialism overseas particularly after 1945. The
social origins of the professoriate among the lower middle class,
furthermore, and its role as indentured if indirect servants of capital,
strengthened its position as inimical to Marxism. Just as careers could be
lost for favoring Marxism, smart and adroit academics could make careers by
advancing some new intellectual angle in the fight against Marxism. And this
was not merely a passing feature of the height of the Cold War: from the
1980s onward, postmodernism, identity politics, and the cultural turn were
invoked to disarm the revolutionary Marxist politics that had developed in
the 1960s. Whatever possible role identity politics and culture might have
in deepening an understanding of class their immediate effect was to
undermine a sense of class and strengthen a sense of liberal social
inclusiveness while stressing the cultural obstacles to the development of
revolutionary class consciousness.
This overall picture of conformity and repression was, however, offset by
the remarkable upsurge of student radicalism that marked the 1960s,
challenging the intellectual and social orthodoxies of the Cold War. In
reaction to racism and political and social repression at home and the
Vietnam War abroad, students rebelled against the oppressive character of
university governance and by extension the power structure of American
society. Overwhelmingly the ideology through which this revolt was refracted
was the foreign and until then largely un-American doctrine of Marxism.
Imported into the universities largely by students, Marxism then inspired a
new generation of radical and groundbreaking scholarship. Meanwhile it is
important to note that the student revolt itself was largely initiated by
the southern civil rights movement, an important bastion of which were the
historically black colleges of the South. It was from the struggle of
racially oppressed black students in the American South as well as the
growing understanding of the anti-colonial revolutionaries of Vietnam that
the protest movement in American colleges and universities was born. Equally
important was the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Indeed, it is the
contention of this work that the issues raised at Berkeley over democracy in
the universities and the free expression of ideas not only shaped the
student movement of that time but are still with us, and indeed are central
to the future of universities and intellectual life today.
At the heart of the Berkeley protest lay a rejection of the idea of a
university as a hierarchical corporation producing exchange values including
the production of trained workers and ideas convertible into commodities.
Instead the students asserted the vision of a democratic university which
produced knowledge as a use value serving the common good. It is our view
that this issue raised at Berkeley in the 1960s anticipated the class
conflict that is increasingly coming to the fore over so-called knowledge
capitalism. Both within the increasingly corporate neoliberal university and
in business at large, the role of knowledge and knowledge workers is
becoming a key point of class struggle. This is especially true on
university campuses where the proletarianization of both teaching and
research staff is in process and where the imposition of neoliberal work
rules is increasingly experienced as tyrannical. The skilled work of these
knowledge producers, the necessarily interconnected nature of their work,
and the fundamentally contradictory notion of trying to privatize and
commodify knowledge, have the potential to develop into a fundamental
challenge to capitalism.
Notes:
1. Paul Fain, "'Nearing the Bottom': Inside Higher Education,"
Inside
Higher Education
, May 15, 2014.
2. Raymond A. Morrow, "Critical Theory and Higher Education: Political
Economy and the Cul-de-Sac of the Postmodernist Turn," in
The
University, State and Market: The Political Economy of Globalization in the
Americas
, ed. Robert A. Rhoads and Carlos Alberto Torres, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2006, pp. xvii‒xxxiii.
3. Perry Anderson, "Components of the National Culture,"
New Left
Review
, No. 50, July‒August, 1968, pp. 3–4.
4. Pierre Bourdieu,
The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art
and Literature
, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, pp. 86–7.
Capitalism requires that total strangers be on the hook for student
loans? And if this is Capitalism then why didn't this trend emerge 100+
years ago? Why now?
Because a) the market for a college degree is vastly bigger today than
it was 100+ years ago b) tuitions were affordable so there was no way for
high-interest lenders ("total strangers") to game the system as they do
today.
Plus I wonder if the legal system or tax code would have let them get
away with anything like what they get away with today.
I agree with everything dude says, but the way he says it is so deathly
dull and needlessly technical . . .
it's a shame that someone so openly critical of the university system and
culture nonetheless unquestioningly obeys the tradition of: "serious writing
has to turn off 99% of the people that might be otherwise interested in the
subject."
Yes, his writing caused this reader to do a MEDGO ("my eyes doth gloss
over")
It was technical in its assertions, but has few metrics to quantify
the trends such as inflation adjusted administrative cost or inflation
adjusted government college funding now vs then.
There is a mention that the USA government has touted the "upward
mobility" or excess value, AKA "consumer surplus", of a college degree to
students and their families for years.
The US government further encouraged the student loan industry with
guarantees and bankruptcy relief de-facto prohibited.
The current system may illustrate that colleges raised their prices to
capture more of this alleged consumer surplus, a surplus that may no
longer be there..
If one looks at the USA's current political/economic/infrastructure
condition, and asserts that the leaders and government officials of the
USA were trained, overwhelmingly, over the last 40 years, in the USA's
system of higher education, perhaps this is an indication USA higher
education has not served the general public well for a long time.
The author mentions this important point "These so-called MOOCs,
delivered via the internet, hold out the possibility, or embody the
threat, of doing away with much of the expensive labor and fixed capital
costs embodied in existing university campuses. Clearly the future of
higher education hangs in the balance with important implications for
both American politics and economic life."
Maybe the MOOCs are the low cost future as the 4 year degree loses
economic value and the USA moves to a life-long continuous education
model?
And that rate doesn't even mention what scores they achieved.
MOOCs are hopeless especially since college is now less about
getting an education and more about a statement about a young
person's lifestyle or identity.
Now sure about the `now' bit. I maybe a bit cynical but I've
always thought, even when I was at one, that
colleges/universities major function was as a middle-class
finishing school for those unable to afford the real deal in
Switzerland.
I do not agree and it is deathly dull and needlessly technical. In
fact it remains me off the marxistic education I enjoyed growing up in
East Germany.
Maybe it is time to rethink after school education. Physical Labor should
loose its stain of being for loosers and stupid people. A whole lot of
professions could be better taught through apprentiships and technical
college mix.( many younge people would maybe enjoy being able to start
qualified work after only 3 additional years of education).
And do we really need 12 years of standard school education? There are so
many kids that do not function well in school.
Universities should be for the really eager and talented who want to
spend a big part of
their youth learning.
I guess we need a lot of new ideas to get away from the old paradigma (
anti- marxist or marxist)
I don't know how you read other works from academics if you think that
this
was dull.
Do you or anyone thinking this was "dull" have any examples of
academic essays or books that contain useful knowledge but also consider
them "shiny?"
Personally, I thought this was a very good essay as it explains some
things I've been thinking about American higher education and quite a few
things about my personal university education at a tier-1 research
school.
Basically universities have become a cog in the machine of neoliberalism.
Rather than anything resembling an institution for the public good, it
has taken on the worst aspects of corporate America (and Canada). You can
see this in the way they push now for endowment money, the highly paid
senior management contrasted with poorly paid adjuncts, and how research is
controlled these days. Blue skies research is cut, while most research is
geared towards short-term corporate profit, from which they will no doubt
milk society with.
I tremble when I think about what all of this means:
1. Students won't be getting a good education when they are taught by
adjuncts being paid poverty wages.
2. Corporations will profit in the short run.
3. The wealthy and corporations due to endowment money have a huge sway.
4. Blue skies research will fall and over time, US leadership in hard
sciences.
5. The productivity of future workers will be suppressed and with it, their
earning potential.
6. Related to that, inequality will increase dramatically as universities
worsen the situation.
7. There will be many "left behind" students and graduates with high debt,
along with bleak job prospects.
8. State governments, starving for tax money will make further cuts,
worsening these trends.
9. Anything hostile to the corporate state (as the article notes) will be
suppressed.
10. With it, academic freedom and ultimately democracy will be much reduced.
What it means is decline in US technological power, productivity gains,
and with it, declining living standards.
All of these trends already are happening. They will worsen.
I'd agree that a more readable version of this should be made for the
general public.
But your description suggests an inevitable bleak dystopic future – a
self-fulfilling prophesy. The future is not written – we can help
determine its course. It starts with grass roots movement building in
your neighborhood and community. And I can't think of a more rewarding
task then creating a better future for our children.
But perhaps my farmer's work ethic, my inclination to side with the
underdog and stand up to the bully capitalists, are notions that most
Americans no longer possess. Perhaps Cornel West is correct when he
states: "The oppressive effect of the prevailing market moralities leads
to a form of sleepwalking from womb to tomb, with the majority of
citizens content to focus on private careers and be distracted with
stimulating amusements. They have given up any real hope of shaping the
collective destiny of the nation. Sour cynicism, political apathy, and
cultural escapism become the pervasive options."
However, it is my observation that Trump's election has woken this
sleepwalking giant, and that his bizarre behavior continues to energize
people to resist. So why not rebel and help bring down the neoliberal
fascists. Is there any cause more worthy? And for those who won't try
because they don't think they can win, consider the words of Chris
Hedges: "I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists
because they are fascists."
I'm going to complain about your headline. A lot of stuff on this blog is
obviously relevant only to the USA, and when it's obvious it doesn't need to
be mentioned in the headline. But it's not at all obvious that this topic is
only about the USA (or North America, since the author is in Canada?), so
maybe you could edit the headline to reflect that it is in fact only about
the USA?
My observation of Australian universities is that they have similar
problems, although maybe to a lesser extent. But I doubt the same things
happen in all countries. I'd be interested to know more about mainland
European universities, and ex-Soviet-bloc universities, and Chinese
universities, and Third World universities.
As for "Universities with large endowments are increasingly hedge funds
with an educational unit attached", I think the rich universities in the UK
(i.e. the richer residential Oxbridge colleges, if you count them as
universities – Oxford and Cambridge Universities themselves are not
particularly rich – plus maybe Imperial College?) have very little invested
in hedge funds and a lot in property. Can anyone confirm or deny that?
In the past two decades, the UK's top universities, often called the
Russell Group after the Russell Hotel in Russell Square where they met to
form a sort of lobby group, have made money and started hiring rock star
academics. I don't know how much these academics teach, but they often
pontificate in the media.
Big business, oligarchs and former alumni (often oligarchs) donate
money, allowing them to build up their coffers. Imperial is developing an
area of west London.
Oxbridge colleges own a lot of property. Much of the land between
Cambridge and London is owned by Cambridge colleges. This goes back to
when they were religious institutions and despite Henry VIII's
dissolution of the monasteries.
London Business School has expanded from its Regent's Park base to
Marylebone as the number of students, especially from Asia, grow. I have
spoken to students from there and Oxford's Said Business School and know
people who have guest lectured there. They were not impressed. Plutonium
Kun has written about that below.
Oxford and Cambridge are British state universities as I understand
it. The Russell Group consists primarily of state institutions that
have assumed / been given / been restored to an elite role in the
British system of higher education, which is overwhelmingly public.
Oxford and Cambridge are at the peak of a relatively flat hierarchy of
elite public higher education. Higher ed's role in the constitution of
British elites is characterized by 3 features: association with an
institutional reputation and thereby access to a network, a financial
hurdle, and a meritocratic process of selection. Of these the
financial hurdle is the least problematic – tuition is still peanuts
compared to that at American elite institutions.
Things have gotten better – you no longer have to be a male member
of the church of England to get in – and the system is more democratic
than the French system of elite public higher ed, i.e. the ruling
elite in the UK can be penetrated by working people, e.g. Corbyn.
My son is half Japanese and half American and holds a passport with both
countries, he is still in elementary school, but my wife and I are
encouraging him to go to school in Japan or to Germany (ancestral home) and
seek his fortunes outside of the US as the crapification of the US roller
coasters out of control.
Japanese universities are still affordable compared to the US and it's
administrative layer, modestly paid, isn't run by MBAs, corporate hacks and
neoliberal apologists and others who would better serve the public by
decorating a lamp post somewhere with piano wire tightly wrapped around
their necks!
My niece attended Kyoto University, one of the best schools in Japan and
it cost her and her parents about 7500.00 a year. She commuted from Nara
City and Finished her degree in just under three years and had a job waiting
for her in the middle of her third year.
Now, I agree that Japanese universities have their fare share of problems
and insanity, but the thought of dealing with US universities nauseates my
wife and me.
The only school in the US that I would want my son to attend would be
Caltech, if he could ever successfully get accepted. They still do great
science there, much of it blue sky research. LIGO is still running!
https://eands.caltech.edu/random-walk-3/
An increasing number of British students are going to the Netherlands
and, to a lesser extent, Germany for courses taught in English and for
under EUR2000 per annum. Leiden and Maastricht are particularly favoured.
Apparently, some Spanish universities are cottoning on to that market.
Half a dozen years ago, a clown masquerading as a BBC breakfast news
reporter went to have a look and condescend. Her concluding remark was,
"The question is are continental universities as good as British ones."
The university system is not set up for education. it's a reward to
the conformists who studied 12 hours a day all through jr
high/highschool to pass the university entrance exams (which
notoriously don't test for any useful knowledge). The idea being that
if you waste your whole childhood studying for a phoney test, you
won't dare question the system once you're in the workforce, as it
would mean admitting your whole childhood was wasted!
Since college is viewed as a reward, rather than a challenge,
there's very little learning going on. it's about developing
relationships (and drinking problems) with future members of this
elite class.
So most Japanese corporations wind up having to teach the grads
everything on the job anyway.
A Japanese degree doesn't mean 'i know things' it means 'i have
already by age 20 sacrificed so much that i don't dare ever rock the
boat', which is exactly how the corporations and govt bureaucracies
want it.
You might say "oh but science! Japanese are good at that!"
But my wife, a nurse, says that it's considered rude to flunk an
incompetent student, providing she/he's respectful of the professor.
There are doctors who routinely botch surgeries, but firing them would
be rude. These doctors would have flunked out of regular (i.e.
non-Japanese) universities.
Having on more than one occasion suffered through management
restructuring organised by MBA's which did nothing other than reduce
productivity in favour of meaningless metrics and increase the power of
managers who had no idea how to actually do the job, I'm increasingly coming
to the conclusion that the MBA was a clever invention by an anarchist
determined to create a virus to undermine capitalism from within. At least,
thats the only possible theory that makes sense to me.
I agree . Putting it more bluntly the MBA is a clever con to get
would-be students to sign up in the belief it'll teach them something
that can't be taught – how to make money. I've said this on this blog
before – the ability to make money is a knack ; it doesn't matter what
the field is it's all akin to someone selling cheap goods on a market
stall .
Many UK universities are targeting foreign, especially Asian, students
for the purpose of profit, not education. Some universities refer to
students as clients.
Some provincial universities are opening campuses in London as foreign
students only want to study in London.
There are many Chinese would be students in London this week. Some
universities have open days at the moment. When the youngsters and their
parents are not attending such days, they go shopping at Bicester Village,
just north of Oxford. It's odd to see commuters arriving from
Buckinghamshire at Marylebone for work and Chinese and Arab tourists going
shopping in the opposite direction, and the reverse in the evening.
The targeting of rich Asian students, often not up to academic standard,
has led to a secondary school in mid-Buckinghamshire, where selective
education prevails at secondary / high school, to take Chinese students for
the summer term and house them with well to do (only) local parents. The
experiment went well for the "grammar" school, i.e. it made money. As for
the families who housed the kids, not so much. There were complaints that
the children could speak little or no English, which is not what they
expected, so the host families could barely interact with the visitors. The
school wants to repeat the programme and expand it to a full year. That is
the thin end of a wedge as the school will scale back the numbers of local
children admitted and probably expand the programme to the entire phase of
secondary / high school. It's like running a boarding school by stealth. The
school is now an "academy", so no longer under government control and
similar to charter schools, and can do what it wants.
Yves Smith,
I like your introduction to the article. "Universities with large endowments
are increasingly hedge funds with an educational unit attached" A recent and
very simple but eye opener interview on the subject-Richard
Wolff-http://www.rdwolff.com/rttv_boom_bust_for_profit_schools_are_making_money_but_failing_the_grade
As Henry Heller mentions Bourdieu, I can not find among his bibliography
much on the specific increasing dominance of the "free market" over learning
institutions. The Field of Cultural Production focuses mainly on the
opposition market/art,cultural field and the rules of art. Some of his other
works elaborate very well on the transformed reproduction of social agents
with different economic and cultural capital weights. His major works on
higher learning are The State Nobility and Academic Discourse, which are
about the homologies between the hierarchy of higher learning centers and
the market position occupiers which the latter produce. All of it within the
French context. The great late Bourdieu certainly denounced the increasing
free market ideology presence and dominance on "everything human"(i.e Free
Exchange, Against the Tyranny of the Market and elsewhere); yet not much in
that regard-to my knowledge-on the centers with the granted power to issue
higher learning degrees. I guess my point is that Heller's reference to
Bourdieu strikes me as a bit odd here.
Nevertheless, I like Heller's article. Just as incidental evidence: my
town's community college President is a CPA and MBA title holder, the
Economics 101 class taught does not deviate the slightest from economic
orthodoxy doctrine and I must add that, despite-or because of- a 75%
tutoring fee increase in the last eight years, the center has consistently
generated a surplus aided by the low wages from the vastly non-tenured
teachers.
The students from China, Singapore and the Middle East often live in the
upscale areas of London, often at home rather than rent. Parents are often
in tow. They also drive big and expensive cars.
It's amazing to see what is driven and by whom around University,
Imperial and King's colleges and the London School of Economics in central
London. This was remarked upon by US readers a couple of years ago. Parking
is not cheap, either.
A friend and former colleague was planning to rent at Canary Wharf where
he was a contractor. He put his name down and was getting ready to move in.
The landlord got in touch to say sorry, a family from Singapore was coming
and paying more. Apparently, Singaporeans reserve well in advance, even
before the students know their exam results.
A golf course was put up for sale near home. The local authority tipped
off some upscale estate agents / realtors from London. A Chinese buyer has
acquired the thirty odd acre property. Without planning (construction)
permission, the property is worth £1.5m. With planning permission, it's
worth £1m per acre. A gated community / rural retreat for the Chinese
student community is planned. Oxford, London, Shakespeare Country, Clooney
Country and Heathrow are an hour or less away.
My favorite line:
Marxism is still regarded with suspicion in the United States.
I love a good Marxist and I know that a totalizing perspective such as
Marxism requires a certain amount of generalization, but I found more to
criticize in this post than to recommend it. Apparently entire disciplines
have agency (
As if on cue, sociology, psychology, literature, political
science, and anthropology all took sides by explicitly rejecting Marxism and
putting forward viewpoints opposed to it. History itself stressed American
exceptionalism, justified U.S. expansionism, minimized class conflict, and
warned against revolution.
).
It is clearly true that the modern university is overly focused on
money-making – both the university enterprise itself and the selling of
higher ed to students – but, from my long experience with one big Tier One
and lesser knowledge of several others, it is wrong to say that the modern
university looks to operate as a business. Indeed, the top heaviness of
bureaucratic administration in the modern university is not very
business-like.
IMO what declining public funding has done is allow/force the modern
university to aim it's giant vacuum sucker in any and every direction. By
the way, if Wisconsin is any example, there are enough Chinese students
interested in American university degrees to keep it in business for quite a
long time.
But my biggest complaint is with the history. After first laying out an
ideal (but not very) historical vision of the utopian university, in
contrast with today's money grubber, he later admits that the mid-century
university was not all that open to leftism. Then the miracle of the 1960s,
which seems to spring from social protest alone. The real story of the 1960s
was the huge expansion of higher ed in the U.S., which led to considerable
faculty hiring, which allowed a lot of leftists to get hired in the 1960s
and early 1970s (often at second or third-tier schools) when they would not
have in the 1950s. This was always going to be a one-time event.
The author also seems to suggest that universities owe it to Marxists to
hire them if their analysis is good. This is a weird argument for a Marxist
to make, seemingly entirely oblivious to the overall political economy he
otherwise emphasizes. It ends up sounding more than a bit self-serving. I'm
not sure lecturing in History on the public dime is Marx's idea of praxis.
"... To insist that offshoring and illegal immigration were not partially responsible for the increase in US inequality is gross denial. As with the earlier moves to the southern states, the lives of the illegal immigrants and the workers in Mexico and Asia were improved, but US workers paid a dear price in wage loss. ..."
"... Another huge factor was the financialization that was occurring during this period (perhaps somewhat due the other changes and their effect on the nations politics). ..."
"... Most college grads are working jobs that do not require a degree. Indeed many jobs routinely filled by high school graduates when I was young now want a college degree. Melvin completely nails it. ..."
"... College degree now serves as a filter to cut off unnecessary applicants. That does not means that the college degree by itself is not worth it. There is a value in the college degree beyond job market prospects. In this sense huge inflation of the cost of higher education is a big injustice in itself. ..."
"... My last point would be that, with things like Dynasty trusts, it becomes much easier for the top .01% to maintain their place at the top of the income 'food chain', versus people born into families of more modest means. Those people in the .01% can send their children to the truly best schools in the country, whereas the rest of us go to whatever schools our parents can afford, or however much college debt we're willing to absorb. ..."
Why the surge in inequality?
Good question. When did this surge begin? What was going on that might have led to this surge?
Seems a lot of agreement on the 1970s as the beginning. What was going on in the 1970? Beginnings
of offshoring to Mexico and Asia (the movement of well paying 'rustbelt' union jobs to the cheap
labor southern states had begun earlier with questionable net in that southern labor gained and northern
lost), industrial automation began to take off (especially in auto manufacturing – car plants that
employed 5k in 1970 were producing more cars with 1.2k by the end of the 70s), but just as significant
– about this time, the US began to lose market share to European and Asian manufacturing.
The education thing is a canard. In the 1950s, Detroit employed millions of workers who had less
than a high school education; by the late 50s, they demanded a high school diploma; today, they can
demand an Associate degree. All apart of the selection process. Higher academic credentials help
the individual find a better paying job, but do not in fact create anymore jobs, let alone the well
paying assembly line jobs of before.
To insist that offshoring and illegal immigration were not partially responsible for the increase
in US inequality is gross denial. As with the earlier moves to the southern states, the lives of
the illegal immigrants and the workers in Mexico and Asia were improved, but US workers paid a dear
price in wage loss.
Another huge factor was the financialization that was occurring during this period (perhaps somewhat
due the other changes and their effect on the nations politics).
In toto, it was a convergence of: loss of market, automation, offshoring, illegal immigrant laborers,
this financialization that led to the surge in inequality.
The paper above references a book called "The Race between Education and Technology" that
provides a useful framing of the issue. Essentially:
"The book argues that technological change, education, and inequality have been involved
in a kind of race. During the first eight decades of the twentieth century, the increase of
educated workers was higher than the demand for them. This had the effect of boosting income
for most people and lowering inequality. However, the reverse has been true since about 1980.
This educational slowdown was accompanied by rising inequality. The authors discuss the complex
reasons for this, and what might be done to ameliorate it."
However, authors of the paper mentioned in the OP do dismiss education as a major cause
of inequality if we are looking at the 1% vs the 99% (rather than a more broad measure).
DrDick -> sanjait...
, -1
Most college grads are working
jobs that do not require a degree. Indeed many jobs routinely filled by high school graduates
when I was young now want a college degree. Melvin completely nails it.
"Most college grads are working jobs that do not require a
degree."
College degree now serves as a filter to cut off
unnecessary applicants.
That does not means that the college degree by itself is
not worth it. There is a value in the college degree beyond
job market prospects.
In this sense huge inflation of the cost of higher
education is a big injustice in itself.
I agree that I don't think there
was any one single thing which started driving inequality.
You pointed out 'Beginnings of
offshoring to Mexico and Asia (the movement of well paying 'rustbelt' union jobs to the cheap
labor southern states had begun earlier with questionable net in that southern labor gained
and northern lost)'. True, but implicitly those southern states were 'right to work' states
which is why the labor was cheaper.
Also, I believe in Thomas Pikkety's book 'Capital in the 21st Century' he pointed out that
the top .01% have so much wealth, they can't spend all the income they earn from dividends,
so that gets reinvested into more equities (stocks, bonds, et al) which then earn even more
dividends.
And when you point out automation, implicit in that is that the owners of the company (either
privately or stockholders) will increase their share of the 'pie', so to speak, which gets
split between the entrepreneurs and the workers, also increasing the inequality.
My last point would be that, with things like Dynasty trusts, it becomes much easier for
the top .01% to maintain their place at the top of the income 'food chain', versus people born
into families of more modest means. Those people in the .01% can send their children to the
truly best schools in the country, whereas the rest of us go to whatever schools our parents
can afford, or however much college debt we're willing to absorb.
"... Another quibble, the defining of inequality by the single metric of share of income of the 1% is a bit reductive, though only a bit. ..."
"... Sometimes I think that the success of neoliberalism would be impossible without computer revolution. ..."
"... Bargaining power was squashed by neoliberalism by design. So this is not a "natural" development, but an "evil plot" of financial oligarchy, so to speak. In this sense dissolution of the USSR was a huge hit for the US trade unions. ..."
"... Education is now used as the filter for many jobs. So people start to invest in it to get a pass, so to speak. With the neoliberal transformation of universities it now often takes pervert forms such as "diploma mills" or mass production of "Public relations" graduates. ..."
"... Neoliberal transformation of universities into profit centers also played the role in increasing the volume -- they need "customers" much like McDonalds and use misleading advertisements, no entrance exams, and other tricks to lure people in. ..."
If the world were sane, this is the kind of thinking that would be taking place about inequality.
Rather than jumping to simple conclusions based on heavy priors (which is where too much of the
"debate" starts and stops), one starts with a broad, open minded and contemplative review that
seeks to identify primary causal factors.
That said ... there is a lot that could be quibbled here.
One, it's not always the case that identifying primary causes leads one directly to solutions.
Sometimes the solution has little to do with the cause. If, for example, changing climate causes
an increase in forest fires, we should consider that as another factor in our evaluation of climate
economics, but in terms of strategies for addressing forest fires, we have to find proximate solutions.
Although in practice, certainly we will often have a better understanding of what solutions
might be possible and might be effective when we carefully analyze causes. The endeavor of identifying
causes is absolutely worthwhile for that reason.
Another quibble, the defining of inequality by the single metric of share of income of
the 1% is a bit reductive, though only a bit.
Last note ... I notice international trade is not mentioned here. That doesn't mean it isn't
a primary driver, although as I've said many times, I don't think it is a primary driver, and
it appears Kenworthy didn't think it even worth mentioning.
Although my biggest quibble is that I think Kenworthy missed the big cause entirely: the effect
technology has had in making workers fungible.
IT has made communications almost free and made micromanagement of business systems ubiquitous.
As a result, firms are no longer dependent on long-tenured workers, or even teams of workers in
a particular place. Anything and anyone can be replaced and outsourced (in the broadest sense
of the term, not just offshoring to foreign workers), and when costs are high companies do this
aggressively.
This change has immeasurably changed the nature of work and the relative bargaining powers
of individual workers and even teams of workers. That, I believe, is why education is rising,
and doing so in the countries that are most adept and aggressive about business process solutions
implementation across many sectors. If I'm right, we will see this trend accelerate very soon
in countries that are laggards in this domain, as they finally start operating as resource planned
enterprises.
Because this effect is not measured and difficult to measure ... I think it gets overlooked.
But if I were a researcher in this field, I'd be looking at ERP adoption trends vs within firm
inequality trends and looking for correlations. This would get confounded by firm size but I bet
there are ways to tease out the effect.
"the effect technology has had in making workers fungible."
Yes, this is a very good point. Especially computer revolution and related revolution in telecommunications.
Starting from "PC revolution" (August 12, 1981) the pace of technological innovation was really
breathtaking. Especially in hardware.
Regular smartphone now is more powerful then a mainframe computer of 1971 which would occupy
a large room with air conditioning (IBM 360/370 series). So say nothing about early 1960th ("Desk
Set" movie with Katharine Hepburn, which was probably the first about displacement of workers
by computers, was produced in 1957)
"This change has immeasurably changed the nature of work and the relative bargaining powers
of individual workers and even teams of workers. That, I believe, is why education is rising..."
The nature of work in "classic" human fields (agriculture, steel industry, electrical generation,
law, etc) was not changed dramatically but the "superstructure" above them did.
