Now I'm going to wander over to the the Education discussion. I've been putting myself through college and university since the 1990's. I worked full time while working towards my degrees and run up mountains of personal debt to get those degrees. I'll be paying on those for years. For the last several years my wife has been doing her best to do the same. A simple class in terminology was over $700! Textbook companies put out a new text edition almost ever year and those books sometimes run several hundred dollars each! I know this. I have the recepts. Just paid a bill the other day for books. One semester's worth of books is almost $1,000. A single year of training for my wife, training that does not lead to a degree is going to cost over $10,000. That is just the last year. She has taken more than two years of "pre-requisites". You know, the Yoga class that you have to have before you can learn how weld a fender. You know, the cooking class you have to take before you can get your business degree.
What a scam.
The post-high school system in this country has been a scam for decades. While the Left has stood there, pointing a finger at the cost of health care, mouth wide and soundless, face frozen in outrage, the cost of post secondary school education has become nearly unattainable any longer. This is a big topic and I'll do my best to muddle through this.
Progressives and Socialists have infiltrated and corrupted the system for decades (perhaps as far back as President Wilson). The G.I. Generation saw college as the ultimate leg up. It was a place you went to get the education and skills you needed to make a qualitative difference in your life, a better life for your family, and for the betterment of your community. The G.I. Generation built the Interstate Highway system, built the infrastructure for the rise of the American Superpower. It was that generation that sent men to the moon. They thought BIG and did the BIG things. They grew up in the Great Depression and then went on to fight a war that spanned the planet. Sure they had their odder element. I believe they were called Beatniks. The proto-hippie, if you will. They were largely ignored by their peers since they were usually too doped up to make much sense in music, art, or literature. Not very many ever took them seriously, other than other Beatniks (and the Art world). College was a place of learning, NOT social experimentation. Their children, the Boomers, did their best to tear down all the great structures that the GIs built. The grading system was oppresive, they said. The concept of working hard for your grades really rubbed them wrong. They were constricted and injection molded into their parent's world. They rebelled in a huge way and gave rise to the hippy.
The most destructive generation since the 1850's was loose upon the modern world. They fought back against what they felt was a spiritually dead society. A society that looked outward to conqure the moon and the very stars themselves, while the Boomer saw only the poor and sick among us. They looked inward and longed to pull the world together in one grand group hug. America was unfair, a place of unbridled greed, corruption and oppression. THEY would make a better world when it was their turn to run things. So now they've been running things. Since the first Boomer to take the White House, President Clinton, the Boomers have been running the entire show. I don't like that show.
Anyhow, to pull this back to Education costs, I first wanted to paint a bit of the Boomer background.
I feel that Boomers have been the most secular (actually, secularism is their kind of religion) and inward looking group of people for a very long time. When they had to play by the rules, they rebelled. Now that they get to write the rules, they write them for themselves without a care to the young or old among us.
I read an article that stated that there were more advanced degrees, Masters and above, granted in the 1960's and 1970's to individuals who then NEVER worked in the private sector then ever before or since. Those people began to climb the internal structure of our country. They became the teachers, and the junior politicians. They began to work at NGOs (non-government organizations and community organizations) in unprecidented numbers. Those people began to infect the secondary school systems in the 1970's. I know that because I was one of those who got to grow up without learning Phonics. Learning how to express myself in english was a nightmare for years. The entire time my parents were wondering why I was not learning my phonics. I also had 'New Math' inflicted on me. To this day, for anything more advanced than simple Algebra I have to go to my wife for help (the communists seemed to have had a better secondary school system than us). Those Boomers began to actually run and not agitate the system any longer. They did away with the rules that they didn't like. Beatnik GIs (like Jimmy Carter), sypathetic souls of theirs that still ran things in the 1970's and 80's aided their programs. The Community Reinvestment Act by Jimmy Carter leads straight to the mess we are in today. But I digress a little.
In the 1980's, these Boomers began to get into positions of senior leadership in the University systems. They bemoaned the low wages and all those pesky rules about publishing papers in their specialties. It is right around the time I graduated from High School, 1987, that the education system began to get more and more expensive. Right around the time they decided that they were not being paid enough for what they did (or were doing to us).
Here is a chart with my thou
ghts below it. Note: Click on the chart to see it better.I don't know how good this chart is going to look once it is posted, but here is my explaination. For the record, this chart comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's the Government itself, folks.
In 1987, the rate of cost inflation in House, Medical Care, and College Tuition were roughly the same, about the rate of over all inflation, give or take. Rates crept up under Bush 41 and then really began to diverge under President Clinton, the first Boomer President. Over the time period, 1987 to 2008, the cost of health care premiums increased 5% on average year over year while housing increased 5.1%. Over that same time, College Tuition and Fees increased an average of 7%. It also shows the dramatic collapse of the housing market (another blog).
So why in the world is everyone getting so worked up over healthcare when the cost for education is that much higher? Don't even get me started on the cost of education prior to college.
Here are my thoughts:
The government has always been one to encourage the use of student loans, government backed (i.e. taxpayer), low interest loans and such to help the average Joe (or Jane) to go to college. Much like government interference in the cost of Health Care made it more expensive (that is another blog), so too did government interference cause education to get rediculous. It became normal for people to simply finance their entire education debt. Gone were the days when people could, literally, work their way through school, financing it themselves while they went (read Sarah Palin's book and you'll see she funded her education that way, and she is not much older than me). Heck, an MBA at Notre Dame cost over $88,000 per YEAR back in 2004. I shudder to think what it is today in 2009.
Why does the cost go up so much every year? We pay for our own books. We drive to the class room. Last I looked, all we needed was a teacher, a blackboard, and a method to quiz and question. The Greeks taught at the base of their Stoa. Many of our Founders studied the classics on a dirt floor in a log hut. Those were some very smart and educated people. They built this country. What do we get for our advanced degrees these days (those that did not get them from a degree mill)? Where is all that money going? Is it a coincidence that the median pay for today's university president is now over a million dollars? How many students need to attend that school year to cover the cost of the pay of that president (not to mention their healthcare benefits and retirement package). The median annual salary for a school teacher (High School) in my district is between 60-88k per year, plus benefits and retirement (for 9 months of work). The median salary for college teachers is over 100k. You really need to crank the students through the mill to meet the annual payroll for these places.
Is the quality of post secondary education better today then it was in the 1950's? Hell no. Not even close. I read a government report from 1997 that said, even then, that the average high school diploma granted a better education in 1947 then a BA degree in 1997. I'm certain that this is more true here in the waning days of 2009.
Is your healthcare better today than in 1947? 1997? Hell yes. Not even close (thats another blog).
So why are we trying to nationalize healthcare when our university system is far more expensive? Oh yeah, the university system has the government subsidzing the debt of the students. Traditional loans are no longer possible. The Department of Education has been taking over all the student loans over this last year. Two of my six have been taken over by the DOE. Even this system of funding is collapsing and I don't see it being replaced with anything other than total nationalization. The Boomer professors and university administrators will continue to pay themselves hansomly for turning out an inferior product. They don't carry malpractice insurance, do they?
This blog is already way, way too long. Perhaps I'll break this up and discuss pieces of it at a later time.
-Zavost.
Chart Source: http://www.creditunions.com/
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