<Maybe politicians should figure out how to stop colleges from scamming students
Published: June 27, 2019 11:37 a.m. ET
Democrats’ bailout plans actually reward the cartel
Is anybody actually going to stop colleges from gouging? Or are we just going to let them keep holding successive generations of American kids hostage, year after year?
Sen. Bernie Sanders is the latest to “address” the “student-loan crisis,” with another bold plan involving other people’s money.
He wants to use our tax dollars to write off everybody’s student debt. That’s a $1.6 trillion taxpayers’ check, worth an average of about $35,000 apiece for 45 million people.
Yes, we know all the sad, dismal and infuriating aspects of this student debt burden. We know why sticking young people with massive student loans is a bad thing. But are we going to address the cause, or just mess about with the symptom?
American colleges are an absolute disgrace. They have doubled their prices in about a generation — and that’s after inflation, in so-called “real” terms or “constant” dollars. The College Board says tuition at a private college now averages $36,000 a year. That’s twice the inflation-adjusted level in the late 1980s. Public colleges have doubled their average tuitions even faster, in 20 years.
What do you call it when a company doubles its prices without any corresponding increase in costs?
What do you call it when all the companies in an industry do so in lockstep, almost like they’re, you know, colluding or something?
You call it gouging. You call it a cartel. You call the Department of Justice.
But instead we’re going to reward them with massive checks and encourage them to turn the screws even further.
Backwards thinking Everyone keeps pretending we have to increase student loans and grants to help students keep up with the rising cost of tuition. But we have it back to front. A big reason tuition keeps going up because we keep increasing student loans and grants.
That’s not just common sense — it was also the findings of a detailed analysis published a few years ago.
Let’s not forget: This $1.6 trillion that students borrowed did not go to the students. They hardly touched the money. And no, it didn’t go to “Wall Street” or to the “billionaires and millionaires” or “the 1%” or any of the other usual villains either.
The money went to the college-industrial complex: Gouge U.
They got the money. Now taxpayers are supposed to write another check to cover it.
But apparently absolutely nobody is going to call out Gouge U on their role in the scam.
Well, I will.
There is absolutely no good reason — none — why the tuition for a liberal arts degree should cost $36,000 a year. How do these people even get there?
I went to Cambridge University in England. I took a mainstream liberal arts degree. My tuition mostly consisted of a one-hour direct “tutorial” with a professor, 24 weeks a year. (The rest of the time was spent on self-study and writing an essay in preparation for the tutorial.) Usually I shared that hour with one or two other students.
This was a pretty good education. Sure, I know Cambridge isn’t up there with your typical overpriced American college, but it’s pretty good. Yet even if you paid our professors $500 an hour, like a top Wall Street lawyer, that wouldn’t cost more than $4,000 to $6,000 a year in direct tuition.
And professors were not paid $500 an hour. Nothing like it.
Bad value Meanwhile, American kids pay many times these costs, and then I hear horror stories of how little they get for the money — including classes taught by trainees or “teaching assistants,” absentee professors, and classes taught by recorded video. What on Earth?
By the way, U.S. college graduates argue on social media — and elsewhere — leaves me wondering what they actually learn. Apparently things I’d consider basic — like logic, or statistics, or the basic themes of world history — are either optional or nonexistent.
I am constantly amazed at the number of people on Twitter with law degrees who cannot spot a circular argument or, say, understand Venn diagrams. That’s seven years of college, folks. Two hundred and fifty thousand bucks in tuition.
Don’t get me started on the scandal of college “textbooks,” either. The kids are told they have to buy overpriced textbooks produced by the professors. And the professors actually make changes every year to make sure the kids can’t buy last year’s books secondhand. I’m surprised this isn’t illegal.>
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