Sometimes I think that the success of neoliberalism would be impossible without computer
revolution.
Bargaining power was squashed by neoliberalism by design. So this is not a "natural" development,
but an "evil plot" of financial oligarchy, so to speak. In this sense dissolution of the USSR
was a huge hit for the US trade unions.
Education is now used as the filter for many jobs. So people start to invest in it to get
a pass, so to speak. With the neoliberal transformation of universities it now often takes pervert
forms such as "diploma mills" or mass production of "Public relations" graduates.
Neoliberal transformation of universities into profit centers also played the role in increasing
the volume -- they need "customers" much like McDonalds and use misleading advertisements, no
entrance exams, and other tricks to lure people in.
So university education now is a pretty perverted institution too.
"... "Nearly half of young Americans start their working lives with student debt, and 43 million Americans carry student loans. A new study by the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center (GFLEC) at the George Washington University School of Business found that many borrowers are struggling to make student loan payments and regret their borrowing. ..."
"... GFLEC's newly published policy brief reports that most borrowers did not fully understand what they were taking on when they obtained student loans. Additionally, 54 percent of student loan holders did not try to figure out what their monthly payments would be before taking out loans. And 53 percent said that if they could go back and redo the process of taking out loans, they would do things differently. " ..."
Released earlier this week from George Washington University School of Business: "Study Finds
1 in 3 Student Loan Holders With Payments Due Are Late With Payments and More Than Half Regret
Their Borrowing"
"Nearly half of young Americans start their working lives with student debt, and 43 million
Americans carry student loans. A new study by the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center
(GFLEC) at the George Washington University School of Business found that many borrowers are struggling
to make student loan payments and regret their borrowing.
GFLEC's newly published policy brief reports that most borrowers did not fully understand what
they were taking on when they obtained student loans. Additionally, 54 percent of student loan
holders did not try to figure out what their monthly payments would be before taking out loans.
And 53 percent said that if they could go back and redo the process of taking out loans, they
would do things differently. "
Odd. I was looking at the comment by Bannon about Spanish young adult unemployment (a serious
problem, as he says) and thinking, well, at least we don't have anything like that here.
No, our young adults aren't unemployed, are they? They are simply working to hand over major
parts of their future to their debt bosses.
And it really is so much better that way. After all, if ours were unemployed, they might take
to the streets like the Spaniards are doing.
"... For over a decade now, Chicago has been the epicenter of the fashionable trend of "privatization"-the transfer of the ownership or operation of resources that belong to all of us, like schools, roads and government services, to companies that use them to turn a profit. Chicago's privatization mania began during Mayor Richard M. Daley's administration, which ran from 1989 to 2011. Under his successor, Rahm Emanuel, the trend has continued apace. For Rahm's investment banker buddies, the trend has been a boon. For citizens? Not so much. ..."
"... the English word "privatization" derives from a coinage, Reprivatisierung, formulated in the 1930s to describe the Third Reich's policy of winning businessmen's loyalty by handing over state property to them. ..."
"... As president, Bill Clinton greatly expanded a privatization program begun under the first President Bush's Department of Housing and Urban Development. "Hope VI" aimed to replace public-housing high-rises with mixed-income houses, duplexes and row houses built and managed by private firms. ..."
"... The fan was Barack Obama, then a young state senator. Four years later, he cosponsored a bipartisan bill to increase subsidies for private developers and financiers to build or revamp low-income housing. ..."
"... However, the rush to outsource responsibility for housing the poor became a textbook example of one peril of privatization: Companies frequently get paid whether they deliver the goods or not (one of the reasons investors like privatization deals). For example, in 2004, city inspectors found more than 1,800 code violations at Lawndale Restoration, the largest privately owned, publicly subsidized apartment project in Chicago. Guaranteed a steady revenue stream whether they did right by the tenants or not-from 1997 to 2003, the project generated $4.4 million in management fees and $14.6 million in salaries and wages-the developers were apparently satisfied to just let the place rot. ..."
PGL on Chicago's parking meters. Yes Democratic Mayor Daley made a bad deal. If Trump does invest in infrastructure is this the kind of thing he'll be doing, selling off public
assets and leasing them back again, aka privatization?
Seems like two different things. Here's an In These Time article from January 2015 by the smart Rick Perlstein.
Welcome to Rahm Emanuel's Chicago, the privatized metropolis of the future.
BY RICK PERLSTEIN
In June of 2013, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel made a new appointment to the city's seven-member
school board to replace billionaire heiress Penny Pritzker, who'd decamped to run President Barack
Obama's Department of Commerce. The appointee, Deborah H. Quazzo, is a founder of an investment firm
called GSV Advisors, a business whose goal-her cofounder has been paraphrased by Reuters as saying-is
to drum up venture capital for "an education revolution in which public schools outsource to private
vendors such critical tasks as teaching math, educating disabled students, even writing report cards."
GSV Advisors has a sister firm, GSV Capital, that holds ownership stakes in education technology
companies like "Knewton," which sells software that replaces the functions of flesh-and-blood teachers.
Since joining the school board, Quazzo has invested her own money in companies that sell curricular
materials to public schools in 11 states on a subscription basis.
In other words, a key decision-maker for Chicago's public schools makes money when school boards
decide to sell off the functions of public schools.
She's not alone. For over a decade now, Chicago has been the epicenter of the fashionable
trend of "privatization"-the transfer of the ownership or operation of resources that belong to all
of us, like schools, roads and government services, to companies that use them to turn a profit.
Chicago's privatization mania began during Mayor Richard M. Daley's administration, which ran from
1989 to 2011. Under his successor, Rahm Emanuel, the trend has continued apace. For Rahm's investment
banker buddies, the trend has been a boon. For citizens? Not so much.
They say that the first person in any political argument who stoops to invoking Nazi Germany automatically
loses. But you can look it up: According to a 2006 article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives,
the English word "privatization" derives from a coinage, Reprivatisierung, formulated in the
1930s to describe the Third Reich's policy of winning businessmen's loyalty by handing over state
property to them.
In the American context, the idea also began on the Right (to be fair, entirely independent of
the Nazis)-and promptly went nowhere for decades. In 1963, when Republican presidential candidate
Barry Goldwater mused "I think we ought to sell the TVA"-referring to the Tennessee Valley Authority,
the giant complex of New Deal dams that delivered electricity for the first time to vast swaths of
the rural Southeast-it helped seal his campaign's doom. Things only really took off after Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher's sale of U.K. state assets like British Petroleum and Rolls Royce in the 1980s
made the idea fashionable among elites-including a rightward tending Democratic Party.
As president, Bill Clinton greatly expanded a privatization program begun under the first
President Bush's Department of Housing and Urban Development. "Hope VI" aimed to replace public-housing
high-rises with mixed-income houses, duplexes and row houses built and managed by private firms.
Chicago led the way. In 1999, Mayor Richard M. Daley, a Democrat, announced his intention to tear
down the public-housing high-rises his father, Mayor Richard J. Daley, had built in the 1950s and
1960s. For this "Plan for Transformation," Chicago received the largest Hope VI grant of any city
in the nation. There was a ration of idealism and intellectual energy behind it: Blighted neighborhoods
would be renewed and their "culture of poverty" would be broken, all vouchsafed by the honorable
desire of public-spirited entrepreneurs to make a profit. That is the promise of privatization in
a nutshell: that the profit motive can serve not just those making the profits, but society as a
whole, by bypassing inefficient government bureaucracies that thrive whether they deliver services
effectively or not, and empower grubby, corrupt politicians and their pals to dip their hands in
the pie of guaranteed government money.
As one of the movement's fans explained in 1997, his experience with nascent attempts to pay private
real estate developers to replace public housing was an "example of smart policy."
"The developers were thinking in market terms and operating under the rules of the marketplace,"
he said. "But at the same time, we had government supporting and subsidizing those efforts."
The fan was Barack Obama, then a young state senator. Four years later, he cosponsored a bipartisan
bill to increase subsidies for private developers and financiers to build or revamp low-income housing.
However, the rush to outsource responsibility for housing the poor became a textbook example
of one peril of privatization: Companies frequently get paid whether they deliver the goods or not
(one of the reasons investors like privatization deals). For example, in 2004, city inspectors found
more than 1,800 code violations at Lawndale Restoration, the largest privately owned, publicly subsidized
apartment project in Chicago. Guaranteed a steady revenue stream whether they did right by the tenants
or not-from 1997 to 2003, the project generated $4.4 million in management fees and $14.6 million
in salaries and wages-the developers were apparently satisfied to just let the place rot.
Meanwhile, the $1.6 billion Plan for Transformation drags on, six years past deadline and still
2,500 units from completion, while thousands of families languish on the Chicago Housing Authority's
waitlist.
Be that as it may, the Chicago experience looks like a laboratory for a new White House
pilot initiative, the Rental Assistance Demonstration Program (RAD), which is set to turn over some
60,000 units to private management next year. Lack of success never seems to be an impediment where
privatization is concerned.
The Guardian is, increasingly (if you'll pardon the phrase) getting on my tits at the moment. Is there anything worse in the
mainstream media than a Progressive In Name Only newspaper?
The BBC's fair and balanced news and current affairs departments (
driven
by its sinister business unit ) are perhaps worse because of its greater reach, but it's a tight race.
Clive, intemperate: The agony of the Guardian is indeed interesting. A while back, I read that its site was the most used among
English-language newspapers, particularly by U.S. readers looking for some balance.
With regard to the U.S. political coverage, and their rah-rah Clintonism, as evinced by the resurrection of the likes of Jill
Abramson, I tend to cut them some slack. I find that many English (in particular, the English) are somewhat tone-deaf about U.S.
culture and folkways. I imagine some Guardian Uxonian editors, who once spent a week in NYC with a side trip to LA, and who have
actually eaten corn on the cob, thinking that they understand the U.S. Constitution and U.S. politics. But they still don't know
how to pronounce Illinois and Arkansas.
The anti-Corbyn hysteria shows detachment from their roots. The Guardian editors should get in a car and head out for a field
trip to Manchester (do they recall Manchester?) to find out more about Brexit and Corbyn. A trip to the English nether-regions
would do them some good.
And yet I can't complain too much: How often do they present Douthat, Bruni, and Brooks as sages?
"... the true rate of pay is often around the minimum wage. ..."
"... i was an adjunct professor of urban studies at new york university for 12 years. the entire academic department was staffed by adjuncts and part-time instructors except for the chairman, who was ironically a tenured professor of labor history. ..."
"... Having come up through the academic process and seeing the handwriting on the wall deciding to opt out of trying for an academic career, I think I can comment a bit. ..."
"... First, no one is forcing these folks to be adjuncts. It's their choice. ..."
"... The real issue is one of information and honesty or at least reality over hopeful expectations. When I was an undergrad my professors encouraged me to go to grad school and were pleased when I decided to pursue a Ph.D. They all implied, if not said, that I would be able to then get an academic job. I think they really believed this, but the reality was far different even at that time. By the time I graduated, unemployment in my field was at an all time high. The reality was that only 20-25% of graduates would get "potentially permanent" positions in either academia or research. So, when I finally graduated I posted a letter for the undergraduates informing them of the future in the field. Needless to say the faculty were taken aback, but when they checked they found that my data was correct. ..."
"... Yes, their choice. They can abandon the academic pursuit and choose another career. Most people with advanced degrees do just that. ..."
"... I agree that their are way too many grad students and they become the adjuncts that are desperate for full time jobs. But grad students serve an important purpose as cheap labor, particularly in research universities. ..."
"... What if the point of a review process was to improve teaching methods and get feedback from students about what works and what doesn't? ..."
"... We are looking at the decades long pursuit of making higher education "more like business". The mantra of privatization and that attitude that segments of our society which served the public: schools, universities, hospitals, departments of governments at all levels, etc., would all be better if they were run as businesses has been proven false a million times over. ..."
"... University Boards have, for decades, been stacked with advocates of market based systems which have been imposed on institutions which formerly served their students and the public. Students are no longer viewed as students but as revenue streams. Public funding for higher education has similarly declined as the cult of the marketplace including that institutions serving a public purpose needed to be more self funding. Because forcing them to have more skin in the game would force them to trim the fat and innovate. You know, like Walmart. ..."
"... This is a false hope–especially in higher education. The University, the large corporation, the particular governmental agency, are now beyond internal reform and we all know this in our bones. ..."
"... Somehow we must individually and collectively find the courage and creativity to move, maneuver and survive outside of these institutions–trading in the fear and anxiety of trying to succeed in dying institutions for the fear and anxiety which comes with creating new institutions. ..."
"The work is there," Wangerin tells me, "they just don't want to pay."
A one-time adjunct and contract lecturer myself, I decide to look into the
matter more deeply. Are Wangerin's contentions particular to her own experience
or are they more widely shared across the United States? And if they are, what
does this mean for higher education?
Information, as it turns out, isn't hard to come by. I write one message
to a long-time Twitter contact who also happens to be a contingent faculty member
and my inbox explodes. As I sort through my e-mails a picture of higher education
begins to emerge and, far removed from the conventional image of pipe-smoking
professors in book-lined studies, it is largely one of exploitation and control.
"I am currently teaching one class, and in all honesty, unemployment benefits
pay double that," a community college lecturer who wished to remain anonymous
told me, "I would be better off not teaching at all."
An art professor from Ohio writes in to tell me that she's just thrown in
the towel after more than a decade of work: "My class was canceled two weeks
before classes start and I decided to get my Alternative Educator License and
teach at the high school level."
I hear of a lecturer whose courses were allocated to someone else after he
spoke out about a contract clause that demanded access to his DNA; about an
adjunct who could not afford to pay property taxes on the family home after
20 years of teaching; and of someone who was fired after a student complaint
that he was a "black racist." "Whatever that means," the adjunct reporting the
incident grumbles.
... ... ...
"Education claims to ameliorate class stratification, but it actually reinforces
it," says Alex Kudera, who has taught college writing and literature off the
tenure track for over twenty years.
It's not hard to see what he means. The average adjunct lecturer receives
only
$2700 per course taught. While that amount is sometimes portrayed as easy
money, in addition to time spent in class lecturers must also prepare course
content, create exams and assignments, grade, advise students, and, of course,
travel from campus to campus. When academics are employed on a casual basis,
such activity is not compensated, meaning that the true rate of pay is often
around the minimum wage.
'Academics may enjoy more intellectual freedom than many workers,
but they also have a duty that does not generally fall on others: to research
and to publish the results of that research regardless of how unpopular
it may be.'
Proposal for a joint Econ/Law paper
Thesis : US academia is a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization
Synopsis : using de facto antitrust immunity garnered by its politically
connected administrators, academia relentlessly hikes tuitions as well as
its intake of governmental funding.
Via false and deceptive marketing, students are promised nonexistent
benefits from earning a degree, then subjected to a loan sharking racket
which indebts them for life, at inflated cartelized prices, without informing
them of the non-dischargeability of those debts.
Systemic marketing fraud is further enabled by glossy alumni magazines
touting the achievements of tenured faculty, without divulging that a majority
of classes are taught by adjuncts.
Recommendations : RICO the entire industry; consolidate it; convict
the managers; reopen it under new leadership (former politicians banned
for life), under new legislation prohibiting marketing fraud and loan sharking.
Seems like the logical solution and the only way to avoid actual collapse
of the institutions. This higher education scam can only continue until
parental funds are tapped out, which is this current generation of collage
age families. New entrants into the workforce, on whole, will not be able
to save enough, or have job security to even consider college for their
children.
The social contract that the elite are forging ahead with is the bond
and willingness to be scammed. It is amazing to see their disbelieving expressions
when any form of resistance is encountered. The rational response would
be to ease up on the exploitation, but doesn't seem to be happening. Other
forces will have to be brought to bear.
"non-tenure track teaching staff – commonly referred to as adjuncts and
contingent faculty – now make up approximately 70% of all teaching staff
in American higher education. This means that roughly three out of every
four courses a student takes are taught by someone without job security
who is working on minimal pay."
Is this actually true? If say some adjuncts are full-time other job &
teach only 1 course, some adjuncts are perma-temp FT & teach ~4 courses,
& tenure-track teach ~4 courses; then you could have a situation where say
1 portion of teachers that are adjuncts. The article mentioned 70% of ANY
teachers teaching at least 1 course in a given semester at Universities
are adjuncts
2 portion of courses taught that are taught by adjuncts: A lower number,
say 40% of the courses taught at Univs are taught by adjuncts, due to having
tenure-track Profs teaching ~4 courses & adjuncts teaching ~1 course each.
The author seems to make a logic error assuming that metric #2 is the
same as #1. It may happen to be, but doesn't necessarily need to be.
What actually is the metric #2 number?
I have empathy for the perma-temp FT adjuncts, IMHO it is no different
than perma-temp FT workers in other occupations, despite the prestige of
Unviersities perhaps somewhat masking its practice.
You're right that we don't have enough info to know #2 from the article,
but I also don't know that you've got it quite right.
If full time instructors are half-and-half tenure/tenure-track and adjunct
(for instance), that would mean that 30% of profs are tenure and 30% are
full time adjuncts. That would leave another 40% of the total that are less-than-full
time adjuncts. So you'd have a majority of classes being taught by adjuncts.
But, of course, we need more info to figure it out for sure, but it seems
more likely to me, based on my experience (~ half my classes were taught
by adjuncts during my college days, which were in the late nineties-early
aughties) that adjuncts represent a firm majority of both personnel and
classroom hours.
I'm not an adjunct but I'm a non-tenure track faculty member in the Electrical
and Computer Engineering department at a very large university. I teach
8 technical courses a year (3/3/2) while the tenured faculty teach 3 or
4 (2/1/0). We also have adjuncts who typically teach one course a semester.
I bring this up because it could be that, from the author's perspective,
I still fall into the adjunct category because my contract must be renewed
yearly and the administration can choose not to renew without cause. I would
say that non-tenure track faculty are responsible for about 50% of the courses
in this department but, being in engineering, our department is small relative
to something in the College of Liberal Arts.
This fits in, sort of, to this posting the dean of the B-school, with
a $500K salary, a supposed expert on "risk management" at Syracuse University,
busted in a prostitution sting:
More of a question here, as I see the author teaches in Ireland. If Dr.
Fuller comes below the line I'd be interested to hear her thoughts on whether
the same process is infecting Irish and other European universities. I know
if at least one college administrator in Itelamd who loudly proclaims the
superiority if the US system. One can only wonder why
Superior in what way? Science? Technical research? Economic research?
For the US undergad, adjunct instructors is the norm. (My local community
college has 70% adjunct instructors.). My local University has slightly
less, but uses more experienced gad students to guide less experienced grad
students. In any event, the product/experience has been cheapened.
Nearly half of the nation's undergraduates show almost no gains in
learning in their first two years of college, in large part because
colleges don't make academics a priority, a new report shows.
Morris Berman has pointed out that US college has become a social rather
than a learning experience. I suspect this cultural shift has made academics
themselves replaceable. Does it really matter who babysits these four-year
party retreats?
i was an adjunct professor of urban studies at new york university for
12 years. the entire academic department was staffed by adjuncts and part-time
instructors except for the chairman, who was ironically a tenured professor
of labor history.
my classes were always bursting to seams, we studied contemporary
issues and were focusing on the sub-prime crisis back in 1995. one class
toward the end of my lecture, i wrote the math for my salary on the blackboard.
it came down to twenty-five cents per student per class, a tiny fraction
of their per semester tuition. a student from the business school remarked
that i could probably make more panhandling the same hours outside in washington
square park. everyone laughed. by the time i got back to the department
less than 20 minutes later, the chair invited me into his office. "don't
talk about salary issues with your students. GOT IT!" someone had ratted
me out. guess i spoiled their day. easier to discuss poor people in the
outer boroughs than someone on your doorstep. in the following years i spent
my spare time organizing the first adjunct faculty union. door-to-door,
button-holing adjuncts on the sidewalk or in the hallways. the less experience
they had, the more reluctant they were to get involved for fear of ruining
their chances for a F/T tenure track position. they wouldn't listen, when
i explained, once an adjunct, always an adjunct. after five more years,
they began to see the light and wanted union. then the uaw swooped in, demanding
my lists and fealty. they knew nothing about activism on an urban campus
and didn't want to listen. when i tried to participate in meetings, i was
accused of disrespecting the regional organizer who commuted to the union
hqtrs. from her home in litchfield, ct. at one meeting they told us who
our "friends" were on campus. yep, heading the list was my dept chair, the
good-old red-diaper baby himself. finally, there was a vote, the union won
a shitty package that deliberately excluded any new hires. end of the semester
the dept chair sends me an email, you're fired! meet the new boss, same
as the old boss.
I do this with my students as well, noting that about 10% of their tuition
goes to me, while the rest goes to the University.
I also like to point out that they pay six six times the tuition compared
to what the people running the university did, and that's before you take
into consideration that they didn't have to pay an extra 1K in "fees."
If they simply cut me a check for the percentage of their tuition that
goes to the class, I'd make upwards of 300K a year.
Thanks for sharing your story. I am sorry to hear that you were fired,
apparently for exercising you human & Constitutional right to labor-organize.
The fact that your boss was "a labor history Prof" is worst-tier hypocrisy
& irony. Reminds me of Constitutional Law Prof 0bama, who continually defecates
on the Constitution with his assasination of US citizens overseas program,
NSA bulk spying, etc.
I hope you found an alternative job that had better working conditions
& a fairer boss.
"Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, We're finally on our own. This summer
I hear the drumming, Four dead in Ohio." CSNY
It seems the "social unrest" stemmed from the collective consciousness
permitted by
unrestrained objectivity. The master-client relationship was overwhelmed
by repeated
gestures that breached the ordained demeandor of prostrate obedience.
The balance between confusion and illumination (consciousness) must be
modified!
After all, successful marketing/propaganda begins where consciousness ends
I was fortunate enough (a long time ago) to attend an Ivy League university,
with my brother attending the same two class years ahead of me. I became
frustrated at one point, finding my courses to always be a number of degrees
more abstract in what they were teaching than I had anticipated, and sought
my brother's advice. "Brown," he said, "doesn't make engineers; they make
graduate students." As I would later come to say, we were not taught to
be mathematicians or chemists or historian; we were taught to think like
them. I can't tell you how valuable that approach to education has turn
out to be for me, both professionally and personally, as I've made my way
through life. These are things you don't unlearn.
I think about this whenever I read articles (like this one) about the
direction of education today, especially but not limited to the college
level. These experiences are being lost as we turn our schools into trade
schools and our students into mere mechanics; OK at any situation for which
they have been specifically trained, but kind of useless for those when
that has not been the case. Our elites tell us that this is what the market
wants, but I never see any of them actually asking the students, and when
I check back at the Ivy, I find that the elites still teach their own the
way I was taught. The answer is clear. we are deliberately being divided
by education into a world where the children of the elites, whether they
have earned it or not, will find no intellectual competition from the classes
below them. The Poors really will be stupid, but it will be intentional,
and built in to the Nature and Nurture the elites have allowed them to have.
Excellent comment, Benedict. The art of teaching people how to think
instead of what to think – the educator who can do this is invaluable, now
more than ever.
1. The shift needed to understand the modern University is to think of
it not as an institution of higher learning, but as a processing plant –
it produces "students" and "graduates, and adjuncts are the staff assigned
the role of processors. The model is industrial. Elite institutions of all
sorts have conspired with the University to require professional credentials
for more and more of the occupations they staff, in order to assure large
flows of people pass through. This also means that larger populations are
drawn into the debt system and thereby depoliticized.
2. The most important role an adjunct can play is to bring the issues
associated with the industrializing of the university into the classroom.
Make students aware of the labor situation, and what they're buying.
Explain to them that adjuncts, like nurses in hospitals, are expected to
overperform, and that their overperformance is what props up a diseased,
corrupt institution. It's very, very important for adjuncts not to get caught
up in the official institutional morality that guilts them into overperformance
(hospitals are probably the leader in this respect). How much overperformance
you indulge in is a personal decision, in my view, but it should never be
taken on uncritically.
My own individualized response to this system has been to take on as
many classes as I humanly can, so that a) my wages actually compare to those
of my tenured colleagues, and b) to demonstrate to students by so doing
that the University does not give a shit about their education. No one pays
attention to how many courses I teach or how prepared I am to teach them.
I've taught hundreds of courses (no exaggeration) and no one ever supervises
me or even checks in (It's happened twice in 25 years) .Fact is, I happen
to be prepared, but I stress that that is not at all a concern of the University.
I've been asked to teach courses in subjects where I have absolutely no
expertise, but since I'm teaching undergrads, know how to read, construct
a syllabus, and make compelling arguments, I get by, sometimes even comfortably.
Many get by this way. But it shouldn't be confused with providing student
a good education. And I'm getting too old to maintain the pace, as we all
do.
According to the evaluation numbers I'm somehow still providing students
with an above-average experience in their courses, but I do so full in the
knowledge that I WILL NOT overperform without making the students aware
that that is what unfairly is expected of me, even though I'm given none
of the resources tenured faculty are given. I cancel classes sometimes,
for the express purpose of the fact I need a break (I don;t get sabbaticals).
They almost invariably understand. They also are sometimes infuriated that
this state of affairs persists, though like adjuncts they fear making waves.
3. Tenured faculty are the enemy (unfortunately) or PT faculty. Eevn
the labor activists among them have different class interests than PT faculty
at most large universities. Full-time faculty are dominated by the administration
and feel themselves to be under siege, but one response to this is that
they dominate PT faculty as a means of freeing themselves as much as possible
from the industrial-style teaching of large University life. As a rule,
they are not willing to equitably share the burdens PT faculty face, and
there's no getting around that.
Having come up through the academic process and seeing the handwriting
on the wall deciding to opt out of trying for an academic career, I think
I can comment a bit.
First, no one is forcing these folks to be adjuncts. It's their choice.
The real issue is one of information and honesty or at least reality
over hopeful expectations. When I was an undergrad my professors encouraged
me to go to grad school and were pleased when I decided to pursue a Ph.D.
They all implied, if not said, that I would be able to then get an academic
job. I think they really believed this, but the reality was far different
even at that time. By the time I graduated, unemployment in my field was
at an all time high. The reality was that only 20-25% of graduates would
get "potentially permanent" positions in either academia or research. So,
when I finally graduated I posted a letter for the undergraduates informing
them of the future in the field. Needless to say the faculty were taken
aback, but when they checked they found that my data was correct.
Do these adjuncts believe that a "potentially permanent" position awaits
them if they keep going on their present path? Are they being told that
by the universities? If so, then they are being deceived. Or, is this just
a case of blind optimism and not wanting to give up their dream? In this
case, it goes back to being their choice. Or do they want a career as a
serial adjunct, and just want the job to be better? The this is just typical
employer/employee bargaining and back to their choice.
So, they can agitate for more money, security, authority, etc. which
is what they appear to be doing, or they can leave the field for one that
is more lucrative, which is what the vast majority of us have done.
It's their "choice" to be an adjunct. Really? If there was a true choice
wouldn't the vast majority "choose" to be full-time faculty with benefits
and equivalent pay? Free marketeers keep using the word "choice", but the
choice they offer is usually one where you get to "choose" between homelessness
and and marginal survival at $11 an hour. A mighty impressive choice!
Do they "believe" they're going to get a full-time position, because
realistic career expectations wouldn't help universities get cheap grad
student labor?
Or maybe they end up in grad school like a lot of people I know - because
the job market was so terrible that the idea of staying in school for another
couple of years was their best "choice" at that point in time? Since the
media constantly tells us education is always good, and those who don't
have it will fall behind, the idea that more education isn't always better
comes as a foreign idea to a lot of 22 year olds. An assembly line of cheap
grad student labor then gets funneled into adjunct teaching.
Yes, their choice. They can abandon the academic pursuit and choose another
career. Most people with advanced degrees do just that.
I agree that their are way too many grad students and they become the
adjuncts that are desperate for full time jobs. But grad students serve
an important purpose as cheap labor, particularly in research universities.
