What You Don't Know About Your College Education

It gets worse.

You've been betrayed by the banks, the investment firms, the government. You skimp and borrow and try to send your kids to the best college they can get into; or you work the night shift at some bar and put yourself through college; or you've got a bachelor's but no job and so you decide to go graduate school, undergo another hundred thousand dollars more of debt, in hopes that another degree will increase your chances of success in the future.

You figure if you can't depend on Wall Street or on Uncle Bernie, you can put your faith in this country's temples of higher education, trust that institutions with vaunted names and golden pedigrees will deliver that which they've promised -- the pursuit of excellence, wisdom, and insight, the enrichment of society through the cultivation of the human spirit, first rate instruction and research. Every other foundation of society (public schools among them) may be going to hell; you know if you're good enough, try hard enough, and pay enough, you'll get your money's worth at one or another of this country's universities.

Well, times are tough. Private universities are concerned about the prospects of fundraising and the size of their endowments. They don't want to part with their highly paid directors who know how to develop relationships with highly generous alumni. They don't want to scale down their astronomical building and expansion plans. They certainly don't want to lower tuition rates or housing or other fees. So they sacrifice the interests of the most innocent and least protected segment of the academic community -- the students -- and trust that no one will know the difference.

It is a moral outrage that, for some time now, many colleges and universities around the United States have devoted their energies to enlarging the size of their endowments at the expense of the education and well being of their students. It is an even greater outrage that some of those universities are coping with the current economic crisis by shortchanging their students on the level and quality of instruction they were promised, by chipping away at student aid and scholarship funds, eliminating work study and assistant lectureships, creating new, "continuing education" degrees the main purpose of which is to feed the endowment by charging regular tuition but dispensing with less -- much less -- than what students in other faculties receive.

How do they do this while maintaining their stellar reputations and the constant stream of applicants knocking on the gates? They hire a few high profile professors, a Nobel Prize winner or two. They admit some PHD students that they will coddle and nurture for the next thousand years, letting them linger at the school tuition-free, giving them assistant lectureships that provide teaching experience should they ever decide to leave the school and teach somewhere else. They put all that on their website.

Then they go back to the real world and tell their students there will be no more TAships or ALships or any other way for them to subsidize their education. They give the "cash cow" department as small a budget as possible, eliminating the possibility that the students might benefit from any of those grand and alluring "extra's" the university website flaunts so brazenly. They fire their most experienced, and sometimes their best, faculty (those who don't have tenure or some kind of contract), fill those spots with new hires for a fraction of the older ones' salaries. They hire everyone part-time, so they won't be eligible for benefits. They actually instruct those instructors not to work too hard, or too many hours -- to avoid any possible claim to benefits.

Ask the deans and directors of these colleges (I have) if they feel the slightest smidgen of guilt over using the school's good reputations to shortchange students who will have to pay for their degree with years of hard work and sacrifice, and they will look at you like you're an imbecile. Ask them if it's fair for the college to charge everyone equal tuition but reserve its resources only for a select few of the students, and they will pretend they haven't heard the question.

Meanwhile, students who have spent time and money on the promised degree feel they have invested too much to walk away or start over somewhere else.

Comments

[kstuff]

Yes! All of my thoughts about higher education have just been put into words. It's a huge scam. One that parents and teachers also bought into, presumably, to ensure that the youngsters were occupied while all the "good jobs" were taken by Baby Boomers. They made us feel guilty about "just" getting a high school degree, or a bachelor's, or a master's...only to bankrupt us in the end. Brillant. Only, we were too young to know any different and now we all have obscene amounts of student loan debt and credit card debt (because you need a source of income while going to school, even if you do have a job). The government should start with forgiving all student loan debt, not bailing out Wall Street.

[gfs5541]

This is sort of bittersweet for me since I have been laid off and I'm now enrolling at a community college in Seattle under that state's worker retraining program (I hope!). I couldn't see myself attending a university for the simple reason that these schools take loan money (My school doesn't accept them). The debt wouldn't be so bad if that didn't happen. The school would then focus on getting grants and scholarships on the federal, state or county level.

[MSaxe]

Higher education has become a factory to produce indentured servants for the student loan industry, pure and simple.

Common knowledge is that you must have a college degree to succeed at anything. To get it, you have to pay the ticket. The universities and the student loan financiers are in cahoots for profit at the expense of students (and parents) futures.

What justifies increasing university costs above inflation? Nothing! Students and parents MUST pay to play. Universities get kick-backs from the lenders. Universities raise costs knowing that the students and parents will sign and pay the bill. The universities make out. The loan merchants make out.

We have an entire generation at the mercy of student loan lenders. Students and parents are just like indentured servants of the past. Go to higher education... lock up your life for 7-10-15 years of debt. It's slavery and must be stopped.

Add the current, financial industry generated, recession/depression, and those new, recent graduates will have increasing difficulty finding gainful employment to repay the debts. Meanwhile the financiers support importing low wage and H1-B employees and exporting every occupation to save dollars, while moving their headquarters off-shore to avoid paying their share of the taxes to support the newly educated that are losing their jobs.

And, by the way, the health care industry, the doctors, hospitals coupled with the insurance companies are doing exactly the same thing to everyone. Abolish 21st Century Slavery.

[tomas0808]

We have one choice: Just refuse to pay back. Be a bum or work off the grid. If enough people did this eventually we would have free education

[OkieIntellectual]

The closing statement really resonates with me. One of my undergrad degrees is from a school in Texas and by the time I realized that I was getting screwed over and screwed out of the quality of education I was promised, I had too many credit hours to transfer to another school without practically starting over. And don't get me started on student loans...

[KennethDanis]

And then there is "the student loan scam", another way higher education is ruining lives, as described in a new book just out by Alan Collinge.

http://www.amazon.com/Student-Loan-Scam-Oppressive-History/dp/0807042293/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231345022&sr=1-1

[caphillprof]

You must be thinking of Georgetown University Law Center, which has transformed from a law school to some sort of resort hotel