Showing your work
A few days ago I talked about the death of the Republican party. I see Republicans everywhere. What in the hell am I talking about? Obviously, what you are seeing could be classified as political zombies. So, it becomes important to provide just one example of how the lack of a viable conservative alternative is impacting citizens on a regular basis.
The economy has done better under Democrats than under Republicans since World War II. You could probably go further back than that, but if we go back beyond FDR we run into problems of how we can define Democrats and Republicans. Part of that can be in how we even look at problems. One of those problems has been the rising costs of college and the college loan debt in the country. Conservatives seem to have the same outlook as they do on big business. That’s because college is big business. In Texas, they lifted caps on tuition. Not surprisingly, those costs have gone up to what we see now.
If you compare that with trends in education overall you can’t help but notice the gap. For those that don’t want to look at the data too hard, I would simply point out that Texas spends somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 per student each year. Obviously, exact figures fluctuate, but it is fairly staggering when you think about all that includes.
I’m officially not a classroom teacher. I am a support facilitator. I go into other teacher’s classrooms. Our campus doesn’t even have anyone that is profoundly disabled. Other campuses have to include support facilitators and those that provide more invasive support. These are things that most colleges and universities don’t provide. That all factors into that cost per student.
If you take a look at the costs for people to attend college in Texas you will notice that only one school came in below 23,000 per year when all expenses were considered. Multiply that four or five times and you’ll see the total cost of a degree. As you might suspect, the number of people that have 92,000 dollars lying around is between slim and none.
So, keep in mind that the cost of college is more than double that of public schools when they don’t even include special education services in most instances. They don’t provide free and reduced lunch. There certainly aren’t nearly as many guidance counselors and they really don’t employ assistant principals. The battle over student loan debt seems to be ignoring the most important element in most instances. Why in all holy hell is college so damn expensive in the first place?
A vibrant conservative party could provide some answers to this dilemma. Instead, they stoke passions amongst the old and inspire them to go into one of those “back in my day” kind of diatribes. I paid off my loans. Why in the hell should they simply erase the debt now? Well, we could start off by pointing out that college costs have skyrocketed over the past 50 years.
You lose your conservative card if you give anyone anything (unless they represent big business). So, it is not surprising that they would push back against retiring college debt. Yet, there seems to be no effort to actually provide any solutions to the problem. Instead, they let the “free market” decide and the free market is what ballooned costs in the first place.
The question is whether higher education is something worth investing in or whether it should continue to go to the highest bidder. Some people might consider free tuition to be a bridge too far. That’s certainly a reasonable opinion, but those that shoot down ideas should be coming up with some of their own.
Thanks, as always Nick. Interesting that you spoke of economic policies. Democrats vs Republicans. I came across a book review at Forbes from 2012 a couple if years ago. Although ten years old, the statistical review is as pertinent as ever. The difference is startling! Why this isn’t common knowledge is beyond understanding – actually not. The one thing Republicans do exceedingly well is messaging, truth be damned!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2012/10/10/want-a-better-economy-history-says-vote-democrat/?sh=7c280781cb44
1I graduated from college in 1967, approximately $3200 in debt. That would be equivalent to around $30,000-$35,000 now. According to First Republic Bank, the average student loan debt in 2021 is just under $40,000, so that’s not a huge increase. (https://www.firstrepublic.com/personal-line-of-credit/student-loan-debt-averages-2021) Now, there’s no way that I’m saying that I was the average college grad in 1967. I’m just providing some data for comparison.
All the same, what I see is this: One of the reasons for America’s ascendance to the richest economy in the world in the years during and after World War II was that we had the best educated citizenry in the world. We had a near 100% literacy rate, and a large majority of Americans had graduated from a public high school. They had had a tuition-free education for twelve years.
Educational systems in many other countries have since surpassed ours, such that the average graduate in Germany, Japan, and many of our economic competitors has the equivalent of a junior college education in the United States. We should therefore adopt a policy of a tuition-free education for fourteen years, i.e., the equivalent of junior college. The alternative is to enhance the twelve years that are already free. The alternative may not be economic suicide, but it definitely looks third-world from here.
2I should have said the average high school graduate in Germany, Japan, et al, in my third paragraph above. I hope there was no confusion.
3Nick, this time you didn’t do your homework on how colleges are funded. When I came to Texas A&M as an Associate Professor in 1981, 50% of the university budget was state funded. It is now under 20% as far as I know. It is the legislature that decided to reduce the state contribution to public higher ed and allow tuition to rise. If the state paid half the cost of running a university, tuition would be a lot lower.
To be fair, all Board of Regents and hence all Chancelors are appointed by the Governor. The result is business people who contribute greatly to his campaign and, in general, know nothing about education. TAMU had one regent with only and 8th grade education so had never experienced higher ed. Our current Chancelor was chief of staff for Rick Perry, not a prior job to fit him to run a university system. A result is that we are now administratively top heavy, one reason for the rise in tuition. Another result is that the people who actually teach and do research have decreasing say on things that affect their job.
