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.