By Professor
Doom
Many times I’ve mentioned that the folks
running higher education really seem to be far more interested in luring suckers
in, draining them of money and spitting them out, than, well, education. Oh,
the Poo Bahs running higher education bloviate about “jobs, community, and
service”, but despite the flowery words, their actions always seem to be about
sucking up the money.
I’ve casually played with my calculator
enough times to know the actions seem more in line with reality than the truth,
but such is so seldom said online that I often have wondered if maybe I’m just
not that good with a calculator.
Sometimes an article agrees with my
calculator:
Interesting. The general slant of the
article is that the children of wealthy families aren’t paying as much for
their education as the children of poor families. It’s an interesting
distinction, although “poor” is starting to be a fair word to apply to much of
the American population today.
Let me pluck out a few tidbits before
pointing out what the article missed:
The statistics here are a little bit
tortured, but there is some truth in this. What’s happening is there are plenty
of merit scholarships available, and those merit scholarships are more often
awarded to children of wealthy families than to children of poor families.
This is true…but there are some overlooked
issues.
Parents want the best for their children,
and, bottom line, money talks. A wealthy parent has more money to spend on a
child’s education, and generally will spend it. A poor parent is told to hope
(foolishly) that the public education system, and nothing more, will be enough
for a child. Social promotion and other problems often leave such children
graduating high school thinking they know what education is all about…only to
hit a brick wall once college starts.
It’s fairly common practice now, in public
schools, for teachers to go over the test material in detail seconds before
passing out the test—students need not study to do well, merely have a decent
short-term memory. In college, the legitimate ones at least, most professors
still don’t give the answers out right before the test. But I digress.
Back to the point for today, the colleges
promised to “help” the poor by putting their kids in college, but how helpful
is it when the poorer kids end up paying more?
“…promised to expand the
opportunities for low-income students to go to college. In fact, the private
universities in that group collectively raised what the poorest families pay by
10 percent, compared to 5 percent for wealthier students,…”
So,
apparently merit scholarships are disproportionately going to kids to have
better opportunities to learn. Awesome. Next up, there’ll be a study showing
that professional basketball teams are disproportionately represented by tall
people.
I don’t want to sound callous here, but I
do want to point out the internet is accessible to almost all the “poor”, and
America’s public library system really does provide pretty much anything anyone
could want to know, for free.
As an example of just how much potential
there are in books, consider the Williams sisters, and their amazing career in
tennis. They didn’t come from a wealthy family, and they certainly didn’t come
from a tennis family. No. Their father, a sharecropper, decided that tennis was
a good way to make money, and so started them on the path to learning about
tennis by checking out books from the library.
So, I acknowledge it’s “a little unfair”
that some parents have the ability to help their children more than others…but
I just don’t believe that enforcing fairness in this matter is possible, or
particularly desirable. The children of the rich have the advantage in that
they can get the books read to them, while the children of the poor are forced
to read for themselves if they want that merit scholarship. I think providing
the books for free is about the best we can do to promote fairness.
It’s tough to take the article seriously
when the author isn’t asking much in the way of questions, but at least there
are some hard numbers:
“…At the University of Virginia, for
instance, the poorest students saw their net price climb $4,313 over that
period, compared to $2,687 for students in the top earning bracket…”
I can’t emphasize enough how strange it
is that the article isn’t asking questions here. I mean, if you’re selling
something expensive, and higher education sure is expensive, should you target
the wealthy, or the poor? That seems easy to answer, but our schools target the poor. Why are our schools
targeting the poor? That’s an obvious question, but even when the article has
the answer crammed in its face, it still doesn’t think about it much:
UVA President Teresa Sullivan was
among the leaders who pledged to help poor families afford the price of
college. From the start of the economic downturn through 2013, however, UVA
raised the net price for its very poorest students by 69 percent, more than
three times faster than for wealthier students, whose tuition increased 21
percent, the federal figures show. And even since January, beginning with the
class that entered this fall, the public university dropped a policy of meeting
full need for the lowest-income students without requiring them to take out
loans and now asks in-state families to borrow up to $14,000 over four years
and out-of-state families up to $28,000.
