college

Thoughts on the State of the Union and Education in America

by Hans Bader on January 25, 2011

in Culture, Economy, Employment, Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

In the Washington Examiner, I discuss some of the president’s anticipated proposals in his State of the Union address today. The president is expected to call for even more increases in education spending. That might not be a good idea, judging from the recent book Academically Adrift. George Leef, of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, argues in the New York Times that rising college attendance rates have led to “lower academic standards” as colleges cater to marginal students who are interested in getting paper credentials, not learning. Leef says that due to “the mistaken notion that the country needs to have far more people going through college, the federal government is making it easier for students to borrow the money for it. Consequently, we will lure more marginal students into college, further increasing the pressure to lower standards. It has been accurately said that college is the new high school; the way we are going, soon it will be the new middle school.”

Students Learn Less in College, Even As Education Spending Skyrockets

by Hans Bader on January 21, 2011

in Culture, Economy, Employment

“Nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates show almost no gains in learning in their first two years of college, in large part because colleges don’t make academics a priority,” according to a new study discussed in USA Today. “36% showed little” gain after four years. Although education spending has exploded in recent years, students “spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago, the research shows.” “32% never took a course in a typical semester where they read more than 40 pages per week.”

Students are learning so little, and borrowing so much to attend college, that some are predicting massive defaults on student loans.

America spends far more on education than most other countries. Yet despite this lavish government support for education (which rewards colleges for increasing tuition), college tuition in the U.S. is skyrocketing. Americans can’t read or do math as well as the Japanese, even though America spends way more on education than Japan does, as a percentage of income.

K-12 education is better in Japan because teachers there learn through apprenticeships and on-the-job training, rather than taking useless classes filled with psychobabble at education school, as George Leef points out in “Nurturing the Dumbest Generation.” “In Japan, there are no education schools at all. Those who wish to become teachers first earn degrees in some academic discipline and some of them are then accepted as apprentices who learn teaching by assisting veterans in the classroom.”

States spend hundreds of millions of dollars operating colleges that are worthless diploma mills, yet manage to graduate almost no one – like Chicago State, “which has just a 12.8 percent six-year graduation rate,” or a college in El Paso that graduated only “1 out of 25 students in a timely manner.”

Some education experts are calling for “draconian education cuts” to eliminate harmful spending. Law professor Glenn Reynolds notes that “some spending on educational institutions” may actually have a “negative” effect on education. People endure useless college courses to get paper credentials, but they get their actual education through internships and work.

College tuition is often a rip-off, since most people who went to college because of rising college-attendance rates in recent years wound up in unskilled jobs (including 5,057 janitors who have Ph.Ds or other advanced degrees), and tuition is skyrocketing faster than housing costs did during the real estate bubble. (100 colleges charge at least $50,000 a year, compared to five in 2008-09.) Bush increased federal education spending 58 percent faster than inflation, while Obama seeks to double it. Spending has exploded at the K-12 level: per-pupil spending in the U.S. is among the highest in the world, and “inflation-adjusted K-12 spending tripled over the last 40 years.”

Image credit: Honeywell-Nobel Initiative’s flickr photostream.

17 Million Unnecessary College Degrees; Obama Administration Seeks to Increase the Number

by Hans Bader on December 9, 2010 · 6 comments

in Economy, Employment, Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

In America today, 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees.  Over 18,000 parking lot attendants have college degrees.  So do thousands of janitors.

As Richard Vedder notes in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.”  This fact is “incompatible” with “the relentless claims of the Obama administration and others that having more college graduates is necessary for continued economic leadership . . . . Putting issues of student abilities aside, the growing disconnect between labor market realities and the propaganda of higher-education apologists is causing more and more people to graduate and take menial jobs or no job at all. This is even true at the doctoral and professional level—there are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.’s, other doctorates, or professional degrees.”  These depressing statistics are also discussed at The Economic Collapse Blog.

