Zero Hedge reports that college tuition has grown at more than double the rate of inflation.
As the issue of college affordability continues to be a prominent talking point on the campaign trail ahead of the 2020 presidential election, a new study shows that the cost of a college education is still increasing at a rate that far outpaces inflation.
The study, put out by the financial technology company Self, found that on average, college costs have risen $2,835 since 2015, increasing 112 percent more than the rate of inflation during the same period.
This remorseless gouging of those least able to afford it is unjustifiable graft. And it’s no use trying to use colleges’ own rising expenses as a shield.
Texas education watchdog Mark Pulliam told The College Fix in an email that the increase in costs in Texas was likely due to an increase in bureaucratic hirings.
Schools are financially crippling eighteen year-olds for life to set up cushy sinecures for bureaucrats who play no role in educating those students.
Being duped into paying money for no gain used to be called fraud.
What’s more, Texas colleges and universities are not alone, he added, noting that while 40 years ago faculty outnumbered administration by roughly 2 to 1 nationwide, today the proportions are nearly equal.
Generation Y and the Millennials, the two cohorts that have been most screwed over by academia’s greed, will soon be the largest voting bloc in America.
If I were a presidential candidate in a tight race, I’d make a student debt jubilee a key plank of my platform.
And in any case, I recommend that you check out my award-winning Soul Cycle.
Just as work expands to fill the time allowed, so will expenses expand to fill the budget allowed. Especially since unused funds means a lower budget next cycle.
In other words, the bureaucracy at the colleges have fallen prey to Pournelle's Iron Law: they are now more devoted to the Institution than the goals of the Institution.
A well-run university that has the actual goal of educating students, as well as (for state-run universities) not wasting taxpayer dollars, would purge most of the bureaucrats and focus on hiring good teachers and paying them well.
But these are not the goals of the institutions.
Instead, we have empire building (the nature of any hierarchy and bureaucracy), as well as peddling the narrative to the proles and making the right connections and checking the right boxes for the elite. (And as proles get into the various institutions, the right boxes change, of course.)
So.
Down with the Education/Indoctrination-Finance Complex!
Academia had fallen prey to Pournelle's Law by the end of the 1950s, when the amount of coursework required for a degree precipitously declined.
Now the universities are willing seminaries for the Death Cult.
Not that long ago, I took the standard libertarian-conservative line on this: They made their choices. Sucks to be them.
But when you look at how widespread the problem is, the system is crippling an entire generation of young people, preventing them from getting a start and forming a stable family. This is a slow-building disaster in the making.
Of course, there's also my increasing suspicion of debt in general. I've seen many more on the right over the past year or so use the old-fashioned term usury, and I think there's a lot of truth in the old perspective on it.
Then, of course, there's the simple fact that debt is slavery, and Christians have long been called to set the captives free.
(Full disclosure: My family has student loans, so this policy would benefit us.)
The only question is how to balance the books. Hmmm, is there a convenient group who could justly be called to account for this mess who also happen to be our political foes? What's the political atmosphere like in universities these days? Hmmm . . .
It's encouraging to hear of your change of heart.
A recent accounting of all American universities revealed that their combined endowments almost exactly equal the total amount of outstanding student debt.
Seize the endowments, use them to pay off the loans, then make student loans illegal or force schools to cosign all future loans.
Seizing the university endowments to pay for the jubilee is way better than passing the buck to the tax payers. That's why it won't happen…
The system is crippling a generation of young people (and their parents) who have been systematically mal-educated and dis-informed on the subject. They've been sold degrees which are useless if they're not actively dangerous, saddled with debts of real money for those fake credentials, and indoctrinated along the way into a pattern of anti-thought would tend to prevent them from recognizing, comprehending, and attacking the problems this long chain of abuses and usurpations is likely to cause. "Sucks to be them" is a suitable response for the Boomers, Jonesers, Xers, and older Ys, but for I expect the younger Ys and the Millenials are standing at the bottom of the hole the Boomers have dug. Is there a Generation Z? If so, they're in the hole, too. The Xers and older Ys saw the end of the Boomer's ladder of success disappearing over the event horizon. The younger Ys and so forth, if they can see the sides of hole past their entertainments, are probably convinced they deserve to be in the hole, or that in order to make up for having been in the first world, they should make the whole bigger in all dimensions.
