Once upon a time, America, a land of ponies and cheap gasoline, made the higher education of its citizens a priority, whether they be rich and privileged, poor and desperate or simply the children of the working middle class. America had some of the best universities and colleges in the world, many of them supported by state governments and almost all of them subsidized by the federal government, with chap loans, grants and other programs that made it possible for any qualified individual high school graduate to afford the cost of getting a college degree. This helped lead to an explosion of the middle class, staggering economic growth, and a nation with enough Gross Domestic Product that it could spend TRILLIONS of DOLLARS on costly wars, costly and unnecessary weapons programs and the single largest military establishment the world has ever known without batting an eyelash.
Somewhere over the past three decades, however, the idea that providing higher educational opportunities to America’s children was a good thing regardless of the class in which they were born went by the way side. As governments reduced their commitment to higher education in order to reduce taxes on the wealthiest Americans, and even in many instances on upper middle class Americans who, though they had benefited greatly from government assistance in obtaining their own college degrees that forever changed their lives for the better, the cost of higher education skyrocketed.
Oh, everyone still believed that their children should go to college, and employers still demanded that college degree as a prerequisite for better paying jobs, but for many reasons — the greed of corporations who sought more profits through employing people in other countries and saw no reason why they should have to pay for educating a work force in their own, individual selfishness, or the the fear that someone else’s kid (and likely a “minority”) was getting a better deal than their own children — led to the popular opinion that government support for higher education was at best unnecessary and at worst, a bad thing that “redistributed wealth” from those who had “made it on their own” to those who did not deserve the same opportunities to which they had been given.
Indeed, the entire idea of higher education as a good investment in our nation;s younger generations was demeaned and discounted. So it should come as no surprise that college costs rose at a rate far in excess of inflation, whether the colleges were private institutions or public ones. And as those costs rose and rose every year due to lack of financial support by our society, America’s institutions of higher education began to fall behind those in other nations, even as more and more graduates took out more and more loans to fund their education. The result was inevitable: a generation of young people who have either been denied the benefits of a college degree altogether, or who went into massive debt only to find that their college degrees have become, in many instances not worth the cost of the effort, time and most of all expense that went into acquiring them:
Student loan debt outpaced credit card debt for the first time last year and is likely to top a trillion dollars this year as more students go to college and a growing share borrow money to do so. […]
“In the coming years, a lot of people will still be paying off their student loans when it’s time for their kids to go to college,” said Mark Kantrowitz, the publisher of FinAid.org and Fastweb.com, who has compiled the estimates of student debt, including federal and private loans.
Two-thirds of bachelor’s degree recipients graduated with debt in 2008, compared with less than half in 1993. Last year, graduates who took out loans left college with an average of $24,000 in debt. Default rates are rising, especially among those who attended for-profit colleges.
In the past, their was a consensus in America that every qualified American high school graduate deserved the chance to better themselves through obtaining a college degree. It was a policy that benefited our economy and millions of Americans, especially WWII veterans and their children, the so-called baby boomers. Now however, many of these people have forgotten the educational opportunities of which they took advantage, and have brought into the propaganda that government investment in future generations is “socialism” and somehow unfair. They rail against parasites stealing their tax dollars (though the tax burden on Americans, particularly well-off Americans, has never been lower) and falsely claim that in the old days they achieved their successes all by themselves.
Thus, it should come as no surprise to anyone that today’s college graduates are far from sanguine about the benefits of a college education that our politicians now openly contend needs less and less funding by government (so that wealthy persons, real or fictional can profit even more) even as our soured economy continues to teeter on the edge of disaster.
“Three in four Americans now say that college is too expensive for most people to afford,” [Education Secretary Arne] Duncan said. “That belief is even stronger among young adults — three-fourths of whom believe that graduates today have more debt than they can manage.”
And the conservative pundits wonder what the Occupy Wall Street Movement wants. I can tell you one thing it wants: a government that benefits real hard working people, not unindicted criminals on Wall Street whose institutions received bailouts and secret loans while students went ever deeper into debt. They want a government that supports them and not the multi-national corporations that have benefited the most from the assault on education, and the failure to invest in the most precious of all our national resources: our children.
