Continued
What Has Our Current Educational System Given us? This is an almost impossible question to answer with any true legitimacy because we have no idea of the outcomes if we had made alternative choices. True, we can look around and make assessments, but they are directly flavored by the political divide this country is fracturing into.
What I see: Large universities are becoming rich at the cost of overwhelming student debt (which a socialist left would have forgiven by making it a part of our national debt). A significant percentage of students emerge from their time at college without the skills employers are seeking. The promise of increased earnings from a basic college degree is becoming a distant memory. An understanding and appreciation for civics (the nature of our nation-state), is disappearing – along with a respect for how we should change those things worth changing. The ability to reason, debate and resolve conflict no longer seems to be a part of the political process. Educators seem to have instilled in the young a belief the government is responsible for their success or failure, rather than understanding personal accountability. Let’s look at each of these separately.
The United States spends more per student on education than most other developed countries,[1] but with far less success than places in northern Europe or Asia. Just to be clear, those countries have a fairly homogenous population and set high expectations for the young. With those expectations comes a stress to excel and with that stress, failure takes on a very personal penalty. We, on the other hand, have an ethnically diverse population with a much larger issue with integration into a common cultural norm. That is a fact, but perhaps not the central issue. Beginning with the post-World War II years we’ve seen the Federal government push the universities to ever larger sizes with the funding of student education, first through the creation of the Veterans benefits and then through guaranteed student loans. Both of these programs have had huge impacts on our nation, and few would argue they’ve not been overwhelming successes for the lives of most who’ve benefitted from them. At the same time though we’ve created an expectation on the part of state university systems that they are due to all the federal funding they can get. They are now an industry, just like Monsanto, and like Monsanto, they lobby for their “fair share” of the government dole. At the same time tier, 1 schools and school systems have increased their endowments to epic proportions[2] where their values are measured in billions of dollars.
Where do we start with understanding a cause? Let’s start with the role of politics as it has been introduced into the equation because of the huge amount of dollars we spend. (Federal Department of Education alone sends the states about $15 billion/year[3]). With our perpetually elected Congress and the educational lobbyists who enrich them, we can see a real correlation. Clearly, Congress has written laws that have taken the risk of loaning money off the backs of the bankers and placed it on the backs of the taxpayers who guarantee these loans. Meanwhile, the airwaves are filled with commercials talking about how much more money a college graduate will make than someone with just a high school diploma. But is that really true? Today we have a deficit of people with the skills necessary to keep our society viable, and an overabundance of people with little experience in anything other than going to school, but who’ve been thoroughly indoctrinated into supporting the preferred political solutions of their educational professionals.
Thanks to the support of our politicians the cost of education has far outpaced the inflation index for the past 40-years. This chart[4] from InflationData.com shows how much the universities have increased costs compared to the standard inflation of consumer prices since 1985.
We hear a tremendous outcry over the “greed” of industries like bankers and investment firms, or hear about the billionaires of the tech industries or the wealthy 1%, but where is the outcry over the wealth of institutions like Harvard, Yale, or the California and New York university systems? Is it because those advocating for the vilification of the 1% have a personal stake in not protesting their own jobs?
Take, for example, Senator Warren (D-MA)[5] who left what seemed to be a cushy job at Harvard where she was paid over $400,000/year[6] to teach (there are claims she taught a single course but there is little hard data to support or refute this claim). This afforded her the opportunity to earn additional income through consultation with both private companies and the Federal Government. She is now a Senator lambasting the rich, but I don’t see much comment on the wealth of the educational institutions where she has spent so much of her adult life. She and many of her colleagues clearly fall in the top 1% themselves and seem to make no effort to voluntarily pay what they say is their fair share of taxes so others can be cared for without regard to cost.
What has this push for college education done for the average citizen/student who is looking to make the most for themselves and their families? What we see in the news is the tremendous burden of student debt we have created. According to Student Loan Hero website[7], the average student in the class of 2017 graduates from college with a debt burden of $39,400 and the total debt is a staggering $1.4 trillion dollars. How did this occur? That’s easy, the politically powerful in the country serve as advocates for the educational system. Routinely we see a crossflow of people moving from education to government and back to education as each administration seeks the “best and brightest” to implement their agenda. The same thing is said of industry and each is a reasonable fact of life, but there is clearly a willingness to enrich those centers of education by creating both the demand for education and the means to enrich those who play along with this whole process.
