Go Home, College. You’re Drunk.
So I’m sitting here watching my beloved Tennessee men’s basketball team getting killed at home vs Vanderbilt. Ugh…… I am in quick need of a distraction from this visual filth, so I reached and opened up my computer, seeking the refuge of Facebook on Al Gore’s internet. So here I am, scrolling along peacefully, blatantly ignoring my TV, yet incapable of turning it off…..Okay, I confess, I peeked. TN is now down 20. My will power obviously is terrible. This is why I don’t keep Oreo's in the house.
I quickly turn my eyes back to Zuckerberg-land, to which I see a link to an article about another PC episode run amok on another college campus. This time it was at Duke University, where a student wrote an article in a student paper that included a narrative about how Freedom of Speech rights only exists to protect white privilege. First of all, I find these kind of news stories to be silly and gratuitous, but they usually don’t bother me that much. At least, not like they do a lot of other people.
As I helplessly glance back at the TV, the glutton of punishment that I apparently am (down 19), I’m reminded of the gender neutral pronoun issue that happened right here at UTK. That was also silly and gratuitous, but again, I didn’t get that worked up about it. I basically had a chuckle and moved on with my day. I think that day, I had something much more important to concern myself with. Like buying a yo-yo.
Look, colleges and universities should be exactly where the haven for free thinking ideas fly with incredible tenacity. Wherever you see a place with a bunch of young people, ages 18–22, placed together tightly in a high populous, their free-thinking wheelhouse is going to be churning like crazy. With the aid of new-found freedoms, a healthy set of raging hormones, and booze — what do you expect? With that, there’s gonna be some good ideas, some moderate ideas and some real stinker ideas. They all can’t be winners now, can they? In the case of the gender pronoun issue at UT, I realize that was a faculty department that brought that idea forward. But according to some former students of mine who now attend UT, that idea was pushed and initiated by a particular group of students. And the department that they brought it to? The UT’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion. Not exactly an office that could ignore looking into such a request, can it? And yes, I thought it would have been silly if UT would’ve carried out an enforced campus wide initiation of gender neutral pronouns, and seemingly trying to create a new language. But, alas, they didn’t. It was an idea that was brought about on a university campus, as it should be allowed to be, as freely as can be without interfering with the any curriculum-based learning. You know, like college athletics. (See what I did there?)
Who cares? Kids speaking their minds on a college campus is hardly new. Neither is emotional student protests about things that we all have been emotional about and effected by throughout history — the Vietnam War, for example. So we shouldn’t get worked up about things like that. We should just go back to our $5 Starbucks and let the college kids go through the growing process of figuring themselves out. And yes, they are kids. I’m 36 now, soon to be 37. When I was between the ages of 18–22, I can tell you with complete conviction that I was a child then. So, give them a little bit of a break here. Most of them will figure it out.
This isn’t the discussion we should be having about higher education anyway. The problem with college is the decreasing value of a modern day college degree. Most studies I’ve seen are conclusive that most college graduates are underemployed (around 65%), with less than 30% working a job that is related to their field of study. Meanwhile, college tuition’s and various other educational costs have increased dramatically, while the availability of student loans being the most available loan on the market, regardless of credit rating. Oh, and then there are those pesky interest rates. In a very real and rational way, college has become a scam.
Now, young people do need to take some accountability here, too. They’re not completely absolved of responsibility. With the costs being what they are today, you don’t even think about attending until you figure out a major and have a plausible, specific idea for how that major will serve you. Too many kids go to college aimlessly with no plan and no strategy, with an ‘I’ll figure it out as I go’ kind of mindset. Part of that is the fault of the older and wiser teachers, guidance counselors, and parents. When I was in high school, we were told to not take any time off after graduating from high school. We should just keep on keeping on, with the rationale that if you take a break, the likelihood is that you’ll never go.