We, my generation, may parent’s generation, and the politicians (all too often beneficiaries of government assistance in the past and corporate cash in the present) who are mere lapdogs to the real rulers of our country have failed our young people. They should be mad as hell about what their country is doing to them, as should any parent trying to find the means to afford college for their children.
The widespread anger over rising college costs came into sharp focus Monday at two student protests. In New York, City University of New York students and their supporters held a raucous street protest, with signs saying “CUNY must be free” and “Abolish the board of trustees,” as trustees approved a series of $300 annual tuition increases extending through 2015.
And in California, Cheryl Deutsch, a U.C.L.A. graduate student who leads the union representing student workers, confronted the university’s regents to extended applause when she said that as bankers and financiers, real estate developers and members of the corporate elite, they were not representative of the people of California. “You are not representative of the students of U.C. You are the 1 percent,” Ms. Deutsch said.
Yes, Cheryl, they are the 1% and they would see your dreams and tour world burn if it would mean one penny more in their pockets.
Let me end on a personal note. I have a 16 year old daughter. She takes all honors and Advanced Placement classes in math science, history, Latin and English. She carries an A average in all of her classes, and achieved the highest mark on her World AP History exam last year. She also studies art, plays the piano, participates in numerous clubs after school and has participated with me as a volunteer in an interfaith program to help homeless families find jobs and homes again, while receiving support (food and shelter) from people like — her.
Yet, she has severe anxiety attacks over her prospects of going to college. Because both her parents are disabled, and our income is limited, she worries that unless she can obtain a full tuition scholarship she will be stuck going to a community college at best. I tell her not to worry, that we will find the means to fund her education, but she does not fully believe me. She wants to be a biochemical engineer, by the way
I have a son who graduated with dual degrees in Psychology and Japanese with a grade point average of 3.7 who cannot find a job and sees his only option as returning to graduate school in the hopes of obtaining a higher degree in a field that will provide him with a career. He was fortunate in that he did earn a tuition scholarship for his undergraduate studies at a major university, but he will have to work and take out loans to afford graduate school as we do not have the means to fund his future educational expenses.
And I? I worry that regardless of whatever education they receive, they may have to emigrate to find a decent paying job, for our economy is not producing jobs as it did back when income inequality was low during the fifties, sixties and seventies. I worry that both will be able to afford decent healthcare, particularly since the health care reform act that requires insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions is endangered.
I have great kids. I also live in a society that has turned its back on them and millions like them. I watch them struggle despite their intellectual gifts and wonder how much harder it must be for others of their generation who have less advantages than they do and greater burdens. For we, as a nation, have failed them. And I see no solution in sight for their plight. We have wasted and ruined the lives of our best and brightest so that the greed and gluttony and lust for power of evil people can be fed.
I salute each and everyone of them who are out there in the streets protesting what our nation has become, and demanding that something be done about the many injustices in our failed society. As I write these words, I know many of them are suffering from physical harm meted out by law enforcement and from slanderous charges and verbal abuse from our diseased corporate media, merely for standing up for themselves and our rights through the use of non-violence. They deserve better.
I just graduated in May with a degree in Aerospace Engineering with a minor in Mathematics. I’m still unemployed because:
a. Employers people with 5-10+ years of experience; I’ve found plenty of jobs that would pay around $100,000 if I had 5 years of experience.
b. The few openings that have come up in entry level are political. You need to know someone to get that entry level job, or it’s going to be filled with a friend of a friend’s child. There just aren’t enough entry level jobs right now.
I have $50,000 in student loans; $29,500 are federal, the remaining are private. I’ll tell you what: the federal scare me more. Not because it’s more money, but because the interest rates are much higher. In many cases my federal loan interest rates are 2x the rate of my private loans. In fact, I’d rather have gone all private at this rate. Yes, there are things you can do with federal that you can’t with private (they’re fixed rates, payment schedule can be made more lenient). This is George Bush’s fault, btw. This all changed in 2006. It’s one thing to give me a fixed interest rate in a time where private interest rates are high…but interest rates were fucking kept low, they knew they’d be kept low, and they didn’t care. More money to the banks.
