Beware of Money Spent Not Wisely But Too Well

Ever since our national leaders decided that the best way to spend our money was to bail out banks that had made bad investments, we keep hearing from one group after another looking for government cash to make life easier for them.

We had a rally focusing on that issue recently and one speaker after another spoke about the need for more money for  higher education. Where should this money come from? Why, the state of course. The state, any, state, is the primary source of money for just about anything. To solve a problem we need only ask the state to throw more money at it. There are two things wrong with this formula. First is that the state produces no wealth of its own. Others produce the wealth of the state. The state's power is limited only to the ability to take wealth from producers by force. If you don't believe force is involved, stop paying taxes and license fees to the government and see what happens.

The second flaw in the formula is that money can be spent on things that turn out to have little or no value. Even if something has value, it's always possible that the same money could have bought something of much greater value. In the end, value is subjective. One person's trash is another's treasure.

So how will this money be spent? Do state colleges have a problem finding qualified professors willing to work for current rates? Are state college buildings deteriorating, creating hazardous conditions for students and staff? Do state colleges need more administrators?

This college had a financial crisis last year. Now, it turns out, there was no crisis. Maybe additional funds are needed to hire competent accountants to assess the financial condition of the college.

Half a century ago, most of today's higher education problems did not exist. Many city and state colleges did not charge tuition. Tuition at UCLA in California and the City University of New York were free to local residents. Both were institutions that had long histories of turning out graduates who went on to became famous.

But there is an old saying abbreviated as TANSTAAFL: there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. So what was the price of free higher education? The price was the traditional one of hard work. To get in, you needed an excellent high school record; to stay in, you had to keep your grades up.

Did that discriminate against those who did not do well in high school? Not at all. Perhaps they lacked motivation in high school; maybe they focused on football or girls. No problem. If they were now ready for the serious pursuit of knowledge, they could enroll in a junior college and by dint of hard work bring up their academic record to the point needed for admission to the state or city university.

Today's system is quite different. Anyone can get in and to stay in you only need a bare minimum passing average. It's not free and this state's public college system is one of the most expensive in the country, but you are automatically qualified for loans to pay your college bills.

Of course if a student does very little work and chooses the easiest courses, they may receive a diploma after four of five years, but they may really have nothing more to offer than they did out of high school. What they will have is $40,000 or so in debt, which will hang over their head for twenty years or so. Worse still, if they fail or drop out, they're still saddled with debt that they may never be able to repay.

Who are the real winners of this system? That's hard to say. There's a student loan industry that, I suspect, is doing quite well. There are well-paid administrators that spend most of their time helping students secure funding thus increasing their debt. There may be professors and lecturers that are trying to teach things that may be of little use in the job market to students who are not that interested in learning them. Who knows?

The high cost of traditional higher education has given rise to many alternatives on the dark side. There are diploma mills that prey on students looking for alternatives to thirty years of debt. Literally thousands of scams have sprung up to bilk people by promising degrees for nothing but hard cash.

But our President claims to understand. He told a group of students that, after law school, he and Michelle had over $120,000 in student loan debt that took nearly ten years to pay off. Ten years? If only most students could be so lucky. Average student loans can saddle some debtors for life and few get off the hook in less than twenty years.

There are no easy solutions, but this is one critical area where creative thinking is called for. One of the most prestigious schools in the nation, New York's Cooper Union still offers tuition free education for students. And Cooper Union is not funded by the City or State of New York. But Cooper Union is very careful with funds from their endowment and the contributions from successful alumnis and others.

On-line education is an alternative that needs examination. And then there are other ways technology can cut costs. Look at ocw. mit.edu, where hundreds of courses offered at MIT are presented online without cost. Other examples of videotaped university lectures include learnerstv.com and freevideolectures.com.

Hold on, you say, on-line video is no substitute for live interaction with an excellent professor. You are absolutely right. But how many times have you sat in a classroom with a professor who lectures from his notes and wants discussion to be minimized so that the course can stay on schedule. Or the professor who lectures from the book that you are expected to bring to class. "Turn to page 274, class and look at that graph (or table, or map, or picture). Couldn't you have looked at that material at home?

You won't find any answers here. The point is that there is a fertile field and a great need for creativity applied to educational methods and practices. Students too, need to be creative, in planning their education and lives.