This was not wise advice. Perhaps at one time, it was before the costs and goals of education got turned up on it’s head. Nowadays, it will lead to a young person starting out with a $48,000-$60,000 debt hanging over them (figuring they had some savings and worked to help pay for it as they go). But, what if you can’t find a job? Or underemployed? Why did you go if you didn’t realize what kind of work you found fulfilling? How did you not go with a specific goal or goals in mind? And figure out how or which college could help you achieve said goal(s)? Or, why are you majoring in Art History? Or Latin? Or Sociology? Or European Studies? Taking on a $60,000 debt as you start out in life in order to study an interesting topic is pretty irrational. A simple library card could prevent a lot of money from eventually leaving your bank account.
However, the problems with higher education institutions and government-sponsored loan programs absorb most of the responsibility. Colleges are not serving their exclusive purpose anymore, and that’s to educate. A place of learning, with exclusive goals to prepare, teach and train people a particular set of skills. With these skills, they can be valuable, contributing, producing members of their communities. Using these skills to make a respectable income, so that they can live and earn a living, buy a home, raise a family, and eventually retire. These students should be able to attend college at an affordable tuition, with affordable room and board, and affordable textbooks, with reasonable interest rates on loans used to help pay for it. Most importantly, these students should have a high level of trust in their college of choice to help them to do so, and not take advantage of their ambitions.
Sadly, this is not the case. Students are being taken advantage of financially. With universities being run like corporations, and their students being looked at as capital. Universities invest heavily in brick and mortar units like climbing walls and high dollar student centers, used as a marketing tools to attract more students, away from competitors. They pay heavy salaries for professors who are well-published and well-respected in their respective fields, professors who never actually teach a course load, instead using further university funding to do personal research and publish more books. This becomes a valuable marketing tool for a university to have such distinctive, published academia on their staff.
Here’s the harsh truth: University’s are businesses, and student loans are the capital that pays for it. Presidents are CEO’s, pulling down large salaries. UT-Knoxville’s President Joseph DiPietro salary is $696, 802, as well as an additional $186,301 he’ll receive in retention bonuses. Chancellor Jimmy Cheek is paid a $447,492 salary, with retention bonuses of $158,098. The point is when universities become corporations, Presidents become CEO’s, and student loans pay the bills. You see a push in the competitive market place between universities for the product, the student. Who borrows the money that keeps the university lights turned on. That marketing pursuit of competing to bring in the students at high volume has resulted in negative by-products, such as higher tuition costs, and less rigorous and challenging curriculum (a recently taken poll reported that 20% of college graduates thinks that Judge Judy sits on the Supreme Court).
(*Disclaimer: I am not attempting to single out and/or dump on UTK. They are just a single bi-product of the problem with higher education throughout our entire country. So don’t turn a Big Orange blind eye on me here. And I also apologize if you’re a fan of Judge Judy. Just because, she’s mean.)
According to a Business Insider article that came out in July 2015, the modern day costs of tuition, room and board average is $23, 872/yr. In 1980, it was a $9,438/yr average for the same tuition, room and board. This is an increase of nearly 260%. Over the same span of time, the increase of all consumer items (according to the Consumer Price Index) is 120%. The article states that the reasons for these huge increases in costs includes an increase in student enrollments and the fact that the states were absorbing less of the cost, meaning that those costs have been passed on to the student.
The increase in tuition does not mean that the value of a college degree is more valuable, as it should indicate based on the dramatic rise in cost. Ask yourself this question, if you had $95,488 (total costs after an average 4 year timetable to earn a degree — without calculating in the interest rates), could there be better investment opportunities that you could make with that amount of money? Like starting up your own business, for example. Consider the average salary for a college graduate (who can find employment), is around $30,000-$36,000/year. Go and find someone who has ever occurred a debt around $100,000 and ask them how hard it is to pay that back. Even if they make as much as 25%-35% more than that average salary.
