Coals Hauled to Newcastle

Film at 11:00.

This is about education, so if that bores you scroll on by.

But if you read on, before you get to the following from “Talking Points Memo”, consider this 1967 quote by William Arrowsmith:

"At present the universities are as uncongenial to teaching as the Mojave Desert to a clutch of Druid priests. If you want to restore a Druid priesthood, you cannot do it by offering prizes for Druid-of-the Year. If you want Druids, you must grow forests."

(William Arrowsmith,”The Future of Teaching”)

(The stalwart TPM handed the joystick over to Matt Yglesias who cast his net and draws this in.)

Colleges Giving Even More Financial Aid to Wealthy Students

Way back in the earliest history of Education Sector--I believe it was January 2006--we published our first "Chart You Can Trust." It described how colleges are increasingly funneling scholarship money away from lower-income students and instead giving it to wealthy applicants who are more useful for boosting both colleges' standing in the U.S. News college rankings and their financial bottom line.

That chart used data from the federal National Postsecondary Student Aid Survey, gathered in 1992, 1995, and 1999. Yesterday, the Education Trust (my former employer) released an excellent new report titled "Promise Abandonded: How Policy Choices and Practices Restrict College Opportunities." It contains a similar analysis, but uses newer data from the 2003 NPSAS survey.

Their conclusion: things have gotten even worse.

From 1999 to 2003, private colleges increased the average aid to students from families making less than $20,000 per year from $4,027 to $5,240, an increase of $1,213, or 30%.

During the same time period, private colleges increased the average aid to students from families making more than $100,000 per year from $3,321 to $4,806, an increase of $1,485, or 45%.

This is on top of even larger disparities in earlier years. Over the last decade, both public and private institutions have devoted a hugely disproportionate share of new scholarships to the most privileged students. The whole principle of awarding financial aid according to financial need appears to be rapidly disappearing from our colleges and universities.
…

As one who has interlaced a fair amount of my pupa and adult stages of development in and around L'Academie, the good news is you can still get a decent education at some of our institutions of higher learning. If you do all the things you’re parents should have been riding you about your whole life – discipline, focus, hard work – you can come out of four-year institution loaded for bear.

If you so choose.

And the mo’ better news is that even if the whims of a fickle economy, or Moore’s Law, or a gut-and-run CEO leave you jobless, those very traits that got you through school the first time will continue to pay dividends wherever you land.

Knowledge and a willingness to dig in and do hard work are the main courses of a movable feast that will serve you well you whole life, and which can never, ever be take from you.

So much for the good news.

That bad news is, more and more college has nothing whatsoever to do with you – Joe Citizen – getting a good education.

A disturbing number of incoming students arrive with a sense of spa-and-brunch entitlement that has to be seen up-close to be believed. Instructors I have known have been lectured to by their students with sentences that began, “You know, I pay your salary...”

Students who showed up late, unprepared and often barely literate.

Students, I might add, who often cop that attitude with the fulsome support of their parents.

And why not?

They know what the game is: Dollars for Diplomas. You are purchasing your entrée to the Ruling Class and the “quality” of what you learn has precious little to do with anything. And more than that, as Universities price higher education out of the reach of the average family, the true scope of the plan becomes clear: the commoditization of the sheepskin also purchases you a legally binding right to discriminate against the underclasses.

These are students, in other words, who have learned the lesson of George W. Bush from the tips of their Pradas to the tops of their Diesels.

To wit, if the proles can’t cough up a few hundred thou to buy into the game, fuck ‘em.

They’ll never even make it in the door, because without that chit you never have to even bother to interview them for anything. You can now demand a degree as a prerequisite for an assistant.

A copy gofer.

A latte wrangler.

A phone jockey.

Anything.

And it’s all quite legal.

And colleges have long since discovered that the ability to bestow the credit, the credential and the diploma is literally a license to print money.

