The Money Pit -- By: John Derbyshire
By webmaster@nationalreview.com (John Derbyshire)
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is an excerpt from John Derbyshire's upcoming We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism , to be released Sept. 29, 2009.
Where I live, in New York's Suffolk County, we are pretty well protected from law-breakers. In the opinion of some county residents, in fact, we are too well protected. Suffolk county cops are the envy of our region. New York City cops call them "the money boys." An officer with the NYPD has a salary of around $60,000 after five years service; our lads are at $98,000 by that point. They also get more than a hundred paid days off a year even outside their normal schedules, so a Suffolk cop works an average of 181 days a year. He's off-duty more days than he's on. He can retire on half pay after 20 years' service, cashing in unused days off (average payout $134,000). Benefits are extravagant. I tell you, people come from all over to take our police exam. There are lines round the block near County Police HQ at exam time.
I'm therefore not very surprised to find, scrutinizing my current property tax statement, that a big chunk of my tax bill goes to the county police district: $765 this year. Library services ($443), garbage collection ($369), and highways ($264) are some way behind.
My total property tax bill is $6,545, though, so the police tab, over the top as it surely is, amounts to less than 12 percent of the total. Police, libraries, garbage, and highways all together only add up to 28 percent. Obviously there's a big-ticket item I haven't mentioned.
There sure is. When I open my property tax demand, the one item that leaps out at me from the page with fangs bared and claws reaching, hissing and rolling its yellow demon eyes, is SCHOOL DISTRICT. I don't know how things are in your neck of the woods, but here in the outer New York City suburbs, "property tax" is well-nigh a synonym for "education tax." This year's actual number for me is $3,979, which is 61 percent of my total tax bill.
In fact that's the first thing you notice about education in the U.S.A. today: It's a money pit.
What do we get for all that money? The main thing we get is administration. My daughter's modest suburban high school held an orientation session for parents of freshmen last fall. There all we parents were in the school auditorium facing a phalanx of school employees up on the stage, not one of them a teacher. Administrators, Directors, Advisors, Psychologists, a Dean, five guidance counselors (under, of course, a Director of Guidance), Administrative Assistants#...#All this for 1,100 students. I cornered the Director of Mathematics, a very cordial fellow, to ask if he himself did any, you know, teaching. No, he regretted to say, he didn't. No time!
To me, child of another time and place, it is bizarre. I got a first-class education at a good boy's day school in England. We had about a thousand students. There was a Headmaster, who did not teach. He was helped by a Second Master, who taught modern languages to juniors. The Headmaster also had a secretary to do his typing and filing. There was a mysterious fellow called the Bursar, occasionally glimpsed scurrying from his own tiny office to the Headmaster's. A groundsman looked after the playing fields. "Dinner ladies" came in part-time to serve the cafeteria lunches, and there was a caretaker with a couple of cleaners, also part-time. The other forty-odd adults on the premises were all full-time teachers. The place seemed to work very well.
It's at our colleges that education spending really gets into its stride. I sometimes go to give talks to colleges and universities. My usual reaction on arriving at one of these places is: "Okay, here's the construction site. Where's the college?" Our higher-education system is swilling in money, and colleges are building like crazy.
When I asked a knowledgeable friend what is going on, he explained thus: "Billy Bachelor graduates, does Wall Street grunt work for a few years, then starts a hedge fund. After a while he's Billy Billionaire. What's he gonna do with all that boodle? Have a building put up at his alma mater, that's what -- a building with his name on it. That's what they all want, buildings with their names on. Plus, his regressed-to-the-mean dimwit kids get legacy admissions."
Hard to object to that. Let people do what they like with their money. You'd think, though, that as awash in cash as they are, colleges would hardly need student fees. You'd think wrong. It is now routine for young people in their twenties to begin life loaded down with student-loan debt it will take them decades to pay off.
Things are so bad, they affect demography. A friend groans: "Our system sees to it that girls from middle-class families have to go to college and end up with a lifetime debt; which means few children. My youngest son's wife says she'd love to have a second child but she has to pay $990 a month every month until her daughter is in her second year of college. They can't afford a second child. It's like Roman times when you could sell yourself into bondage. Meanwhile we are taxed to support public colleges which then take all that money and set up the loan system to get more#...#"
The website Collegeboard.com reports average annual tuition and fees at private four-year colleges as $25,143 for 2008-09. That's up 5.9 percent from the previous year, twice the Consumer Price Index rate of inflation (which, in the opinion of many economists, understates true inflation by a lot). For public four-year colleges the figure is $6,585, up 6.4 percent on the year. That's just to feed the college; students still have to feed, house, and clothe themselves.
Yet some of these institutions are bloated with cash. Ivy League college endowments are stupendous. Even after the 2008 market crash, the eight Ivies ended the year with over $88 billion in endowments -- that's about a million and a half dollars per undergraduate. If the Ivies with their 58,000 undergraduates were a country, they would rank way down at the bottom by population, along with micro-nations like St. Kitts and Nevis (50,000) and Liechtenstein (35,365); but they'd be up at No. 55 on the World Bank's list of 180 nations by Gross Domestic Product, just behind Kuwait (pop. 2.9m) and ahead of Slovakia (pop. 5.4m). Yet still tuition increases at twice the rate of inflation. What do they even need tuition fees for?
(Some colleges manage without them. New York City's Cooper Union, California's Deep Springs College, F. W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Mass., the Curtis Institute of Music in Pennsylvania, and many other colleges are no-fee. For some reason no-fee tuition hasn't caught on.)
At colleges the mania for administration is all raised to the fourth power. Pick an American college and wade into their website. There are the college employees smiling out at you from the thumbnail pictures in their little biographies on the site: the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and International programs; the Assistant Vice President for Labor Relations and Human Resources; the Director for Residence Life, with -- of course! -- her Associate Director and three Assistant Directors; the Assistant Vice President for Affirmative Action and Multicultural Programs,#...#and so on, and on, down through the administrative food chain to lowly Financial Aid Advisors and Assistant Librarians.
I've seen it written somewhere that a typical big American university has more administrators running it than British India had. I wouldn't be surprised. |