What A Reader said.
You said it better than I could have. Better than I did.
The standard libertarian-conservative position of "f 'em" validates and perpetuates big government.
Young people were misled by state-mandated schools beholden to public sector unions. The entire scam can be traced back to central banking and fake money. It's usury all the way down.
If the GOP wasn't the Stupid Party, President Trump and Cocaine Mitch would support a student debt jubilee and use the resulting goodwill to pass a "higher education reform" bill that guts the academies.
Should not the banks pay for this too in some way (besides rightly making the universities pay it via endowments)? It was they who wrote the loans and spent millions to get Congress to declare student loan debt ineligible for bankruptcy.
Durandel – removing the special status of student loan debt is certainly a step in the right direction.
Here's how you know it's all funny money. I know of a judge who effectively destroyed $70k with one bang of a gavel. See below.
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*nods*
If all the datacenters that support the NYSE crashed at the same time, how [much] wealth would simply vanish?
Money that consists of bits and bytes is a mass delusion.
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I agree, a debt jubilee on student loans is a guaranteed winner. Helps a desirable voting block of people who are pretty much universally sympathetic (young people with almost no resources). And it doesn't even hurt the governments chequebook, just declare all student debt cancelled and say the state won't enforce them (or better yet, universities will be directly liable for some % of the debt of it's students, so as not to "unduly burden" the lenders).
Let the banks and universities eat the shit sandwich they've prepared for everybody else.
It's such a good idea, in fact, it'll be a miracle if it's put into practice.
The fraud part is salient point for me.
The people taking on this debt, who lack real world experience, are being told by people they trust, the people who were supposed to educate them, that it will all be fine.
It won’t be fine and they will be debt slaves to the system for years if not decades.
Forgive the debts and let the Educational System absorb the debt. Let it collapse.
Win-win.
Don't forget the high school seniors who take out five-figure loans at age 17.
A friend of mine fell into that category. His parents sued to get out of it and put the whole debt burden on him years after they'd cosigned the loans.
That is a travesty of justice. I'm sorry for your friend.
I haven't forgotten. And I would add those parents names to My List. What list, you ask?
Never you mind what list.
Thank you. Luckily, my friend is far savvier than the average Millennial. He successfully motioned for a change of venue to federal court when he saw the state court judge was adversarial toward him. He got lucky again when the federal judge assigned to his case wasn't a sociopathic vampire. The second judge canceled the remaining $70k of my friend's initial $100k loan balance. Add in $30k in legal fees, and my friend ended up paying $60k to retire a $100k debt.
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If some kind of mass college debt forgiveness were to happen, I would only ask that those of us who paid off our college debt the old-fashioned way also be considered in bill proposals.
But then what's next? Forgive all credit card debt? Will such bills teach people that they can run up debt and are entitled to government bailouts down the road? A slippery slope. The national debt is already in trouble.
Hanging the albatross around the neckof the institution would be a nice answer to this.
Five will get you ten that after a decade of this you will see far fewer course offerings in the "humanities".
Nick
I understand your concern. But the college debt crisis is one of the common good. The usurious greed of the universities is undermining domestic tranquility. Young people saddled with such unjustified burdens that it harms them and the society.
xavier
I think you are underestimating the extent and nature of the problem. Millions of people qere sold a bill of goods and then prices were artificially jacked up in a diabolical case of fraud on an extreme level.
This is usury, and the only way yo deal with usury is to stop it, immediately. Then punish the usurers.
Bellomy said it well. It would be for the common good to end this. As to credit cards, I think they should be heavily restricted, if not banned and force everyone to go back to paying with cash or lines of credit. Credit cards eat away at people's capacity for temperance and self-denial.
Durandel,
Interesting proposal to ban credit card. I'd favour restricting them.
If we were to pay in cash for internet purchases; I'd want a fee waiver for certain international transactions.