That if you make a degree the precondition to entry into the professional-track job market at even the lowest level, you hand the keys to the Castle over to a breed of MBA-minded Chief Education Officers who no longer see learning as a value, but see The Diploma as a commodity.

And once that structure is in place, the outcome becomes inevitable.

This is, of course, suicidally stupid over the long term. One of the greatest boons to democracy, the economy and the stability of the nation was the G.I. Bill. Education was always the Great Leveler; it was the hope that was held out to the middle and lower class, offering the promise that, come what may, there was a way up and out for you.

But the signs that the rich are not only pulling the ladder up behind them but dumping flaming pitch over the parapet to take out anyone who is still trying to claw their way up the wall by their fingernails are unmistakable. There is the evidence in this article. The fact that Universities are now overwhelmingly dependent on part-time and adjunct (read: "disposable") faculty who are paid shit and have to gypsy from job to job just to keep three hots and a cot. The way their “servant” status is reinforced by one anecdotal tale after another from these same professionals. The fact that dorm fees at some of the tonier colleges are pricier than the cost of a four-year degree fifteen years ago.

This is a spiraling and mutually-reinforcing scheme. It is one that mercilessly up-ratchets the privilege-threshold by jacking the entry fee into the genteel, professional classes completely out of the range of average Americans, and is one that the gentry, the students and the Universities have all figured out, and have all figured out how to game.

And the day will come – if it is not here already – when the ideal that is hallowed by word and deed in our institutions of higher learning is no longer "Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher." but “Where’s my fucking latte!”

However with college fast becoming just another adjunct to the class system -- one that does not confer laurels but mints meal-tickets that certify only that you or you family can afford a seat above the groundlings -- one of the weirder and more hopeful facts I have come across is that the salvation of the idea the Educated Middle Class may come, of all places, from the hungry heart of Capitalism itself.

Even as we speak, legions of older, fairly-well-educated workers are aging out of the labor force, following a trend that will positively explode over the next 10-12 years. Millions upon millions of Boomers are coming to the end of their demographically formal working lives and are moving from wage and wealth productivity producers to consumers.

Why not? They've certainly earned it.

This Elder Exodus also happens at a time when the marketplace is emphatically not knowledge-static or education-neutral. Quite the contray. To put it bluntly, in industry after industry, if you are a business owner and you don’t have an educated work force on-tap, sooner rather than later you’re fucked. And if you are a small-to-medium sized business, odds are very high that you do not have the internal capacity to create and maintain your own, private Little Red School House to train, retrain your own, private army of expert artisans.

At which point the question stops being one of liberal social justice and class equity and starts becomes one of hard-nose, pragmatic capitalist survival. Or, rather, these two customarily-divided streams find a confluence and become a torrent.

Let a few thousand teachers, students and social activists march on City Hall and demand a better educational system at a fairer price, and it will never register on anyone’s radar. No one will answer the door. No one will bother to mention it on the news. And like rain falling on the ocean, a march for the democratization of learning will vanish without a trace.

But...

But when local merchants, businessmen and chambers of commerce turn to the marketplace fill their depleting ranks with skilled tradesmen and find the cupboard bare?

When company owners find their ability to not just grow and prosper, but simply compete and survive, threatened by an education system that cannot produce a reasonably well-educated worker at a reasonable price?

That’s when things will change, because men and women like these have Rolodexes. Men and women like these -- especially acting in concert; coming on like a tide -- get their calls returned and their letters answered.

Men and women like these don’t want to hear any shit from any provost or superintendent or University flack about dorm room amenities and $200 textbooks when they can still remember that once upon a time, within the memory of living men, schools produced citizens who could read, write, speak, think, solve problems and show up to work on time.

Yet now, for all the taxes they pay and for all the times they have read of the price of college doubling, re-doubling, and re-doubling yet again, they still can’t beg, borrow, steal or import enough competent workers to keep their businesses alive.

And men and women like these do not take the half-assed delivery of fucked up product at war-profiteering prices lying down.