The problem is state appropriations for higher education have dropped dramatically, forcing more costs onto students in the form of higher tuition.
State of Michigan Higher Education Appropriations vs. tuition:
Yep. Not a peep about this, because they know people will break their backs and their own finances to send their kids to college, no matter how much they raise expenses.
Of course tuition has gone up. The massive decline in state support has driven this madness as state funds continue to be rerouted to welfare programs. But hey, let’s kick education to the curb and continue the transformation to a welfare state run by organized criminals of the DC empire.
There’s a simple method to the scheme. Every single university in the nation....hired up a massive support apparatus after WW II...people who aren’t professors and don’t really provide educational support....other than paperwork or pretending to do paperwork. Since no state legislature is willing to take them on...it’s a mammoth who can only grow larger. You’d think that state legislatures would get smart and create a new university operation...with a limit of one support person to each professor, and suddenly flip the tuition episode upside down with $300 classes in existence once again.
I graduated from college in 1979, had a family, had a job, went to night school, paid for my courses as I went along, and didn’t owe a penny to anyone when I walked to my car after my last class. That was a 4-year degree at night. Didn’t owe a penny.
Then all of a sudden up comes government loans and all kinds of crap started: increased tuitions, 4-year degrees became 5 year degrees, etc.
Long past time for the government to stop subsidizing 4-year degrees in trans-gendered Aleutian folk music.
A disaster in the making. Good article.
Just read through the article... it’s all Reagan’s fault.
Salon is just plowing the ground for Obama’s executive order bailout of student loans. No, he has no power to spend this money, but will the GOP stop him in an election year? We all know the answer to that. And the ignorant student voters will turn out in droves to vote Democrat.
If easy student loans had not been available, the universities would not have been able to raise tuition and have students.
alleged high health costs gave us the ACA . . .
what can high education cost give us ?
Look no further than supply and demand. The economy measures “demand” in dollars. The more dollars you throw at something, the greater the demand. More money for education hasn’t meant more opportunity for education... it’s meant greater cost of education. And it’s an inelastic good... so we’ll pay it.
Step 1 of nationalizing college was student loans.
Step 2 of nationalizing college was eliminating private student loans.
Step 3 will be forgiveness of student debt via taxes.
Step 4 will be nationalizing all tuition through taxes.
Step 5 will be government colleges.
Step 6 will be the demise of the USA as a significant player on the world stage.
I’ve often wondered why America is so insignificant in end-times prophecy. It may just be that we had a moment in time on the world stage.
The article barely touches on the government-sponsored easy credit that allows the prices to go up.
And the article neglects to mention that colleges are filled with an enormous number of favored students (mostly various minorities, Democrat grievance groups) who do not pay full freight. The current system is just another avenue of attack in the redistributionist war on White Republican clingers. At least, that is how I think the Obama crowd looks at it. I mean, their voters are not the ones whose children are graduating from college with enormous debt.
Especially when you consider the quality and usefulness of the curricula has declined significantly.
The two areas of the economy that have inflated by far the fastest are health care and education, both of which have had trillions of government money pumped into them. Hardly a coincidence.
I don’t think I agree with the author:
“Let me repeat, as a fact of some significance, that the great tuition price spiral began in 1981. That was the same year in which Ronald Reagan brought his jolly band of deregulators to Washington, in which Congress enacted the landmark Kemp-Roth tax cut, and in which the air-traffic controllers’ union went down to humiliating defeat...
...But in retrospect I think the answer is obvious. It happened then because these things are all related: deregulation, tax cuts, de-unionization and outrageous tuition inflation are all part of the same historical turn.”
I’m not buying the “It is Ronald Reagan’s fault” line...
The problem is state appropriations for higher education have dropped dramatically, forcing more costs onto students in the form of higher tuition.
State of Michigan Higher Education Appropriations vs. tuition:
Thomas Frank presents a casebook example of muddled liberal thinking.The government comes in with classic third-party payer-victims (aka taxpayers) through a guaranteed and subsidized student loan scheme, and Frank doesn’t come close to identifying its role in the spiraling prices. Instead he bizarrely and without evidence tries to pin it on “tax cuts”.
And the solution is rather easy and simple, and has already been adopted by many Chinese universities.
Get rid of nonsense courses and nonsense majors. In the US, this is the job of state legislatures, and only a few of them have made any tentative steps to do so.
“The University of South Carolina Upstate eliminated the center that sponsored a gay culture symposium this spring as part of $450,000 in cost cuts for next year. School leaders said that sponsorship did not lead to the 15-year-old center’s demise.
“Meanwhile, state senators voted Tuesday to require Upstate and the College of Charleston to spend nearly $70,000 to teach the Constitution and other U.S. founding documents. That is the same cost as the colleges paid for gay-themed books that they assigned to freshmen last fall.”
In more general terms, all it takes is a single state legislator to start with the axiom that, “The purpose of the state subsidizing higher education is so that students can get better jobs as graduates than if they were high school graduates, thus benefiting the state.”
Then he holds of a list of majors offered by the state universities, compared to how many graduates of those degrees were placed in degree specific employment within six months after graduation.
At the top of the list are Nurses, Criminal Justice, Education, etc. And at the bottom are race and gender studies, sports, basket weaving, Star Trekking, etc.
Then he asks the simple question: Why is the state subsidizing the turkeys? Why are taxpayers paying for degrees with no effective return? Why can students impoverish themselves to support these scams?
Why don’t we stop?
And the facades of the ivory towers fall off. In the first year alone it could save a single state a billion dollars or more.