So; today I read the news and it says:
The Bush administration, seeking to avert a crisis for students seeking college money this fall, threw its weight behind a congressional plan for the Education Department to buy billions of dollars in student loans from private lenders.
Does the litany never end? Does society just not comprehend that doing the same thing over and over and over again but expecting different results is the definition of insanity?
According to professional anti-capitalist whiners like the State Public Interest Research Groups (State PIRGs), wicked vile America does not do nearly enough to make college affordable for all qualified students, like they do everywhere else in the civilized world.
Put aside for the time being that what defines a "qualified" college or university student these days often tends to include people who are so poor in their reading or mathematics skills that they shouldn’t even have a public high school degree.
What’s salient here is that these professional whiners and haters always come back to the same old story that the reason higher education is not affordable to so many American families with college-age kids is that there is just not enough being done by the government, which means not enough student subsidization.
Put aside for the time being the principled notion that it’s probably not the government’s business to be subsidizing students, since for just one thing that means some ivory tower keep dwelling bureaucrat gets to define who is "needy" and who is not (and that is hardly the sole reason).
So. PIRGs and related whiners shout about needing more student aid, in other words, and they are adamant that the pool of such aid is rapidly shrinking (no doubt the fault of the Vast Wight Wing Conspiwacy of the Wascally Wepublicans, huhuhuhuhuhuhuh!).
So…how to explain the fact that in the decade from 1995 through 2005, total federal student aid (in real dollars) more than doubled, reaching $90.1 billion?
And according to the College Board, average real-dollars aid to full-time students reached $10,113 in 2006. In 1986, that was $4,108. In real dollars, that is nearly a 150% increase in federal subsidizing of college students!
But, as all this has been going on, professors’ actual classroom hours have on average shrunk drastically. Forty years ago, professors were expected to spend 12 hours per week per semester in the classroom (keep in mind dear reader than none of that accounts for preparation time, student consultation time, research time, or paper-grading time).
Nowadays there is an outraged hue and cry from the ivory towers if that expecation is more than 6 hours per week.
What gives?
The answer is what many of us have heard of called "publish or perish". Professors are expected to spend more time than ever doing research and less time than ever actually lecturing, or teaching.
Why is that?
Because research is where the federal grant money is. And colleges and universities rely very, very heavily on that grant money–which is nothing more than subsidies. More and more institutions of higher learning bar a younger professor from gaining tenure and any significant raise until she is doing her part to fill the coffers with federal or state grant money–which, again, is earned not by actually teaching, but by doing "useful" research.
Even more perversely, the American Association of University Professors has policies that show extreme anti-market bias, a long-standing thorn in the side of economists throughout history.
In other words, the AAUP has policies in place that for all intents and purposes make it impossible for most universities or colleges to compete for talented students based on price. What that means for people is that higher education is strong-armed into relying on federal and state subsidizing–which, I should point out, all ultimately comes from you the taxpayer–and not on that proven price cutter and performance enhancer, competition.
Competition based on price would also mean that academies would not be able to take in as many students as they do now–they would not, after all, be able to afford them. Which means: they would become much, much more selective in who they accepted.
This thought is anathema to the Left, which in yet another one of its misinterpretations of the U.S. Constitution believes that everyone in America has a "right" to a college level education.
This belief is smugly ignorant and patently outrageous. College is, simply put, not for everybody. Just ask Bill Gates.
In addition, students who did fit in at college but who really couldn’t afford the tuition would find a new market opened up to cater to them: let’s call it "Angel Investors in Future Promise". These angel investors whose niche market was students in need of more capital would pay the cost of the tuition as the "investment". In return, the students would be expected to maintain quite high academic standards–which would actually mean something because now professors would actually be teaching again–and would then be expected to pay back the angel plus a return on investment out of future earnings. I suppose that would also leave some room for very promising future sports stars, but what’s important is that it would open wide the doors for the backwoods genius and the misfit entrepreneur.
The professional whiners, the suicide kings, the drama queens, and the bratz would all be removed from the system in short order–unless their parents just didn’t care about throwing away their money, which they would have a right to do.
But if they didn’t want to…while we don’t need professional whiners, we always need someone to sweep the floors and pick cabbage.