I regularly buy books from Europe and the bank shouldn't profit from electronically converting and transferring funds.
xavier
It is a tricky subject. I had a pathological fear of debt during those years and capped off my academic ambitions at an associate's degree. Now I've been getting tsks and eyerolls from my old friends for years, about how I settled for less, should have done more, etc etc etc. And it's true, doors are closed to me that I might have liked open. But hey! No debt!
I don't like the current situation, and I dont believe in making others share in one's own suffering for the sake of atoning for privilege. But I still have to tell you… This doesn't feel like much of a fix.
Let's talk about serious measures to constrain future costs as part of this arrangement and I think it'll play to a larger audience.
Peruse the comments on this post, and you'll find several thoughtful proposals for dealing with the problem and preventing it in the future.
Here's what it comes down to. Total student debt currently stands at $1.5 trillion. That is a hot potato of civilization-destroying magnitude. Factor in the multitudinous other ills undermining our society, and we'll be lucky to end up in a Great Depression-scale scenario if the potato drops.
When an asteroid is inbound on a direct course for Earth, you put everything you've got into nuking it. Then you can focus on managing the fallout.
Cue the Matt Walsh whining whenever this topic is brought up.
Now you know why he's angling to get in on the gun control racket.
Matt Walsh is a worshipper of Mammon and. traitor and thus deserves to be shot first
I am all for this, including felony criminal charges for everyone responsible for this mess that include sedition (and sedition is a Death Penalty offense) and conspiracy.
They knew. Hang them.
There has been a lot of sedition going on in Christendom for decades now.
#WhatIfWeWon
Brian
And let's not forget there's usury in all this.
And that's a crime.
Universities aren't any different from a loan shark except legalized.
O and the endowments must be liquidated to pay off the debts.
xavier
How could I forget?
Brian
Not you as you've quite clear about usury. It's more to remind all of us that it's there and contrary to the common good.
Deldenda fiduciae est
xavier
Hear, hear.
You've sold me on the moral aspect, HOWEVER…
I object on one basis alone, and that is that until the system that gave rise to this is dealt with, it only invites it to recur, just like amnesty now, border wall later always leads to increased border crossings to line up for the next amnesty.
I would propose first ending all subsidies, guarantees, and other special rules that separate student loans from any other loan. Make them bankruptable and leave the lender twisting if the borrower can't pay. Suddenly, these banks will be very heavily invested in graduation rates and the job prospects of graduates. They would also be willing to settle for less than they're owed, knowing that, as unsecured creditors, they're screwed if the person can't pay. They would probably start denying loans based on high school performance, work history, and choice of major. They might even offer tutoring and job hunting services. This would also force universities to concentrate on what they promise, increasing earning potential, as that's the only way they're getting money.
Maybe it wouldn't work, but I would have to see SOMETHING done to prevent it happening again before I would be on board for this kind of amnesty, especially given that, like housing bailouts, it ends up telling people that paying their debts is for suckers.
As a side note, I think all debt is foolish. Pay it off as fast as you can, before you discover what it truly means to be slave to the lender. Yes, that includes home and student loans. Fight me.
Fine. Put a piece of paper in front of me making student loan debt dischargeable through bankruptcy, and I'll sign it. That concern is ancillary to the $1.5 trillion kill shot aimed right at our heads. At this rate, we'll still be standing around debating the minutiae of the perfect plan when the Collapse hits.
NB, to illustrate the key difference between Conservatives and the authentic Right:
"You've sold me on the moral aspect, HOWEVER…"
vs
"You've sold me on the moral aspect, PERIOD."
Hey, I am with you here. I just don't want the zoomers caught in the same trap because Congress did what it always does and punts, all the while the banks and universities continue to get rich selling worthless degrees and indoctrination.
Even if I, personally, don't like the solution, something has to be done to keep the same crooks from doing the same thing again.
As far as the moral aspect, yes, you've convinced me that a bailout can be moral, but not at the cost of all future generations, something Christendom used to care about before we decided the cost of a decision didn't matter so long as we could bill our grandchildren. Something can be moral and also not worth the cost.
Sorry for the double post, but I think the simple of it is that any bailout that doesn't punish the universities, the banks, or both ultimately rewards their behavior and just tees up more victims. It has to be part of the package.
No worries.