Interest on student loans is one of two major ways that students are just plain being taken advantage of financially. Interest rates are complicated, varying in percentages based on need, subsidized or unsubsidized, how and when you pay it back, etc. It can get further complicated as how the interest is compounded, with in some select cases, the interest rates are compounded daily after a certain amount of time has elapsed. Government issued loan interest rates are set by congress and typically range from 3.4%-6.8%. It can get even more complicated during the political voting cycle, when politicians target young college voters with promises of changing the rates, payback methods, even debt forgiveness. Which can change everything for new borrowers. It is rare that a current borrower be allowed to change over to lower rate, if new, better rates or plans are legislated. Ambitious politicians are almost ALWAYS going to hold some sort of publicized stance on college affordability and student loaning. Considering that since 2004, the amount of students with student loan debt has grown from 23 million to almost 44 million. That’s a pretty big voting base to appeal to. Although, it’s interesting to note that in 2005, politicians eliminated the use of bankruptcy to discharge a student loan.
The other major way is through textbook sales. If you want to find the place on the planet where you’ll find the most expensive books in the world, it will be a college campus bookstore. According to a study by the Bureau of Labor statistics, costs of textbooks have increased 812% since 1978. An increase that’s shot up faster than health-care, home prices, and of course, inflation. Why? For one, professors will often times assign titles needed for the curriculum without considering the cost. Or, if it’s a book they wrote, then cost be damned, that book will become required reading. The average costs for books per school year cost in a range between $650-$700. Not exactly a drop in the bucket expense.
This is a shameful and exploitative practice. Book stores bring in new editions of a textbook every year, often times with little to no notable changes in them. Which is strange, since in the case of history textbooks, for instance, history typically never changes. In this tech advanced time we’ve developed into, does anyone else find it curious that textbooks are still be so widely mandatory? Tradition, I suppose. Books are sacred.
The economic-minded lot of you will immediately contend, that if it is true that universities are run like competing corporations, shouldn’t that drive tuition costs down, not up? No. State run institutes of higher learning are only competing with other universities/colleges within their own states. Out of state tuition are usually, if not always, considerably much more. So, as in UTK’s case with their enrollment size and endowments, they really do not have much competition with other schools of similar size/endowments that can help drive their pricing point (tuition) down. In fact, with UTK being the state’s flagship university with a valuable product (education/diploma, facilities, UT football, etc) it can actually drive price points up, with more freedom to dictate, due to this lack of competition. And competition is a key driving force in a capitalistic economy.
Now before you go accusing me of being some liberal agitator, a la Michael Moore, who hates capitalism, let me tell you that is not the case. I’m very moderate about most issues, and I am fiscally conservative. I very much believe that capitalism is the best economic system in a free society. I am also not ready to declare that a capitalistic model does not work when applied to running state-run universities. I’m just saying that it isn’t working right now. Because they are not completely committing to capitalistic principles. Which is costing everyone really, because they are not maximizing what their production can be, and it is by far costing the students the most.
As it is currently implemented, the only capitalistic aspects being carried out at universities exist at the top. Investing aggressively on salaries to bring in qualified administrators, using free market contracting practices to attract qualified, desired candidates to fill them. Indeed, this is a capitalistic concept and consistent staple of successful capitalistic organizations. These administrators are usually overseeing a large staff with a multi-million dollar budget. So you need to have smart, qualified people filling these spots. Duties usually include various responsibilities developing research, brick and mortar projects, retain and graduate current enrollees, increase enrollment in graduate programs, attract and retain stellar staff and faculty, furthering the improvement of their resource base, and more. It is imperative in hiring efficient, smart leadership for implementing and development of the entire educational process, or business model, as well as maintaining a sustainable budget. Where in, if budgets are managed and invested appropriately, then costs can be kept low, because investments are seeing a return, or profit.
However, if the only implemented capitalistic principles are only applied to making boardroom hires, then it will become a self-defeating endeavor, resulting in ballooning tuition costs. Some of the basic tenets of a business in a capitalistic system are the product, sales and production (generated revenue/free cash flow), marketing, labor costs, research and development, administration, budget, etc. The product here is education/diploma. The generated revenue made on sales and production are the tuition paid by the student body, or student loans. The rest can vary, and for the purpose of this example, I’ll digress. However, any good business owner or business person will tell you that the lifeblood of any business is sales, revenue used to earn a profit and reinvest back into the business for purposes of growth. If that is never your priority and focus, the business will decline and falter.