Why would they want to give that up? Again, this is an issue of information,
which is why I posted my letter. If undergrads knew the actual prospects
for grad students after they graduate perhaps they would choose a different
path. But, grad school and academia are extremely attractive pursuits for
many people so they readily put up with all the impediments in the hope
of making it as a professor. The reality is that academia has become an
avocation, a hobby, rather than a vocation for most people.
Here's a thought: maybe if our education system weren't built around
fear, we'd be able to present a more united front.
Consider: instructors are tasked with judging students and, if they grade
on the curve, punishing some of them regardless of their skill or effort and
often enough this sorting is accomplished through BS methods like high-stakes,
time-limited testing. So yeah, sometimes students get resentful of the instructors
who get seen as the enemy. And so, they take it out be leaving a bad review.
The reviews, just like the tests and grading systems, are being used
to sort and punish profs. Bad reviews from students can be devastating financially
and career-wise, as detailed in the article. So profs get scared and therefore
fail to ask much of the students, so as to come off as a "nice guy/gal."
The students live in fear and don't learn, and the teachers live in fear
and don't teach. But what if we did things differently?
What if the point of a review process was to improve teaching methods
and get feedback from students about what works and what doesn't? What if
reviews were done in a way aimed at supporting instructors, rather than
censuring them? And what if students were treated the same way. What if,
instead of a reprimand and a shaming, students were given support and encouragement
(more like Evergreen and Sarah Lawrence)?
Maybe then we'd stop being afraid of each other and be able to support
eachother as we demand an answer to the question of how it is that tuitions
keep going up while faculty pay keeps going down. Demand in no uncertain
terms that the top Admins take major pay cuts or step down so their secretary
can take over for them (with a hefty pay raise, of course, but something
reasonable ).
We are looking at the decades long pursuit of making higher education
"more like business". The mantra of privatization and that attitude that
segments of our society which served the public: schools, universities,
hospitals, departments of governments at all levels, etc., would all be
better if they were run as businesses has been proven false a million times
over.
University Boards have, for decades, been stacked with advocates of market
based systems which have been imposed on institutions which formerly served
their students and the public. Students are no longer viewed as students
but as revenue streams. Public funding for higher education has similarly
declined as the cult of the marketplace including that institutions serving
a public purpose needed to be more self funding. Because forcing them to
have more skin in the game would force them to trim the fat and innovate.
You know, like Walmart.
For decades, political contributions bought politicians who in turn mandated
that federal student loans had to be administered by banks, thereby siphoning
off billions, if not tens of billions, of dollars that could have otherwise
gone to students and universities. The politicians also permit these banks
to gouge students on interest rates, to pass laws making it harder or impossible
to discharge loan debt through bankruptcy, or to refinance their loans.
None of these abuses of students served a public interest. All of these
abuses exemplify our current model for how to apply business practices to
higher education.
In the business sense, the only concern a University has for its product
is its relationship to the revenue stream. A little like the charter school
model. Universities have a need for instructors, and in applying the methods
of successful business as it is defined today they will seek to fill that
labor need at the absolute lowest cost achievable. Those who long for the
past are out of luck; universities are never going back. Faculty pay will
keep going down as long there are new warm bodies to take the place of those
who don't like it, and adjuncts will be squeezed for all that can be wrung
from them.
Adjuncts are nameless, faceless, and entirely forgettable as far the
University administration is concerned. The administration will blow as
much smoke up adjunct's asses as needed to keep their slots filled. Adjuncts
are in an abusive relationship, whether they understand it or not. The abuse
is never going to end, as the obstacles are not just the administration
and the university Board, but the politicians, the big donors, and the attitudes
of our society at large.
What you have so precisely described is yet another Ponzi scheme. Of
course it is because that is what post capitalist Capitalism is .
Think
of it like this : there is approximately 7 billion of us living on planet
Earth and between us we can and do produce enough food, clothing and could
produce enough housing ( that's another matter ) for all 7 billion.
So the
problem for the capitalist is how do I create the illusion of scarcity upon
which Capitalism works. Answer : grab by any and every means possible –
legal and illegal , it's all the same thing – the lions share of what already
exists ; in other words steal it . That's the 1 % .
And then con the 99%
into believing resources are scarce etc, etc and bending to the will of
the 1 %.
Most of us continue to hope that we will eventually find a secure/meaningful
position somewhere in one of the major institutions that make-up our society.
This is a false hope–especially in higher education. The University, the large corporation, the particular governmental agency,
are now beyond internal reform and we all know this in our bones.
Somehow we must individually and collectively find the courage and creativity
to move, maneuver and survive outside of these institutions–trading in the
fear and anxiety of trying to succeed in dying institutions for the fear
and anxiety which comes with creating new institutions.
"... The corruption I'm going to describe seems more along the lines of converting a public institution to serve private purposes (assuming higher education to be a public institution, which I do, because education is a public good)[3]. ..."
"... Now, human nature being what it is, a certain amount of empire-building and concern for one's rice bowl has always been inevitable, but when greed for one's self, or one's class, becomes the institutional driver, it's time for a thorough cleansing. ..."
"... New York University students carry some of the highest debt loads in the nation, a fact they are bound to remember through gritted teeth when they read the New York Times report about the school's loans to top faculty for vacation homes in places like Fire Island and the Hamptons. ..."
"... The house, which is owned by John Sexton, the president of New York University, was bought with a $600,000 loan from an N.Y.U. foundation that eventually grew to be $1 million, according to Suffolk County land records. ..."
"... I think this perfectly describes what I've observed with public school superintendents also. They are like 'The Music Man.' Selling dreams that our children will be smarter, better looking, and above average if we just get with the program. While our school district has a local in charge who appears to be here for the long term, a neighboring district had a 'Music Man' or rather, woman, who got the city to float a $10 million bond issue so every fourth grader could have an I-Pad. She then left to do the same (for a higher salary) in another state. Another, much poorer, district nearby wanted to get rid of a super who had allegedly threatened subordinates with bodily harm: they bought out her contract for $300,000. In a county with a population of 20,000 and ten percent unemployment. ..."
"... It is not only at the college level that those in charge are engaging is questionable behavior. It is a society wide problem. ..."
"... To a naive student with no experience in institutional politics, their stories of resentment, gossip, backbiting, and the politics of personal reputational destruction were like a glimpse into an unimagined world. ..."
"... It used to be that there was a saying in academe: the competition is so great because the stakes are so low. But, if there is a path to six or seven figures, now I see that there is serious cash to be banked to justify working in the university racket. ..."
I haven't posted on higher education before, and a series of posts on credentialism really should
focus on the institutions where those credentials are, in the main, granted. But rather than a serious
analytical piece on the state of the university, this will be a light-hearted romp through some spectacular
examples of executive malfeasance at NYU, Baylor, and Penn State.[1] (Tomorrow I'll look at the adjunct
system, and potential effects of
yesterday's NLRB decision . And there will be more posts to come on this topic, as I come to
understand it better.)
Before I begin, though, let's recall Zephyr Teachout's definition of corruption. Not a quid pro
quo - that's the Citizen's United doctrine, now supported by the Clinton campaign - but the use of
public office for private ends. What does corruption look like in a university setting, given that
some universities are private to begin with, and that "ends," in the ancient and tricky academe,
may not always be immediately evident?
Here's a story from the University of Maine, Maine's "flagship" university. Our last President,
Robert Kennedy, gave the contract for sports broadcasting to ClearChannel, thereby moving the profits
out of state, because he took the contract away from Stephen King's radio station (yes, that Stephen
King). Naturally, this ticked King off, and King - up to that point the university's largest donor,
and the funder of many good works round the state, like dental clinics and libraries - decided he
would no longer give to the university. (Kennedy then rotated out to the University of Connecticut,
for a hefty salary increase, where he was shortly
axed by the Regents for a cronyism scandal . Dodged a bullet, there, Maine!)
Dollying back to the larger picture, King came up through the much despised and derided English
Department, in the humanities, which powerful institution forces in the administration and the Board
of Trustees are shifting resources away from, in favor of more pragmatic, "business-friendly," corporate
majors (graduates, that is, that they themselves can hire[2]. Even though King was the university's
largest donor.)
Is there corruption here? I would argue yes, but I'm not sure that Teachout's definition quite
meets the case. The corruption I'm going to describe seems more along the lines of converting
a public institution to serve private purposes (assuming higher education to be a public institution,
which I do, because education is a public good)[3]. This is evident from the King story in two
ways. First, Kennedy is only one of
many university administrators
who stay a couple years at an institution, punch their ticket, and move on to a higher salaried position
elsewhere. Second, optimizing university curricula, grounds, personnel decisions, etc. for corporate
ends is about as corrupt as you can get (as are the concomitant rationalizations and cover-ups that
occur when scandal breaks). Now, human nature being what it is, a certain amount of empire-building
and concern for one's rice bowl has always been inevitable, but when greed for one's self, or one's
class, becomes the institutional driver, it's time for a thorough cleansing.
With that, let's look at the case of John Sexton, once President of NYU. (NYU is an important
nexus for the Democrat nomenklatura , so we'll have more to say about NYU in the future.)
NYU gave president's aspiring actor son apartment on campus
Jed Sexton, whose sole affiliation with NYU was his status as the president's son, for years
enjoyed a spacious faculty apartment while the university experienced a "severe" housing shortage,
The Post has learned.
In spring 2002, NYU ordered that a pair of one-bedroom apartments normally reserved for law
school faculty be combined into a lavish, two-story spread in the heart of Greenwich Village,
property records show.
The Harvard-educated Sexton, who was a 33-year-old aspiring actor at the time, shared the new
duplex with his newlywed wife, Danielle Decrette, for the next five years, according to documents
and people briefed on the situation.
That's despite the fact that NYU officials, just weeks earlier, had warned in a written report
of a "severe housing shortage" for faculty, "especially of larger units."
NYU Offers Top Talent a Path to Beachfront Property
New York University students carry some of the highest debt loads in the nation, a fact
they are bound to remember through gritted teeth when they read the New York Times report about
the school's loans to top faculty for vacation homes in places like Fire Island and the Hamptons.
The loans, which have gone to at least five faculty members in the medical and law schools
as well as university president John Sexton, sometimes get forgiven over time as their recipients
continue to work at the university. Mortgage loans apparently aren't unheard of as compensation
packages for professors and executives in tight real estate markets, but they're usually for homes,
not vacation properties.
From
the New York Times , which broke the story, it seems that Sexton gifted himself a house,
an "an elegant modern beach house that extends across three lots":
The house, which is owned by John Sexton, the president of New York University, was bought
with a $600,000 loan from an N.Y.U. foundation that eventually grew to be $1 million, according
to Suffolk County land records.
Since the late 1990s, at least five medical or law school faculty members at N.Y.U. have received
loans on properties in the Hamptons or Fire Island, in addition to Dr. Sexton.
While that feeling is understandable, it is important to note the economic truth that the markets
for different positions often dictate different levels of compensation, whether that is embodied
in salary payments, loans, or an overarching agreement about terms of employment. And, when we
commit to provide such compensation, we do so only when we are sure
that the benefit to the University far exceeds the cost.
First,
CEO compensation
and shareholder returns are inversely correllated ; even if we grant Dorph's premise, and a corporate
model for the university, it's just not clear that top compensation means top talent. Second, why
doesn't NYU simply pay its talent more? Why complicate matters by bringing in vacation housing?
Why not just write a fatter check? The answer can only be
arbitrage of some sort: NYU giving access to property that otherwise isn't on the market, tax
advantages of some kind, a better rate on the mortgage, or whatever; some way in which NYU uses its
muscle on behalf of the compensated. But that is, precisely, converting a public institution to serve
private purposes. Not to mention Sexton openly using NYU facilities to house his son and for his
own vacation home on Fire Island. Come on. Why is that not self-dealing? And the rest of looks suspiciously
like powerful faculty members feathering their own nests. "Why not? We deserve it."
The 19th and topmost floor of the building will be turned into a master-bedroom suite, where
Dr. Hamilton will have private exits - one from the bedroom and one from the bathroom - onto a
terrace overlooking Washington Square and, to the south, the financial district skyline, according
to documents filed with New York City.
Baylor University, the country's largest Baptist university and a bastion of Christian values,
has just been denounced in
a blistering
report by the
University's Board of Regents for "mishandling" - covering up might be a more apt description
- credible allegations of horrific sexual violence against female students, especially alleged
assaults by members of the football team. The Board of Regents said it was "shocked," "outraged"
and "horrified" by the extent of the acts of sexual violence on the campus, which covered years
2012 through 2015, and the failure of the University to take appropriate action to punish violators
and prevent future violations. The Board issued an "apology to Baylor Nation," fired the football
coach, and "transitioned" (the Regents' term) Baylor's President, Kenneth Starr, to the role of
Chancellor. Starr also was allowed to retain his lucrative Chair and Professorship of constitutional
law at Baylor's law school .
As Baylor's president from 2010 to 2016, the vexing question is the level of Starr's culpability
for the "shocking," "outrageous," and "horrendous" sex scandal. What exactly did Starr know? The
allegations of sexual violence on the campus were rampant and notorious, especially by the football
players. Starr had to know something about the extent of the University's response to the complaints,
and most likely the failure to address these complaints properly. Indeed, there were several Title
IX investigations by the Justice Department at the time that Starr must have known about. Moreover,
there are plenty of egregious examples of sexual violence on the campus that had to have been
reported. In one egregious case, an All-Big 12 football player was accused in 2013 of sexual violence
against a student. Although Waco police contacted university officials, nobody in the university
investigated the case until two years later, after a Title IX investigation was underway, and
media reports highlighted the case. This was after several other Baylor football players were
indicted and convicted of sexual assaults. It was only then that the University hired an outside
investigator. Notably, the headlines also prompted a public outcry, and a candlelight vigil at
Starr's residence.
The Board of Regents Report describes the breadth of the independent investigation into the
university's failure to properly address the University's dereliction. The investigators interviewed
numerous University officials, but there is no mention whether they interviewed Starr, and if
so, what he may have said. Starr may have claimed to be unaware of the repeated failures of
university officials to investigate these complaints, but is that contention credible? Starr presumably
had to know that aggressively investigating these allegations - indeed, as aggressively as he
investigated the sexual misdeeds of President Clinton - might have interfered with his intensive
multi-million dollar fundraising efforts to build a new and lavish football stadium, which opened
in 2014. And Starr may have believed that getting too deep into the mud of the roiling sexual
scandal would undermine the public perception of Baylor's "Christian commitment within a caring
community" - again the Board of Regents' description - as well as compromise the heroic efforts
of the Baylor football team to win a national championship.
So Starr is no longer the university's president. To be sure, it's a demotion of sorts. He
was allowed to keep his Chancellorship, which he just relinquished, but he still gets to keep
his Chair and Professorship at the Law School. One might think this is not a very harsh result,
certainly not if Starr knowingly violated federal law, or by his deliberate indifference allowed
serious criminal conduct to take place at the university he led.
Not to put too fine of a point on it, but Ken Starr is accused of ignoring sexual violence
at Baylor University mostly because doing something about it would have jeopardized a cash cow.
(Note that the disgraced Baylor football coach's salay,
$6 million , was six (6) times college President "Judge Starr." Starr will also retain his position
on the faculty. Priorities!)
The New York Times says what Alternet says , in its own more muffled language:
[Baylor] also fired the football coach, Art Briles, whose ascendant program brought in millions
of dollars in revenue but was dogged by accusations of sexual assault committed by its players
- an increasingly familiar combination in big-time college sports.
Among the firm's findings was that football coaches and athletics administrators at the school
in the central Texas city of Waco had run their own improper investigations into rape claims and
that in some cases they chose not to report such allegations to an administrator outside of athletics.
By running their own "untrained" investigations and meeting directly with a complainant, football
staff "improperly discredited" complainants' claims and "denied them a right to a fair, impartial
and informed investigation."
Starr wanted the revenues. Briles wanted the revenues, the facilities, the salaries, the ticket
to be punched, etc. Again, this is quite directly converting a public institution to serve private
purposes. And like NYU, Baylor appears to have learned nothing. Starr still has a job, and was never
censured. The full report was never released. And
from an ad taken out by Baylor alumni : "Thank You Judge Ken Starr - For your integrity, leadership,
character and humble nature."
ERIC J. BARRON: We actually have launched a whole program, which is titled
" Invent Penn State ," and there are several
different elements of this. One is to do more to incentivize people on campus to get their ideas
out into the marketplace. We have many, many student events that are competitions and have scholarship
funds at the end of it. The second part of it is to add more visibility to our intellectual property.
A third part is to build an ecosystem around our campuses that promote startups and partnerships
with communities.
A general view, in my opinion, is that many universities are focused on this topic as a source
of revenue, not as educational experiences for students and opportunities for them to do startups.
We have a lot of effort on the student side. The minors have expanded. I think we have six or
seven entrepreneurship minors now that are embedded in curriculum for different colleges if you
want. Last year, we started having any student with any major to be able to get all the credits
equivalent to a minor in business. There's a lot on that side plus startup weeks and other activities
with a scholarship side of it.
We have funded but have not yet cut the ribbon on a total of 20 incubators and accelerators
around the state of Pennsylvania associated with our campuses. In March, we cut the ribbon on
what's called Happy Valley Launch Box, which is here in State College, with the idea of having
30 startups in there at any one time. I think we had about 15 before even 30 days. All of these
have gone through some sort of vetting process or competition for which they were winners. It's
growing just left and right. Many of them, we've given them seed money and they've gotten many
times more money from their community and other partners that want to enable the students.
Never mind converting an entire student population into "winners" and "losers."
Never mind that 90% of start-ups
fail . Never mind that when startups succeed, it's as much a matter of luck, and especially the
luck of having been born into the right social network. Thomas Frank has already described Barron's
program, and where it leads. This is
the innovation cult ! Quoting Frank once more:
I just finished Thomas Frank's excellent Listen, Liberal , and he has a great rant about
"innovation," of which I will show a great slab here, from p 186 et seq. Frank even helpfully
quotes the more egregious bullshit tells, so I don't have to highlight them! Do read it in full.
After visiting hollowed out mill town Fall River, Frank goes to Boston:
And:
Let's also leave aside the issue of whether "innovation" culture increases "income inequality."
Suppose Penn State structures its curriculum to optimize for startups (and not for education as such;
critical thinking skills, the construction of narratives, the sciences, research, even (relatively)
humdrum majors like accounting). What happens to the students when 90% of their startups fail,
as history tells us they will? What will they have to fall back on, if everything has been optimized
for startups, and the rest of the university's assets have been stripped?
The future lies ahead on that question. For now, I'm uncertain whether "the innovation" cult is
corrupt as such, or not. Certainly it provides almost limitles opportunities for backscratching,
logrolling, bezzle creation, and so forth. And Barron seems to conceive of it as a big revenue generating
opportunity for Penn State (rather like the football team, if it comes to that). If the program fails,
and is seen to fail, will Penn State learn from the experience? It's hard to know, but
Barron's handling of the fallout from the Sandusky matter does not inspire confidence .
Conclusion
So, what we've got here is an NYU President handing a New York apartment, meant for faculty, to
his son, and what looks rather like powerful faculty members feathering their own nests with cheap
housing; we've got a Baylor President not wanting to cross a powerful and wealthy football team,
even to the extent of failing to handle a rape scandal; and at Penn State we've got a President who's
a member of the "innovation cult," when it's not at all clear this will benefit the student body
as a whole. Have any of these institutions learned from these experiences? No. Are these college
Presidents personally responsible for corruption at their universities - for converting a public
institution to serve private purposes? Sexton and Start, yes. For Barron, the jury is still out.
And these are the institutions of higher education that are granting credentials. Not a good look.
More examples from readers welcome!
NOTES
[1] I should disclose my priors and/or prejudices: I'm a university brat with a humanities
background. Family tradition mandates that I instinctively distrust college administrators, Big
Football, fraternities, and sororities (and, my parents would urge, for very good reasons). Only
the first two will be at issue here.
[2] That is, they're creating hires, as opposed to creating graduates some of whom might be
creative enough to come up with businesses that compete with their own.
[3] If you think that implies that neoliberalism is intrinsically corrupt, since it will put
everything up for sale, including itself, you're not wrong.
'First, Kennedy is only one of many university administrators who stay a couple years at an
institution, punch their ticket, and move on to a higher salaried position elsewhere.'
I think this perfectly describes what I've observed with public school superintendents
also. They are like 'The Music Man.' Selling dreams that our children will be smarter, better
looking, and above average if we just get with the program. While our school district has a local
in charge who appears to be here for the long term, a neighboring district had a 'Music Man' or
rather, woman, who got the city to float a $10 million bond issue so every fourth grader could
have an I-Pad. She then left to do the same (for a higher salary) in another state. Another, much
poorer, district nearby wanted to get rid of a super who had allegedly threatened subordinates
with bodily harm: they bought out her contract for $300,000. In a county with a population of
20,000 and ten percent unemployment.
It is not only at the college level that those in charge are engaging is questionable behavior.
It is a society wide problem.
It is not only at the college level that those in charge are engaging is questionable behavior.
It is a society wide problem.
That is my impression as well-corruption is a society wide problem from top to bottom. The
small town mayors, courts, police, newspapers, insiders, etc may be playing with small potatoes
but corruption is corruption whether it is $1000 or a $1,000,000. I know it can't be everyone
with a little power but way too many. Makes you doubt the whole system.
Greetings from one of those coworking spaces that Mr. Frank took to task in Listen, Liberal
.
Let me tell you a dirty little secret about this place. And, no, I'm not talking about who
left a lunch in the fridge for too long. This is an even dirtier secret. Here it is:
Most of us are not innovators.
That's right. I said it.
The truth is, most of us are working on things that are, well, pretty run of the mill. Guy
behind me is doing digital marketing work for his out-of-state employer, an ad agency. Lady over
there is doing marketing for a resort in Mexico. Oh, and the guy who's my best friend here? We're
both photographers. His other main hustle is graphic design and mine is writing for business.
We have a handful of what could be described as startups, but those businesses are definitely
in the minority.
Well we don't need a sh&t pot full of "innovators" . we need people that can do what they do
well. Does everybody have to create something "new"?? I don't think so.* Edison wasn't the greatest
guy in the world overall, but as he said getting something up is 99% perspiration and only 1%
inspiration – I think he would have spit at the word "innovation", btw.
In fact, he has another lesson for the "innovators" in that a lot of his perspiration was generated
due to his efforts in stealing ideas from other people. Which is going to happen to almost all
of the (if we take their optimistic slices) 10% that do come up with something anybody cares about.
*For a good example, I love the improvement of the American pub scene over the past few decades.
But the best beer and grub isn't the best because it is "innovative" - sometimes it is a bit different,
sometimes not - but because it is very, very well done.
Slim, in your home town town there is one of the perfumed princes that could have fit nicely
into Lambert's post. Us AZ residents are paying neoliberal scumbag a premium price for their "talents"
of enriching themselves.
Oh, brother. Ann Weaver Hart. Don't get me started.
Okay, I am started. So, here goes
A couple of summers ago, I was meeting with a longtime acquaintance and potential client on
the University of Arizona campus. Madame Presidente was about to move her office into Old Main,
which is the UA's oldest building. It's revered as this sacred space. Or something like that.
Any-hoo, I was in a pretty spacious office in a building near Old Main. But my meeting host
told me that Ann Weaver Hart's Old Main *bathroom* was bigger than that office.
Yeesh.
Oh, as for the work space, were you involved in the one that had a pirate theme? Because that
place was - and is - full of pump -n- dump startups.
'King came up through the much despised and derided English Department, in the humanities.'
Although not a product of the English department at my alma mater, Whatsamatta U., I knew some
professors in the department.
To a naive student with no experience in institutional politics, their stories of resentment,
gossip, backbiting, and the politics of personal reputational destruction were like a glimpse
into an unimagined world.
It used to be that there was a saying in academe: the competition is so great because the
stakes are so low. But, if there is a path to six or seven figures, now I see that there is serious
cash to be banked to justify working in the university racket.
Nowadays I bristle when someone describes me as "faculty," even though it's technically correct,
because it papers over the fact that some of the people doing the exact same job as me have full
employment, a full salary, and fringe benefits, where the people in my position get paid per credit
with no benefits. We are "permitted" to buy into university health insurance, at full cost, but
that's the extent of our bennies.
If you're getting to the employment situation in a further post, I'll save my more extensive
comments for that.
Update: one of the articles cited in this essay says Ken Starr resigned from Baylor Law School
and severed all ties with the university this past Friday.
As someone who has a university background, as a grad student in three different universities,
and short stints as a faculty member and an administrator (I was shoved out/left in disgust from
administration)- I attest that this kind of neoliberal thinking, which automatically generates
converting public responsibility to private advantage, is commonplace. As readers here know, the
university is a place where one must strive to present oneself - and simultaneously fool oneself
- as creative and independent-minded within the confines of the matrix. This is most pronounced
in the professional school because they are most beholden to corporate money. A final note: you
will find the best to the worst of humanity in universities.
One more for the honor roll: West Virginia University's former president Michael Garrison,
who ordered the granting of an M.B.A. to moral leper Mylan CEO and Epi-Pen price
optimizer Heather Bresch in 2007,
I have to repeat my favorite historical anecdote here (h/t the late, great Paul Goodman, from
his Compulsory Miseducation, I believe).
It seems that in the summer of 1650, while the faculty was away helping in the fields, Henry
Dunster sold Harvard to a group of Boston businessmen, creating the first Corporation in the New
World, and making himself "President" thereof.
Now Wikipedia claims that Dunster "set up as well as taught Harvard's entire curriculum alone
for many years, graduating the first college class in America, the Class of 1642". So perhaps
Dunster was simply ahead of his time in creating the prototype for Trump University.
Administrators in academia hold themselves to the same high ethical standards as officials
in government. In other words, they do whatever they can get away with, and then sputter about
future "transparency," and "doing better," when their misdeeds come to light.
This blather from Austin, Texas, could just as well have come from Washington, D.C.:
"I've read the report a half-dozen times in totality, and I found no willful misconduct
, no criminal activity on the part of any of the folks at the University of Texas
at Austin, and have told the Board of Regents that I intend to take no disciplinary action,"
he said.
"Can we do things better? You bet," he continued. "Should we have been more transparent?
Absolutely. Are we going to get this fixed? No doubt about it."
Mr. Powers pushed back against the report's suggestion that he had not been forthcoming,
saying he had been "truthful and not evasive" in his dealings with investigators.
My $2c; apologies that they're a bit unpolished: One question you/we might ponder is how (a
desire for) obvious nepotism engenders privatization, versus more "principled" demands
for privatization of public goods/services. To give a very brief summary of the developments since
WWII inspired by my reading of David Harvey's The Enigma of Capital : privatization became
important once western economies 'matured', because of how this meant that there were ever fewer
(obvious) opportunities for growth. And secondly because, once more and more people started getting
degrees, there was an explosion in the number of people who were "trained" (only) for middle/upper
management positions; for who there was fairly little demand in public institutions, probably
because workers had decent unions/voice, so that the people who ran those places couldn't easily
justify managerial metastasis and the taking away of job-related autonomy (to create demand for
"decision-makers") by creating cultures of institutionalized distrust (via yammering about the
importance of "accountability"). (Though the latter was/is still an issue, it gets worse the more
neoliberalized the organizational mode gets, because of neoliberalisms implicit (rational-actor)
misanthropic world view.) Those developments strike me as separate from the more narcissistic
( professional class/meritocratic-reasoning )-related forms of corruption/grift/etc. that
you discuss above, though.
(To clarify, Harvey doesn't talk about professionalization; that's just me combining observations
made by Graeber with those made by Tom Frank in Listen, Liberal .)
Harvey's book is great; as for Frank & Graeber, I was thinking of Graeber's remarks about what
he (in Debt) calls the crisis of inclusion (which he's also talked about elsewhere, e.g. in the
Army of Altruists essay in Revolutions in Reverse ). Graeber there (as I assume you recall)
only talks about the fact that those who don't belong to what Frank calls the professional class
(and those who self-identify with them), only have the army and the church open to them if they
wish to pursue goals other than accumulating money/power; yet the higher-ed explosion must've
also had enormous consequences for the supply of people with managerial and similar training.