Lastly, TAMU has an effect Disability Service department as well as many academic advisors. The names of the positions may be different but the jobs and the costs are the same as for the schools in the first 12 years of education.
Please get your facts straight before you write a diatribe.
4Rich folk send their kids to private school for $25K to $30K per child per year for twelve years. They see anyone who can’t do that as the servant class and they don’t need schooling, so why should rich folk send them? This is why so many medical personnel are coming here from Asia and Africa; we can’t seem to produce our own. I don’t see anything changing.
5SueG,
Thank you for your response. There’s a lot packed in there and since you accuse me of not doing homework I’ll try to address your points one at a time.
1) The state actually has done the very same thing to public education that it has done at the college level. The state legislature contributes a much smaller portion of the cost per student. For public education that means recuperating more in the form of property taxes. In essence, it is a conservative shell game. We tell people we cut their taxes when really we just transfer the costs into another form. Whether it be rising tuition or property taxes, people pay the bill in one form or another.
2) One of my jobs is helping students prepare for college after high school. That involves helping them turn their paperwork into the disability office at the college of their choice. However, we have to tell them they do not get the same services we give them. You do not get a support facilitator in all of your classes. Profoundly disabled individuals do not get direct care from the university.
3) Obviously administrative costs are more. That’s one of the issues. As I have taught adjunct classes and am married to someone that worked at a university, I know the money isn’t going to you or other professors. In fact, many of the local colleges (particularly community colleges) are not hiring full-time staff members because adjunct professors are cheaper. We don’t get the same benefits. Even though they are saving on that they are not lowering costs. That money goes somewhere.
So, I don’t understand the offense, but that’s fine. The whole point is that college costs more than it should and most people can’t afford the crippling student loans. That means that either the government should make the loans less crippling or help bring costs for everyone down. I don’t see this as particularly controversial.
6Actually, Nick, there is direct care for profoundly disabled students at TAMU. Such students have other students hired by the university to live with them, take them to class, etc. Furthermore, I had someone from disability services in my classroom at every class meeting to help one of my students. Just because we don’t have people with the title support facilitators nor guidance counselors doesn’t mean we don’t have people doing those jobs.
7Pre-Tea Party, before Republicans went completely crazy, my general feeling about the parties was this:
8Democrats were much better at identifying the problems with society that needed to be addressed. But Republican usually had better solutions to the problems, if Democrats could get them involved. For example, cap and trade turned out to be a very efficient way to reduce acid rain. Similarly, Obamacare, which is the Heritage Foundation’s Romneycare, has been a big success. It could be even better if Dems could work with R-Senators like Kemp, Dole, Baker, and McCain instead of having guys Hawley, Paul, and Cruz trying it burn it all down. I rarely agreed with the previous generation of Republicans, but they did help moderate some of the Dems worst impulses.
In the interest of showing work, allow me to demonstrate a few key differences. My campus has nearly 100 special education students for a campus of 1450 student. That’s nearly seven percent of our student body. Looking up Texas A&M I found the following.
https://disability.tamu.edu/statistics/
For those that don’t want to go there, the university had just over 55,000 students in 2020 and just over 2800 were counted as disabled. If you go to the site above you can see a further breakdown of how those 2800 are parceled out. So, that’s roughly five percent. In the fall of 2020, roughly 200 of those would be students that were physically or intellectually disadvantaged in some way. That’s roughly 0.3 percent.
Conversely, the national center for education statistics reported that 14 percent of students nationwide received special education services in 2019-2020. 15 percent of those are some combination of physically disabled or intellectually disabled. Another 15 are labeled with other health impairments which include a wide array of conditions that may or may not need one on one attention.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cgg
In other words, if we were to extrapolate that to overall numbers, we would say that somewhere between three and five percent of students need one on one or small group services during a regular school day. Now, what does this all mean in plain English? Simply put, a heftier percentage of per student costs go to assisting students with disabilities before students graduate from high school than after. Period.
Of course, each university has to answer for how thoroughly they support a diverse population of students. I have no reason to question whether A&M does a good job. So, all the defensiveness in the world won’t change the fact that colleges charge a lot of money. They charge more than two times the cost of a public school education. Protests about how well or not well colleges treat students in need of accommodations still fail to address that.
9Your column brings two things to mind:
1. A sense of guilt that when I started college back in 1958 my tuition was $100 a semester [rising to $900 a semester when
two years later I transferred to an out-of-state college].
2. As a professor of geology I would have one or two students
with a disability of some sort every semester. I was never given any guidance as to how to deal with or help them except that for some who needed it we could arrange for them to take their exams over at the guidance office, where they could have more time for the exams and some sort of support.
For geology labs I had to come up with several innovations on my own, individually tailored to whatever difficulties that were presented. Usually I would try to pair the student with another student who could work with them, so that, for instance, could have another student hold a rock or mineral specimen for them, and the disabled student would then instruct the other as to what he or she wanted done. The legally blind students were more difficult to deal with, but I coped, using a great deal of imagination.
Dyslexics were no real problem, but when faced with a student whose learning disability was “an inability to grasp abstract concepts”, I gave up, and told the counselor that I had no idea how to teach abstract concepts to someone who was unable to grasp them.