We wrote earlier about the college debt bubble, and how greedy, government-subsidized college administrators are charging obscene amounts of money for largely useless and ideologically-slanted “educations.”  (100 colleges now charge $50,000 or more in tuition, compared to just 5 colleges in 2008-09, and federal financial-aid subsidies effectively reward colleges for increasing tuition to levels that would evoke outrage in other civilized countries.)

Image credit: Honeywell-Nobel Initiative’s flickr photostream.

Virginia Weighs Discriminatory Mandate on Divorced Parents

by Hans Bader on January 6, 2010

in Legal, Nanny State, Personal Liberty

Married parents don’t have any legal obligation to pay for their adult children’s college education or living expenses. But a bill just introduced in Virginia’s legislature would require divorced parents to pay for such expenses.

HB 146 would extend child support beyond age 18 to age 23 when the “child” is attending college. Right now, child support in Virginia usually ends soon after the child reaches the age of majority.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a similar provision mandating post-majority support as a violation of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. It reasoned that since married parents do not have to support their adult children, it was discriminatory to force divorced parents to do so. See Curtis v. Kline, 666 A.2d 265 (Pa. 1995) (Courts have apparently split over the constitutionality of such requirements).

I agree with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s reasoning, on principle. Married parents in Virginia generally have no duty to support their college-age children. Thus, neither should divorced parents.

But I also oppose this requirement based on my experience as a lawyer. (I should note, by the way, that I am not divorced, and have no child support obligations.)
As an intake lawyer for a non-profit law firm for over 6 years, I saw cases of aging divorced parents forced to pay the college bills of ungrateful offspring with whom they had an acrimonious relationship, even though they could ill-afford to do so – like a father dying of incurable liver disease forced to pay his estranged daughter’s graduate school expenses, under a state law permitting child support to be awarded for adult children. (We did not handle family-law cases in state court and I thus had no choice but to reject these people’s pleas for legal assistance.)

Divorced parents, like married parents, should have the right not to pay for their adult children’s living expenses or college costs — for example, if the child engages in conduct or a field of study that is objectionable to the parent.

It is an unfortunate reality that courts are likely to apply this bill, if it is enacted and not struck down, in a way that results in support obligations that are inequitable to some aging parents. Virginia courts have sometimes awarded support even in situations where statutory language would appear to bar any support. For example, in Calvin v. Calvin, 31 Va. App. 181 (1999), the Virginia Court of Appeals awarded spousal support, even though the recipient had engaged in adultery and been “vindictive and cruel” in the court’s own words, and even though Virginia’s statutes expressly bar support to adulterous spouses absent a finding of “manifest injustice” under both economic and fault-based factors. Additional examples are given here.

Come Sail on our Internship

by Richard Morrison on January 8, 2009 · 1 comment

in Odds & Ends

A special alert to college students, grad students and recent graduates: CEI has an excellent intern program, and we’re always looking for new applicants. Interning with us gives you the chance to write and research in addition to the standard office tasks. In fact, we don’t even make you fetch coffee for the senior staff. Past interns (like myself) have gone on to all kinds of exciting positions of power and influence in the pro-freedom movement. So start making plans for summer and apply today. Details here.

In related news, our good friends at The American Spectator are also looking for interns. I’ll let Managing Editor J.P. Freire describe the gig:

Just a friendly reminder that we do, in fact, have internships, and we’re very flexible on starting dates. They’re typically paid, depending on how long you can work with us. They’re also, in the journalism world, very, very valuable. I worked on my college paper and thought I knew enough to get a start in journalism, and as it turns out, my AmSpec internship taught me I was wrong.

We’re currently looking for good writers who want to learn a thing or two for the spring and summer. More information is on our About page. And even if you’re not interested, you can pass this on to any college students you know — people are always chomping at the bit for an opportunity for some real journalistic work.

For people who were thinking about a summer internship but couldn’t decide where they wanted to apply – I’ve just presented you with your two options. You can thank me when you get to Washington.