September 2012
Many parents and the children they send to
college are paying rapidly rising prices for
something of declining quality. This is because “quality” is not synonymous with
“value.”
Glenn Harlan Reynolds,
a University of Tennessee law professor, believes that college has become, for
many, merely a “status marker,” signaling membership in the educated caste, and
a place to meet spouses of similar status — “associative mating.” Since 1961,
the time students spend reading, writing and otherwise studying has fallen
from 24 hours a week to about 15 — enough for
a degree often desired only as an expensive signifier of rudimentary qualities
(e.g., the ability to follow instructions). Employers value this signifier as an
alternative to aptitude tests when evaluating potential employees because such
tests can provoke lawsuits by having a “disparate impact” on this or that racial
or ethnic group.
In his “The Higher
Education Bubble,” Reynolds writes that this bubble exists for the same
reasons the housing bubble did. The government decided that too few people owned
homes/went to college, so government money was poured into subsidized and
sometimes subprime mortgages/student loans, with the predictable result that
housing prices/college tuitions soared and many borrowers went bust. Tuitions
and fees have risen more than 440 percent in 30 years as schools happily raised
prices — and lowered standards — to siphon up federal money. A recent Wall
Street Journal headline: “Student Debt Rises by 8% as
College Tuitions Climb.”
Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economist,
writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that as many people — perhaps more — have student loan debts as have college
degrees. Have you seen those T-shirts that proclaim “College: The Best Seven
Years of My Life”? Twenty-nine percent of borrowers never graduate, and
many who do graduate take decades to repay their loans.
In 2010, the New York Times reported on Cortney
Munna, then 26, a New York University graduate with almost $100,000 in debt. If
her repayments were not then being deferred because she was enrolled in night
school, she would have been paying $700 monthly from her $2,300 monthly
after-tax income as a photographer’s assistant. She says she is toiling “to pay
for an education I got for four years and would happily give back.” Her degree
is in religious and women’s studies.
The budgets of California’s universities are
being cut, so recently Cal State Northridge students conducted an almost-hunger
strike (sustained by a blend of kale, apple and celery juices) to protest, as
usual, tuition increases and, unusually and properly, administrators’ salaries.
For example, in 2009 the base salary of UC Berkeley’s vice chancellor for equity
and inclusion was $194,000, almost four times that of starting assistant
professors. And by 2006, academic administrators outnumbered faculty.
The Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald notes that sinecures in
academia’s diversity industry are expanding as academic offerings contract. UC
San Diego (UCSD), while eliminating master’s programs in electrical and computer
engineering and comparative literature, and eliminating courses in French,
German, Spanish and English literature, added a diversity requirement for
graduation to cultivate “a student’s understanding of her or his identity.” So,
rather than study computer science and Cervantes, students can study their
identities — themselves. Says Mac Donald, “Diversity,’ it turns out, is simply a
code word for narcissism.”
She reports that UCSD lost three cancer
researchers to Rice University, which offered them 40 percent pay increases. But
UCSD found money to create a vice chancellorship for equity, diversity and
inclusion. UC Davis has a Diversity Trainers Institute under an administrator of
diversity education, who presumably coordinates with the Cross-Cultural Center.
It also has: a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; a Sexual
Harassment Education Program; a diversity program coordinator; an early
resolution discrimination coordinator; a Diversity Education Series that awards
Understanding Diversity Certificates in “Unpacking Oppression”; and
Cross-Cultural Competency Certificates in “Understanding Diversity and Social
Justice.” California’s budget crisis has not prevented UC San Francisco from
creating a new vice chancellor for diversity and outreach to supplement its
Office of Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity and Diversity, and the Diversity
Learning Center (which teaches how to become “a Diversity Change Agent”), and
the Center for LGBT Health and Equity, and the Office of Sexual Harassment
Prevention & Resolution, and the Chancellor’s Advisory Committees on Diversity,
and on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Issues, and on the Status of
Women.
So taxpayers should pay more and parents and
students should borrow more to fund administrative sprawl in the service of
stale political agendas? Perhaps they will, until “pop!” goes the bubble.
Washington Post, June 8, 2012.
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