But I only started pondering that question recently, after reading Frank woke me up to the obvious.
How about Cooper Union president Jamshed Bharucha - who managed to screw up the school's endowment
that had been in place since 1859. Check out the movie "Ivory Tower".
NYU is a school run by money, and it's so transparent that for a board populated by billionaires,
run by a press-shy guy who helped a lot of them become billionaires, that they prop up the flamboyant
Sexton's supposed fundraising abilities and
"imperial" presidency. Fortunately for Sexton and NYU, he's paid enough money to take the
press's lashings like a good boy.
But surely such a mediocre pedant isn't the mastermind behind the bloated, technocratic, real
estate development company and vanity project (which also offers classes, which are taught by
#publicintellectuals).
Pam Martens has written several posts at Wallstreetonparade talking about NYU's corruption,
connections to Wall St, and Jack Lew. Don't have links handy but easy to Google.
I would like to point out that Chancellors Linda Katehi (UC Davis)and Nicholas Dirks (UC Berkeley)
have both recently resigned under pressure from UC Top Honcho Janet Napolitano. It seems Administrator
transgressions (impunity and self-dealing) are finding its way into the "sunlight".
Some people starting up can get "small loans" of $1,000,000 from the old man and have those
kinds of resources to fall back on if they flop. The other 99.99% of us? Not so much. How is this
innovation dogma supposed to work for those of us who can't buy our way into the Creative Class?
"... ...It might seem counterintuitive that lack of access to credit results in delinquency-seemingly a problem of "too much debt." But in fact, lack of access to credit and delinquency are two sides of the same coin. Nearly everyone needs access to credit markets to meet basic economic needs, and if they can't get loans through competitive, transparent financial networks, poor people are more likely to be subjected to exploitative credit arrangements in the form of very high rates and other onerous terms and penalties, including on student loans. That disadvantage interacts with and is magnified by their lack of labor market opportunities. The result is exactly what we see across time and space: high delinquency rates for those with the least access to credit markets. ..."
The geography of student debt is very different than the geography of delinquency. Take the Washington, D.C. metro region. In
zip codes with high average loan balances (western and central Washington, D.C.), delinquency rates are lower. Within the District
of Columbia, median income is highest in these parts of the city. Similar results–low delinquency rates in high-debt areas–can be
seen for Chicago, as well. (See Figure 1.)
...What explains this relationship? There appear to be two possible, and mutually consistent, theories. First, although graduate
students take out the largest student loans, they are able to carry large debt burdens thanks to their higher salaries post-graduation.
Second, the rise in the number of students borrowing relatively small amounts for
for-profit colleges has augmented the cumulative debt load, but because these borrowers face poor labor market outcomes and lower
earnings upon graduation (if they do in fact graduate),
their
delinquency rates are much higher. This is further complicated by the fact that these for-profit college attendees generally
come from lower-income families who may not be able to help with loan repayments.
The inverse relationship between delinquency and income is not surprising, especially when considering that problems of credit
access have disproportionately affected poor and minority populations in the past.
...It might seem counterintuitive that lack of access to credit results in delinquency-seemingly a problem of "too much debt."
But in fact, lack of access to credit and delinquency are two sides of the same coin. Nearly everyone needs access to credit markets
to meet basic economic needs, and if they can't get loans through competitive, transparent financial networks, poor people are more
likely to be subjected to exploitative credit arrangements in the form of very high rates and other onerous terms and penalties,
including on student loans. That disadvantage interacts with and is magnified by their lack of labor market opportunities. The result
is exactly what we see across time and space: high delinquency rates for those with the least access to credit markets.
...For user-friendliness, we assign each of these student debt scale variables a qualitative category. If average loan balance
on the map is "somewhat high," for example, then it means that a zip code's average loan balance is between 25 and 35 percent higher
than the national average of $24,271. Similarly, if the delinquency reads "very low," it corresponds to a scale level between 0.067
and 0.091.
Figure 6 summarizes the relationship between each of the scale variables' levels and their qualitative description.
It's Hard to Shut Down a Poorly Performing For-Profit College. California Attorney General
Kamala Harris announced the filing of a lawsuit against the for-profit Corinthian Colleges on Oct. 10,
2013 in San Francisco
Cutting off access to the student aid spigot is probably the most important way the Department of
Education can clamp down on poorly performing for-profit colleges, but doing so isn't easy-as the
ongoing saga of Corinthian Colleges
(COCO)
shows. Today, Corinthian announced that it missed a deadline to reach an agreement with the government
to wind down and sell its programs, although both it and the department expressed optimism that a plan
is coming soon.
Corinthian Colleges owns 107 campuses under several for-profit chains, including the
Everest Institute, Everest College, WyoTech, and Heald brands, most of them located in California. Questions
about the quality of Corinthian's education have dogged the company for about a decade, and students
at several of its schools
have had among the highest loan-default rates in the country. California Attorney General Kamala
Harris
sued Corinthian in October for allegedly targeting vulnerable, low-income students with
deceptive marketing that misrepresented job placement rates. Other state AGs
have followed suit.
... ... ...
In January, the department began formally requesting information from Corinthian about its practices,
including more details on its job placement results and responses to allegations of altered grades and
attendance records. Not happy with the answers it was getting, in mid-June the Department
put Corinthian on notice that it was temporarily withholding student aid money for Corinthian.
Federal student aid, largely via Pell Grants and student loans, can make up to 90 percent of the
revenues for for-profit colleges. Corinthian
said
without the government disbursement, it would run out of cash and that its existing lenders wouldn't
loan it any more money.
About a week later, the Education Department
reached an agreement that gave Corinthian a short-term disbursement of $16 million and a July 1
deadline to create a plan to sell off or unwind its programs by the end of the year. That deadline came
and went yesterday with no official agreement.
... ... ...
The Education Department is also in the midst of a multiyear effort to formalize its process of determining
which colleges provide such poor education that they should lose federal aid. For-profit colleges
are fighting the department's
current proposal. Whatever version of the new rules is ultimately put in place, Corinthian's example
indicates the path
" a mind-numbing and degrading set of scams perpetrated on students, including the bait and
switch of hitting them with extra charges they can't possibly find out about before they have committed
to the school, to the tune of an estimated $10,000 per year; providing mediocre education" That's
the essence of neoliberal university. Be careful and check facts before getting into "predatory neoliberal
university". The list of scams they're running is impressive, but you can avoid them.
Just go to your in-state public University, kids, you'll be glad you did (or at least glad you
didn't go to NYU).
Under Chairman of the Board Martin Lipton and President John Sexton, New York University has been
operating as a real estate development/management business with a predatory higher-education side
venture. A group of 400 faculty members at NYU, Faculty Against the Sexton Plan (FASP), have been
working for years against
what Pam Martens has called"running NYU as a tyrannical slush fund for privileged interests."
FASP just published a devastating document, The Art of the Gouge, which describes how NYU engages
in a mind-numbing range of tricks and traps to extract as much in fees as possible from students,
while at the same time failing to invest in and often degrading the educational "product".
The first part of the report goes through a mind-numbing and degrading set of scams perpetrated on
students, including the bait and switch of hitting them with extra charges they can't possibly find
out about before they have committed to the school, to the tune of an estimated $10,000 per year;
providing mediocre education in programs that require "study abroad" while also requiring them
to stay in grossly overpriced university housing; admitting a high proportion of foreign students,
precisely because they pay higher fees (and predictably, NYU's premiums are even higher than that
of other schools), and offering shamelessly overpriced, narrow, and not very good health services.
Mind you, that list only scratches the surface.
The second part, which describes how the funds are used, describes in gory detail how the school
throws money at real estate empire-building, disproportionately for administrative space and housing
when teaching facilities are in short supply. The third document describes how NYU is an even
more extreme practitioner of squeezing the incomes of faculty while gold-plating administrator pay
and perks. Consider
one famous example that we discussed in 2013, Jacob Lew, who was then the presumed incoming Treasury
Secretary:
Remember, Lew came from a job at NYU where he already looks to have been considerably overpaid.
He received over $840,000 for the academic year 2002-2003, which had him earning more than most
university presidents, including NYU's president. And on top of that, as Pam Martens ferreted
out, he was apparently given a $1.3 million house. I'm not making that up, go read her piece.
The mechanism was that NYU lent the $1.3 million to buy the house to Lew and then forgave it over
five years. Oh, and they paid him the money to pay the interest too. We will assume that the forgiveness
of debt was reported properly to the IRS.
In September 2009, the New York Times published a remarkable exercise in inanity, profiling
John Sexton, President of NYU..
We don't, for example, learn from the interview that his home on Fire Island has been financed
since 1994 by several million dollars in loans from the NYU School of Law Foundation and NYU itself…
This is not the only residence that NYU has made possible for its President. He has the use
of two well appointed apartments owned by NYU in Manhattan. Sexton, who turned 70 in September,
is also set to receive a length of service bonus of $2.5 million in 2015 and an annual pension
of $800,000 when he retires. That pension is the equivalent of NYU taking $10 million of its assets
and placing them in an immediate annuity for Sexton.
Sexton has plenty of company when it comes to getting out of the city in the summer through
the generosity of NYU. Richard Tsien, Director of the NYU Neuroscience Institute, bought a house
in East Fishkill, New York, 76 miles from the university, for $1,125,000 in February 2012 with
$500,000 in financing from NYU. According to an online description, it's a stone house on 7 park-like
acres with a flowing stream and a functioning 12-foot water wheel.
Numerous other NYU professors have country homes financed by the NYU School of Law Foundation
or NYU. Between primary residences and vacation homes, NYU and its affiliated nonprofits have
an estimated $72 million to $96 million outstanding in loans to faculty and administrators. The
university has acknowledged 168 loans.
So the sort of conduct documented in these three reports is no surprise if you've been following
this story, but having them documented in so much detail is devastating. I hope you'll read them
and circulate them widely, above all to parents whose children might be considering applying to NYU.
I'm an NYU grad and my son started there a few years ago. In that 30 years, the cost of
housing roughly doubled, while the cost of tuition roughly quadrupled. So, Forbes' "pocketbook
demands of living in New York" rationale doesn't really fly. The cost of educating a student
there must be less now, in the era of faculty serfdom. I wonder if one reason the tuition has
skyrocketed is because student loans are so easy to get – often "guaranteed." Maybe the
university charges as much as the families can borrow?
sufferin'succotash, May 22, 2015 at 8:12 am
It's known as preparing students for the wider world.
hemeantwell, May 22, 2015 at 8:26 am
Here's another link to a Doug Henwood KPFA interview, this time with Christy Thornton, a
grad student at NYU who was part of a recent successful organizing drive among teaching
assistants. It's particularly good on NYU's corporate-mimicking multinational strategy, funded
by jacking up student fees. The Thornton interview is the second half.
Higher education, comrades: as with options, the big profits accrue to the seller, not the
buyer. Is anyone surprised that, like our Dear Leader, NYU's John Sexton is a Harvard Law
grad? It's not the musty old tomes on torts and trusts, but the lifelong networking with
fellow toffs and racketeers that pays off big time.
An NYT article just revealed the biz model:
Seen from the Internet [sic], it is a vast education empire: hundreds of universities and
high schools, with elegant names and smiling professors at sun-dappled American campuses.
Their websites, glossy and assured, offer online degrees in dozens of disciplines, like
nursing and civil engineering.
Yet on closer examination, this picture shimmers like a mirage. The news reports are
fabricated. The professors are paid actors. The university campuses exist only as stock photos
on computer servers. The degrees have no true accreditation.
What other kind of biz gets customers lined up and pounding on the door to get in? I love
it!
So I'm starting my own educational empire: Harward, Yates and Princetown. They're all
members of the prestigious Hanseatic League, and are accredited by IATA (the International
Academic Transcript Authority).
Don't miss our summer sale, at only $995 a credit hour. We accept Paypal and Bitcoin.
Enter to win a free PhD Econ degree if you sign up by June 30th!
washunate, May 22, 2015 at 5:33 pm
His bio really is a fantastic who's who of what's wrong with our leadership class. He's a
banker lawyer professor extraordinaire. And he's got quite a doctor running the med center.
President Sexton is Chair of the Independent Colleges and Universities of New York, Chair
of the New York Academy of Sciences, and Vice Chair of the American Council on Education. He
is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of both the Association
of American University Presidents and the Council on Foreign Relations. He has served as the
Chairman of the Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (2003-2006) and Chair of the
Federal Reserve Systems Council of Chairs (2006). He served as a Board Member for the National
Association of Securities Dealers (1996-1998), and was Founding Chair of the Board of NASD
Dispute Resolution (2000-2002). He also serves on the Boards of the Council on Foreign
Relations, the Institute of International Education and the Association for a Better New York.
While Dean of the Law School he was President of the Association of American Law Schools.
NYU had a scam going with student loans back in the 1980s that finally got exposed in the
1990s. It's almost impossible to find anything about it now. The story never seemed to grow
legs.
Michael Hudson, May 22, 2015 at 10:18 am
NYU is to education what Scientology is to religion.
Remember a generation ago, when NYU bought a spaghetti factory and claimed tax
deductibility for its profits because the spaghetti was part of a tax-exempt "educational
institution."
There's a metaphor here.
diptherio, May 22, 2015 at 10:29 am
But, but…they're in New York City and everybody knows that whatever happens in NYC is
better, and more advanced and more important–and just more real–than things that happen
anywhere else in the country! Everybody knows that. NYU may have it's share of problems, but
at least it's not located in some lame city in Missouri….jeesh!
Jim Haygood, May 22, 2015 at 11:00 am
"NYU bought a spaghetti factory"
How else are you gonna learn to write C code?
Plus it served as a case study for vertical integration of campus food services.
Got my doctorate in Motorcycle Mechanics there, based on lifetime experience in benching and
wrenching.
diptherio, May 22, 2015 at 10:26 am
I'll just note that "non-refundable deposit" is an oxymoron.
The list of scams they're running is impressive, but in a bad way…go to your in-state public
University, kids, you'll be glad you did (or at least glad you didn't go to NYU).
The high salaries sometimes percolate down the ladder.
Rosario, May 22, 2015 at 2:49 pm
Today's universities only offer potentially three valuable opportunities for students:
facilities (at huge cost covered by tuition), faculty (sometimes), and peers (the best of the
three, think students as laborers versus employer with the potential for unionizing).
Students no longer attend universities as hubs of knowledge or information. They are
hubs of opportunity. By analogy, it is like paying for the opportunity to get an
interview at some high paying job.
Thus why attending NYU, Harvard, MIT, etc. is a must for any social climber, and what a
dream in NYC with cocktail parties and beautiful people abound in the midst of perpetual
fantasy.
craazyman
May 22, 2015 at 4:17 pm
The top 10 reasons why NYU bureaucrats get pay and perks worth millions . . .
Reason $10. You gotta show the kids how da woiled woiks
Reason $9. When you hire the students as hookers, you can afford to pay an internationally
competitive fee
Reason $8. They want their own rung in Dante's inferno! Whoa!
Reason $7. Take a look at Raphael's School at Athens then think about all the marble and
pillars. That's not a low rent operation.
Reason $6. They're too old to have their toga parties in a frat house.
Reason $5. When you live and work in NYU mansions, you're always on the job! Isn't that worth
overtime pay?
Reason $4. They say they're salesmen and salesmen make a lot of money. OK bucko?
Reason $3. Buildings are taller in New York than most other places. So there's more to
administer
Reason $2. They say they don't need a reason.
and Reason $1 why NYU bureaucrats get pay and perks worth millions . . . drum roll please . .
. They're not really sure, but they've hired themselves as high-priced consultants to
figure it out!!! . . whoa! ka-ching!
ginnie nyc, May 22, 2015 at 7:20 pm
Wow, Yves, thanks for posting this report. I made the very expensive mistake of enrolling
in grad school at NYU in the early '90's – the degree of fraud and shaving, simply in the
academic sense, was astonishing. My advisor was nowhere to be found after classes began for
the entire first year; they lied about who headed my department (no one), and when someone was
finally hired at year's end, he was an administrative hack from within who had absolutely no
foundation in the department, the division, or any related discipline. All my 'professors'
except one were much-abused adjuncts.
The main library, Bobst, is a fitting monument to its pederast donor (look it up). A good
deal of the collection was 'missing' or heavily vandalized; the NY Public Libraries books in
circulation are in much better shape with far more users. There were no carrells for masters
candidates in the library, for love or money. Most of the library's cubic footage is occupied
by a vast, central atrium that travels the height of the building, with the book collection
squeezed around the periphery. This atrium is a favorite place for stressed students to end it
all.
I decided to take some courses at their IFA (Institute of Fine Arts), which is near the
Metropolitan Museum. The administrator there refused to let me enroll as I was not "in the
school". I thought about this, called the professors directly, got signed letters from them
(naturally), and happily returned to give the admin apoplexy. None of this crap took place
when I was an undergrad at Penn – I never had a problem enrolling in PhD classes,
administratively, whether inside or outside my school.
New York University is not a university, it's a random collection of isolated departments
and special institutes created around famous, very expensive names, who usually do not stay
beyond 4 or 5 years. It costs more than Columbia, which is Ivy League, for what that's worth,
and took me 15 years to pay off. Even after I had to go on SSDI, which was helluva lot of fun.
Michael Fiorillo, May 22, 2015 at 8:40 pm
As a lifelong Villager, NYU has always been The Enemy, and it has been a stock phrase of
mine for a generation that it's a real estate development company with a higher education
subsidiary.
The university is a classic example of how geography is destiny, since for years it was a
second-tier commuter school that happened to be located in a globally-hyped youth ghetto
(which it then institutionalized). In many respects, it's still a second-tier school (worse,
given their extreme grabbiness) tarted up with some celebrity academics that students, treated
like rubes, will never see.
From personal experience, I know that most departments are profit centers. Twenty
years ago, I got a Master's degree in education (and, to be fair, they gave me a fairly
generous financial aid package). I had young children, so it was mostly a matter of
convenience. Of the dozen classes I took, apart from student teaching and observations,
only three were taught by full-time, tenured faculty. The others were taught by adjuncts and
TAs who ranged from OK to really terrible.
That was graduate school; I hate to think of the poor, deluded kids who can't afford the
extortionate hustle of attending this school, indebting themselves for many years to do so.
Fool, May 23, 2015 at 5:00 pm
You're not alone. NYU ruined New York City for all of us.
lord koos, May 24, 2015 at 12:03 am
Universities are now just another institution to loot. This piece reminds me of a scene in
the 2014 documentary "Ivory Tower", which if people haven't seen, they really need to.
Although I'm sure many readers here are familiar with the story of Cooper Union, there is an
interview with the University president that is a priceless peek at the looting class.
He basically squandered Cooper Union's legacy by taking the college's money and gambling it
in the stock market a little before the crash of 2008 and by spending $170,000,000 of the
college's money on a building that was not really needed. A school that had been pretty much
funded in perpetuity (Cooper Union owns the land under the Chrysler building), became indebted
for millions of dollars and they now must charge students to attend, as well as having to sell
off assets. I can't believe the guy is still president of the school.
Tuition has done it again: up by 8.3% for universities and by 8.7% for community
colleges, according to the College Board. Here in California, tuition increases
are outright ridiculous. Much of it will be paid for with student loans (though
grants, scholarships, other aid, and tax credits will cover some of it). Student
loan debt will exceed $1 trillion by the end of the year-a stunning amount.
But unlike other debt, it cannot be discharged in a bankruptcy.
The skyrocketing costs of higher education add to the strains already weighing
down the middle class whose median household income has fallen 9.8% between
December 2007 and June 2011 (Sentier Research) and whose real wages have declined
1.8% over last year (BLS) and around 9% since their peak in 1999.
We all support education; we want the next generation to be productive. So
now, under increased pressure to "do something," the Obama administration has
come up with a Band-Aid, which includes income-based payment limits and ultimate
debt forgiveness in certain cases-an accelerated implementation of program improvements
that would have taken effect in 2014. Looking forward, it is likely that more
taxpayer funded relief is on the way.
But the system itself is dysfunctional. The cause: a misalignment of interests
within the complex relationships between students, universities, the student-loan
industry, and the federal government.
Universities are businesses, and businesses have the natural purpose to charge
the maximum price the market will bear. But unlike Walmart or the shop down
the street, universities operate in a system that has become devoid of market
forces, and when they demand higher tuition, the whole system falls in line
to support those increases:
Students want an education, and they have to get it within the higher
education system. When costs go up, they can't massively drop out; doing
so would endanger their future. They can choose cheaper universities and
community colleges, but they're all within the same system, and they're
all doing the same thing: jacking up tuition and fees. And the very logical
mechanism of "out-of-state tuition" ends up being a highly anti-competitive
measure. So students fight tuition increases the only way they can: obtain
more funding.
The student loan industry profits from processing student loans and
related government subsidies. Naturally, they encourage students to
take on more debt. Risk would function as a natural brake for making loans.
But in the student loan industry, there is little or no risk as the government
guarantees the loans, and loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. Further,
the amount of a student loan is a function of the cost of a particular school-which
further reduces price competition between schools.
The government, in constant need of voter support, will fund or guarantee
whatever it takes to allow students to get their education. Any cutback
would be perceived as a way to strangle the education of the next generation.
The only option the government would have is limit what universities can
charge, similar to the limits that the government imposes on Medicare providers,
but that option is a non-starter.
As a consequence, university budgets have become huge. Administrator salaries,
bonuses, benefits, golden parachutes, and pensions have shocked the public when
they're exposed in the media. Programs that have little or nothing to do with
education swallow up more and more money. And sure, everybody loves to have
well-equipped labs.
sellstop
Tuition is high in part because people are lazy. Instead of going to
a junior college, working while they do it, then move up to a better paying
job and then continuing their education as they can pay for it, they go
for the fulltime 4-10 yrs of college to get a big degree while they party.
Then when they get out of college they expect to be made CEO of some company.
'Cause they don't like real work.
in other words it is the same old credit-based society and the inflation
that goes with it. Don't blame anyone but the participants. gh
blindman http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLwh9eMvcuc MONEY: Before Ron Paul,
was Merrill M.E. Jenkins Sr. (M.R.) . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff0dcR1_ZeE&feature=related
MONEY: Before Ron Paul, was Merrill Jenkins (M.R.) 2 . http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=3Ha8HKSUxgk
MONEY: Before Ron Paul, was Merrill Jenkins (M.R.) 3 . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yrSHMn_CZo&feature=related
MONEY: Before Ron Paul, was Merrill Jenkins (M.R.) 4 . ...etc.
Beancounter
What do you call it again when cheap subisidized credit is chasing a
modestly constrained resource (a degree) produced by a tax subsidized entity?
a bubble? hell yeah. time to eliminate the exemptions for nonprofits education...
Catullus
Missing in the "income-based" student loan repayment is that if the government
"discovers" cost savings 15 years from now by not allowing the debt to be
forgiven, it becomes a permanent 10% income tax increase. It's how you sneak
in an income tax increase to a generation of debt slaves.
philipat
It seems to me that education has been very slow to adopt technology.
I mean attending lectures is just a waste of everyone's time when the subject
matter could be better covered online. By adopting online study programs,
courses could be shorter, especially for students who are prepared to work
harder, and staff numbers could be reduced. But, of course...........
Mark Pappa .
..Colleges have the most bloated administrative staffs I have ever seen.
Who would ever quit when their kids gets to attend the college for free. In
CT, they are giving in state tuition to illegal immigrants, squeezing out the
in state tax payers. System is insane.
topcallingtroll
I had always planned for my kids to be able to go to harvard or some
other expensive private school. However i wont qualify for financial aid.
I now think they are much better off skipping harvard and me just giving
them a couple hundred thousand.
Being born in the mid sixties I was part of the last group that could
benefit from getting as much of the most expensive education possible. That
strategy for success is no longer valid.
RafterManFMJ
I had always planned for my kids to be able to go to harvard or some
other expensive private school. However i wont qualify for financial aid.
I now think they are much better off skipping harvard and me just
giving them a couple hundred thousand.
Being born in the mid sixties I was part of the last group that could
benefit from getting as much of the most expensive education possible. That
strategy for success is no longer valid.
Your biggest mistake was working hard and making a large income, as well
as being white. I'll bet you feel pretty damn stoopid. Here, I'll help you
improve your plans for your kids; convert your 'couple a hundred thousand'
into shiny PMs, then give them to them...
...and why go to Harvard now? Would be terrible to graduate into the
'elite' just when people start hanging them from lampposts by the thousands,
right?
| AldousHuxley
Employee name Job title Campus Overtime pay Gross payDescending Tedford,
Jeff Head Coach-Intercolg Athletics Berkeley $0 $2,342,315 Howland, Benjamin
Clark Coach, Intercol Athletics,Head Los Angeles $0 $2,058,475 Busuttil,
Ronald W Professor-Medcomp-A Los Angeles $0 $1,776,404 Leboit, Philip E
Prof Of Clin___-Medcomp-A San Francisco $0 $1,574,392 Mccalmont, Timothy
H Prof Of Clin___-Medcomp-A San Francisco $0 $1,573,494 Shemin, Richard
J Professor-Medcomp-A Los Angeles $0 $1,400,000 Neuheisel, Richard Gerald
Coach, Intercol Athletics,Head Los Angeles $0 $1,290,136 Azakie, Anthony
Assoc Prof In Res-Medcomp-A San Francisco $0 $1,098,588 Ames, Christopher
P Aso Prof Of Clin___-Medcomp-A San Francisco $0 $945,407 Montgomery, Michael
J. Head Coach-Intercolg Athletics Berkeley $0 $918,562 Weinreb, Robert N.
Professor-Medcomp-A San Diego $0 $869,436 Lawton, Michael T Prof In Res-Medcomp-A
San Francisco $0 $821,468 Esmailian, Fardad Hs Clin Prof-Medcomp-A Los Angeles
$0 $815,958 Reemtsen, Brian L Hs Asst Clin Prof-Medcomp-A Los Angeles $0
$813,937 Berggren, Marie N Treasurer Of The Regents Office of the President
$0 $810,341 Jamieson, Stuart W Professor-Medcomp-A San Diego $0 $807,500
Gershwin, Merrill E Professor-Medcomp-A Davis $0 $796,135 Prusiner, Stanley
B Professor-Medcomp-A San Francisco $0 $795,574 Schanzlin, David J. Prof
Of Clin___-Medcomp-A San Diego $0 $793,000 Vail, Thomas P Professor-Medcomp-A
San Francisco $0 $780,000
Check out AXNER DAVID's $180k/year salary while working only 260 days
a year!
Year Name District Building Salary Days Worked 2007 ABEGGLEN JOHN W.
