Lex Anteinternet: Funding Failure, part three

Something to ponder while you are watching those Thanksgiving university football games, which I wholly hope to avoid if at all possible.

I ran this item in 2011, last time we were having a major election; Lex Anteinternet: Funding Failure:

One of the topics that's been kicking around the GOP Presidential race is that of student loans.  At least one candidate, Ron Paul, says he wants to phase them out altogether.

I wouldn't be in favor of that, but I really do think that the entire topic needs to be revisited, as it's helping to fund failure, and has a weird impact on our economy.  This is the reason why.

Generally, student loans are a government backed system in which private young individuals receive funding for university or college irrespective of the needs of the economy, or the wisdom of their choice.  I'm not suggesting, of course, that we should override the choices of individuals who make study choices that are not likely to advance our collective economic well-being, but I do feel that it's a bad economic choice to fund them.

Students of the history of student loans often point out that they've been a boost to the American economy, which is somewhat true, but which really confuses the loans with the GI Bill, which was an outright grant.  At any rate, what they fail to note is that the early post World War Two American economy was such that that the student population

(largely male) was unlikely to be study something that wasn't directly usable in the work sphere, and that having a college degree in the 1945 to 1975 time frame was rare enough that nearly any college degree could translate into business utility.  Neither of those factors is true today.  Indeed, at this point in time college degrees have become so

common that a lot of them have no economic value to their holders at all.

This is not to say that pursing a college degree is worthless. That would hardly be true.  But if the government is to back the study of something, it ought to be something useful to the nation as a whole.  Not something that's likely to have no use to the nation, and which moreover is likely to have no real value to the holder in later economic terms.

As an example of this, which I've already noted here, one of the protesters at the Wall Street occupation was reported to have a $90,000 student loan for the study of art.  Why would the nation help fund this.  If she wants to study art, the more power to her, I just don't want to help.  In economic terms, this isn't going to help the nation at all, and frankly she'll be really lucky if she ever fines a job.  By funding her, we've made ourselves poorer and, chances are, her too.

What I'd propose to do is to restrict funding to areas where we really feel we need to boost the nation's educated populace.  If we're weak in the sciences or engineering, that's what I'd fund.  Other areas where we need new workers, who need an education to obtain it, would likewise be eligible for loans.  I wouldn't bother funding art students, or literature students. That doesn't mean their studies are unimportant culturally, or personally, but rather if they are important, it's in a manner that cannot be economically judged, and therefore people shouldn't be taxed to help fund it.  Law is the same way.  The nation has a vast oversupply of lawyers and I can't see any good reason to give a person a loan to study that.

I don't think that this would mean these other fields would dry up by any means.  But it probably would mean that a lot of people who don't qualify for private scholarships and who don't otherwise have the means of obtaining such a degree would do something else. Frankly, however, that would be a good thing, as by funding the non economic, we're fueling the hopes of a lot of people who aren't going to be able to find employment later.

And, no, I didn't have any student loans, thanks to the National Guard and my parents.

 And I followed that post up with this one;  Lex Anteinternet: Funding Failure II: 

 A very interesting NPR Talk of the Nation episode on Student Loans.

What is so interesting about this, I think, is that there's at least one caller who emails in with complaints about how the burden of loans caused her to take a career she didn't want, Wildlife Management, over one she did, Veterinary school, as she couldn't afford the loans.  She then goes on to blame the burden of servicing her loans for living far from her family, and for not having any children.

The other thing that is is interesting is that a few callers have no sympathy at all with those complaining about their loans.

I'm afraid I'm in that camp, the one without sympathy. Choosing a career you don't want, just because the loans are cheaper, is stupid.  Beyond that, avoiding real life, to service loans, is as well.

This probably says something, however, about the current nature of our societal view towards education. Why must we go this route?  We don't have to, we're choosing too.  And now, a large section of the population views paying for the loans they obtained for their education as unfair, when nobody asked them to get the loans in the first place.

Not that society cannot be blamed to some degree.  We've created a culture where we now view manual labor as demeaning, and teach our middle class children that.  The grandsons of machinist and tool and die makers feel they must go to college, and indeed they must as we sent the tool and die work to China, more or less intentionally.  So we're now all over-educated, and can't pay for it with the jobs we retained. And we encourage this to continue on by giving loans for educational pursuits we know will never pay off.

Since I posted these items, this has been more in the news than ever.  And a lot of that has to do with the combined impact of student protests as well as Democratic Senator Bernie Saunders suggesting that he cause their to be free college for all.

Before we go back to the main point of this, let's take up that free college for all topic. Truth be known more Americans are college educated than ever before, so it isn't as if we're failing to get people to college.  Granted, student debt is a big problem, but by and large we are getting a lot of students there.

We're also quite frankly generating a lot of junk degrees that are worthless.  This is a popular conservative point about higher education, and it's frankly true. While we are graduating more degreed people than ever, a college degree of 2015 doesn't mean the same thing as a college degree from 1965 meant, or 1945, or 1915.  A student graduating in 1915, while their were far fewer of them, was quite frankly far better educated than many are today, depending upon their major.

College level educators, unfortunately, have a vested interest in this, which explains more than a little about the current level of dissent and rank idiocy on college campuses today. The recent series of demonstrations at the University of Missouri should be pointing this out.  Take, for example, University of Missouri professor Melissa Click, who infamously asked for "some muscle" to eject those recording the demonstration.

