College Guide
Blog
It’s a dangerous situation for our students, but it’s a very, very secure place to do business, isn’t it? Safe streets, docile citizens willing to work for low wages.
I think she’s presenting something very interesting here. College costs, after all, do not necessarily increase beyond the level of affordability. There are things colleges buy. With all of this “strategic planning,” they’re making choices. These things reflect university priorities. The situation in which we find ourselves is probably not accidental.
It’s not entirely well documented, of course. In order to believe that Scott is really right I’d think there would have to be some sort of planning meeting among American business executives, but still, it may have really happened anyway; certainly they’ve gotten everything that they wanted. A great big respect for businesses, much less union power. And when was the last time we saw a business crippled by angry protestors?
Even Occupy Wall Street, which certainly complained about student loan debt, didn’t actually do anything to reduce student debt. What could they do? What options did they have?
Facebook
Twitter
bluewave on August 23, 2012 9:05 AM:
Well yes. And no. No, because you're not adequately accounting for the time value of money. Don't use those watered down government approved inflation numbers. Just perform the though experiment of using the historical 8-8.5% increase in the Dow Jones Industrial average as the REAL change in money over time. In 1977 the Dow was at 742. Today it's around 13,100. Which isn't that far from the Temple University example. Yes, the cost of college has increased somewhat excessively, but the real problem is the wage stagnation. When the Temple grad got his diploma, his earning potential (depending on degree) probably went from the 8-10k a year he could make as a high school grad to 12-15k as a newly minted college grad, or a 30-50% increase in income. And using the same time/money approximation, today the high school grad would be making $104k a year, the college grad $216k. And you could live the middle class lives our parents lived, with stay at home moms on 104k a year, and you could pay off the college loans on $216k. Trouble is, the hs grad is lucky to make 30k and the college grad will get, maybe 40-50?
But yes, yes, a million times yes, the whole point is to have a hunkered down citizenry in the last throes of learned helplessness, grateful for whatever crumbs are thrown their way and just praying that nothing else falls on their heads, and killing public education at all levels is a big foundation stone in that program.