West Clermont Local West Clermont Local $121,034.00 218 2008 ABEGGLEN JOHN
W. West Clermont Local West Clermont Local $123,454.00 218 2010 ACKERMAN
JILL A. Lima City Lima City $102,000.00 260 2011 ACKERMAN JILL A. Lima City
Lima City SD $104,040.00 260 2011 ACKERMANN TIMOTHY A. Milford Exempted
Village Milford Ex Vill SD $102,375.00 223 2010 Acomb Michael J. Solon City
Orchard Middle School $104,252.00 227 2011 Acomb Michael J. Solon City Orchard
Middle School $104,252.00 227 2011 ACTON JAMES F. Finneytown Local Finneytown
Local SD $104,981.00 265 2007 AdamsJohn Willoughby-Eastlake City Willoughby-Eastlake
City $117,147.00 261 2008 AdamsJohn Willoughby-Eastlake City Willoughby-Eastlake
City $117,147.00 261 2008 AdamsJennie Berea City Berea City $104,864.00
260 2009 AdamsJohn Willoughby-Eastlake City Willoughby-Eastlake City $123,675.00
261 2009 AdamsJennie Berea City Berea City $107,333.00 260 2010 AdamsJohn
Willoughby-Eastlake City Willoughby-Eastlake City $123,675.00 261 2010 AdamsJennie
Berea City Berea City $109,451.00 260 2011 ADAMS NATASHA L. Forest Hills
Local Nagel Middle School $103,384.00 232 2011 ADAMS WILLIAM J. Revere Local
Revere High School $100,410.00 248 2011 AdamsJohn Willoughby-Eastlake City
Willoughby-Eastlake City SD $123,675.00 261 2011 AdamsJennie Berea City
Berea City SD $113,573.00 260 2011 ADEN MARC E Cleveland Heights-University
Heights City Cleveland Heights High School $101,914.00 220 2010 ADKINS MARY-ANNE
Aurora City Craddock/Miller Elementary School $101,004.00 185 2011 ADKINS
MARY-ANNE Aurora City Craddock/Miller Elementary School $101,004.00 185
2011 ADKINS PATRICK D. Port Clinton City Port Clinton City SD $100,587.00
260 2007 ADREAN ANGELA A. Gahanna-Jefferson City Gahanna South Middle School
$105,209.00 220 2008 ADREAN ANGELA A. Gahanna-Jefferson City Gahanna South
Middle School $109,646.00 220 2009 ADREAN ANGELA A. Gahanna-Jefferson City
Gahanna South Middle School $114,254.00 220 2010 ADREAN ANGELA A. Gahanna-Jefferson
City Gahanna South Middle School $119,039.00 220 2011 ADREAN ANGELA A. Gahanna-Jefferson
City Gahanna South Middle School $120,397.00 220 2007 AERNI KENNETH H. Maumee
City Maumee City $110,626.00 223 2008 AERNI KENNETH H. Maumee City Maumee
City $114,461.00 224 2009 AERNI KENNETH H. Maumee City Maumee City $118,430.00
224 2010 AERNI KENNETH H. Maumee City Maumee City $118,430.00 224 2011 AERNI
KENNETH H. Maumee City Maumee City SD $120,759.00 223 2010 AHO MARTIN H.
Twinsburg City Twinsburg City $106,446.00 260 2011 AHO MARTIN H. Twinsburg
City Twinsburg City SD $108,166.00 260 2011 Aker Jeffrey C. Solon City Solon
High School $102,694.00 186 2007 ALEXANDER GLENN C. Clermont County Educ
Serv Cntr Clermont County Educ Serv Cntr $121,550.00 261 2007 ALEXANDER
GLENN C. Clermont County Educ Serv Cntr Clermont County Educ Serv Cntr $121,550.00
132 2008 ALEXANDER GLENN C. Clermont County Educ Serv Cntr Clermont County
Educ Serv Cntr $121,550.00 261 2009 ALEXANDER GLENN C. Clermont County Educ
Serv Cntr Clermont County Educ Serv Cntr $121,550.00 261 2010 ALEXANDER
GLENN C. Clermont County Educ Serv Cntr Clermont County Educ Serv Cntr $121,550.00
261 2011 ALEXANDER GLENN C. Clermont County Educ Serv Cntr Clermont County
Educ Serv Cntr $121,550.00 261 2007 ALEXANDER RAMI CAROLINE J. Olmsted Falls
City Olmsted Falls City $112,054.00 227 2008 ALEXANDER RAMI CAROLINE J.
Olmsted Falls City Olmsted Falls High School $112,718.00 227 2009 ALEXANDER
RAMI CAROLINE J. Olmsted Falls City Olmsted Falls High School $112,718.00
227 2011 ALEXANDER-JONES SHIRLEY L Columbus City School District Columbus
City Schools City SD $103,332.06 260 2010 ALIG JANA M. Reynoldsburg City
French Run Elementary School $101,674.00 232 2011 ALIG JANA M. Reynoldsburg
City Herbert Mills Elementary School $101,674.00 232 2007 ALLEN DAVID L.
Mason City School District William Mason High School $111,330.00 261 2007
ALLEN DENNIS L. Rocky River City Rocky River City $134,780.00 261 2007 ALLEN
DONALD S. London City London City $105,400.00 260 2007 ALLEN ALFRED Gahanna-Jefferson
City Lincoln High School $102,310.00 220 2008 ALLEN ALFRED Gahanna-Jefferson
City Lincoln High School $111,097.00 261 2008 ALLEN NANCY S. Centerville
City Centerville City $109,930.00 224 2008 ALLEN DAVID L. Mason City School
District William Mason High School $116,238.00 262 2008 ALLEN DONALD S.
London City London City $107,400.00 260 2009 ALLEN DONALD S. London City
London City $111,588.00 260 2009 ALLEN ALFRED Gahanna-Jefferson City Lincoln
High School $111,097.00 261 2009 ALLEN DAVID L. Mason City School District
William Mason High School $121,331.00 261 2009 ALLEN NANCY S. Centerville
City Centerville City $113,357.00 261 2010 ALLEN DAVID L. Mason City School
District William Mason High School $121,331.00 261 2010 ALLEN DONALD S.
London City London City $114,500.00 260 2010 ALLEN NANCY S. Centerville
City Centerville City $113,656.00 260 2010 ALLEN DAVID L. Mason City School
District Mason City School District $125,123.00 261 2011 AllenAmy R. Kettering
City J F Kennedy Elementary School $101,403.00 220 2011 ALLEN MARY C Columbus
City School District Oakland Park Alternative Elementary $100,022.00 260
2011 ALLEN DAVID L. Mason City School District Mason City City SD $130,194.00
260 2011 ALLEN DONALD S. London City London City SD $114,500.00 260 2009
ALLENICK DAVID S. South Euclid-Lyndhurst City Brush High School $101,120.00
215 2010 ALLENICK DAVID S. South Euclid-Lyndhurst City Brush High School
$106,074.00 215 2011 ALLENICK DAVID S. South Euclid-Lyndhurst City Brush
High School $106,074.00 215 2011 ALSTON ANTHONY E Columbus City School District
Beechcroft High School $104,562.12 260 2007 ALTHERR EVELYN E. Middletown
City Middletown City $115,781.00 225 2008 ALTHERR EVELYN E. Middletown City
Middletown City $118,652.00 225 2009 ALTHERR EVELYN E. Middletown City Middletown
City $118,652.00 225 2008 AMES JOHN A. Loveland City Loveland City $102,677.00
222 2009 AMES JOHN A. Loveland City Loveland City $104,637.00 222 2010 AMES
JOHN A. Loveland City Loveland City $107,954.00 222 2011 AMES JOHN A. Loveland
City Loveland City SD $110,560.00 222 2008 AMODIO ROBERT M. Fairfield City
Fairfield City $101,499.00 228 2009 AMODIO ROBERT M. Fairfield City Fairfield
City $101,499.00 228 2010 AMODIO ROBERT M. Norwood City Norwood City $105,000.00
260 2011 AMODIO ROBERT M. Norwood City Norwood City Schools City SD $105,000.00
260 2007 AMOS MICHAEL J. Oak Hills Local Oak Hills Local $107,234.00 260
2008 AMOS MICHAEL J. Oak Hills Local Oak Hills Local $107,234.00 260 2009
AMOS MICHAEL J. Oak Hills Local Oak Hills Local $117,561.00 260 2010 AMOS
MICHAEL J. Oak Hills Local Oak Hills Local $117,561.00 260 2011 AMOS MICHAEL
J. Oak Hills Local Oak Hills Local SD $122,310.00 260 2007 ANDERSON STEPHEN
P. Jackson City Jackson City $112,255.00 260 2007 ANDERSON BART G. ESC of
Central Ohio Educ Serv ESC of Central Ohio Educ Serv $139,500.00 255 2008
AndersonLarry D Bellefontaine City Bellefontaine City $104,738.00 262 2008
ANDERSON STEPHEN P. Jackson City Jackson City $126,309.00 260 2008 ANDERSON
BART G. ESC of Central Ohio Educ Serv ESC of Central Ohio Educ Serv $145,000.00
255 2008 ANDERSON EDNA S. Columbiana County JVSD Columbiana County JVSD
$101,057.00 260 2008 Anderson Dennis P. Solon City Solon City $100,288.00
260 2009 ANDERSON ELIZABETH A. Rocky River City Rocky River City $118,994.00
260 2009 ANDERSON STEPHEN P. Jackson City Jackson City $128,252.00 264 2009
ANDERSON BART G. ESC of Central Ohio Educ Serv ESC of Central Ohio Educ
Serv $149,350.00 255 2009 AndersonLarry D Bellefontaine City Bellefontaine
City $109,975.00 261 2009 ANDERSON EDNA S. Columbiana County JVSD Columbiana
County JVSD $104,594.00 260 2009 Anderson Dennis P. Solon City Solon City
$104,211.00 260 2009 ANDERSON RONALD W. Greene Educ Serv Cntr Greene Educ
Serv Cntr $102,870.00 190 2010 ANDERSON ELIZABETH A. Rocky River City Rocky
River City $121,739.00 261 2010 ANDERSON BART G. ESC of Central Ohio Educ
Serv ESC of Central Ohio Educ Serv $151,590.00 212 2010 ANDERSON EDNA S.
Columbiana County JVSD Columbiana County JVSD $108,046.00 260 2010 ANDERSON
RONALD W. Greene Educ Serv Cntr Greene Educ Serv Cntr $106,598.00 190 2010
AndersonLarry D Bellefontaine City Bellefontaine City $109,975.00 261 2010
ANDERSON MICHAEL D. East Cleveland City School District East Cleveland City
School District $100,202.00 260 2011 ANDERSON ELIZABETH A. Rocky River City
Rocky River City SD $129,192.00 261 2011 ANDERSON BART G. ESC of Central
Ohio Educ Serv ESC of Central Ohio Educ Serv $155,590.00 212 2011 AndersonLarry
D Bellefontaine City Bellefontaine City SD $109,975.00 261 2011 ANDERSON
MICHAEL D. East Cleveland City School District East Cleveland City Schools
Ci $109,492.00 260 2011 ANDERSON RONALD W. Greene Educ Serv Cntr Greene
Educ Serv Cntr $111,750.00 190 2011 ANDERSON EDNA S. Columbiana County JVSD
Columbiana County JVSD $111,612.00 260 2011 ANDRE CHARLES M. ESC of Central
Ohio Educ Serv ESC of Central Ohio Educ Serv $103,083.00 200 2007 ANDREWS
GEOFFREY G. Polaris JVSD Polaris Career Center JVSD $106,279.00 215 2008
ANDREWS GEOFFREY G. Oberlin City Schools Oberlin City Schools $101,416.00
260 2009 ANDREWS GEOFFREY G. Oberlin City Schools Oberlin City Schools $110,950.00
260 2010 ANDREWS GEOFFREY G. Oberlin City Schools Oberlin City Schools $113,085.00
260 2011 ANDREWS GEOFFREY G. Oberlin City Schools Oberlin City SD $113,085.00
260 2009 ANDRZEJEWSKI JANINE M. Parma City Valley Forge High School $103,713.00
230 2010 ANDRZEJEWSKI JANINE M. Parma City Valley Forge High School $105,780.00
230 2011 ANDRZEJEWSKI JANINE M. Parma City Valley Forge High School $105,780.00
230 2007 ANGELLO MARTHA J. Sycamore Community City Sycamore Community City
$107,734.00 260 2008 ANGELLO MARTHA J. Sycamore Community City Sycamore
Community City $110,966.00 260 2009 ANGELLO MARTHA J. Sycamore Community
City Sycamore Community City $110,966.00 260 2010 ANGELLO MARTHA J. Sycamore
Community City Sycamore Community City $115,740.00 260 2011 ANGELLO MARTHA
J. Sycamore Community City Sycamore Community City SD $117,740.00 260 2011
ANTEL SHIRLEY A. Amherst Exempted Village Amherst Ex Vill SD $108,397.00
260 2008 APOLITO ELIZABETH A. Montgomery Educ Serv Cntr Montgomery Educ
Serv Cntr $103,646.00 200 2009 APOLITO ELIZABETH A. Montgomery Educ Serv
Cntr Montgomery Educ Serv Cntr $100,339.00 180 2010 APOLITO ELIZABETH A.
Montgomery Educ Serv Cntr Montgomery Educ Serv Cntr $102,446.00 229 2011
APOLITO ELIZABETH A. Montgomery Educ Serv Cntr Montgomery Educ Serv Cntr
$103,572.00 229 2011 APPLEBAUM ROBERT J. Maple Heights City Maple Heights
City SD $100,981.00 260 2011 ARBAUGH JAY G. Keystone Local Keystone Local
SD $106,000.00 260 2009 ARCHER RUTH Cleveland Metropolitan Cleveland Metropolitan
$100,785.50 260 2010 ARCHER RUTH Cleveland Metropolitan Cleveland Metropolitan
$100,785.50 260 2011 AREND LOIS E Columbus City School District Columbus
City Schools City SD $103,093.12 260 2010 Argalas Roger Northwest Local
Northwest Local $107,482.00 251 2011 Argalas Roger Northwest Local Northwest
Local SD $110,643.00 251 2011 ARGENTI KAREN M. Amherst Exempted Village
Marion L Steele High School $108,603.00 184 2009 ARLEDGE JR ROBERT L. Greene
Educ Serv Cntr Greene Educ Serv Cntr $103,179.00 260 2010 ARLEDGE JR ROBERT
L. Greene Educ Serv Cntr Greene Educ Serv Cntr $103,179.00 260 2011 ARLEDGE
JR ROBERT L. Greene Educ Serv Cntr Greene Educ Serv Cntr $106,274.00 260
2007 ARMOCIDA ANTHONY M. Yellow Springs Exempted Village Yellow Springs
Exempted Village $109,496.00 248 2008 ARMOCIDA ANTHONY M. Yellow Springs
Exempted Village Yellow Springs Exempted Village $109,496.00 248 2009 ARMOCIDA
ANTHONY M. Yellow Springs Exempted Village Yellow Springs Exempted Village
$109,496.00 248 2007 ARMSTRONG BRUCE W. Highland Local Highland Local $128,048.00
260 2008 ARMSTRONG BRUCE W. Highland Local Highland Local $128,048.00 260
2009 ARMSTRONG BRUCE W. Highland Local Highland Local $128,048.00 260 2011
Arnoff Gail Solon City Grace L Roxbury Elementary School $102,694.00 186
2011 ARNOLD MATTHEW D. Beavercreek City Ferguson Middle School $103,965.00
213 2007 ASHWORTH MARY ANNE Delaware City Delaware City $111,427.00 261
2007 ASHWORTH DENNIS D. West Clermont Local Glen Este High School $102,630.00
260 2008 ASHWORTH MARY ANNE Delaware City Delaware City $115,210.00 262
2008 ASHWORTH DENNIS D. West Clermont Local Glen Este High School $104,683.00
260 2009 ASHWORTH MARY ANNE Delaware City Delaware City $121,757.00 261
2009 ASHWORTH DENNIS D. West Clermont Local Glen Este High School $112,456.00
260 2010 ASHWORTH DENNIS D. West Clermont Local Glen Este High School $114,704.00
260 2010 ASHWORTH MARY ANNE Delaware City Delaware City $121,290.00 260
2011 ASHWORTH MARY ANNE Delaware City Delaware City SD $121,290.00 260 2008
ATCHLEY JAMES R. Ansonia Local Ansonia Local $100,060.00 254 2009 ATCHLEY
JAMES R. Ansonia Local Ansonia Local $103,062.00 260 2010 ATCHLEY JAMES
R. Ansonia Local Ansonia Local $103,062.00 260 2011 ATCHLEY JAMES R. Ansonia
Local Ansonia Local SD $103,062.00 260 2008 ATKINSON CHERYL L. Lorain City
Lorain City $175,000.00 260 2009 ATKINSON CHERYL L. Lorain City Lorain City
$175,000.00 260 2010 ATKINSON CHERYL L. Lorain City Lorain City $210,058.00
260 2011 ATKINSON CHERYL Lorain City Lorain City SD $210,058.00 260 2007
AUBUCHON WILLIAM R. Parma City Parma City $102,457.00 230 2008 AUBUCHON
WILLIAM R. Lorain County JVS JVSD Lorain County JVS JVSD $113,000.00 260
2008 AUBUCHON WILLIAM R. Parma City Parma City $102,457.00 230 2009 AUBUCHON
WILLIAM R. Lorain County JVS JVSD Lorain County JVS JVSD $113,000.00 260
2010 AUBUCHON WILLIAM R. Lorain County JVS JVSD Lorain County JVS JVSD $113,000.00
260 2009 AUGINAS CHRISTINE M. Shaker Heights City Shaker Heights City $113,626.00
250 2010 AUGINAS CHRISTINE M. Shaker Heights City Shaker Heights City $113,626.00
250 2011 AUGINAS CHRISTINE M. Shaker Heights City Shaker Heights City SD
$113,626.00 250 2007 AukermanCatherine Berea City Berea City $101,862.00
260 2008 AukermanCatherine Berea City Berea City $107,685.00 260 2009 Aukerman
Catherine Highland Local Highland Local $120,000.00 260 2009 Aukerman Catherine
Berea City Berea City $107,685.00 260 2010 AUKERMAN CATHERINE L. Highland
Local Highland Local $122,100.00 260 2011 AUKERMAN CATHERINE L. Highland
Local Highland Local SD $122,100.00 260 2007 AULT MARK C. Indian Hill Exempted
Village Indian Hill Exempted Village $109,000.00 260 2008 AULT MARK C. Indian
Hill Exempted Village Indian Hill Exempted Village $116,480.00 260 2009
AULT MARK C. Indian Hill Exempted Village Indian Hill Exempted Village $120,557.00
260 2010 AULT MARK C. Indian Hill Exempted Village Indian Hill Exempted
Village $122,667.00 260 2011 AULT MARK C. Indian Hill Exempted Village Indian
Hill Ex Vill SD $124,813.00 260 2010 AUSTIN SHENISHA D Cleveland Heights-University
Heights City Frank L Wiley Middle School $118,000.00 190 2008 AXNER DAVID
E. Dublin City Dublin City $170,000.00 260 2008 AXNER DAVID E. Chagrin Falls
Exempted Village Chagrin Falls Exempted Village $135,990.00 260 2009 AXNER
DAVID E. Dublin City Dublin City $175,100.00 260 2010 AXNER DAVID E. Dublin
City Dublin City $180,353.00 260 2011 AXNER DAVID E. Dublin City Dublin
City SD $182,157.00 259 2007 BABCANEC WAYNE Norwalk City Norwalk City $101,113.00
260 2008 BABCANEC WAYNE Norwalk City Norwalk City $105,195.00 260 2009 BABCANEC
WAYNE Norwalk City Norwalk City $105,195.00 260 2010 BABCANEC WAYNE Norwalk
City Norwalk City $108,877.00 260 2011 BABCANEC WAYNE Norwalk City Norwalk
City SD $108,877.00 260 2010 BACHO ALAN A. Sylvania City Sylvania City $102,827.00
boiltherich
But But But what happened to letting people make as much as they possibly
can and keeping every cent without even income taxes to worry about?
I see, it is OK when it is YOUR money but a total bitch kitty when it
is other people.
I have a brother whom I have nothing to do with for personal reasons,
he grew up in the same grinding poverty I did, real poverty, went to college
in 1973 after high school, took a LOT of drugs and became a hippie, dropped
out of school. I went back to college late and got a degree in Finance,
by then he was burned out on planting trees in mountain country in all weather
and smoking weed for minimum wage, he went back to school the following
year for an accounting degree. I graduated 1996, he in 1997.
I faced my own set of issues after graduation, he went to work for the
county auditor/controller. Thirteen years he did the best work and when
the auditor/controller died or retired or whatever he was appointed or elected
into that position, I am not sure which because I still think he is a flaming
asshole and we do not speak, but California lists all elected officials
salary ranges ( http://lgcr.sco.ca.gov/ ) and there is his name, $125,000
-167,000, and I assume he makes the low end of the range.
The job description you can skip over if you like but I post it for a
reason, because the responsibility and liability is huge, and a lot of the
time it is out of your control. Serves as chief accounting officer in the
County; records the financial transactions of the County and other related
agencies; audits and processes claims for payment; issues receipts for all
monies received by the County; prepares financial reports; compiles the
County budget; audits and issues payroll checks; maintains personnel earning
and benefit records; accounts for property tax monies; oversees the divisions
of Payroll, Accounting, Accounts Receivable, Audit and Cost Accounting and
Property Tax.
He was 56 yesterday. $125,000 now for a CPA and elected auditor controller
is just about equal to $12 grand a year when we were kids in the sixties.
MIDDLE CLASS. It is anything but rich. People try to better themselves and
a few like myself and my brother succeed in upward mobility from true poverty
(you know true poverty when you have to go to school with nothing to eat
in a couple days and wearing a blouse your sister outgrew last year, and
you are a boy) to just middle class. The vast majority of people doing what
we did find they did it for nothing, they can get no job no less a middle
class or better job.
And you all who say take any job, if illegal Mexicans are willing to
break the law and work under the table for less than minimum wages then
you should be too, eat my feces and die, employers who hire such people
do so because they are nameless and faceless, seen as subhuman, and I would
have worked for them at points of desperation but they would not hire me
because it is one thing to use illegal aliens as slaves, it is far worse
to use Americans with an education for such work. They will not hire you.
They go from a fine to a prison sentence if they do.
I had to take out a student loan in 1988 when I originally went back
to college. Only $2,400, I also had $1,200 in California Board of Governors
grant, $1,400 in Pell grant, a veteran disability of $62 per month, and
old GI bill that paid $365 a month. Not enough, I had to work 20 hours a
week in the hospital on top of that. I was still eating and living with
mom. Our rent on the duplex we lived in was $850 a month. Cheapest place
we could get.
All vets had a different office from the financial aid office, because
of our GI Bill issues we all had one guy assigned just to take care of veterans.
He went on vacation during semester break and while he was gone some fat
cunt in the regular financial aid office took it upon herself to recalculate
all the Pell Grants for veterans using their VA disability as income even
though it was bold capitalized in black letters on the application form
that VA disability was not to be counted. The result was when I went to
collect my pay the next first of the month I was told I had been found to
be $20 over the limit for Pell Grant and thus it was canceled.
When the vet rep came back from vacation he said don't worry about it
I will fix it. Three days later I was told once a Pell Grant is voided it
cannot be "fixed." I had to drop a class and take more hours at work to
adjust for the loss of the Pell Grant. But when I did the VA and BOG Grant
were also reduced by half forcing me to drop all classes and go to work
full time just to eat. Now I owed the VA money for the payments in the semester
I dropped out, with the intention of going back in the fall once the mess
(that I had no part in creating) was cleared up.
No go. Once you have an overpayment from the VA you can't qualify for
any federal financial aid, period till it is satisfied. I appealed but it
took months and by the time they found in my favor the six months was up
on the student loan, now I had to repay that before I could get any financial
aid. Jesus fucking Key rist!
I lost my vehicle, I lost my job because it was 1984. I had no place
to turn and was essentially homeless for years. No credit, part time jobs
with no benefits, minimum wage or close to it jobs. Many of them. Moved
every few months because I could not pay and nothing ever worked out the
way it was supposed to. Broken promises, crooked employers that looked to
take advantage of willing people. One employer was deducting SS and FICA
but when I looked at my statement later they had no record I ever worked
there, the boss was just pocketing the money they were supposed to pay into
the government.
I finally gave up and asked the VA to reexamine my disability. They did
and a couple years later they said OK we will up it to 40%. Why does it
take years? But it qualified me to go back to college under Chapter 31 benefits
for disabled vets. It was still only $800 a month plus tuition and books,
with free medical care. I could not go back to school in 1993 on that, not
in California, so I had a friend in New York that said I could live at his
place free of charge if I wanted to go to school at UCON in Danbury. I agreed
and went there, but the VA messed up the paperwork and my tuition was not
paid. I had to go back to California and start over again.
I had to drive a car for a transport company because I could not afford
to fly or take a train. I drove to Santa Cruz in less than 72 hours non
stop. Most states were still 55 MPH speed limit then too. Talk about an
intrusion into our daily lives.
They fixed the problem and I went to Columbus Ohio for their program
in business at Ohio state. When I got there I was told that the annual $20,000
tuition was only for Ohio residents, my tuition would be $40,000. The VA
would not pay it. But, they said that there was a private business university
in town called Franklin University that they would pay for. I took it. I
still had to work full time plus, and go to school in the evenings for almost
four years, because we all know you can't get a four year degree in four
years these days.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck! It never ends for people born to parents that
are not wealthy. All the promises made by America are broken unless you
are rich to start with. At one point my debit card to access my VA money
did not work. It had expired. The money was in my account but I could not
access it. There were no BAC branches in Ohio, and they would not even talk
to me on the phone. They did say they would send a new ATM card in the mail.
Two days later my mother called an said she got a letter from Bank of America.
They sent my card to her address. I had not eaten in three days by then.
I had my mother send it via overnight mail so I could get something to eat.
Two days later no card. I called the post office and bitched them out royally
and all they could say was if I wanted to file a complaint or track overnight
mail I could come into their main office. Total bottom. I had not eaten
in five days. At that point I was actually and really ready to die killing
fat pigs rather than one more night without eating. When my card would not
work all I had in the house was the sugar in the a little sugar bowl. I
searched the place for fallen tidbits, found a small bag of wallpaper paste
powder. Ate some of it before I read that it had insecticide in it to kill
silverfish. I was hallucinating when someone knocked on the door and said
she was from the post office. A black woman with like a three foot tall
hair tower and six inch nails in a smoking beat up old Camaro aks me if
I am Mark. I said yes, and was so embarrassed because I think I had a big
diarea stain, I was so horrified. She had the mail from mother, mom had
spelled the street name wrong, instead of Elesmere Street she had printed
Elsmere Street. For that dropped letter I had to deal with bureaucracy that
can only be deemed evil, and I ended up going 6 days with no food.
Trust me when I say that is only a small taste of the abuse our society
has given me. No wonder people give up and go criminal. And I am supposed
to lick the boots of the wealthy because the GOP says that your human worth
is equal to your net cash worth?
Call me a terrorist, call me a commy, call me anything you want to call
me but I am an honest, loving, educated man who happens to be gay. A citizen
first, a man second, yet I am full to overflowing with the shit the rich
and their boot licking GOP have given us. DONE! Wall Street resists with
violence now. Get ready for more. Login or register to post comments Wed,
10/26/2011 - 21:27 | Schmuck Raker AH, are you familiar with the terms 'Proportion',
or 'Link'? Login or register to post comments Wed, 10/26/2011 - 19:46 |
falun bong Depends what a country wants to spend its money on. America decided
to spend all the money on great new ways to kill goat herders on the other
side of the world. Educating its citizens? not so much...
AldousHuxley
America has no choice.
They squandered the generations of wealth gambling it away on wall st.
Since 1980, America took the position of colonizing oil rich countries to
support the gambling habits. WAR-OIL-FED is all part of the Petro dollar
system.
Everything else takes a backseat.
acaciapuffin
Could Wal Mart start a college. it sounds funny however with the success
they have had with their business they could do something like this. Also
there could be an alternate to college which essentialy gets people some
basic skills they need.
Education for the 21st century is also something that should be addressed
at the high school level. I am under the impression that in the 30's and
40's someone with a high school education was very highly educated up to
the current level of an associates degree. What has happened in the last
50 years?
Don Smith
Acacia, thanks for your service. Now, about Wal-Mart - they are a huge
part of the problem. They have destroyed more jobs in America than I would
have to guess any other company.
1) They lure Americans into buying cheap crap from China.
2) They squeeze the vendors for lower-cost goods, keeping those vendors
profits down.
3) Jobs are shifted overseas through wage and tax arbitrage.
4) People take lower-paying jobs, and now need to shop at Wal-Mart to
survive.
5) Their competitive advantage bankrupts smaller stores, forcing out
more jobs.
6) Rinse and Repeat.
Were it not for wage arbitration and our ridiculous tax policies, Wal-Mart
would compete fairly and we wouldn't have the behemoth we have now. I applaud
Wal-Mart for its model and how it got where it got, but for the last 15
or so years, its effect on our economy is now irreversible and wholly negative.
Who cares about a $30 DVD player if the only job you can get is at Wal-Mart?
philipat
Not just Wal-Mart. Globalisation has been very kind to all US Corporations
but not so kind on the masses. Manufacturing has been systematically shifted
to the lowest cost locations, whilst Transfer pricing has systematically
shifted profits to offshore tax havens such that most US Corporations pay
little, if any, taxes. They also wholly own Congress, which therefore does
nothing to change the totally corrupt system.