I hate agreeing with conservatives, even if it’s for different reasons, but the American university system is honestly one of the most corrupt entities in the world. It’s the hotbed of capitalist socialization. It basically provides corporations with the best service they could possibly ask for. It’s just a machine constantly turning individuals into capitalists. The only competitor would be the American health care system.
Libertarians are right when they say “unlimited student loans are the problem,” but they’re only right in so much as saying “government intrusion into health care is why we have such high health care costs.” It’s a stupid technicality, but it’s not honest. Student loans were not always needed. They were only needed when the state stopped funding the universities, and the neoliberals decided to allow students to have some “skin in the game” to lower the costs; throw debt off the government and onto the private citizen. Hmmm, sound familiar? Neoliberals, they’re like hipsters: they ruin everything.
Well, one thing: the cost of higher education is not rising because college professors are getting paid more. We’ve barely kept up with the cost of living, and for the past three years I’ve had my pay cut or held flat.
What’s driving up the cost are amenities that students expect: copious and up-to-date computers and other technology, slick dorm rooms, game rooms, and so on.
I work at a small, residential liberal arts college. We’re certainly not catering to corporate interests, and I certainly don’t turn individuals into capitalists.
I just don’t like being painted with such a broad brush: I work too hard for too little money to teach kids the skills they need to get along in the world: how to write, how to speak, how to think (I make a LOT of liberals!), and how to work with others effectively.
Sorry, let me be more clear about where I think the rise in college costs are coming from:
The reason for the increase is because American universities are not just places of learning anymore; they’re turning them into a hotbed for white suburban kids. No longer are dormitories just some bare minimum with a cotbed. Now they’re like mini-condos. At most colleges it’s cheaper to live off campus than on. Others are adding ridiculous amenities (like this: http://www.depts.ttu.edu/recsports/aquatics/leisure.php ). Administrators continue to skim more off the top for themselves, and add new employees that they don’t need through adjunct professors at the expense of tenured profs. And last, colleges are subsidizing sporting events at the cost of everyone. While some colleges this is fine — like the big ones — smaller colleges cannot handle this cost.
And yes, college professor’s pay has pretty much stayed the same…I think it’s just kept up with the pace of increased costs. But no lift in pay, really.
So I’m not blaming you, so much as administration. I wouldn’t say the students are demanding these changes; admin wants to compete for prestige. “Oh look at what Harvard just got! We need one, too!”
However, they’re doing this because no matter how much they increase tuition, they keep getting money in the form of student loans without any cost controls. The problem is always the neoliberal way of doing things; the usage of the market to achieve government aims through government sanctioned policy. Either accept that college will remain in the upper classes with a few people squeaking through, or pay for the damn education and stop shifting costs onto students while universities gouge everyone else.
The reason costs are rising at my wife’s institution have very little to do with amenities and everything to do with the fact that the state keeps cutting funding, and the only way for the university to keep functioning is to raise tuition to make up for reduced state support. The state’s share of the costs for the university have gone from something like 40% done to something like 15% percent over the last ten years, and there are more big cuts on the horizon.
Right. But that doesn’t account for increases of the real cost of education, just cost shifting from government to private individuals.
It’s like Paul Ryan saying he’s reducing costs by getting people off Medicare. But that’s just not true. He’s just shifting the costs from the taxpayer to the private citizen. And when the real reason college is getting more expensive isn’t addressed — mainly those three reasons I used above, but there are other, smaller reasons — it just becomes unsustainable when private individuals are turned into wage slaves with unlimited college loans.
It’s really a lot like our health care situation, actually. Something has to give.
The other major area of overhead for universities nationwide is administration. I forget what the most recent numbers looked like, but about half the personnel costs are administrators – from university presidents and provosts down to the level of Deans. There’s a running joke somewhere I’m sure that if a university president got concerned about finding solutions to the problem of too many administrators, he or she would create a vice president position in charge of “solving” the problem. 🙂
Something else to mention too…the private for-profit online “universities” (Kaplan, etc.) should be avoided at all costs. Those are the source of the student loan bubble we’re seeing.