However, like our federal and state governments, the problem is that fear of consequences do not exist like they do for private market business owners. When government agencies mismanage or run out of money, the people who usually suffer is the consumer AND the product, not just the product. The neglect of sales drive, while placing priorities above them (grants, brick and mortar, development/research, inflated labor/payrolls), result with the students getting stuck absorbing the costs. But hey, no worries, because politicians passed legislation making student loans more accessible. So students don’t suffer from this, right? (Sidenote: I hope you noticed my sarcasm there. I tried to lay it on pretty thick. Don’t make me start using hashtags.)
Universities are always wanting (and needing)to be on the cutting edge of research and development, and pour lots of money into R&D program. There’s value of that in the educational process, no doubt. However, it should not be a priority so much that it contributes greatly to inflated tuition costs. After all, the #1 purposes of education is to educate, and of course, graduate their students at affordable costs. Without the power of consequences, what keeps sharp, disciplined consistency when constructing a budget. When it’s decided what funds will be decreased, increased, or cut and where those funds are allocated, in relation to where they need to keep a desired price point at.
In the private sector, a business will create a price point for their product, based on what that price point will generate the most affordable price the consumer will purchase it for. Then, energy and focus and funds will be prioritized to reach a certain volume point, which is calculated to see where they will begin to see a profit. At this point, they’ll know how much volume they needed to produce and sale to reach a desire profit goal. This is why emphasis on sales are placed at priority #1. Research, marketing, development, and labor all factor in to the bottom line, but the lifeblood of the company are sales. Everything else is a second priority. Would a company jack up or down a price point to put more money into research and development? No. No way. Why would they do that? That would slow down their revenue of cash flow and, therefore, growth.
So, in theory, if colleges decided to make tuition more affordable, and focused on a price point, they may be able to get that tuition price point down to a more affordable rate. IF, that’s where the #1 priority lies. Sadly, it isn’t. Due to a lack of the fear of consequence, there is not an influence to make other cuts to get to that point. With the utilization of student loans that are easily made available, they can meet the price point as is, and the budget costs and expenditure priority’s are placed in other areas. Which is the fatal flaw, because if you’re only going to practice capitalism-inspired principals in select areas, but not in the basic fundamental areas, then it suffers. Well, the students suffer, since they foot the bill, and accumulate the debt. This is the where the true moral tragedy lies. Politicians got involved, dealing with consumer banks like Sallie Mae to allow incredibly accessible student loans, which are used to justify inflated tuition costs.
Other areas I want to look at are antiquated ideas in higher education. Why not look into the idea of whether or not there is still a need that it has to take four years to obtain a degree? Why is four years this magic number that has never really fluctuated up or down? With the advancements in technologies that solve so many problems for us, is it really necessary? Or that practically every major takes four years to complete, even though it transcends different skill sets in completely different areas of study? I do not think that sounds practical or reasonable. Perhaps, there can be some serious looks at overall academic classroom syllabus changes. Perhaps, with some given majors, classes can be combined, condensed or eliminated to allow the students to learn the skill sets in their given majors. If tuition costs can go down, and combine it with a various majors of study that take only 3 or 3.5 years to graduate, then students will owe less student debt, and tuition rates may not need to be cut so drastically. Efficiency studies into these ideas may prove to be effective.