This is, or should be, at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street (And DC)
movement. Unless the system changes, the future is bleak for the citizens
of The United Corporatocracy of America.
acaciapuffin
My education took place in the military and the schools I attended there
and the field work I did. It shocked me when I would come back to my hometown
and chat with the kids who had gone to college instead. I was out there
learning about radios and Law enforcement and they were taking remedial
english. In the mean while I have gone back to college and recieved my bachelors,
much of my military experience came in handy. Login or register to post
comments Wed, 10/26/2011 - 19:40 | acaciapuffin My education took place
in the military and the schools I attended there and the field work I did.
It shocked me when I would come back to my hometown and chat with the kids
who had gone to college instead. I was out there learning about radios and
Law enforcement and they were taking remedial english. In the mean while
I have gone back to college and recieved my bachelors, much of my military
experience came in handy.
Melin
"The ultimate but innocent and well-meaning enabler: the setup of government
guaranteed student loans."
Are you referring to the government as innocent and well-meaning in this
sentence? Login or register to post comments Wed, 10/26/2011 - 19:19 | rlouis
We're from the government and we're here to help you....
darteaus
American ideal (used to be):
You pay for yourself, and I pay for myself. If you can't afford it, you
can't buy it; and me neither. If I drive my cab twice as many hours as you
do, then I should make twice the money. If I make money then it is my money.
I don't owe you anything, and you don't owe me anything. If you watch TV
all day, that's your wife's problem.
batterycharged
Yeah, unlike insurance companies and the health care system. That is
working great.
Realize that the reason schools are expensive is because of the banks
lending money to own students for life.
Take banks out of the picture and schools will have to function within
a budget. Unlike the federal gov't, states can't print money.
When Joe from the ghetto can't get a $100,000 loan from sallie mae, all
bets are off on tuition increases.
This is exactly what Milton Freidman wanted, indentured-servant students.
Look it up.
boiltherich
The REAL problem at base is a debt problem just exactly as it was in
the 1920's. I keep saying, and people keep ignoring me, when you live in
an economy with a debt based fiat currency - which does not have to be a
bad thing if properly controlled - anybody who borrows/lends is in essence
creating more debt based money, that is counterfeiting. When there were
strict standards and accounting rules and enforcement long ago this was
fine, the money supply was exactly adequate most of the time to deal with
transfers to service debt, but we have had a 40 year run up in borrowing
and lending, mostly in the top elite 1%, without a concominent run up in
cash money supply to service this debt, the result is borrowing to pay bills
on all levels.
The day you borrow a dime to pay a debt you are toast. And that is as
true for government as it is for me. The same laws that prevented this long
ago are still mostly on the books because it is fraud, but they are no longer
enforced because business has bribed government - also illegal - up the
money supply, send every American adult a packet of cash, say $100,000,
and then enforce the laws that are on the books and guess what? The fallout
will be far less than you think and a whole lot better than poverty and
class warfare and blood and death, the road we are on leads to the end of
America. Login or register to post comments Wed, 10/26/2011 - 19:00 | navy62802
So the government is going to step in and try to fix a problem that it created.
Wonderful. And by the way, this student debt problem has been around for
several years now. It's only getting attention because it has been allowed
to grow so incredibly large.
Mark my words, this is a debt bomb that is just waiting to explode. Students
graduating with such incredible debt loads (sometimes in the six figures)
are entering a collapsing job market. This story does not end well for anyone
involved ... neither the students nor the taxpayers. Login or register to
post comments
Vampyroteuthis
This crap will end quickly when the next credit crunch comes. Parents
and students are both unemployed and no credit results in unpaid tuition.
No students.
navy62802
At this pace, the US is going to be a nation of tootheless vagabonds
roaming the dust-covered ruins of a once-powerful nation. And all the profit
that was squeezed out of the American Dream will be absolutely worthless.
While Bama is a sellout, the whole political wchene is a variation of political
Jonestown. The Grand Old Party, so named when it really did evoke America, has
so narrowed its base that it has become a political cult.
I have a disability with epilepsy where I cannot drive. This is responsible
for my lack of employment, since I live in a small town without public transportation.
There is nothing within walking distance of where I live. My only source of
income is from Social Security.
I placed myself $30,000 in debt with student
loans because I listened to lying counselors who said it would be easy to find
a job online if I attended college online. I earned a Bachelor of Science in
Business Administration with a minor in Process Management. I also earned certifications
in Time Management and Human Resources. I even am a Microsoft Office User Specialist
in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
However, I cannot find work online. The online colleges told lies about finding
employment online. All they want is your business. I've even tried to start
entrepreneurial businesses online, but they have failed.
I'm very disappointed to hear that my #1 man -- President Obama -- would
even consider cutting Social Security income. Social Security represents the
only source of income for disabled people and hard-working retirees who worked
hard their entire lives as dedicated tax payers in the American economy.
But we need to be realistic. The one and only reason why President Obama
would suggest cutting Social Security and Medicare is because those wealthy
Republicans are forcing him to do this because they refuse to negotiate with
him. The Republicans have the selfish belief that if they receive higher taxes
for earning higher levels of income, it means they are being penalized for doing
their job as successful capitalists.
Wealthy Republicans do not realize the full scope of what they are doing
by cutting Social Security. If my disability income from Social Security is
reduced, I may need to get a part-time job at a local restaurant or grocery
story in order to receive extra income. The problem is, it is illegal for me
to drive and threatens the life of others on the road. Think about what would
happen if I had a seizure while driving and ended up killing one of those wealthy
Republican families. The wealthy Republicans are too 5th-dimensionally near-sighted
and selfish to think of things like that.
The simple fact of the matter is that the wealthy Republicans earning more
than $250,000 per year can in fact afford to pay higher taxes in order to help
our country get out of debt. Another simple fact of the matter is that those
receiving Social Security income absolutely cannot afford to have that income
reduced.
When wealthy Republicans receive a higher tax level, it means they may be
forced to attend a smaller number of professional sports games each year. It
means they may be forced to buy a 35' boat instead of a 40' boat. It means they
may be forced to buy a $400,000 house instead of a $500,000 house. It means
their children may be forced to attend a community college for a couple years
instead of an incredibly overpriced Ivy League school.
When those receiving Social Security receive any form of cut, it means they
will no longer be able to afford basic things such as food! It means they will
no longer be able to afford basic things such as transportation!
We cannot allow anyone, Democrat or Republican, to allow any form of reduction
in Social Security to occur. President Obama has done an excellent job as President
so far -- he saved the auto industry; he restored the stock market; he revived
the banking industry; he even invaded Pakistan without permission in order to
successfully kill the most wanted terrorist in history! President Obama has
even won the Nobel Peace Prize, and rightfully so since he was able to do things
like keep Pakistan as an ally and continue killing off those terrorist leaders.
The solution to this problem with Social Security cuts is to take the focus
off of President Obama and make it 100% clear to all senators and representatives
that anyone who votes in favor of reduction of Social Security will not be reelected
at the next election!
Now is the time to start writing to senators and representatives in order
to let them know they will not be receiving votes if they decide to support
a reduction in Social Security! Remember, tomorrow is the devil's favorite word!
Take action today!
Do not just "pray" to God and ask Him to keep Social Security the way it
is. Remember, 1 Corinthians chapter 15 talks about how God does things through
the natural, and then the spiritual. In other words, don't pray to God for something
unless you plan on doing your part to acquire what you are praying for.
If you want God to answer your prayers to maintain Social Security, you need
to take action today by contacting your local senators and congressmen. Make
sure you point out the fact that your vote represents a form of political violence
that you will take against them if they are willing to selfishly take income
you desperately need to survive!
For the record, I have recently written a very successful article I am very
proud of on my blog. This article is titled: "Boycott of Casey Anthony Starts
Here – Sign Up Now!" The article asks you to write a pledge to boycott any product
or TV show that attempts to generate any form of financial gain from the death
of innocent little Caylee Anthony.
As an act of faith to confirm your loyalty, please write a Comment as a pledge
to confirm your desire to boycott anything associated with a financial gain
from the death of Caylee.
Lot's of people have already taken this pledge to boycott anything associated
with a financial gain from the death of Caylee Anthony. This has already helped
Caylee receive the justice she deserves. Today I learned that a pornographic
company has officially withdrawn their offer for Casey Anthony to star in an
XXX-rated movie. The pornographic company specifically said that they "Now realize
people want nothing to do with her and that includes an XXX movie."
This means the plan for a large number of people pledging to boycott products,
retailers, and distributors who try to financially gain from the death of Caylee
Anthony is working. By grouping your personal pledge to boycott in the same
place as everyone else, it gives us bargaining power to threaten publishers,
retailers, and TV companies if they try to gain financially from the death of
sweet Caylee Anthony.
Please take the time to write your personal pledge to boycott. Just visit
the website URL listed above. Thank you very much for helping Caylee Anthony
gain justice in this way. Nobody should be allowed to gain financially from
her death, and if we work together as a team we can make that happen. But each
of us needs to do our part as an individual. Thank you again for doing your
part.
The greatest cultural tradition and the greatest tradition of culture:
and ironically these days…
…it all comes down to finance!
Gaelen
What you seem to miss is that these for
profit schools are able to charge such exorbitant fees because of federal
loan assistance. They really are extracting a rent from a positive government
program.
I agree that we need to offer a larger chunk of our population access
to higher education, but the way to achieve that is through the community
college system and regional campuses of State universities. The demographics
that are served by CC's and for profit schools are very similar, and
everyone I know that has gone to a for profit would go to CC if there
was space.
In closing, this is an incredibly distorted market that these institutions
are taking advantage of. If the gov. was not supporting the education
of students these institutions would not exist.
Bruce E. Woych
PEOPLE do not go to college because of (debt creation) easy money
from loose credit standards. Loose credit standards arrive because the
lenders and the sellers want to make it easy to bring people into their
gaming plan. What I have seen across the board is that easy credit pushes
a false price structure upwards when there is a pooled source of disconnected
money fueling incentives. The incentives are all on profiteering, getting
maximum gains from the public pool, and sustaining the system of feeding
into the pool.
When chimpanzees were being studied it was easier to attract them
to one place all at once by providing a central source of bananas at
a base camp. the plan was innocent and it clearly facilitated the process
of study. The chimps loved the easy access, the course of least resistance
(of course!). What began as an easy street soon became a competition
for dominance over the central feeding supply.
In addition, because it was a prolonged study over time, it soon
became apparent that an unanticipated "dependence" had developed over
the supply and the less dominant chimps had trouble going back to loose
nit foraging in the original seasonal pattern of territorial feeding
strategies. The behavior changed to re-approaching the central supply
which ended up increasing aggression over all. An attempt to withdraw
the bananas slowly ended up in a classic complex of feeding frenzy aggression
and defensive territoriality. Pooled money markets of credit is an abstract
banana center and it has multiple dimensions.
The Universtiy without Borders! Teach your children well!
Bruce E. Woych
I saw, first hand, the transition to professional administrators
in the university system (very similar to the business model in hospitals
as well). Tenured professors were seen as a problem and adjunct professors
were utilized to fill the gap. Part time
adjuncts were and have been exploited at a starvation level (and most
of these are heavily in debt from the system that allowed them the privilege
of becoming adjuncts …)
Departments were downsized or not financed at all. Survival that
is interpreted as profit is OK but not when that profit margin is covering
"other than" education as its central "product" and traditional educational
priorities become marginalized.
The truth of market education is that
the university system holds leverage over license and credentials over
professional careers and has become brokers to a state system that is
captured by class interests. Power brokering becomes
the primary purpose of college administration and the social construct
of class prestige is more important than the discovery and dissemination
of "Universal" knowledge.
Woop
Places like the Heritage Foundation, are having their "intellectuals"
deride and decry any need for a public education at the university level,
arguing the masses of middle class students are ill-prepared, and do
not benefit from the experience.
Thus, It seems to me that my children ought to start preparing for
a career in motorcycle mechanics, and tile-floor installation, because
the "rich" are sick and tired of underwriting the costs of these places,
via taxation. They just don't want to pay any taxes, period. Let the
slaves pay is their motto.
Well, lookie here…..we all are not going to sit idly by, while your
Nihilism and Reactionary stunts go unchallenged.
This is class warfare, and you bast*rds are going to see levels of
arousal you never dreamed possible, here, and everywhere.
snydeq found a
story questioning "the
quality of education on offer at institutions such as University of
Phoenix, DeVry, ITT Tech, and Kaplan in the wake of increasing scrutiny
for alleged deceptive
practices [PDF] that leave students in
high debt for jobs that pay little.
'For-profit schools carry a stigma in some eyes because of their reputation
for hard sales pitches, aggressive marketing tactics, and saddling students
with big loans for dubious degrees or certificates,' Robert Scheier writes.
'Should IT pros looking to increase their skills, or people seeking to enter
the IT profession, consider such for-profit schools? And should employers
trust their graduates' skills?'"
tepples:
I'm doing hiring for my team. I don't care too much about
the education: if the candidate can do a decent job on the coding
quiz
When you have a thousand resumes for two positions, how do you choose
which ones even get to take the coding quiz?
tripleevenfall:
I've known people on both sides of the spectrum, but I can definitely
say that if you come out of a University of Phoenix or DeVry program
you're going to face a hiring stigma.
Deservedly or undeservedly, these programs have a reputation that
ranks decidedly below basically any traditional four year institution.
They don't seem like a great deal considering the high cost, but when
you compare that to what a candidates other options are (or lack thereof),
it still might be a good plan.
It sure would suck to have to pay back those loans on a desktop support
kind of job salary.
iamhassi:
I can definitely say that if you come out of a University
of Phoenix or DeVry program you're going to face a hiring stigma.
"
Mod Parent UP!
That's the real problem. UoP and DeVry turned themselves into diploma
mills. They accepted everyone and gave everyone a degree if you paid
$80,000+.
Of course every student is different, but the ones that end up at
UofP or DeVry are usually the less desirable type.
Before you decide on any college call (or email) the places you want
to work and see if they hire those graduates! But you have to word it
right, if you say "Do you hire University of Phoenix students?" and
they say "NO" that could open them up to a lawsuit so HR will never
say a direct "no" to any college.
So you have to say "I would like to work for XXXXX after graduating
from college. I am considering XXXXXX, XXXXXX and UofP. Which of these
schools would be the best to attend when I apply to XXXXX?" Hopefully
they'll be honest, and if they don't directly say UofP then don't bother
going. Also call the accreditation board to make sure where you're going
is accredited. -- my karma will be here long after I'm gone
brainboyz:
Having attended DeVry (I stopped because I ran out of money 3/4 through)
and seeing what passed as senior level students, I wouldn't hire a DeVry
graduate unless they had other credentials. I gained some knowledge
there, but only because I actively sought additional information from
professors and helped with several extra-curricular activities revolving
around more advanced topics.
For example: one of my classmates was stumped that she couldn't get
her Java project to compile. Instead of a .java text file, she had a
MSWord document in the solution. When I told her she'd need to convert
it to a plain text file, she couldn't figure out the "invalid character
at line Y, position X" errors from the MSWord quotes and hyphens left
in the text. And she was a CS major on her
last term.
Skater:
For example: one of my classmates was stumped that she couldn't
get her Java project to compile. Instead of a .java text file, she
had a MSWord document in the solution. When I told her she'd need
to convert it to a plain text file, she couldn't figure out the
"invalid character at line Y, position X" errors from the MSWord
quotes and hyphens left in the text. And she was a CS major on her
last term.
To be fair, I saw some of that sort of thing at my traditional, not-for-profit,
state-run school.
koyangi:
It can be a foot in the door (albiet a rather expensive one). We
have a pre-sales support engineer from DeVry. He did not have the grades/money
to go to GA Tech, so he worked as a test technican while he went to
DeVry. He is very good at what he does but I mostly attribute that to
his intelligence rather than anything he learned at DeVry.
His degree allowed HR to "check the box" for college education and
thus his manager was allowed to interview him and find out that he could
be trained as well as tie his own shoes. The customers love him and
he often finds very creative solutions to difficult problems. Had he
not attended DeVry then he never would have made it past HR or, if he
had gotten a job here, it would have been on the production floor.
bluefoxlucid:
So you're saying his degree was worthless
and he got $5k-$10k a year pre-tax for it? Man the last
2 years of a 4 year degree costs me as much as a decent sports car,
and my salary hike after cutting taxes off for it would be... enough
to pay it off in a decade.
By then, the sheer volume of experience I have makes up for the gap,
and my degree is so old it's worthless in the job market. Not to mention
the quality of living drop; the cost is too high, I can't live like
that without the ability to actually have a life and afford things (I
live alone, no room mates, in a small 1br; a 2br costs twice as much,
plus the heating bill, never mind a house). Buying a used car off a
dealer lot was a mistake enough. -- All civilized men should study Geometry,
Philosophy, and the game of Go.
fermion:
Any open admissions institutions has
the problem of accepting students and then not delivering a product.
It is the nature of beast, Ethically, open admission institutions have
the obligation of insuring that the student can succeed within the parameters
of the school. This is even the case a good private K-12 schools. Students
are asked to leave if they do achieve success.
What has traditionally been the case is beyond this. ITT has been
in trouble for at least 15 years because it appeared that they aggressively
recruited students, encouraged the students to maximize student loans,
without any regard to the ability of the student to enjoy any level
of success in the program. It seems that University of Phoenix merely
expanded this model of student loan harvesting from the technical school
to the University. I am sure that ITT and U of Phoenix both provide
a valuable educational experience. What I am not so sure of is if they
should be allowed to use federal student loans to provide such services.
Here is the thing that I am sure is never told the incoming student
at ITT or U of Phoenix or any of the private diploma mills. A federal
student loan never goes away. The student has to pay it back. No bankruptcy,
no forgiveness. And the loans are relatively high interests rates, which
accrues always, even if one has a delay in payment. The 50K many of
these instituions charge can easily become 100K. It is easy to argue
that such institution exist solely to transfer money from the federal
tax payers purse to the coffers of private corporations. I would not
do so. I would only say that in a free market in which these private
for-profit institutions are competing, why would we need a federal loan
program if they were in fact providing value. Sure, for non profit school
such things can keep things fair and allow all qualified students to
get an education. But if we are not talking qualified student, and any
student, I think the private market would make much more reliable decisions.
At least the student would be able to declare bankruptcy, and institutions
with a high rate of bankruptcies would not longer receive loans. The
free market, in this case, would work.
--
The world is sacred..God made it all...an expression of mathematical
playfulness-Galileo's Dream-KSR
Gribflex:
"otherwise we'll be like europe where if you don't do well on
the high school tests they give you will never go to college and never
have a chance to change your life in the future"
When I first moved to France, it was the season when test results
were just coming out. A major paper ran a story about 'What do do if
your kid doesn't get into a Top 10 school?' The answer: enroll them
in an IT program, or ship them to America.
Kinda took the wind outta my sails a bit to read that what I'd considered
a good career choice (Ok, I went to a Canadian school but still) was
the second rate choice here.
After spending two more years here, I've realized that it was only
partly a jab. While it's true that IT careers are not typically highly
regarded over here, it's also true that in both North America, and IT
worldwide, your test scores are not considered a primary qualifier for
success.
larry bagina:
Harvard is a private non-profit. Colleges are either public
(state run, taxpayer subsidized) or private (no state funding, money
comes from tuition, donations, endowments). Private colleges can either
be for-profit or non-profit, which is a tax designation. non-profit
colleges will gladly help you rack up 6 figures of debt for a completely
useless degree.
sean.peters
... is that for-profit colleges have a particularly bad track record
of ripping off their students. Some of the horror stories include continuing
to auto-register students for classes after they've announced their
intent to withdraw, and charging them for it - even though they've long
since stopped attending the school. Then the student gets hit with a
gigantic bill for an education they haven't even received.
Can non-profit schools rip off students?
Sure. But it seems that many for-profit institutions are particularly
egregious and horrible about this.
shis-ka-bob:
There is an entire new class of educational institution that Wall Street
has dreamed up. They basically use college students to suck up government
and private loans. The money from the loans get deposited into the university.
The students get an online degree that probably doesn't get them a job.
But the student in 100% liable for the loan. You cannot even escape
with bankruptcy. But the investors who never gave the student nothing
more than a worthless sheet of paper is protected. This scam artist
like Phoenix University are mere doppelgangers, they lack the substance
of a reputable University like Harvard.
--
A UNIX admin must be root. A Windows Admin must reboot.
CEOs of for-profit colleges receive
up to 26 times the amount of pay that the heads of traditional universities
do.
Many of the schools make up to ninety
percent of their revenue from U.S. taxpayers, through
the Pell Grants, Stafford Loans, and other federal assistance used
by their students. 91.5 percent of Kaplan's revenue comes from the
government, along with 88 percent revenue at the University of Phoenix.
Just 11 percent of higher education students in the country
attend for-profit schools, yet they account for 26 percent
of federal student loans and 44 percent of student loan defaults.
Artraze
THIS. Where are my mod points? The entire point of a college is to make
money; even for state schools. This has
become particularly bad in recent years where college has become less
about higher learning and more about getting that piece of paper that
shows that you payed and are now eligible to do anything beyond grunt
work.
I, for one, welcome these "for profit" schools:
They are like a parody of the existing system,
showing how a diploma is really just about paying the money and playing
the game.
I am cautiously optimistic that the weakness of their 'shovelware'
degrees will wake people up to the fact that every other institution
is fundamentally the same.
Krater76:
The entire point of a college is to make money; even for state schools.
I don't know which college you went to, but the college I went to
(Washington State University [wsu.edu]) is a research college as are
all the universities in the Pac-10 (soon to be Pac-12). They don't tend
to make money to do anything other than educate and do more research.
You don't see a lot of this research as an undergrad unless you ask,
or have a professor who talked about it. I fortunately had both.
Also, a lot of people are talking about how expensive college is.
I will say that Washington and Oregon are raising tuition,
I know that it's about $9k per year for tuition for the state/public
schools in both states. Sure it was only $3k when I started
college in 1995, but it's still a great deal for a top-quality education.
Meanwhile, It's not like ITT or DeVry
are cheap alternatives, they are at about $20k per year for tuition.
If money is really a problem, you can always go to a
community college for the first 2 (or less if you are smart and driven)
and then on to a university for the remainder. Even with student loans,
you could probably get out of there with less than $20k of debt and
a degree from a respected institution.
-- "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the
price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
eepok
Liberal Arts programs aren't there to help people make money. In fact,
most university degrees weren't (and shouldn't be) designed to create
workforce-ready individuals. They exist to create intelligent, educated
people who are capable of learning even more after they graduate and
putting that knowledge to use in improving life on Earth. (Mileage varies.).
The modern Liberal Arts (History, Language, Literature, Political Science,
Sociology, Anthropology, Philosophy, etc.) are there to explore humanity
for what it was, what it is, and in an effort to prevent past mistakes
from repeating themselves.
Ya, that sounds
"high fa-lootin'", but that's why universities exist and that's why
the curriculum is as it is. It's idealist in that its purpose is to
make a better (interpretable) world just by giving people information
and teaching them how to analyze and act on it.
Vocational training is completely different. DeVry and ITT Tech (for-profit,
vocational colleges) may genuinely offer more reliable, quicker means
to getting a well-paying position than a State University liberal arts
degree, but they, again, do to different things. DeVry can teach you
how to become an electrician's apprentice after which you learn a bunch
of skills and make money in the future. Cool. The liberal arts degree
can help you understand the world around you. It all depends who you
are and what you want from life.
It's also worth noting that there are some very close overlaps between
vocational schooling and university training. For example, nursing schools
train their students along very similar lines of master's degrees in
biology, but just with less expectation of in-depth knowledge and a
greater focus on responsibility and accountability. A program in electrical
engineering will have very similar concepts taught to a vocational series
on becoming an electrician, but the two final products (the more-educated
individual) are competent in two very different fields.
There are even certain fields where subjects outright overlap in
their academic and vocational training: Teacher training vs. academic
studies in Education, Business, Accounting vs. Economics, etc.
tripleevenfall
Your prospects for salary are based on how rare your skillset is multiplied
by how useful it is to a private firm that exists to make money. A doctorate
in philosophy might be rare, but it isn't useful to a lot of software
companies. A software company might need secretaries, but there are
many millions of people who have that skill set. Having one of the two
doesn't mean you deserve a great starting salary, you have to have both
things going for you, and as people try to achieve that, salary structures
change in some industries over time. They only remain the same for jobs
where entry barriers are always relatively high or relatively low.
Rob the Bold :
There are problems in how they recruited students, so the
skills of the students who finish are in question? How does one
lead to the other?
Surely you've noticed that some schools recruit and admit students
primarily on their belief in their academic abilities and potential
(grades, test scores, previous educational institutions, . . .).
Other schools -- in particular the for-profit-tech schools in question
here -- recruit and admit on a different basis.
In the case of the for-profit-techs, that
basis is the prospective student's ability to qualify for student loans.
My sister-in-law works for one of these
institutions in the recruiting department. Her job is a quota-based
sales position. Salespeople who meet their quota are retained, those
who don't get put on "probation" and are eventually cut. Her motivation
is to get as many candidates to enroll as possible. Her employee evaluation
is based solely on body count.
I would say, therefore, that the skills of graduates of programs
where students are recruited in such a system as employed by the for-profit-techs
might be lacking compared to graduates of more selective institutions,
if for no other reason than the "quality" of the incoming students.
-- I am not a crackpot.
kugeln:
Our hiring practices generally exclude
anyone not coming from a "real" accredited college.
I'd rather hire somebody from a community college than anyone that
went and sold their soul to ITT Tech or Devry--it shows a profound lack
of common sense and planning ability.
It's right up there with hiring somebody that lists "Geek Squad"
on their resume. Pass...
ArhcAngel:
Our hiring practices generally exclude anyone not coming
from a "real" accredited college. I'd rather hire somebody from
a community college than anyone that went and sold their soul to
ITT Tech or Devry--it shows a profound lack of common sense and
planning ability.
It's right up there with hiring somebody that lists "Geek
Squad" on their resume. Pass...
As a graduate of ITT Tech I understand the sentiment but submit you
might be missing some diamonds in the rough with that attitude. I have
worked with individuals with CS degrees from "real" accredited colleges
I wouldn't let program my DVR let alone my mission critical application.
I also had a classmate who had been attending different vocational schools
for many, many years because he got government assistance as long as
he was a student. The point is it is not the school but the individual
who really matters in the equation.
My AAS degree got my foot in the door on the ground floor making
very little. It also gave me the opportunity to discover I was more
happy working on the service side than I was the programming side (
I liked the Mountain Dew and cheesy poofs but not the hours and lack
of human interaction).
Now my degree is little more than a foot note in my resume and my
service skills are sought out because I understand the hardware the
software and the people using them.
BTW It was actually common sense that led me to choose ITT. I knew
I wanted to go tech and ITT had a program that would put me there in
two years instead of four or more. That made perfect sense to me. Of
course I didn't know what I was in for and I might have done it differently
if I had but that's the way hindsight works doesn't it?
-- "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals
and you know it." - K
EmagGeek:
DeVry is STEEP for an ABET-T accredited program. One could go to
a State school and obtain an ABET-E Engineering degree for a LOT less
than the cost of DeVry.
What these colleges have over the State schools; however, is the
complete lack of selectivity. They will
let just about anyone in, and it'll be up to them to sink or swim. Most
of them sink, and some of them swim, and I have no doubt that a very
small percentage of bright people, who are otherwise inadmissible to
a State School due to circumstances not related to their academic performance,
do very well for themselves. That's a tiny tiny percentage though.
It's not all bad, but the lack of selectivity means most students
will fail, and do so owing a lot of money. It's not entirely the school's
fault. They should, however, raise the admission standards at least
a little bit.
dazedNconfuzed:
...Inaction is very expensive and just showing up isn't good
enough.
Most discussions about failure in education fails to note the student's
own failure to DO THE WORK.