But what kind of job market are they coming out of college into? Well, obviously that depends on what kind of job market the country has based on its involvement in the current (capitalist) based system. As in most things, there seems to be a natural cycle where the economy ebbs and flows, but what the record has shown in the 20th and 21st centuries is the greater the government involvement in regulating and controlling the free market system the greater the likelihood of stagnation and job loss through poor policy and market manipulation. The year 2008 stands as a testament to this, when the government support of cheap money for housing for those who could not afford to repay their loans lead to a collapse of the housing market, and bankruptcies for tens of thousands if not millions of families.
With millions of unemployed workers, salaries stagnate and new graduates find little improvement in their lives. As universities encourage students to spend their time studying areas that offer great social awareness, but little social value they come out of college with debt but ill-prepared for a job market where specific skills are in demand and a degree in women’s studies only prepares them for more education. But even when students pursue degrees in the touted STEM disciplines, the fact the job market is so soft creates a real question of how does a degree generate a reasonable return on investment?
The other day I was talking to my brother, an electrical engineer, and he gave me a great example of how this all fits together. When he graduated from college in the 1980s his cost of education was about $45,000 dollars. His starting salary as an engineer was $28,000/year. His daughter recently graduated from college with an engineering degree, her cost of education was well over $200,000 but her starting salary is $45,000. A markedly reduced return on investment. Life for teachers, who will have about the same sunk cost in education is significantly worse since their salaries routinely fail to keep pace with private industry.
Now let’s consider how education has changed from opening minds to political indoctrination.
Who are our teachers? Teaching is a unique profession, and as in all professions there is a standard for admittance into it, and with expanding government regulation a licensing process the selection process seems to narrow to those who have a common view of the role of a teacher. One of the things that make the majority of teachers unique is they are government employees (obviously private/religious schools are the exception). As public employees, their salaries are set by the state legislatures and the role of the union would seem to be one akin to a lobbyist where they persuade the local and state politicians to reward their members with good salaries. But there is a difference, like all unions they have from time to time taken their members out on strike and when this happens the union members seem to act exactly as if they were any other union with protest and occasional violence against those who fail to support them.
Who trains our teachers? Teachers are trained by other teachers, who work at the college/university level and who are quite possibly employed for life through the tenure system. Reducing their accountability for job performance to nearly zero. While I have not bothered to actually check on the credentials of the tenured professors there is enough information in the news to suggest these individuals come mostly from my generation were for the male’s college was a way to escape military service, and their formative years were spent advocating for social upheaval. They have risen to positions of authority where they have surrounded themselves with like-thinking individuals and are now engrained in the institutional structures creating a social bubble for themselves and their students that mirrors what we see in socialism. There is only one right answer and failure to adhere to that idea will result in loss of position, failure and perhaps expulsion.
Over the past thirty years, we’ve seen our educators set on a path of cultural change that removes the focus from learning to indoctrination to support a single-party political state, where the citizen is dependent on the largess of the state for their physical well-being. With the fall the of the Soviet Union teachers can push aside the evil that occurred in that government and selectively celebrate the free healthcare, universal employment, and educational benefits while casting aside the empty store shelves, state oversight of one’s personal life, and the slaughter of millions of its citizens. To do this they must make time in the curriculum -- so the study of our own civic responsibility within the republic seems to be far less important.
One of the historical roles of education was to teach the young the history of civilization and how it has evolved to create the modern world. It seems now educators are more concerned with teaching how we must reshape society to conform to their expectations and we are now expected to vilify those who’ve gone before us. Their failures are the focus of a great debate about the evils of society. In the course of this shift in focus, any thought of celebrating the successes of society are cast aside and a full discussion of the pros and cons of the society are lost. Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, also known as George Santayana, reminds us “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I believe what is most important in this idea is knowing that remembering requires us to understand the context of the past as well as just a few random events. That distinction seems to be lost on today’s youth. Perhaps because the teachers are focused on reshaping the minds to think as they think, rather than creating a true liberal learning environment?
Then we enter into the whole politically correct and sensitive speech arena where you just can’t express yourself, you’ve got to self-regulate so as to avoid any potential for offense to those who might disagree with you.
The whole myth of politically correct speech is cloaked with the idea it is about being sensitive to others. I think nothing could be further from the truth. The idea of controlling speech has been, and will always be, about control and domination of the political debate. How better to win an argument than to limit the opponent’s ability to respond by changing the meanings of words, by identifying words as offensive, and by shaming the opposition into a subordinate position. Who better to do this indoctrination than the educators we turn our children over to?
Sadly, what I see in reading the commentary on social media of the socially conscious millennial is an inability to distinguish fact from opinion and a willingness to forsake reason for instant gratification as they respond to some media-generated outrage. I wonder, will they change as they grow older? If my generation is any indication I fear they will not.
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