I've been frittering away my writing time just perusing the Internet when I should have been making my entry. I've run a few errands today. Most urgent one was to pick up flea medication for my cat who's begun to scratch her neck bare. It might be colder than a yeti's turd out there, but the fleas seem to have discovered it's spring, and they're having an early Global Warming party.
Today was a disaster. It looks like I'll probably have to dump my car after all, but I'll write about that ordeal tomorrow. Today I have a question:
When you have the world wide web, and whole classes are on youtube, why would anyone need $20,000 a year for college? I can't think of any reason to recommend higher education right now. Yes, they say you need it to gain a higher income, but it's a gamble. Considering the role it has in trapping people in debt for the rest of their lives, and considering the fact that debt is the leading cause of slavery in the world, and considering that colleges have blithely raised tuition and other fees, I think the gamble is now not worth it. Americans now owe a total one trillion dollars in student loans. Those loans can't be defaulted. What happen when you can't get out from under them and you can't pay?
Answer: totally awful things begin to happen. It might be poor houses. It might be a resurgence in slavery (slavery is legal if you're in prison, according to the 13th Amendment. It's exactly how the South was able to abuse chain gangs).
Back when I went to college, I remember higher education undergoing some important changes, all of which, I think can be traced back to resentment of college students after the Vietnam protests. Most of it was Conservative resentment. First, I remember the Reduction in Force (RIF) program at the St. Louis Community Colleges in 1978, but it was actually a widespread trend in higher education. That's where colleges turned from full-time to part-time staff. Thus, it destroyed job security for academics. It was no longer a sound career move to go into academia unless you were already independently wealthy. Those that did had to supplement their incomes by being industry consultants. This had the result of pushing staff into the tutelage of corporations.
A more important change was that they got rid of most grant programs that had been the bread and butter of low-income students, and, as I remember, they raised the interest rates on Federally Guaranteed Student Loans, from 7 to 9 percent (interest rates were high in the late 70s, during stagflation.) The significance of this is that when you have to pay back massive loans that you can't default, you'll tend to be more cautious. You'll tend to wonder if that protest you attended would end up on "your permanent record." Colleges and universities are dependent on various forms of loans. I can't say for certain, but I would guess it meant having university boards that were friendly to the finance industry.
And, the third great change, across the board at every level of higher education, they jack up the prices. I remember when community college cost a whooping $14 a credit hour, and it jumped immediately to $17. It sounds so cheap now that it's a joke, but you work out the math, and that was a 21% jump in a single semester. For fifteen credit hours, that goes from $210 to $255, and that was at a community college. In the late '70s, that was a lot.
In short, what happened after the Vietnam War was an organized oppression of higher education. I went to colleges in both the late '70s and the mid-80s. The difference between the staff, students and overall culture of those two times was profound. In the late '70s, there was optimism and people were open to each other, and they were somewhat more tolerant. You didn't see so many social separations, and there was a certain idealism. By the mid-80s, the campuses were full of bitter cynicism. Everyone was openly out for themselves. They either considered themselves elite, or wanted to be elite. There was also an obsession with power that I didn't see earlier. Social differences were now pronounced.
Yes, but those are just my perceptions, and they might represent what I thought I was seeing. Maybe I just hadn't discovered the cynicism before due to my own lack of knowledge.
That's all unimportant compared to what it did to education in general. It was gutted. Higher education now is a great racket. And if you're poor and your lured into it, recent studies show that 27% of students in the quartile go to college, and only 9% earn their degree. In the highest socio-economic quartile, those percentages are 80% and 54% respectively.
If you're poor and you don't complete your degree, the consequences can be stiff. Student loans that you can't pay back and can't get out from under.
Like a lot of things, the situation in education and every level does make me despair. The quality is declining, and the poor are getting screwed here as in so many other places. If the poor can't improve their lot through education, where does that leave us, and where does it leave the so-called American Dream?
I realize I believed my own version of it. When I was in my teens and twenties, I had a lot of trouble, and I was pessimistic about myself. However, I really thought that the world and the country was going to get better.
And it did for a while.
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