About 1/3rd of my students fail, not because I'm tough or the material
is hard or whatever the usual excuses are - they fail because they just
don't do the work! Online quizzes not even opened/started, online discussions
not participated in, homework assignments not submitted (not even a
"I'm confused" text file as I recommend)...I am very sensitive and responsive
to even slight attempts at effort, but if they don't do anywhere close
to enough work - and I mean if I gave a 100% on every assignment they
did do it still wouldn't hit 60% for the course - then there is nothing
anyone else can do for them.
If you are willing to do the work, you can get a fine education at
any school at any price. If you are not willing to do the work, you
will fail and lose a lot of money in the process.
And yes, for-profit tech colleges can be trusted. If their product
(education) sucked as bad as is implied by the question, they would
soon fail because (hey, get this) they didn't do the work.
-- Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
$RANDOMLUSER:
As someone who taught programming (advanced C++, Java) part-time
at the community college level for years, I can tell you that the lack
of selectivity you talk about has a far more pernicious effect than
simply allowing unqualified students to sign up for courses they are
destined to fail. Allowing unqualified students into a classroom simply
because they can pay for it has the reverse effect of "a rising tide
raises all ships" - 2 or 3 (or 8 or 10) students in a classroom of 25
who don't have the prerequisite knowledge to be there causes NO END
of distractions and problems for both the teacher AND the qualified
students in the room.
I got out of teaching because unqualified students who didn't (and
never could have) understand what I was talking about expected me to
somehow pour knowledge into their heads without any effort on their
parts - because, after all, they were PAYING for it, by god. Meanwhile,
they were forcing me to present a dumber course to the people who really
DID "get it". And the better students were frustrated by the dumber
(and slower) level of instruction. Truly a lose/lose situation for all.
-- No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.
- Winston Churchill
gad_zuki! :
I think its unethical marketing leading this craze. There's a whole
lot of people out there that are just floundering at some crummy job,
or never went to college, etc who see all these ads like "Be a game
developer in 18 months!" or "Be a computer animator in 6 months!"
What they don't understand is that going from having zero programming
experience to hacking C++ takes a lot longer than 18 months at a diploma
mill. The materials are hard because the subject is hard. Even dumbed
down a lot of these people fail because it turns out that these non-traditional
students are crappy students in general.
I see this shit pretty often on tech sites with "Full Sail University"
ads. Yet another expensive "private university" that markets directly
to the general public with promises that I'm skeptical work out in the
real world. 21 month Bachelor's in Software Dev/Game dev/Animation/Graphic
Design? Right.
-- Imagine no religion.
dkleinsc:
In the United States at least, if you have no college degree but
are interested in putting in the time, money, and effort needed to get
one, you will get the biggest bang for your buck at your local community
college, possibly followed by some time spent at a nearby branch of
your state university system. It's not MIT, RIT, Caltech, Stanford,
etc, but it's going to be a pretty solid college education at a very
reasonable price, and cost considerably less than the clowns at ITT
or DeVry or University of Phoenix will charge you.
The only real exception to this rule is if you qualify for significant
financial aid that allows you to attend a fantastic technical school
at the same or lower cost than your government-run schools.
-- The box of animal crackers said "Do not eat if the seal is broken."
I opened it up, and sure enough . . .
e9th:
One BIG problem with the for-profits is that once you start
with them, you're stuck. As ITT-Tech [itt-tech.edu] puts it: It is unlikely
that any credits earned at an ITT Technical Institute will be transferable
to or accepted by any institution other than an ITT Technical Institute.
At least with even a community college, there's a good chance that
many or most of your earned credits, especially at the 100 or 200 level,
will transfer.
rsilvergun:
Even a community college is hard when
you're working full time. Most of the degrees that'll
lead to a good salary need full time schooling. The classes are in the
day and you have to attend classes.
There's some knowledge based jobs out there that don't fall in that
category, but there was a story today about those going away to computers
and outsourcing...
School isn't as easy as everything thinks. People always point to
guys that work two jobs and go through school, ignoring the fact those
guys are genetic freaks that get by just fine on 4 hours of sleep a
night. If you can't physically do that you're SOL.
-- Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
martyros:
you will get the biggest bang for your buck at your
local community college
But don't underestimate the value of
being in a really smart peer-group at a high-quality university.
I might have covered the same material if I'd gone to a community
college, but man, finally being with people
who were both really smart and really motivated academically was an
awesome change and an awesome challenge.
--
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
emagery :
Probably ~not~ but I would argue that the university system isn't
immune to monetary temptations either; I went to a state university
system, came from a working class family that could not afford to help
me out... though the compsci and physics programs were challenging and
rewarding (and well respected), the financial aide department was apparently
(for lack of any rational alternative probability) offended at a 'poor'
boy coming to their school. They raked me over the coals, lied through
their teeth, and set me up for a lot of unnecessary pain including myriad
courses audited due to their shinanigans preventing me from being able
to afford the textbooks!
This may sound like whining, but compare this to my wealthy ex-girlfriend
at the time who came from out of state (re: triple tuition costs) who,
in spite of a much more shallow and far less lustrous academic background,
got a free ride through school. To her credit, she maintained it well...
I'm not blaming her.
But the school played serious favorites with what their fiscal equations
must have indicated that she was better odds in terms of alumni donations
to the school. They rewarded her and punished me based on equations
and assumptions, best as I can figure. Well, now she's working in a
department store and I'm writing code that empowers a million plus people,
and that school's behavior has taken on something of a self-fulfilling
prophecy; they'll never get a donated cent out of me.
hedwards:
That's bureaucracy. I couldn't get work study in college, which was
the only viable means of having employment during the school year, because
I hadn't had it the first year I was in school. I had a friend whose
father received several promotions in one year and as a result couldn't
qualify for financial aid even though his parents didn't have the money.
And another whose parents weren't well off, but had grandparents who
were loaded and paid for everything, she got financial aid. Nothing
against her, that's just the way that t he system is set up around here.
Around here there are calculations about how much your parents are
supposed to pitch in, good luck if they can't or won't do it.
140Mandak262:
Ivies are costing 50-60K per year now a days. Met an alum of U-Chicago
who was shocked to learn his alma mater charges 55K per year.
The most refined form of socialism practiced in USA in the admission/financial
aid policies of the Ivies. It is all, "If you have the money pay the
full price even if you are the top student being admitted. If you don't
have money you a get a full free ride, even if you are at the bottom
of the admitted students".
The really rich don't care. The poor don't care they get benefited.
It is the frugal middle who did all the right things, who took sensible
size mortgage, squirreled away the money, took less expensive vacations
and cheaper cars and did everything your grandma told you to do, are
being punished for good behavior. With incentive system so warped, is
there any surprise America is on the decline?
--
If you think the whole world revolves around you, quit staring at the
GPS display while driving.
GodfatherofSoul :
Ever heard of early admissions or legacy? We've had 2 recent Presidents
who lucked up into Ivy enrollments and gentleman-C'd their ways to big
fat Golden Ticket that is an Ivy league degree. The Ivy League schools
are still powered by privilege. I'm also assuming that never had to
worry about paying for college if you think that people without the
money for tuition magically get a free ride.
College aid for poor students is so that kids with parents either
unblessed with wealth or too financially incompetent to assure college
education for their children still have a chance in life. And, unlike
the odd impression you've got about paying for college, it's not easy
by any means for the financially limited. Ask around, you'd be surprised
at the people who've come up thanks to our government's investment in
people at all social levels.
I'll share an anecdote about a roommate from college. She was overall
pretty cool, attractive, worked really hard, and unlike the average
dingbat keg-standing through college, she had her head together.
If you asked her, she'd tell you she paid her own way through college.
Now keep in mind:
■She didn't pay her own rent ■She didnt pay her own utilities ■She
didn't buy her own books ■She didn't pay for her own car
Who knows where her tuition money came from considering she only
worked about 10 hours a week in the sorority.
Now, in her mind she probably did make "sacrifices" by not being
able to go on that Cancun Spring Break trip with the rest of the sorority
sisters. These are all the little things that some of us who had more
opportunities seem to forget.
Call it "socialism" if you want, but it's worked for the past 50
years.
140Mandak262Jamuna:
That is a pretty uninformed rant.
Perhaps, it is you who is uninformed. I am going to be writing checks
totalling 240K to one of the top 10 schools over the next four years,
and I am pretty well informed.
The legacies have a relaxed admission standards, but they pay full
price, usually these legacies are loaded. They might get a "scholarship",
but that would essentially a tax dodging "non-profit" set up by a grand-uncle,
administered by Aunt Agatha, benefiting just that clan. Since they full
price I do not care.
I do not resent any one poorer than me getting aid. They deserve
it.
Nor do I resent anyone with better grades/scores getting aid, they
earned it.
It is those who earned as much as I did, and then gamed the system,
used income management, etc so that they can claim "low net worth" and
get aid. I resent that. Those who earned spectacularly more than I did,
and burnt it all off in expensive vacations, hobbies, homes etc can
now get assistance.
But I saved diligently, lived reasonably, squirreled away the earnings,
... now I am asked to pay full price as if I am some loaded millionaire.
And these kids are masters in gaming the system. Their actual SAT
scores puts them in the bottom quartile of the admitted students, and
they get full aid? Their parents earned more than I did. The kids scored
less than my child. And I pay full price and they don't? That is not
fair.
I immigrated with a 5000$ loan for airfare. Ended grad school with
$18000 in total debt just in 1994. Now the top schools are saying that
my 17 year savings puts me in the same bracket as Bushes and Kerrys
and Kennedys and I need to pay full price?
sean.peters:
Sure, elite colleges are quite expensive, and the cost-benefit
relationship in a lot of cases is way out of whack. But at least with
an elite college you can 1) be reasonably sure you're at least going
to get a top-quality education out of the deal, and 2) not worry too
much that the university is actively trying to steal from you. The quality
of education you get out of, say, ITT Tech or Kaplan is sometimes dubious,
and such institutions have been known to use shady tactics like continuing
to auto-register you for courses (and charging you for them) after you've
withdrawn from the school. In some cases this went on for mulitple semesters
before they finally "expelled" the student for non-attendence and then
hit them with a giant tuition bill for instruction that they never even
received.
So, yes, in a lot of cases elite colleges are not the best value.
But they're probably not actively ripping you off.
istartedi:
The socialist aspect of Ivy tuition doesn't bother me; but I wonder
if the implementation needs some work.
A while ago, it was big news when Stanford announced that any undergrad
from a family earning less than $100k/yr would get free tuition (and
maybe board, I don't recall).
The first thought running through my head was, "Wow, I bet there
are some people turning down some nice raises, or selling some dividend-earning
stocks to make sure they make high 90s instead of $100k"
It's the same problem as "bracket creep" in taxation, and I would
expect a bunch of smart guys from Stanford to know that. Did they do
it right though? I don't know.
-- For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs
the question, "who cares"?
GigsVT:
I attended a state college as well as Capella. They were both hard,
in different ways. I'm not really happy with what I learned in either
one of them. Both were generally a complete waste of time and money,
with the exception of a small handful of classes.
I generally recommend that anyone who is smart at all should avoid
the college trap. If you already have the ability to learn things on
your own, it's just going to be a massive and frustrating waste of some
of the best years of your life. We have the Internet now. If you want
to learn things, you don't need to listen to some egotistical asshole
talk about it for 50 minutes three times a week. You can just type some
things into Google and start learning and creating.
-- I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
spudnic:
The quality of the many recent graduates I interview from traditional
colleges and universities is atrocious. They have no analytical skills
what so ever and expect to come in making big bucks and leading projects.
The ones that I did hire sit around all day worrying about how they
could have used super duper new programming paradigm X and take forever
to complete what should be simple development tasks. They shut down
if a design spec given by a customer is not perfect rather than working
with the customer to clarify or work through the issue.
Argh! You kids get off my lawn!
-- load "linux",8,1
Computer Learning Center (Score:2) by Bigbutt (65939) writes: Alter Relationship
on Monday March 07, @11:44AM (#35406928) Journal Ok, so this is a few years
ago and anecdotal but there you go.
I got out of the Army in 82, spent a year doing odd jobs before landing
a part time programming position in BASIC. In 1985 I went to Computer Learning
Center to get better. Better training than the hobby and part time stuff
I'd been doing and a chance at a better paying, full time job. The FORTRAN
instructor was very good in teaching programming. The COBOL instructor was
a screw-up who threw up on the grade book after a night of partying (the
staff had to look at the grades from the reverse side) and lost several
projects when they blew away in the parking lot (the affected folks had
to redo their projects). In general I thought it was a pretty good set of
training and even taught the COBOL Report Writer in class for extra credit.
Anyway, when I started looking for a full time position, I couldn't get
past HR. This went on for several weeks until one HR woman said I should
remove Computer Learning Center from my resume as they generally punted
the resume once they see that.
I took it off and the next position I applied to offered me a programming
position on an IBM System/23 and on the IBM PC AT programming Funeral Home
and Point of Sales programs.
[John]
-- Shit better not happen! Reply to This I know someone who teaches at
one of these... (Score:2) by Rooked_One (591287) writes: Alter Relationship
on Monday March 07, @11:46AM (#35406978) Journal "...institutions."
They say it is a very sad state of affairs because the practice of taking
advantage of poor and undereducated people is all too common. This particular
person teaches English and states that they are blown away by the lack of
fundamental grammar and even spelling skills. That being said, if you don't
have a command over language, how will you ever understand that these schools
are in fact, *for* profit (for someone at least) and they do not have people's
best interests in mind?
The best suggestion I give when I come across someone who goes to one
of these is "STAY AWAY AND GO TO THE LOCAL COMMUNITY COLLEGE WHERE YOU CAN
TRANSFER CREDITS IF NEEDED!!!" I don't say it in all caps but make it very
obvious that it is not only the cheaper way to go, you will also become
more educated, and of course, the fact you can transfer creds, which you
cannot from many of these schools stated in the article. Reply to This Herzing
grad... (Score:2) by RingDev (879105) writes: Alter Relationship on Monday
March 07, @11:48AM (#35407002) Homepage Journal I went to Herzing. It was
on par with UW:Madison tuition. After ~$25,000 in debt I had an associate
degree and two bachelor degrees, although I maxed out my transfers/test
outs.
At the time, their associates CS program was, IMO, one of the BEST systems
to produce entry level programmers/consultants I've seen. I've gone to a
number of other universities and public schools (while in the military,
including military CS training), and I would have had no qualms hiring any
of the recent grads from their assoc CS program for entry level positions.
Their Bachelor programs seemed a bit more hit or miss. They had some
really amazing profs and teachers, and a couple of really bad seeds. They
were usually pretty good about getting bad teachers out in short order (usually
2-symesters and they would be gone). Really though, the Bachelor programs
were 100% dependent on how much you were willing to put in. If you did the
bare minimums, you could have still passed, but it would have been a waste.
If you were really dedicated to the topic though, there was a lot they offered.
That said, towards the end of my time there, they started to go in the
wrong direction as far as profitability over education, IMO. They introduced
some new degree programs (including a couple of video-game design programs)
that were really designed, IMO, to get kids to part with their money, and
not with future career in mind.
They also merged books into the tuition cost, so students couldn't re-use
books to save money.
And the thing that really chapped my hyde was when Renee Herzing (the
President) became a board member on a PAC that opposed a recent Dept of
Education rule change on capping schools' tuition rates for low-employment
and low-pay fields (ie: no running up $25,000 debt for a IT support desk
assoc degree) and she used her position to make the faculty send students
completely one sided arguments about how this rule was the worst thing ever
and it would destroy their education. When in reality, Herzing wouldn't
have been significantly impacted, and even then, it would have capped their
tuition rates only on specific programs. Their IT and Nursing programs would
have been completely uneffected.
-Rick
-- "Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state
if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
HerculesMO:
I graduated from a good private university, went off to get a tech
job in the finance sector and make very good money. Having been down
that road now, I realize what all colleges do -- "for profit" or not.
They are businesses out to make money.
First, they steer you towards bad loans. For example in New Jersey,
the financial aid office steers you towards "NJClass" loans that have
a 7% interest rate. You can do better if you go down to your local bank,
or even shop around online. But the college gets a cut from this, so
they offer you the NJClass loan. The prices you pay, especially for
private schools, don't come NEAR what you will be worth in any amount
of time. If you assume no scholarships (and I had a half scholarship
-- more on that later), a good school can run you anywhere from $15k
to $40k a year -- the former for a public state school, and the latter
for a private school. Things are variable of course, whether you commute
or dorm, but the minimum you can look at
nowadays is about $15k, even commuting.
I commuted to a private university with a half scholarship, and 5
years and a major change later, I graduated 65k in debt from school.
I however, am one of the luckier ones as I have a real skill and work
in an industry that while full of bad ethics, pays really well. I still
pay about $450 a month on my loans, and that's after consolidating and
everything else. If you figure that a college graduate that comes out
of school will make less than a six figure salary, that $450 is going
to be debilitating to pay back. And odds are, it will be even higher
just because financial firms have gotten more twisted and turned over
the years. Remember how the sub prime mortgages got bundled up and sold
off as good loans to other people? It happens with school loans TOO.
The bank has no reason to keep the loans, and in the 10 years I've been
paying back my loans, I have had six different lenders.
The only thing we can do as parents (if you are one, as I am), is
to steer your kids to making good choices and spend less money on their
education. The return simply doesn't work out well in their favor, especially
with the debt load they will likely have to carry. Community college
for two years, then a decent school for another two, and graduate with
as little debt as possible. I am one of the lucky ones as I said; I
have a six figure salary, I have a really good resume, I am good at
what I do and I enjoy it to boot. Not everybody is that lucky, and the
really unfortunate part is that it will affect their lives in a profound
way, while Wall Street (and the industry I work for) will profit handsomely
as they help shrink the middle class even more than they already are.
If you want to take a real stand, write your senator and get the
allowance for federal student loans raised to a higher level. It's easier
to repay a 1.5 or 2% loan than a 7% with variable interest and lots
of legalese you can't follow.
-- The price is always right if someone else is paying.
rAiNsT0rm:
I have been offered three positions with different tech institutes/training
centers to be an instructor and in the end turned all of them down.
I can only speak from the prospective employee side but the experience
was very similar at all three and it was slimy/dirty feeling from every
angle. Some of the outrageous things that were said or demanded of the
instructors as well as how the "students" were regarded and spoken about
put me off completely. Years later I now hire tech candidates and see
many resumes and get calls from these places, the signal to noise ratio
is so high it is often not worth my effort to go through 10-20 candidates
to find 1 good one (which is roughly what I have found to be the case).
Go to a decent community college for an associates, if you want to further
it then transfer to a solid state school. You will be far better off.
-- http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Red_Chaos1:
I learned the hard way that Certification Mills are not worth a damn.
I made the choice to go to CEI years ago. They got me Pell, and Stafford
Sub/Unsub loans, and I had to round out with a nice 19% interest Sallie
Mae loan. In all about $15K just to get an A+, MCP, Network+ and some
other cabling cert that I'd never heard of and have never heard about
since. About 3 weeks into the first class, I decided I'd made a mistake,
and decided to drop out so as not to incur major debt. they tried to
talk me into staying, but relented. They returned the Pell Grant, and
all of the Stafford loans, leaving me with about $3K in 19% interest
Sallie Mae as a thanks.
Had I had my druthers, I would've just spent the money on a few books
and study guides to brush up on what I didn't know, and taken the A+
and MCP tests on my own for a grand total of maybe $1K and avoided the
debt altogether. Hindsight and all..
roc97007:
The amount of my loan at DeVry doesn't seem like much now as it was
in late-70's dollars, but it took me until 1991 to pay it off at punishing
interest. And then a collection agency called me a year later and said
I still owed money (a few hundred). So I paid it. And then a different
collection agency called me a year and a half after that and said I
still owed money (a smaller amount, but still in the hundreds). After
fighting with them for some time, I ate the cost and paid it. I lived
in some anxiety for the next decade expecting yet another call.
My BSET from DeVry qualified me for a engineering assistant position
at about 50% above what was minimum wage at the time. The ads show you
working in the space industry or military electronics and you can get
those jobs (I did) but what they don't tell you is that stringing wires
is still stringing wires, whether it's a PBX or a command module.
My financial situation didn't turn around until I taught myself programming
and system integration, which positioned me to ride the internet / dot
com wave. DeVry had little to do with that -- their few programming
classes were still on punch cards when I was there.
-- George Lucas (Verb) Lucasing, Lucased (a) The act of committing
graphics overkill.
If there's one thing University of Illinois physics professor George Gollin
values as much as his students, it's the degrees that made him a professor,
reports CBS News Correspondent Lee Cowan.
So when he found out prestigious degrees like his were for sale on the
Internet, he decided to investigate.
"I got pissed off, basically," says Gollin. "There were people committing
fraud who were putting at risk innocent victims."
His research uncovered hundreds of sham universities – diploma mills
– offering fake degrees in everything from oncology to emergency surgery.
There are no lectures, no staff, no faculty, yet some people will pass
off these phony documents as legitimate degrees.
Take London's Strassford University. Its Web site claims this impressive
looking institution was founded during the reign of Queen Victoria. But
an attempt to find those ivy-covered halls of learning turned up no grand
building, no ivy, not even a sign.
"It may have a beautiful brochure, it may have a picture of a gorgeous
building on it, but it's not theirs," says former FBI investigator Allen
Ezell.
Fake degrees are nothing new to Ezell. What is new is the level of sophistication.
"They offer you lifetime verification, lifetime backup to your employer
if you're going for a job interview," Ezell says.
That means buyers not only get a fake diploma, they get a bogus transcript
with grades for courses never taken – and even letters of recommendation.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Me., is a not-too-grateful graduate. During her
investigation, she applied for two masters – one in medical technology,
the other in biology.
And what does she know about medical technology and biology? "Zero, nothing,"
Collins says. "In fact I never took a college level biology course in my
life."
But she really got mad when she discovered that a woman named Laura Callahan
boasted a doctorate in computer information systems from one of the phantom
universities.
And Callahan landed a job at the Department of Homeland Security.
"It raises questions, particularly if the individual has a security clearance,"
says Collins. "That's very troubling to me."
Troubling also, Collins says, because many of these fake degrees can
also be used to get student visas – just like two of the Sept. 11 hijackers
used to get into the country in the first place.
All reasons, says Gollin, to double-check fact against fiction and make
sure that virtual degree is indeed from a virtuous institution.
Students fresh out of college, six-figures deep in debt, face decades of
debt slavery. Both parents and students are wondering what went wrong. Please
consider
Placing the Blame as Students Are Buried in Debt.
Like many middle-class families, Cortney Munna and her mother began
the college selection process with a grim determination. They would
do whatever they could to get Cortney into the best possible college,
and they maintained a blind faith that the investment would be worth
it.
Today, however, Ms. Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University,
has nearly $100,000 in student loan debt from her four years in college,
and affording the full monthly payments would be a struggle. For much
of the time since her 2005 graduation, she's been enrolled in night
school, which allows her to defer loan payments.
This is not a long-term solution, because the interest on the loans
continues to pile up. So in an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens
of thousands of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning. They and
their families made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason,
much as subprime borrowers assumed the value of their houses would always
go up.
The Project on Student Debt, a research and advocacy organization in
Oakland, Calif., used federal data to estimate that 206,000 people graduated
from college (including many from for-profit universities) with more
than $40,000 in student loan debt in that same period. That's a ninefold
increase over the number of people in 1996, using 2008 dollars.
No one forces borrowers to take out these loans, and Ms. Munna and her
mother, Cathryn, have spent the years since her graduation trying to
understand where they went wrong.
She started college at age 17 and borrowed as much money as she could
under the federal loan program. To make up the difference between her
grants and work study money and the total cost of attending, her mother
co-signed two private loans with Sallie Mae totaling about $20,000.
When they applied for a third loan, however, Sallie Mae rejected the
application, citing Cathryn's credit history. She had returned to college
herself to finish her bachelor's degree and was also borrowing money.
N.Y.U. suggested a federal Plus loan for parents, but that would have
required immediate payments, something the mother couldn't afford. So
before Cortney's junior year, N.Y.U. recommended that she apply for
a private student loan on her own with Citibank.
Over the course of the next two years, starting when she was still a
teenager, she borrowed about $40,000 from Citibank without thinking
much about how she would pay it back. How could her mother have let
her run up that debt, and why didn't she try to make her daughter transfer
to, say, the best school in the much cheaper state university system
in New York?
The balance on Cortney Munna's loans is about $97,000, including all
of her federal loans and her private debt from Sallie Mae and Citibank.
What are her options for digging out?
Her mother can't help without selling her bed and breakfast, and then
she'd have no home. She could take her daughter in, but there aren't
good ways for her to earn a living in Alexandria Bay, in upstate New
York.
Cortney could move someplace cheaper than her current home city of San
Francisco, but she worries about her job prospects, even with her N.Y.U.
diploma.
She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for
a photographer. It's the highest salary she's earned since graduating
with an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women's studies. After
taxes, she takes home about $2,300 a month. Rent runs $750, and the
full monthly payments on her student loans would be about $700 if they
weren't being deferred, which would not leave a lot left over.
"I don't want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an
education I got for four years and would happily give back," she said.
"It feels wrong to me."
What Went Wrong?
Supposedly "Ms. Munna and her mother, Cathryn, have spent the years since
her graduation trying to understand where they went wrong."
It should take seconds. Going $100,000 in debt to get an interdisciplinary
degree in religious and women's studies seem rather foolish to say the least.
Exactly what kind of job did Ms. Munna expect to get with that degree?
Now she is working for a photographer and it is plain to see her degree
is totally useless. Kill the Pell
Grant Program
Rather than throwing hard earned taxpayer dollars at programs that invite
fraud and make debt zombies out of students, it's time to kill the program
entirely. Instead, Obama wants to expand the fraud, even indexing the
fraud to inflation.
Education is not the answer when the cost is $100,000 for totally useless
degrees.
Government meddling enabled this mess, and the best cure (although it will
do nothing for Ms. Munna) is to shut off all student aid programs, offer
more online programs at low cost, fire needless administrators, and get
rid of bloated pension plans for teachers.
Instead, Obama is compounding the failures of the disastrous Bush administration
"No Child Left Behind" program.
The president wants to throw still more money at the problem. This will
do nothing but increase the profits at questionable schools, jack up the
pay of administrators, and make more student debt zombies.
The student vote turned out overwhelmingly for Obama and his policies are
helping make them debt slaves for life.
This guest post is contributed by Mark Paul and Anastasia Wilson. Both
are members of the class of 2011 at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
For-profit colleges are expanding enrollments at a rapid pace, but it is
questionable whether these revenue-seeking universities give adequate consideration
to students' welfare, retention/graduation rates, and overall economic well-being
alongside their bottom line profits.
A new post by
Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor at Columbia Teachers College and new
weekly contributor to the New York Times Economix blog, explores the merits
of for-profit colleges, arguing that in many ways these schools are more
efficient at seeking funding opportunities for students and adopting new
teaching technologies. These schools procure more Federal dollars per student
and employ more cost-saving technologies, in the classroom and online, than
their non-profit public and private competitors.
However, the real question is not a matter of efficiency, but instead
concerns students and the taxpayers funding Federal loans and grants consumed
by for-profits. Are the relative merits of profit-oriented
schools, including their comparative advantage in securing Federal funding,
being used to improve the return on investment for students or for their
shareholders? On the macro level, does the growth of for-profit higher education
promote new risks in the economy, as drop-out and loan default rates continue
to increase?
The relative efficiency
or effectiveness of for-profit schools is not necessarily what has been
driving record enrollment rates, which were
up 25% just over the past year. The Great Recession has pushed many
students and unemployed folk towards higher education, as better credentials
often mean better job prospects. With the unemployment rate for those holding
a bachelors degree at
4.2%, there are incentives to enroll. In fact,
applications and
enrollments for colleges are up across the board, perhaps meaning the
overflow from more selective schools is being crowded into the fast-growing
for-profit institutions.