Hmm. So, obviously, they’re targeting the
poor, but the excerpt above explains why: thanks to the weird student loan
scam, the poor have more money (at least for the university) than the rich…the
poor are more likely to qualify for those insane loans. It’s easier to get
money from the people without money.
What a mad, mad, world higher education is
today.
Even at the 36 taxpayer-supported public universities that signed the
White House pledge, poor students paid an average net price of about $8,000 in
2008-09 and almost $10,000 in 2012-13. That’s a 25 percent increase. During the
same period, wealthier students at those schools saw their average net price go
from about $18,000 to $21,000, a 16 percent increase.
Wait, what? This doesn’t even make
sense, the wealthier ARE paying more. Now, as a percent it’s not more, but
that’s a meaningless statistic…a nominal increase of even $5 will still reflect
worse on the poor than the rich.
Universities “are giving lots of
merit aid to kids who don’t need it,” and less financial aid to those who do,
said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan think tank The
Century Foundation.
Now the article is going full-on train
wreck. Merit aid isn’t FOR kids who “need” it, it’s for kids who “merit” it.
You’d think a “senior fellow” would know that.
Seriously, just put more scholarship money based on need on the table,
and this problem could be fixed. Oh wait, that would cut into those sweet,
sweet, student loan checks.
It really should be pointed out that many
merit scholarships are granted, not through schools, but through organizations
that are interested in promoting one thing or another. So, “math scholarships”
for example, are created by people donating their own money to promote and
encourage students to study math, and the same is true for many other fields.
It’s not the school’s fault that this is the reality of how the world
works…although it’d be nice if they did some things not to screw over poor
students into endless debt.
Oh wait, that would cut into the sweet,
sweet, student loan checks:
“…Requiring all students to borrow is
projected to save the university more than $10 million through 2018.”
Wow, $10 million is a lot of money, the
school must be getting pretty tight on funds not to be able to spare that over
the course of several years.
Heh:
“…even as it was cutting the cost of providing financial aid to its
poorest students, UVA was spending $12 million on a new squash facility and
increasing its marketing budget by $18 million annually...”
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a Poo Bah in
higher education that thought maybe education should be about education, jobs,
or community? I’ve nothing against squash personally (I honestly can’t even
tell you if the game uses a ball, or is played 1 on 1), but if the school
really gave a damn about helping the community, maybe it could use that $12
million bucks to help the community? If jobs were a priority, well, I encourage
the gentle reader to peruse the want ads and see just how much demand for
squash players there is in the community.
I’m sure all the money for squash is part
of some financial shuffling to support and hide money spent on more visible
sportsball programs, but I want to talk about the marketing here.
$18 million dollars for “marketing”. Sales.
More customers. Growth. UVA is taxpayer supported, I imagine folks would be
less willing to spend their taxes if they knew the money was going to pop-up
ads and commercials, instead of the “education, jobs, community” that the Poo
Bahs spout.
One last line:
“There’s plenty of aid going to the
$80,000 [earners] and below, but once you get to $80,000 it’s not like it’s
some magic number and you can suddenly afford tuition.”
While the
article really wants to make a distinction, please realize that “poor” really
does apply to just about all applicants; I suspect the bulk of my readers are
in the “$80,000 and below” category that’s being called “poor”.
The “unfairness” of merit-based
scholarships is now under attack, and used as some explanation of the immense
expense of higher education, but I promise you, the bigger issues are the
student loan scam and the ruling caste of administration that cares nothing for
education. This ridiculously highly paid caste spends huge fortunes on squash
facilities and marketing, while pompously lecturing us that there just isn’t
enough money to help the poor.
No comments:
Post a Comment