The “everyone must go to college” crowd is a cult. With a nice topping of pretension and moral preening.

If college is so expensive, why doesn’t it provide a truly stellar, unrivaled learning experience? Part of the reason is that very little of the exorbitant costs go towards educating. Only 21 cents out of every tuition dollar goes to instruction, according to Richard Vedder, Director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.

From a purely market-orientated standpoint, why wouldn’t colleges keep raising their prices, as long as people keep paying? Ursinus College increased its freshman class by 55% after raising its prices. William Cooper, president of the University of Richmond, said that he and his administrators increased tuition by 27% in 2005 because, by maintaining their lower tuition prices, they were “leaving money on the table,” and they did not want to be “the cheap school” anymore. Russell Osgood, president of Grinnell College (the richest liberal arts college in the country, with around $1.5 billion in its endowment), says that he and his administrators raised their tuition price by 5% because the school had “been motoring along for about 20 years at a tuition figure and fees that was about 10 percent below the average for our [competitors], and … being lower [wasn’t] doing great things for us.” It’s as if a school can be seen as better or more prestigious simply because it dares to ask for more.
. . .
But don’t dramatically higher prices make it more difficult for poorer students to attend a given college? They do, and that may be the idea. Colleges have vastly increased scholarship money for students in families earning $100,000 or more per year, but have relatively neglected scholarship increases for students from families earning just $40,000 or less. And it’s not just private colleges that offer this preferential treatment: the top 50 public colleges have recently increased aid to richer families by eight times more than the aid to poorer ones.
. . .
These sorts of practices border on the unethical because they follow a process in which students are encouraged to borrow as much as possible and pay expensive interest rates. Many colleges even own stock in student loan companies, allowing them to benefit even more from their students’ debt, and over half of all colleges are more likely to accept a student who shows an interest in attending. They know that the more enthusiastic a student is, the more willing they’ll be to pay a high price.

The best way to combat this, ironically, is by educating prospective students. Yet most students seem blissfully unaware of how the process works, and colleges have no incentive to encourage them to find out.

If this sounds nothing like the picture of college you have in your mind, you’re not alone. The word “college,” for many of us, conjures up feelings of integrity and learning, of expanding one’s knowledge and promise, and of a collaborative process by which the learned people in society help the next generation achieve what they did. But the reality is not so grand. Colleges are a business, and they have no qualms about doing what is necessary to extract as much from prospective students and their families as possible.

The First Person in My Family NOT to Go to College

I hear plenty about the corrupt hucksters on Wall Street, why aren’t we talking about the wealthy con artists in academia who turn absurd profits by convincing broke kids to bankrupt themselves?
. . .
Why do we send guys like Bernie Madoff to prison while the academic elite get away with gouging an entire generation to death?

Thank God I wasn’t college material

A trillion dollars in student loans. Record high unemployment. Three million good jobs that no one seems to want. The goal of Profoundly Disconnected is to challenge the absurd belief that a four-year degree is the only path to success. The Skills Gap is here, and if we don’t close it, it’ll swallow us all. Which is a long way of saying, we could use your help. . .

PROFOUNDLY DISCONNECTED

Bonus “taxes and frugality are for the little people” story:

Union bigwigs representing some of the nation’s lowest paid workers are holding their annual board meeting at one of Florida’s ritziest resorts just months after increasing membership dues.

The United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents 1.4 million workers, is holding its annual board meeting at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort, where “Victorian elegance meets modern sophistication.”

Two-hundred-fifty union officials are attending the 11-day conference ending Jan. 25, although not all are staying at the Grand Floridian. Resort rooms start at $488 per night before taxes and can exceed $2,000 if officials opt for a two Bedroom Club Level suite.

Living Big on the Backs of Grocery Baggers

Continue reading ‘Corruption and the College Con’ »

The next time you are dealing with a mechanic, HVAC person, locksmith, plumber, electrician, any skilled tradesman or tradeswoman, ask them how much money they make. If your entire focus has been on “college”, you will be surprised.

Bring your passion to your work.

Profoundly Disconnected

Mike Rowe Foundation

Buy the poster and give it to your local high school!

1. I believe that I have won the greatest lottery of all time. I am alive. I walk the Earth. I live in America. Above all things, I am grateful.

2. I believe that I am entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Nothing more. I also understand that “happiness” and the “pursuit of happiness” are not the same thing.

3. I believe there is no such thing as a “bad job.” I believe that all jobs are opportunities, and it’s up to me to make the best of them.

4. I do not “follow my passion.” I bring it with me. I believe that any job can be done with passion and enthusiasm.

5. I deplore debt, and do all I can to avoid it. I would rather live in a tent and eat beans than borrow money to pay for a lifestyle I can’t afford.

6. I believe that my safety is my responsibility. I understand that being in “compliance” does not necessarily mean I’m out of danger.

7. I believe the best way to distinguish myself at work is to show up early, stay late, and cheerfully volunteer for every crappy task there is.

8. I believe the most annoying sounds in the world are whining and complaining. I will never make them. If I am unhappy in my work, I will either find a new job, or find a way to be happy.

9. I believe that my education is my responsibility, and absolutely critical to my success. I am resolved to learn as much as I can from whatever source is available to me. I will never stop learning, and understand that library cards are free.

10. I believe that I am a product of my choices – not my circumstances. I will never blame anyone for my shortcomings or the challenges I face. And I will never accept the credit for something I didn’t do.

11. I understand the world is not fair, and I’m OK with that. I do not resent the success of others.

12. I believe that all people are created equal. I also believe that all people make choices. Some choose to be lazy. Some choose to sleep in. I choose to work my butt off.

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.
. . .
The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it. Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.

But it isn’t just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me.
. . .
The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from.

The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth.

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education: Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers (emphasis added)