Though increased enrollment appears to imply
increased opportunity, many students are in higher risk of drop-out and
loan default when choosing a for-profit college. The for-profit education
sector is in large part to blame for the sharp rise in student loan defaults,
accounting for almost half of total defaulters. In the graph below, the
Department of Education has concluded that despite only having 12% of total enrollments, for-profit schools disproportionally
account for 48% of total student debt defaults. Since for-profits
are so effective in securing Federal loans and grants for their students,
this means that the schools are in essence receiving an indirect subsidy
from the government and taxpayers, while leaving students in the red.
While an increasing number of students enroll
in for-profits and take on large amounts of student debt, they also increase
their risk of drop-out. A report published last year by the
Education Trust shows how devastating dropout rates are, with only 22%
of students enrolled at for-profit four-year universities graduating within
six years, as compared to 55% and 65% at public and private non-profit universities,
respectively. Many students enrolling in these institutions are left without
credentials and burdened with debt, yet the schools are able to retain their
profits made from students' tuition.
The increased prevalence of for-profit universities,
with their dangerous combination of drop-out and default, may be aggravating
a
looming student debt crisis. Overall, the volume of loans in default
grew to
$50.8 billion in 2009, up 30% from the year before. As more students
enroll in risky for-profit schools, these rates are likely to increase,
perhaps leading to another consumer debt crisis similar to the foreclosure
fiasco.
Although many are well aware of these alarming
facts, our elected officials appear to continue favoring the implicit tax
dollar handouts to for-profit colleges. The
spending bill recently passed by House Republicans even blocks the Department
of Education from enforcing a new rule that could limit for-profit schools'
access to Federal money. While arguments can be made that profit-seeking
schools give wider access to higher education, it seems that the profit
motive and shareholder loyalty are overtaking concerns for the well-being
of students and the economy at large. Instead of allowing Federal dollars
to support for-profit education, the money ordinarily received by these
schools should be used to increase the capacity of public higher education
and provide
"finish line" grants to those facing financial struggles in their final
year of study.
As the Obama administration seeks to increase enrollment, graduation
rates, and investment in higher education, policy makers need to consider
redirecting their funding towards students and not into the pockets of shareholders
by subsidizing private profits.
A bipartisan House group voted on Friday to block the Obama administration
from cracking down on career college programs that leave students with debt
they can't repay.
The
House budget amendment, proposed by Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., and approved
289-136, would prevent the Department of Education
from publishing long-discussed consumer protection rules that would regulate
for-profit colleges and some community college programs.
Known as the "gainful employment" rule, the hotly debated regulation
would gauge whether students at such programs are able to repay their student
loans and can attain salaries that don't bury them under unmanageable debts.
Programs that fail to meet certain student debt targets could lose access
to federal higher education grant and loan dollars -- revenue that is crucial
to the survival of the for-profit college industry.
The measure is still far from becoming reality, as the House budget bill
will face a major uphill battle in the Senate, and the threat of a veto
from President Obama. But the vote is indicative of the growing political
influence of the for-profit education industry on both sides of the aisle
in Congress.
More than 50 Democrats in the House joined Republicans in opposing one
of the Obama administration's key higher education reform proposals.
Industry representatives applauded the vote, saying the regulation would
"cost in excess of 100,000 jobs and deny a pathway to employment for more
than 1.5 million students, disproportionately affecting minorities and women,"
according to a statement from the Coalition for Educational Success, an
industry group representing some of the largest publicly traded for-profit
education companies.
Individual programs -- not entire schools -- could be subject to sanctions.
The Department of Education estimates that if the rules go through, about
16 percent of for-profit programs could lose access to federal higher education
dollars.
For-profit colleges are facing increased public scrutiny amid a bevy
of data that shows students at such schools take on much more debt and default
on federal student loans at much higher rates than other college students.
Average tuition at for-profit schools is nearly twice that of the in-state
tuition at four-year public colleges, and more than five times the average
tuition at community colleges, according to a Senate report released last
year. And recently released data from the Department of Education show that
a quarter of all students enrolled at for-profit schools defaulted on federal
student loans within three years -- more than double the rate of students
at non-profit institutions.
Debate on the
gainful employment rule has often centered on access to higher education.
Opponents of regulation say the rules would prevent mostly minority, low-income
students from attending college. Supporters argue the regulations would
simply target the worst actors in the industry, who seek profits from federal
aid dollars with little regard for student outcomes once they enter the
workforce.
The Department of Education has not yet released a final version of the
rules, but a draft version would allow programs at for-profit colleges to
remain fully eligible even if less than half of students are repaying the
principal on federal student loans.
A spokesman for the Department of Education defended the regulations,
and said the agency would "continue working with Congress and education
stakeholders as we thoughtfully move forward on this important issue."
"Far too many students are being saddled with unmanageable debts in exchange
for degrees and certificates that do nothing to improve their employment
prospects," said the Department spokesman, Justin Hamilton.
Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the House Education
and the Workforce Committee, who opposed the amendment, said the vote would
"shut down work on protecting students from financial exploitation."
"When these institutions can make up to 90
percent of their revenue from federal student aid, we have an obligation
to protect the taxpayer investment," Miller said.
The media has been so preoccupied with acute symptoms of the debt crisis
– sliding home prices, foreclosure abuses, ongoing Euromarket bank/sovereign
debt stress, ongoing battles over financial regulation implementation, unhappiness
over the Fed's QE2 – that lingering problems are not getting the attention
they deserve.
High on the list is the how the weak job market is affecting new college
and advanced degree program graduates. We have an unspoken social contract:
young people who get an education, particularly a "good" education (which
means more elite universities, more serious courses of study, graduate degrees)
are supposed to be rewarded by higher lifetime
earnings. And the prospect of higher lifetime earnings in turn makes it
rational to borrow to invest in education.
But this whole premise has started to go awry, and the huge uptick in
unemployment has started to make matters worse. A guest post at Baseline
Scenario by UMass-Amherst students Mark Paul and Anastasia Wilson
outlines the grim conditions facing new graduates:
Currently, even after a slight boost in jobs growth, unemployment
for 18-24 year olds stands at 24.7%. For 20-24 year olds, it hovers
at 15.2%. These conservative estimates, using the Bureau of Labor Statistics
U3 measure, do not reflect the number of marginally attached or discouraged
young workers feeling the lag from a nearly moribund job market.
Take note: half the recently-minted college grads are in jobs that do
not require a college degree.
Now if these graduates were going to college for the mere love of learning,
and didn't mind working at Home Depot because they could work on a novel
in their garret, this picture might not be quite as terrible as it looks.
But I sincerely doubt that anyone in the US goes to college to become a
working class intellectual.
But the economic (as opposed to social and
personal) value of higher education
is exaggerated.The widely-touted College Board claim that lifetime earnings
for college grad outpace those of mere high school grads by $800,000 does
not stand up to scrutiny. The author of the 2007 study which the College
Board relied upon disclaims that estimate and says $450,000 is a better
figure. Mark Schneider, a vice president of
the American Institutes for Research, who used actual earnings data of graduates
ten years after college, and allowed for other factors such as taxes, pegged
the difference at $280,000.
And these estimates are averages. Students who are drawn to fields such
as architecture, which require advanced education but are not terribly well
paid, will fare less well.
In addition, the value of a degree is premised
as much on its scarcity and credentialing value as it is on actual gains
in skills. If college educations go from a sign of achievement
to a mere social norm, do they really provide that much income benefit to
the recipient? James Galbraith, in The Predator
State, argued that encouraging more people to get college degrees actually
lowered its value, but also served the useful social function of delaying
entry into the job market, and hence reducing employment pressures.
But students and their parents have been sold on the value of education
as an investment, and it isn't hard to see why. As higher education costs
have skyrocketed, more and more students need to borrow to finance their
schooling. The Economist gives an overview:
For decades, college fees have risen faster than Americans' ability
to pay them. Median household income has grown by a factor of 6.5 in
the past 40 years, but the cost of attending a state college has increased
by a factor of 15 for in-state students and 24 for out-of-state students.
The cost of attending a private college has increased by a factor of
more than 13 (a year in the Ivy League will set you back $38,000, excluding
bed and board). Academic inflation makes most other kinds look modest
by comparison.
In the stone ages of my youth, many middle
class parents could afford to send their kids to Ivy League schools. A year
at Harvard, with room and board, is now over $50,000, on a par with median
household income.
And perversely, student loans are the only form of consumer debt that
is virtually impossible to discharge in bankruptcy. Per
FindLaw:
Thanks to a provision the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer
Protection Act signed into law by then President George W. Bush,
the current law only allows the discharge
of private student loans in bankruptcy after a showing of "undue hardship,"
the same requirement that is made for federal or non-profit backed student
loans. Undue hardship requires a separate showing to a bankruptcy judge
proving, in essence, that the borrower would never be able to pay off
the loan. This is an extremely difficult legal standard to meet.
New graduates are, or at least should be, very attractive to employers.
Someone who can't find a good job right out of school will face even higher
hurdles down the road. Paul and Wilson describe how
high unemployment rates for young people represent
a an economic and ultimately a social problem:
Recent college graduates, those in the labor force with the freshest
batch of knowledge and skills, are currently underwater and sinking
fast with unprecedented student loan and personal debt. Average
student debt for the class of 2008 was $23,200, an increase over
four years of about 25%, meaning that students
are knee deep in negative equity between their educational investment
and actual earnings.
Between inflated student debt and the lack of available jobs for
qualified graduates, students are defaulting at an
all time high level of 7.2%. From 2008 to 2009, student debt defaults
jumped about 30% to $50.8 billion. This earning-to-debt gap not
only hurts lending institutions, but also may affect students' future
abilities to borrow – a significant hurdle in our credit driven economy.
If student debt and job stagnation continue, younger workers will
face real structural unemployment (as opposed to the fake kind that
had been suspected by some economists, but was recently debunked by
the
San Francisco Fed). The more time these young workers spend unemployed
and underemployed, the greater chance for future structural unemployment
due to deteriorating human capital.
High debt, high defaults, and low family earnings will prevent many
students from finishing college at all. High unemployment for those
who do manage to graduate with a degree will create barriers for those
unable to start their careers.
This is a slow motion train wreck. Optimistic estimates of economic recovery
project unemployment reverting to pre-bust norms by 2015; more realistic
forecasts put it at years later. And the more students drop out of college,
the worse job market pressures become.
At the end of their piece, Paul and Wilson make a persuasive case for
action:
In order to solve future structural problems
in the United States and ensure a future for the sandwich generation,
fiscal policy focused on educational and job growth is crucial. While deficit hawks may squawk about the costs, the burden
of repayment is on younger people. Without adequate education and careers
for students, we will never be able to balance the budget. In the long
run, it makes more fiscal sense to create jobs and collect tax revenue
than to rely on a model that merely waits for the private sector to
invest.
But the "long run" and "fiscal sense" don't count for much in deficit
debates. Sadly, the very real plight of this cohort is certain to be ignored
unless they can find a way to make their needs heard.
I sat a few months ago with a former classmate from Harvard Divinity
School who is now a theology professor. When I asked her what she was teaching,
she unleashed a torrent of obscure academic code words. I did not understand,
even with three years of seminary, what she was talking about. You can see
this absurd retreat into specialized, impenetrable verbal enclaves in every
graduate department across the country. The more these universities churn
out these stunted men and women, the more we are flooded with a peculiar
breed of specialist. This specialist blindly
services tiny parts of a corporate power structure he or she has never been
taught to question and looks down on the rest of us with thinly veiled contempt.
I was sent to boarding school on a scholarship at the age of 10. By the
time I had finished eight years in New England prep schools and another
eight at Colgate and Harvard, I had a pretty good understanding of the game.
I have also taught at Columbia, New York University and Princeton.
These institutions, no matter how mediocre you
are, feed students with the comforting self-delusion that they are there
because they are not only the best but they deserve the best.
You can see this attitude on display in every word uttered by George W.
Bush. Here is a man with severely limited intellectual capacity and no moral
core. He, along with Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who attended my boarding school
and went on to Yale, is an example of the legions
of self-centered mediocrities churned out by places like Andover, Yale and
Harvard. Bush was, like the rest of his caste, propelled forward by his
money and his connections. That is the real purpose of these well-endowed
schools -- to perpetuate their own.
"There's a certain kind of student at these schools who falls in love
with the mystique and prestige of his own education," said Elyse Graham,
whom I taught at Princeton and who is now doing graduate work at Yale. "This
is the guy who treats his time at Princeton as a scavenger hunt for Princetoniana
and Princeton nostalgia: How many famous professors can I collect? And so
on. And he comes away not only with all these
props for his sense of being elect, but also with the smoothness that
seems to indicate wide learning; college socializes you, so you learn to
present even trite ideas well."
These institutions cater to their students like high-end resorts. My
prep school -- remember this is a high school -- recently built a $26 million
gym. Not that it didn't have a gym; it had a fine one, with an Olympic pool.
But it needed to upgrade its facilities to compete for the elite boys and
girls being wooed by other schools. While public schools crumble, while
public universities are slashed and degraded, while these elite institutions
become unaffordable even for the middle class, the privileged retreat further
into their opulent, gated communities.
Harvard lost $8 billion of its endowment over the past four months,
which raises the question of how smart these people are, but it still has
$30 billion. Schools like Yale, Stanford and Princeton are not far behind.
Those on the inside are told they are there
because they are better than others. Most believe it.
The people I loved most, my working-class family in Maine, did not go
to college. They were plumbers, post office clerks and mill workers. Most
of the men were military veterans. They lived frugal and hard lives. They
were indulgent of my incessant book reading and incompetence with tools,
even my distaste for deer hunting, and they were a steady reminder that
just because I had been blessed with an opportunity that was denied to them,
I was not better or more intelligent. If you
are poor, you have to work after high school or, in the case of my grandfather,
before you are able to finish high school. College is not an option. No
one takes care of you. You have to do that for yourself. This is the most
important difference between them and the elites.
The elite schools, which trumpet their diversity, base this diversity
on race and ethnicity, rarely on class. The
admissions process, as well as the staggering tuition costs, precludes most
of the poor and working class. When my son got his SAT scores
back last year, we were surprised to find that his critical reading score
was lower than his math score. He dislikes math. He is an avid and perceptive
reader. And so we did what many educated, middle-class families do. We hired an expensive tutor from the Princeton Review, who taught him
the tricks and techniques of taking standardized tests. The tutor told him
things like "stop thinking about whether the passage is true. You are wasting
test time thinking about the ideas. Just spit back what they tell you."
His reading score went up 130 points. Was he smarter? Was he a better reader?
Did he become more intelligent? Is reading and answering multiple-choice
questions while someone holds a stopwatch over you even an effective measure
of intelligence? What about those families that do not have a few thousand
dollars to hire a tutor? What chance do they have?
These universities, because of their incessant reliance on standardized
tests and the demand for perfect grades, fill their classrooms with large
numbers of drones. I have taught gifted and engaged students who used these
institutions to expand the life of the mind, who asked the big questions
and who cherished what these schools had to offer. But they were always
a marginalized and dispirited minority. The bulk of their classmates, most
of whom headed off to Wall Street or corporate firms when they graduated,
starting at $120,000 a year, did prodigious amounts of work and faithfully
regurgitated information. They received perfect grades in both tedious,
boring classes and stimulating ones, not that they could tell the difference.
They may have known the plot and salient details of Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness, but they were unable to tell you why the
story was important. Their professors, fearful of being branded political
and not wanting to upset the legions of wealthy donors and administrative
overlords who rule such institutions, did not draw the obvious parallels
with Iraq and American empire. They did not use Conrad's story, as it was
meant to be used, to examine our own imperial darkness. And so, even in
the anemic world of liberal arts, what is taught exists in a moral void.
"The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace,
but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes
with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of
intelligence: the analytic," William Deresiewicz, who taught English at
Yale,
wrote in The American Scholar. "While this is broadly true
of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and
faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such
a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally
prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one's advantages.
But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability,
to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among
the educational elite."
Intelligence is morally neutral. It is no more virtuous than athletic
prowess. It can be used to further the rape of the working class by corporations
and the mechanisms of repression and war, or it can be used to fight these
forces. But if you determine worth by wealth,
as these institutions invariably do, then fighting the system is inherently
devalued. The unstated ethic of these elite institutions is to make as much
money as you can to sustain the elitist system. College presidents
are not voices for the common good and the protection of intellectual integrity,
but obsequious fundraisers. They shower honorary degrees and trusteeships
on hedge-fund managers and Wall Street titans whose lives are usually examples
of moral squalor and unchecked greed. The message to the students is clear.
But grabbing what you can, as
John Ruskin
said, isn't any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your
brains than with the power of your fists.
Most of these students are afraid to take risks. They cower before authority.
They have been taught from a young age by zealous parents, schools and institutional
authorities what constitutes failure and success. They are socialized to
obey. They obsess over grades and seek to please professors, even if what
their professors teach is fatuous. The point is to get ahead. Challenging
authority is not a career advancer. Freshmen arrive on elite campuses and
begin to network their way into the elite eating clubs, test into the elite
academic programs and lobby for elite summer internships. By the time they
graduate, they are superbly conditioned to work 10 or 12 hours a day, electronically
moving large sums of money around.
"The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions
and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can't be measured
by a letter or a number or a name," Deresiewicz wrote. "It forgot that the
true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers."
"Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger
intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim
soul," he went on. "These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least
because they get so little support from the university itself. Places
like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.
Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big
questions. I don't think there ever was a golden age of intellectualism
in the American university, but in the 19th century, students might
at least have had a chance to hear such questions raised in chapel or
in the literary societies and debating clubs that flourished on campus."
Barack Obama is a product of this elitist
system. So are his degree-laden cabinet members. They come out of Harvard,
Yale, Wellesley and Princeton. Their friends and classmates made huge fortunes
on Wall Street and in powerful law firms. They go to the same class reunions.
They belong to the same clubs. They speak the same easy language of privilege
and comfort and entitlement. They are endowed with an unbridled
self-confidence and blind belief in a decaying political and financial system
that has nurtured and empowered them.
These elites, and the corporate system they serve, have ruined the country.
These elite cannot solve our problems. They
have been trained to find "solutions," such as the trillion-dollar bailout
of banks and financial firms, that sustain the system. They
will feed the beast until it dies. Don't expect them to save us. They don't
know how. And when it all collapses, when our rotten financial system with
its trillions in worthless assets implodes, and our imperial wars end in
humiliation and defeat, they will be exposed as being as helpless, and as
stupid, as the rest of us.
Well, well, well, someone has finally found
the end run societal gambit. I have been wondering
about this for quite a while. My thinking which I am presently acting
on is that student loans are going to be
as large if not larger problem than housing not for financial reasons
but those of social stability. Basically the average
student debt load is so high as be be likely unpayable in real if not
even in nominal terms. The recent proliferation
of for profit schools has exacerbated this problem. Furthermore
these high debt loads delay purchases like homes and delay or prevent
new household formation. And maybe most importantly the lesson from
the last 3 years I took away w/r/t debt and the government is that it
is better to gamble on the Federal Government embracing moral hazard
than to be prudent. Lastly the interesting thing about student debt
vs. any other loan is that while they might wreck your credit if you
fail to repay, a. they cannot take your degree or knowledge back and
b. they will not pursue you to a foreign country to get the money. So
if a person were smart they might get in as deep as possible and if
the job market here leaves them cold just go where the work is…..
Psychoanalystus:
See my comment below. The problem is that as the US is losing the
respect of the world, so are American degrees. It used to be easy for
an American graduate to have his degree accepted abroad. Now it's getting
harder, and for good reason, because American higher education is getting
worse by the day. The current exponential growth of for-profit education
will completely prostitute American education.
Similarly, getting a work visa abroad for Americans is becoming harder.
This is why I have been harping around here for a few years now about
the importance of having two citizenships. For example, some EU nations
are still willing to give citizenship (or at least residence and work
visas) to somebody who can trace his or her roots to that country for
up to 3 generations. Might come in handy.
Psychoanalystus:
Great article! In addition to my clinical work, I also teach part
time at a private medical school. Some of
my students graduate with as much as $350,000 in debt.
I think the average is around $150,000.
Another problem is that in many professions, if a graduate falls
behind in paying his student loans, the DOE sometimes will go as far
as to prevent that person from getting a license to practice. I know
several doctors, dentists, and psychologists with huge debt in that
situation. And, since they cannot practice, they obviously aren't able
to pay their student loans. Catch-22. I know a few who were forced to
leave the country because of this, and now practice in Europe just because
here their careers were ruined by student loans. It is an insane system.
heavyjetcaptain:
The prospect of getting a job as an associate
at a big firm right out of law school has disappeared over the past
few years for just about anyone who hasn't gone to a
top tier law school and graduated in the top 5% of the class.
Law school doesn't even begin to arm you with the skills necessary
to litigate against a major defense firm, so these new lawyers would
be no match for the army of experienced lawyers the law schools would
hire to defend any class action suit for the fraud they have committed.
And since the case would likely be a loser, it would be very difficult
to find a worthy plaintiffs' law firm willing to sink the money into
a case on a contingency fee basis. Moreover,
the ABA would absolutely pull out all stops to keep their little
law school ripoff scam running. Most of the judges are active ABA members
too, so I can't see them having too much sympathy for the plaintiffs.
My best friend graduated from Michigan State University Law School
a few years ago and passed the Georgia bar on his first attempt.
He has over 100K in student debt and has
only been able to find "document review" jobs in other cities. This is the new future for law school graduates that they
don't tell you about when you take the LSAT. He is driving to another
city away from his family, paying for his own hotel room and food, sitting
in a room with 50 other lawyers for 12 hours per day, and
making $17 per hour with no benefits and
no overtime (professionals are exempt).
Big pharmaceutical companies hire these contract lawyers to review
tetra bytes of documents to see if they contain privileged information.
Really, a gaggle of monkeys could probably do the same job. It certainly
doesn't require a juris doctor degree, but I suppose since there are
hundreds of thousands of new lawyers out there who cannot find anything
else, why not hire them for peon wages and make them feel like they're
practicing law while they look for a real legal job.
Take a look at some of the jobs that new law school graduates can
expect. http://www.shitlawjobs.com/
. How can anyone pay back a student loan at wages that are only slightly
higher than Starbucks when you factor in benefits? My friend tells me
that, of the 50 attorneys in the document review room, most everyone
has placed their student loan in deferment status.
I am puzzled about why it's taking so
long for people to figure out that law school is a three-year ripoff.
I guess every student wants to believe that they will graduate
in the top 5%, but the odds are very much stacked against them.
attempter:
I've already heard of a few cases of law students suing their law
schools for having fraudulently represented the value of the degree
and the jobs that would be available to them, and inducing them to take
out student loans on that fraudulent basis.
Poetic justice (for both parties, in the case of law students) aside,
the moral soundness of such a suit is clear. This is a clear-cut case
of predatory lending. You fraudulently represent an expensive asset
as being an investment which will always appreciate in value, and induce
the mark to take out a usurious loan in order to purchase it.
The parallel with housing is clear, and the fraud is even more direct.
In the case of mortgage lending fraud, the seller was usually technically
the previous homeowner, with the banks and their flunkeys managing the
sale (and the government only propagandizing for it).
Here the school and the government themselves, along with the banksters,
are active participants in the loan fraud.
It's even worse in this case because there are no non-recourse student
loans. There's no house collateral to repossess. There aren't even recourse
loans which can be discharged in bankruptcy. Instead the "repossession"
on a default can be nothing other than indentured labor. Legally, there's
no walking away from a student loan. Once the distressed student borrower
can't pay, he's placed in the Hobbesian state of nature vis the indenturing
system. The 2005 bankruptcy law has only made this worse.
Then there's the fact that many of those who went on to post-graduate
study did so expecting to be hired at asset-appreciating rates by the
very educational system which was making these promises for these assets.
Yet everywhere today we see the schools themselves failing to hire in
sufficient numbers, and low-balling those they do hire, and seeking
neoliberal structural adjustments for professors and teachers at every
level.
It's there that the loan fraud is most stark, direct, palpable.
So I'd love to see class action suits against the universities by
the distressed student debtors, and a parallel political campaign unmasking
this systematic lending fraud on the part of the schools and the very
government which makes it impossible to discharge the debt, but wants
to turn it into indentured servitude.
While here it's not legally possible to jubilate the debt from the
bottom up (the way it is with e.g. mortgage debt), it's possible to
politically demonstrate it to be predatory debt, the victims being the
children (and by extension the parents who have to keep financially
helping them) of the very middle class who would be the target audience.
And this way may lie some kind of political relief, some kind of top-down
acquienscence in the demanded jubilee.
(Meanwhile, I don't know how legally viable such lawsuits would be.
The law is no doubt rigged against them, and even if not it would still
depend upon non-corrupt judges, judges who aren't pro-bankster. But
I think the main point of such suits would be political. Money shouldn't
be a problem, if we have all these unemployed lawyers. All you need
is enough of them who recognize that the most likely path to relief
is political, and that such suits can be part of that political campaign
even if they don't prevail in the proximate legal sense.)
Beyond that, this is yet another stark lesson in the fact that the
government and system institutions have become on the whole enemies
of the people. What other conclusion can be drawn from the fact that
they've taken the education aspiration itself, something which throughout
history was the shining emblem of socioeconomic advancement, always
right at the core of the work-hard-and-play-by-the-rules propaganda
(and let's recall how just a few years ago the likes of David Brooks
were trumpeting the notion that America needed to aspire to universal
college attendance), that they've taken this and turned it into another
malevolent dead end and debt trap.
We know what Hobbes said the person who has been cast out and placed
back in the state of nature should do, what he's morally entitled to
do, if the sovereign unilaterally breaks the social contract. The student
debtor, the victim of top-down loan fraud and the target of indenture,
should recognize that the existing system first lied to him and then
unilaterally declared war upon him. He should regard it in kind.
An article in the Times for September 4 describes two women,
a medical student with a stunning quarter million
dollars in loan debt so far, and a woman with a bachelor's
degree who incurred $170,000 worth. There has been a tuition bubble these
last thirty or so years just as there was a real estate or an Internet bubble,
and it is having some similar consequences. It is a very unwise and dangerous
choice to go that far into hock just to get an undergraduate education,
and there is no guaranty that with a mere BA the latter woman will be able
to earn enough to pay off her debt.
Even the doctor-to-be is facing a situation in which she may never slip
up, never take time off to have children, in order to be debt free when
she is in her fifties (!!).
Banks which lend these amounts of money for education are engaging in
many cases in exactly the behavior of banks which loaned absurd amounts
of money for real estate purchases by people who would never be able to
repay it unless a miracle occurred. Such lending is doubly irresponsible,
putting the bank at risk and ultimately forcing bail-outs with public money,
but also encouraging individuals to engage in risky behavior.
The spectacle of young people starting their adult lives as much as a
quarter million dollars underwater is very disturbing. The role of government
in sponsoring, encouraging and guaranteeing student loans also needs to
be re-examined. A government role which made
sense when people were graduating with $20,000 in debt looks entirely different
when the number is ten times as much.
In 2004, a housecat
named
Colby Nolan was awarded an "Executive MBA" by
Texas-based
Trinity Southern University. The cat belonged to a deputy attorney general
looking into allegations of fraud by the school. The cat's application was originally
for a Bachelor of Business Administration, but due to the cat's "qualifications"
(including work experience in fast-food and as a paperboy) the school offered
to upgrade the degree to an Executive MBA for an additional $100. As a result
of this incident, the
Pennsylvania
attorney general has filed suit against the school.
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
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Here, the data are showing us something that we find to be very interesting. Namely, that those who spend more money on a low-ROI bachelor's degree often find their careers to be more 'meaningful' than your average engineer. Does this mean there's an inverse relationship between spiritual fulfillment and monetary compensation when it comes to ones' career path? Possibly. But would like to suggest another possible explanation.
During this period, we have witnessed a huge national decline in well-paid middle class jobs in the manufacturing sector and other sources of employment for those lacking college degrees, with median American wages having been stagnant or declining for the last forty years. Meanwhile, there has been an astonishing concentration of wealth at the top, with America's richest 1 percent now possessing nearly as much net wealth as the bottom 95 percent. [2]
Bruce
E. Woych:
