Posted on 10/19/2018 7:09:36 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Because government decided to subsidize it with student loans.
Because it’s subsidized.
Subsidize anything and it’s price will shoot up.
It goes deeper than that. On one level the explosion in cost is also from an explosion in hucksterism, people used the idea of education and credentials to advance ways of separating people from their money and they were very efficient at it. It meant the ability to have a steady income without producing anything or having results expected from you. The multiplication of unmarketable “disciplines” or ones that are only truly marketable if you got in early enough or have the right connections / pedigree that got in early enough, a sort intellectual pyramid scheme, led the charge.
There are disciplines where having credentials makes the most sense and these are those where the soundness of professional judgment may be objectively assessed just from the facts known to have been available by others. This includes fields of engineering, medicine, accounting and others. Likewise if a certain orthodoxy if desired because of a profound accountability and stewardship, say in the instance of theology when done correctly, there is a different sort of justification for credentials.
But for many of these problematic disciplines, from what economics and law have become (liberal theology too) to especially all these Leftist squishy sciencey feel good studies the simple fact is that there is no ability to analyze the soundness of their proposals and ideas until long after the damage has already been done and those who first caused the harm are long gone. Such really have a poor claim for the authority of their credentials.
Yet once in motion in education they don’t stop, and indeed they cannot stop. It isn’t that it’s always knowingly some scam but that unsoundness breeds more unsoundness as students seek to excel and accomplish more than their mentors. In the end it really can, and has in come cases, reach an extreme point where papers are being written, positions being taken, and degrees being conferred, where no one will ever cite, no one will ever read again, and except for a nattering among those who must all stand up for their “educations” or everyone will be out of a job all of it will never again matter. A virtual black hole for money.
......The University of Michigan, for example, has more than 90 diversity administrators today....
I DESPISE the “diversity”-related e-mails I get from both of my highly-regarded alma maters (undergrad and graduate)—over and over!!!!
I am AGAINST diversity!!!! But if I said so to these universities, I would be labeled an extreme right-wing nut!!!!
Universities would be better off if they would fire all the “diversity” administrators, and if they would STOP implementing diversity!!!! They would probably cost less for students, parents, and governments, too!!
You’re paying Marxist professors salaries and padding the pockets of crooked politicians getting kickbacks for government grants would be my best guess.
Comments anyone?
Of course Congress actually has no delegated power to regulate things which are not factually commerce among the several States but only merely affect it — the idea that the Congress can regulate things which are not interstate commerce, like intrastate commerce or agriculture, manufacturing and employment, was something the Court pulled out of its ass in the 20th century. There is no delegated power to regulate things which affect interstate commerce (never mind that the actual Power has nothing to do with what Persons or privately held enities do when they engage in commerce but only was enumerated to prevent the States from using their police powers to muck up commerce among the several States).
There is no lawful basis for title 7.
Educational-industrial-government complex.
It is the desire of industry for a continuous supply of semi-intelligent, servile workers, combined with the votes of people who love to receive benefits from the .gov, combined with the brainwashing expertise of the educational establishment. Pull out any piece of that 3-legged stool, and the whole thing collapses.
IMHO, the easiest leg to saw off is the government subsidies. Simply stop increasing the amount of loans available, and you’ll have the colleges and universities scrambling to cut costs (because they assume ever-increasing revenues). Guess what is the easiest for them to cut? It is things like gender studies (whatever TF that is, I still can’t figure it out), race studies and the like - these things produce no value for ANYONE, except the universities while teaching it, and professorships and book deals for the lucky few that excel at regurgitating the pablum. So you’ll get lower relative costs for education and simultaneously get rid of the worst aspects of the educational establishment.
I would also modify the Bankruptcy Code so as to allow student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy. It used to be that way, until about 2005. The result will be that banks will refuse to loan funds (oh, and you have to remove the loan guarantees - just have the .gov pay interest until the kids are out of school for 6 or 9 months, and stop the subsidy after that). That will ensure that funds only flow to those students who show the promise of actually being able to graduate, and then only in programs that offer degrees in fields that offer the reasonable chance to earn enough to actually repay the loans. End of Sociology programs, gender and race studies, and other utterly worthless programs. End of tenured professorships for crazy radicals that wish to kill all conservative men and feed their genitals to pigs (yeah, that sick professor is at my alma mater, sad to say).
It is all about money. Force a change in behavior with a change in the nature and amount of the subsidies, and we’ll be on the road to restoring some semblance of normalcy in our society.
Oh, and the Leftist tears on this issue will rival the oceans of tears that emanated from them after Trump’s election...that’ll just be a bonus.
Right on the money Lurkinanloomin.
They get their money no matter what. There are no incentives to control the cost of higher education, nobody loses their job because the guaranteed money keeps coming in.
I’ve noted that — despite the fact that Cultural Marxism undergirds so very much of the Leftists mental puttering that if it’s influence were to suddenly disappear most all Leftists wouldn’t even be able to recognize their own thoughts — many Leftists seem to think Cultural Marxism is unimportant, uninfluential and a spurious footnote.
It’s like the leaves of a tree pish poshing the trunk and the roots.
James G. Martin was my chemistry professor in college.
That it all.
“Government subsidies.
Anything the government pays for always costs more than it should.”
FYI, it is a literal conspiracy - Princeton University “cracked the code” by figuring out how to get these ever-increasing streams of cash flow...but they understood well that they could not do it alone. EVERY college and university had to be on board, so they sent out letters to hundreds of the biggest and most prestigious colleges to get them on board (which didn’t exactly take much convincing - a large part of those streams of cash went directly into the pockets of the administrators). Too bad that most of the people involved back then (circa 1973) are now dead, because they belong in prison for fleecing the American public of literally trillions of dollars (and growing) over the last 45 or so years.
Massive government spending, and even more massive student debt, in printed, low interest federal reserve dollars.
One other consequence, It supports a huge bubble sheltering parasitic leftist ideologues
You don’t know how pissed off I was to discover that a full 20% of the tuition that we paid to send our son to Texas Tech for his degree in Mechanical Engineering went to support other students tuition’s.
We did not find out about that until he had graduated.
The more you speak out, the more will be alerted! I think We The People should demand detailed investigations into the colleges and universities, e.g., the political bent of the professors, what they’re paid and by whom, and make them account for all their funding and what grants they get and from whom? A financial colonoscopy so to speak!
They have NO conception of the way money works and if you ask them to economize on ANYTHING ... you just walked into a leaf shredder. They (faculty especially) take it personally and they get unbelievably vicious. A mild mannered even meek faculty member instantaneously grows fangs.
I believe they charge so much simply because they can.
Someone before me mentioned that almost every job requires a degree now. One does not need two years of college to answer the phone and take orders for merchandise.
I believe it goes deeper than student loans and government aid.
The educational industry conspired to make college an absolute necessity.
IMO, college is a scam unless you plan to go into a specialized field like medicine or law.
The real reason everyone “needs” college is to prove they’ve been thoroughly indoctrinated and were desperate or malleable enough to actually pay for it themselves or take on hundreds of thousands in debt for the privilege.
The treadmill never ends. Work, pay your taxes and pay your student loans which, unlike most debt, cannot be written off in bankruptcy IIRC.
You become an institutionalized slave of the state with the correct mindset that benefits the state.
Whoever mentioned control earlier nailed it too.
How many of the idiots marching around for the state-the deep state-are college edumacated?
They are nothing but a brainwashed mob of NPC and I would pity them if they weren’t a bunch of bike lock in sock wielding pavement apes.
Worthless drivel like gender studies, queer studies, black studies, etc..
Anyone who thinks this is an accident should be reminded of Bill Clinton’s “HOPE college credit” Federal Tax incentive. Set up as a credit for 2 academic years, a logical choice would have been to offset the higher costs of the final 2 years of college. It should be of no surprise that the ‘academia establishment’ nudged the very willing President to make it for the FIRST 2 YEARS. Got to keep those 300 seat general course lecture halls filled, right?
Student loans backed by the government....
that and the proliferation of “administrators”
I would also add in the amenities many college now offer to attract students. These are not cheap. The dorms we lived in “back in the day” were fine, but would be considered slums now.
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