10We can’t keep calling them “conservatives”, they’re just not. They’re radical anti-democratic fascists, and we need to drop the cover of conservatism that they use to provide a “common sense” cover for their their insane Russian-tool, neo-nazi, cop-torturing, election-stealing bullshit.
11The G. I. Bill, sponsored by the V. F. W. and Am. Lgn. ,built the post W. W. II middle class. Those Vets went to school and rebuilt the U. S. on the ashes of the depression and war. The “Ruling Class “ has been trying to stuff that Genie back in the bottle ever since, restricting real education to their caste. That is Trumps MAGA. 1880s Golden Age. No uppity middle class or unions.
12Time for Friday toons already. Looking forward to them.
13Pancho Sanza, tell it jefe.
14I know what you are saying Charles. On my campus, students must be capable of passing a licensing exam, so we cannot accept students that have a serious intellectual disability or physical disability that would prevent them from being able to perform the job in that particular trade. So, 90 percent of our students either have autism or a learning disability. Working with autistic students in English classes is challenging to say the least. Most of them are very highly functioning so they can identify main idea very easily and do very well in math and science classes where things are more concrete. As soon as you ask them to be empathetic towards a character or to imagine themselves in a situation they break down. Some just flat out say, “that’s never happened to me before” and just shut down.
It’s hard not to be passionate about your life’s work, but I also think we got lost in the weeds here. The ultimate question is one every society has to ask: who was college made for and do we want to make it available and affordable to everyone? That’s a legitimate question. Other countries have answered that question and some have answered it far differently than what we would imagine here. Every country must ultimately come up with their own response.
All that being said, if someone is expected to go to college for training they can’t get in high school then those costs need to be defrayed somehow. Either the whole experience needs to be more affordable or the process of paying back the loan needs to be more affordable. That’s really the point and one where we are better off if a majority of people bring something to the table.
15Pancho Sanza – thank you! My thinking exactly. “Conservatives” don’t believe in conserving anything. They are, to quote you, “radical anti-democratic fascists”. Abbreviated to “GOP”.
16I’m still staggered by how Texas high schools have been turned into trade schools. We have an amazing juco system which offers so much in the way of trades so why are we needlessly duplicating their work?
17I’ll go to the mat for what we do Alan. It is invaluable. Students can still go to college and get a four year degree, but they also get invaluable experience in their field of choice. Many discover that they can go immediately to work making good money right out of high school. Our welding program is probably the most lucrative for students in that regard.
What ends up happening is that the community college system (San Jac for us) ends up working with our school. So, skills are not necessarily repeated. If they want to get further training in their field they can get additional certifications. Our school also works with business partners so we can teach kids the skills they will need in the workplace. So, they walk out of here either with certifications or a license. Almost every pathway (that’s what they are called here) has enrichment opportunities at San Jac and other trade schools, so while it might seem redundant, it actually is a way around requiring four year degrees for meaningful work.
18High School has only been available for most people for the last 100 years. Before that one needed to be well off to send kids to high school.
19Competition for funding between K-12 and post-secondary education is a pernicious effect of Republican definitions of responsibility for education.
As a reminder — virtually NO ONE is getting rich by being a professor, teacher, or professional staff person at a public institution of learning. Some involved are making at or below the lower margin of the middle class, 50% of the approximately $60,000 median salary in the United States. A very, VERY few earn more than 200% of the median, putting them into the “upper” class by some definitions.
One reason for the varied level of spending is that Universities are asking their faculty (and increasingly, their staff) to “create knowledge” or do “public service.” All of the schools I attended or taught expected faculty to spend at least 1/3rd of their professional time doing something beyond their teaching. K-12 public schools do not have a “publish or perish” standard, and if a teacher has a “public service” dimension, it seems to be a co-curricular activity with additional pay.
A second reason for varied levels of spending — recruiting students, assisting them to marshal the money for their tuition, and doing the accounting on all the variations for individuals is much more complicated than providing a service students are mandated to take and getting money from and accounting to a very short list of funders (usually only local, state, and federal governments).
20After WWII the GI Bill allowed thousands of returning soldiers to get a college education. One that I know went on to become an MD in my area and paid taxes as a physician for over 40 years.
The question is: Who got the better deal? My doctor friend, or the United States of America?
The question answers itself.
If we support education and youth now, we get excess returns for decades. Just in dollars and cents terms, this makes sense.
Even Republicans might be able to figure this out if they are ever exposed to the concept. Unfortunately, they never are.
21Everything you say is true John. To point out that there is waste in the system doesn’t mean it’s all waste. I never taught in a university system but I have adjuncted in community college and watched my wife get her PhD. So, I know full well where a lot of the money goes and doesn’t go. So, I certainly am not pinning this on the teachers.
This is a simple discussion with a number of possible solutions. To go from a 10K education to 25K education indicates that some of those additional costs are unavoidable are some aren’t. From a policy perspective you can either cut fat and reduce costs, or subsidize it somehow. If everyone were invested in finding solutions we’d have a number of proposals on the table. Sadly we don’t.
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