Finally, states have largely stopped supporting the state institutions, so in order to simply keep faculty from starving, buildings from crumbling, etc., universities have resorted to tuition and fee increases instead.
You are unemployed because H-1Bs are given your job.
We need to END THE H-1B PROGRAM NOW.
Unlikely. Most jobs in my field require citizenship, or at the very least employer sponsorship. That’s an extra hurdle that they don’t want to go over. Secondly, almost every job in my field requires a security clearance. You can’t get a security clearance unless you’re a citizen. So, in other words, you’re wrong.
Well, you clearly do not see the big picture.
There are a limited number of jobs. We have 8,000,000 H-1Bs occupying a lot of IT jobs, and jobs in various engineering positions as well. If a person cannot get a job in the SPECIFIC field that they were trained in, they can often be qualified for a similar field. So, the spillover of the H-1B situation is that others take jobs that they are not perfectly qualified, but marginally qualified for.
That moves down the line.
In addition, if there was a job available and you were there with your aeronautical skills, you could be qualified for the next close position. But the huge pool of excess labor in the H-1B system means that the employers require very tight matches. As an engineer, you can do a lot of different things. You will not be offered the close position, because of the labor over-supply.
You unemployed students also don’t understand what is going to happen unless you start a huge scream at congress – they may INCREASE the yearly number of H-1Bs from 85,000 + 20,000 to either UNLIMITED or much higher.
The good jobs are out there, but the H-1B system means that there is a huge oversupply of labor available.
Better rethink your view of H-1Bs, L-1s, O-1s, F-1, B-1s, and several others. There are MILLIONS of jobs being occupied by foreign labor, and you are unemployed. Why are you sitting on your butt?
I thought people who found this post interesting might enjoy this talk from the Royal Society.
From my personal experience my college education (1998-2000 before I dropped out) was a mixed bag. I don’t think the experience was bad… but my work as an intern provided much more benefit to me and really launched my career (and paid me instead of creating student loan debt). That and a personal commitment to being a “life long learner” and genuinely interested in the task of trying to understand what my employer is trying to do and figuring out for myself what needs to be done.
But I totally agree with Steven… I have no idea how the future is going to work out for people younger than me (and many in my generation as well). How are we all supposed to do more than just “survive” if the entire economy of the United States is completely broken (and we’re trying to export this everywhere else…).
This also reminded me of something I read over at Daily Kos the other day. And which related to this other RSA Animate post. And also tied back to W. Edwards Deming’s Out of the Crisis which I was reading last month.
Anyway… awesome post Steven!
Go back further, Steven D. I remember exactly when that happened.
Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California, got the great idea to sell the research services of the university to government and corporations on a more massive scale than was going on before 1960. The idea of actually teaching students sort of fell by the wayside; students became just another income stream (mostly from the state of California at that time).
The increased collaboration (and its accompanying loyalty tests) with the military industrial complex spawned the Free Speech Movement and the campus era of 1960s protests that soon became focused on the Vietnam War. Prior to 1964, folks who protested and organized had to leave campus and go South on Freedom Rides or Freedom Summers.
By 1966, protests in Berkeley were in full swing, and there were folks who didn’t like that form of political education. They elected Ronald Reagan as governor of California. In order to “give the kids a dose of reality”, California began upping the tuition and fees. Now state support of California’s public universities is a small part of their income stream.
And as the cliche goes, California is the model for the nation.
So the specific date is January of 1967.
We are still giving 100,000 H-1B jobs away every year, and now the morons in congress are considering offering foreign students who get a graduate degree a green card.
THIS IS INSANE.
Our universities are there to teach OUR STUDENTS. We teach foreign students but THEY SHOULD GO HOME.
THe H-1B program is now tieing up about 4,000,000-5,000,000 jobs which are high-tech jobs.
WHY DO WE CONTINUE THE H-1B PROGRAM??????
Large public and private universities have very quietly been building schools in India and China. Brings in pure profit to be divided by CEO’s that run our schools. An Education is about to be nothing more than a commodity like sugar or coffee.
I could give a shit about those. They are not the issue. The issue is JOBS IN THE US. At this time, there are MILLIONS of jobs being held by foreign guest workers. At the same time, there are MILLIONS of US unemployed.