They’re many areas of budget cutting that are never looked into very seriously, because of the lack-of-consequence incentive I mentioned earlier. And guess what? Every election year, politicians on every level target higher education tuition costs as an issue. Almost always, these ambitious politicians seem to have only 2–3 ways they want to address it. Easier access or increase to student loans. A flat out government paid for tuition payment through grants (Pell), debt forgiveness program, etc. Or the newly proposed idea from certain moronic candidates this year, which is that the government will slap a 90% tax on millionaires and billionaires, and that money will be used to pay tuition costs. None of these proposals have been good enough, at least not long term. (One will not work at all. Can you guess which one?) Why not initiate a proposal that includes incentives FOR THE UNIVERSITIES. The incentives are that if they can cut tuition to a certain price point, while remaining on budget with rationing and cuts, then those universities will receive federal incentive bonuses, on top of the state funds they receive. Doesn’t sound plausible? Why not? Government spending, both state and federal, already have funding budgeted for higher education. Don’t just hand it over, make the universities earn it with performance-based incentives. These incentives will benefit the students with lower tuition costs, and universities will be motivated to reach the pricing point in two ways. To receive performance-based funding, and not wanting to publicly answer for it if they don’t meet those performance standards. Remember, universities already competing for students anyway, and bad press like that is not good for marketing or branding. They already are using capitalistic free market practices, why not create a consequence incentive to increase it’s effectiveness? It could actually end up costing less money at the federal level. And, you know, the students would save money, too. Just a thought.
I’d hate myself if I didn’t also include this, but really, universities need to give the ultra left wing rhetoric in the classrooms a rest. Seriously, this is irritating. Can we do something about it? I think so. For one, ask yourself this, how come our K-12 teachers are monitored by a model that they must go by, with evaluations and common core, etc. Anyway, that’s a mess and a disaster, we all know that. But college professors run departments with impunity without any sort of checks and balances at all. For instance, I had a professor in a gen-ed psychology class once, and for some reason, he started talking about Ronald Reagan, and proceeded to solicit to the class that “there is a special place in hell for that son of a bitch” I also had a Western Civ teacher once, who stopped class to express to us that “Rush Limbaugh does not have a degree, so why is anyone listening to him?” Both classes were not relevant as it pertained to the class syllabus (I know, I double checked). Oh, and just imagine the fire storm that would come down on a high school English teacher if he/she said that. Just sayin’. Keep the liberal rhetoric in your pipes and stick to the business of, you know, educating, not the business of political commentary through forced audience participation. Blowhards.
Don’t worry, everyone. I get it. I know the college experience is about a lot more than just getting an education. It’s about growing and evolving into an adult, meeting new friends, meeting future spouses, football games, tailgating, spring break, and if you can find the time, have a little fun and drink a beer. But hey, it’s about getting prepared for something that effects you forever. That fact determines even what school you attend, based on what you may want to study. Getting tuition costs down is so important. The statistical trends showing where the costs of tuition are going at what pace and cost cannot be acceptable. Those trends simply have to suggest, based on costs comparisons, that something can be done about it. Preying on a young group of people who just want to make a better life for themselves does not project well on us. Putting college grads in enormous debts starting out in the workforce keeps them from doing things as early as previous generations did, like buy a house, get married, etc. And after all, the economy flourishes the most when a) citizens have money and can afford to spend, and b) U.S. production is high. They have to work together, of course. If no one can buy it, no one produces it, and the economy slows, freezes or regresses. College students who have to pay back big loans could reflect that kind of economic effect, since they use their money to pay the banks back for the loans (thanks, politicians). Which, in essence, can effect ALL of us. Eventually.
Why not do something about it now, instead of later when it becomes a bigger problem. Or worse, the value of a college diploma drops to the point where higher education does not mean the same as it used to. Because attendance goes down, private companies start to train their own workforce, or it gets so expensive to earn a diploma that it doesn’t translate very efficiently to the market place. Higher learning has a positive impact in growing the economy and building communities. It should appeal to everyone to want to address this issue, because we all will eventually feel it’s effects if universities, banks and politicians do not start behaving themselves.
We live in a great country. You have a power because you have a vote. Get their attention with it, then use your voice to raise awareness. They’ll eventually listen once enough of us speak together. If not, we can give them a proverbial kick in the ass.
Think about it.
#BlogOfWar