Posted on 03/07/2012 10:34:45 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Another student protest, another mass arrest. Monday, thousands of students from all over California snarled traffic during their march on the Capitol in Sacramento. Hundreds of students then flooded the Rotunda of the Capitol, a somewhat raucous affair. Eventually, the California Highway Patrol cleared them out, and 60 were carted off and thrown in the hoosegow for trespassing and resisting arrest.
Their problem: tuition increases. Already, tuition in California's state schools has tripled over the last decade, and state budget cuts will induce universities to jack up tuition again. But the state is out of money. And so it's struggling in a weird and ineffectual way with its red ink. For more on California’s ongoing debacle, read.... Search For The Missing Moolah.
The same day the students were arrested, the New York Fed released a report on the consequences of incessant tuition increases across the nation: ballooning student loan balances that are increasingly difficult to bear:
- 27% of the borrowers who had to make payments (not current students) were past due.
- $870 billion in student-loan balances at the end of the 3rd quarter 2011 (higher than credit card debt of $693 billion and auto loans of $730 billion), up 2.1% from the 2nd quarter, while other consumer debt declined or remained flat.
- Average balance: $23,300. That includes the millions of student loans that, after years of payment, have much smaller balances or are nearly paid off. Average balances owed by recent graduates are much higher.
The report lauded President Obama’s executive actions of October last year designed to ease the repayment burden of federal student loans. Laudable as they may be, they only soothe the symptoms for ex-students by shifting more of the costs to the taxpayer. But they don’t deal with the cause: the system itself. It has become dysfunctional.
Universities as businesses, in an environment that is devoid of price competition. For example, when the University of California system demands higher tuition, the whole system falls in line to support those increases, rather than resist them.
Captive customers. Students have to get their education within the higher education system. When tuition goes up, they can’t massively drop out because it would jeopardize their dream (by contrast, if air fares jump, customers react by flying less). They can choose cheaper colleges, but all colleges are jacking up tuition and fees. And the nationwide existence of “out-of-state tuition,” while plausible on a state basis, stifles cross-border competition. So students fight tuition increases the only way they can: by obtaining more funding.
Finance. The student-loan industry profits from processing student loans. Naturally, they encourage students to take on more debt. The amount is a function of the cost of the school, not of the ability to pay back the loan. While risk serves as a natural brake in making loans, in the student-loan industry, risk is transferred to the taxpayer who guarantees the loans.
The ultimate enabler. The government, in constant need of voter support, will fund and guarantee whatever it takes to allow students to get their education regardless of how reckless tuition and fee increases are. Thus, Obama’s executive actions make repayment less onerous, but they don’t do anything to contain tuition increases.
There are no price pressures on universities—except student protests (so, keep at it). Outrageous clockwork-like tuition increases are met not with resistance but with an unquestioning, endless, and ever increasing flow of government-guaranteed student loans. The beneficial forces of market discipline have been wrung out of the system, and governments have not stepped in to exercise alternate controls.
University administrator salaries, bonuses, benefits, golden parachutes, and pensions have shocked the public when they’re exposed in the media. Programs that have little to do with education swallow up more and more money. And sure, everybody loves to have well-equipped labs in fancy buildings. But the system needs to be restructured, either by opening it up to competition or by exposing it to effective checks and balances. Solutions won’t be easy, but there isn’t much room left before it will bankrupt an entire generation.
And just when the information age demands more from education than ever before! In this respect, an insidious and at once funny information-age issue with worldwide implications erupted, of all places, in a tiny village in France. Read.... Can't Even Urinate in his own Yard Anymore.
No , it isn’t. I missed that class because I had to change the oil on an airplane.
The first law to remove should be the "Equal Opportunity" laws that are used to hammer employers who don't hire or promote minorities in the "right" proportions. Then employers could hire people without degrees and just test applicants for reading, writing, and math abilities, or just be allowed to look up the applicant's SAT scores and school transcripts.
The second law to remove is the one which makes student loans non-dischargable in bankruptcy, and which gives taxpayer guarantees on student loans. Suddenly, loan issuers would be reluctant to extend $150K in loans to people who want to major in Women's Studies, or otherwise look like they would not be getting a job at graduation that would allow for loan payback.
What I would like to see would be for universities to back loans from their own endowments. When professors' pension funds are on the line, they will be less willing to admit marginal students.
Brilliant. About the same probability of happening as me marrying Salma Hayek, but brilliant.
Of course the universities would hate it. I could see making the universities putting their money where their mouths are by making them underwrite at least a percentage of the student loans as a condition of participating in the federal student loan program. If the feds completely exited the picture, private loan issuers might make similar demands that the university accept a penalty for each default.
In the absence of federal loan guarantees (and absence of EEOC threats), private loan companies would deny loans to people who do not meet a profile that indicates a high probability of payback (no loans unless you have a minimum SAT/GPA profile, no loans for worthless majors, no loans to schools whose graduates do not get decent jobs upon graduation).
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