At this time, many in congress (Zoe Lofgren among them – she in an immigration attorney who is trying to increase the number of h-1Bs to the US which will increase her clientel) want to increase the H-1b and other work visas. Millions more jobs will not go to US students.
There is something very evil in congress where they want to give jobs to foreign persons over our own students and university grads. I have 3 kids, one out and 2 as seniors in college. They will be looking for work, and who need jobs. I do not want to see the labor pool expanded hugely. We do not need a huge new labor pool.
You really hit it out of the park this time Steven.
Lots of great observations in these comments, but the making the pieces of the puzzle fit together is tough.
As mentioned, faculty salaries have stagnated, admin costs have soared. Some better student “amenities”, but unlikely to explain the rise in tuition.
The way I see it, the increase in amenities and admin costs are an EFFECT, not a CAUSE. The cause is that extra tuition cash has to be soaked up in current expenses, because 99% of colleges are non-profit, so they don’t have stock options or dividends. And heaven forbid that they pay the faculty more…that’s just crazy talk! No, the administrators have decided: administration is more important.
The reason for the tuition increases is supply and demand. The supply increases slowly, population has gone up, the percentage of jobs that requires a degree has skyrocketed. State universities used to keep the overall tuition level somewhat in check; no longer.
The student loan bubble has just delayed the day of reckoning, when demand drops because a degree isn’t worth the cost. That’s one (bad) way to slow down tuition hikes.
My prescriptions: fund state universities, so that they stabilize tuition cost levels (much like a ‘public option’). Increase supply, expanding colleges in number and size to meet the public need. Tell colleges that they lose their tax-exempt status if they spend more than 25% of their wages on administrators. (oh the screams…it’d be music to my ears).
Those complaining about research being ‘too much’ at world-class universities like the (old) UC system: go ask an MIT grad (or Caltech grad) how good the ‘teaching’ was. Then ask them how much they learned.
It’s a very different environment where new knowledge is being continually created, compared to where the same-old same-old is being regurgitated for the n’th time, but that’s probably not obvious unless you’ve experienced it first hand.
BTW, Steven, for your son. There’s a program that recruits young american college grads to teach English in Japanese schools for a year or two.
All japanese kids take many years of English, few are lucky enough to have a native speaker as a teacher.
I’ve heard it’s an interesting and rewarding experience, so he might want to check it out.
Best of luck for your daughter as well; you might want to try and track down scholarship sources online yourself, rather than hope that a financial aid office will do it for you.
I strongly agree that the rising cost of higher education represents a significant societal failure with long-term negative consequences.
However!… (and this is directed specifically toward Steven D, but also to anyone else who feels a good higher education is out of reach despite strong academic qualifications)
There are some excellent schools, including some of the Ivy League schools, that have made a strong commitment to making their schools affordable. They really do look at what you can actually afford and make up the difference. (They have a need-blind admissions policy.)
My son is attending such a school. (Not an Ivy.) Because of the financial aid provided by the school, he will graduate without debt. We are a middle-class family that can afford to pay about a third of the bill, so we do. The school pays the rest. If we couldn’t afford even that, the school would make up the difference.
I have not seen this financial aid policy broadly available, so it does not have broad application or broad benefits to society. But for the specific case the Steven D mentioned, of an outstanding student with limited financial means, please investigate the financial aid policies of schools with strong academic reputations before giving up that dream.
Sounds like that school provides the aid from donations. I assume it’s private. That doesn’t help most people. I mean, I was offered a scholarship to attend private schools that paid about 2/3 of the bill, too. Problem was, the remaining third was the same cost as my public university.
My daughter got such a deal at a well-known private university. She had done OK in high school, and I hoped she would do well in college. Unfortunately, her first year was not particularly successful. After that, her grades were below the level for the scholarship. So, we were forced to pay full price, and after a 3rd semester of very dubious performance, we made a mutual decision to go to the local community college.
Many private schools do that. They know that many students will not get grades as good as in high school, and are willing to put up a small scholarship for a year, hoping to bind you with ties to the school. Works pretty well for many, I am sure.
Yep. Very nice point.