Click is the Department of Communications, an ironic post for somebody seeking "muscle" to prevent the recordation of an event, but I'll note that communications are a legitimate field of study.  But consider her master dissertation, which is "It’s ‘a good thing’: The Commodification of Femininity, Affluence, and Whiteness in the Martha Stewart Phenomenon.".  This is a thesis that did not need to be written and perhaps one that an institution of higher learning should have rejected.  Click, as George F. Will points out in a recent article, also "has a graduate certificate in “advanced feminist studies.”". That's baloney packaged up between two thick slices of baloney, and is the type of certificate only useful in a fake, highly left wing, purely academic, world.

Indeed Will's article points out a whole host of similar absurd academic behaviors, and even the University of Wyoming has become a little guilty of some institutionalized nonsense.  The net impact is to reduce the seriousness of the situation the students are about to be ejected into combined with a probably temporary political radicalization of them.  In other words, they're separated from their cash, or probably their parents cash, or the public's cash, not really educated, save for a career in university level academia, and then booted out into the real world with diminished job prospects.

That is, in part, because there are a lot of worthless majors now crated by this system and the social and economic atmosphere that created it.  Somehow the number of degrees has vastly exploded, and not in a good way, if for some the application of those degrees is marginal.  People who would have had fairly rigorous Liberal Arts degrees 40 years and back now sometimes have specialized degrees with no practical application at all.

That's why the "free college for all" (which of course would not be free) is a bit of a farce in real terms.  A "free education" isn't free if you spend four years of your life on it, and the net results is that you are not educated in real or practical terms.

This is why comparing our educational system at the college level to that of other nations, by which we really mean European nations, is quite questionable.  While European degrees are presently in a state of evolution, European university degrees have generally been fairly hard to obtain.  I don't know the current situation, but when comparing the public funding for them, that can make quite a difference.

For instance, over 40% of Americans have a college degree, while only 30% of the Swiss do.  Are the Swiss international slackers?  Probably not.  Indeed, we have more people with college degrees than the United Kingdom, Denmark Belgium, Australia, Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, South Korean and Finland do.  We are on par with New Zealand and Japan and really only Russia and Canada have a true statistically greater percentage of their populations that are college educated.   So it sure isn't the case that we aren't sending people to college.

Therefore, if measured in terms of the sheer number of people in the population who have degrees, we beat out every country except for Canada and Russia, which is pretty impressive on some level.

But that's only impressive it it really means something, which gets back to the main point.

What college students are really complaining about now is that a college education doesn't pay off the way it once did. If you had to invest $100,000 in something but were almost sure to get it back, you wouldn't worry much about the loans to obtain it.  Now, that's quite uncertain. And as it's quite uncertain, those doing it are hoping for somebody else to pick up the risk, that being the taxpayer.

That's not a good idea for a lot of reasons, the foremost being that if the public is going to pick up the risk, it ought to reap some sort of a reward. And that is where our system is really messed up.

In a country where about 30% of the population is obtaining a degree it stands to reason that its likely the degree is worth more, and its probably in an area with application.  But the American system has sort of evolved to where many college degrees are nothing much more than High School Degrees +.

When I was younger, it was emphasized quite correctly that if a person had any hope of economic success at all, they needed to have a high school degree. That's still true, but our economy has evolved to the point where you need a college degree for that now.  And that is, quite frankly, completely absurd.

There's no earthly reason whatsoever that many former areas of employment that only required a high school degree should not require a college degree, and the concept that they do is deeply flawed.  It's commonly stated that he world is more complicated, but it frankly isn't.  The global level of complication has changed very little, and computerization of things has served to simplify, not complicate, many things.  The ability to operate a computer is something that every kid coming out of high school is well versed with, so the sometimes heard excuse that people need to learn the technology is baloney, they know it.

And the fact that degrees have become available for everything means that they have become debased in value.  There are entire fields that are not really of the type that should require post high school education, if high school was done well.

What this means, in part, is that colleges and universities ought to dump a lot of the academic degrees they have that are of little value, and that would mean dumping the vested interests that maintain them.  It also means that university needs to toughen back up, academically.

Indeed one of the real shocks for people who obtained "hard" degrees from decades ago is the level of frivolity that is now so deeply associated with universities.  University as a four year party seems to be both commonly experienced and accepted. That's nonsense, particularly if its on the public dime.  This was not always the nature of university, in spite of the popular image to the contrary.

The biggest reform that could be done for the system, and to the advantage of the students, would be to change the funding system we presently have to one, as noted above, that funded a real demonstrable public need.  That doesn't force anyone to do anything, but it does mean that if the public is funding an education, even through a loan, it ought to be in an area where the public derives a benefit.  What fields, that is, does the US benefit from in terms of producing college graduates?

I fully acknowledge that this means I'm completely discounting the cultural benefit argument.  Some would argue, and probably validly, that the nation enjoys a richer cultural life if it produces artists, etc., in addition to engineers. Well, tough.

Or more accurately, to the extent the nation benefits from people in those categories, it benefits and should encourage them in the way that has been done with all former cultures, in the stuff we publicly procure. Btu we've done a poor job of that recently as well.  By that, I'd note, churches and public buildings fueled the arts, but on their terms.  Not through loans.  That's a better process as its market based, the way the real world ultimately works.  If a person desires to be an artist, be one.  But being one probably means suffering for your art at some point, which doesn't require the public to fund the suffering at he university level.