My sister alerted me to this piece not too long ago, and I've been meaning to talk a little about it for awhile. This article, which would repay your careful reading, reminds us that, due to the way the laws were written, the federal government is on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars that have been lent to students to go to school. (The average debt for graduating seniors is $24,000.) In short, an education bubble that continues to inflate threatens more financial disasters for the country. And for what, because a college degree is not what it used to be. To wit . . .
Since 1978, the price of tuition at US colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the US economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But while college applicants’ faith in the value of higher education has only increased, employers’ has declined. According to Richard Rothstein at The Economic Policy Institute, wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished. Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007 recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.
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The most predatory and cynical subprime lending has its analogue in for-profit colleges. Inequalities in US primary and secondary education previously meant that a large slice of the working class never got a chance to take on the large debts associated with four-year degree programs. For-profits like The University of Phoenix or Kaplan are the market’s answer to this opportunity.
While the debt numbers for four-year programs look risky, for-profit two-year schools have apocalyptic figures: 96 percent of their students take on debt and within fifteen years 40 percent are in default. A Government Accountability Office sting operation in which agents posed as applicants found all fifteen approached institutions engaged in deceptive practices and four in straight-up fraud. For-profits were found to have paid their admissions officers on commission, falsely claimed accreditation, underrepresented costs, and encouraged applicants to lie on federal financial aid forms. Far from the bargain they portray themselves to be on daytime television, for-profit degree programs were found to be more expensive than the nonprofit alternatives nearly every time. These degrees are a tough sell, but for-profits sell tough. They spend an unseemly amount of money on advertising.
Other points:
fewer and fewer students benefit from fully qualified faculty members; most of their classes are taught by graduate students or poverty-level-paid adjuncts
administrators are soon going outnumber teaching faculty, and they command mind-boggling salaries
students can be hounded for their loan debt for a lifetime, even though the holders of loans have already been compensated
colleges and universities benefit from a myth that surrounds college degrees with almost mythical power; in reality, a degree doesn't mean much anymore
higher education has basically become yet one more scam in the dying empire.
Upon reflection, this article is far too meaty to be handled by one in a hurry to get things done before the next trip. This weekend, remember? Suffice it to say that none of the news about higher education is good. You won't like what you read in this article, but you should read it anyway.
. . . for only a few days and then I'm on the damn planes again, this time to Louisiana. There I'll see both my family and Susan's family. Was certainly glad to get home. Only thing marring the return was that some huge piece of black plastic that goes behind the wheel well in my car just decided to come loose. I thought the damn tire was shredding, but no, that was this thing, whatever it is called, flapping against the side of the car! Needless to relate, I was a little perturbed about having to deal with this on my way home. Much easier than fixing a flat, which is what I thought I was going to have to do. I just ripped the thing loose and threw it in the trunk. If I know anything about these matters, here's what I predict:
The car cannot do without this thing, whatever it is
It will cost $400 to fix it
And a virulent pox upon all car repairs. I hate them. Doesn't everybody?
Some of you know I'm a chess player. I learned how the pieces moved when I was about 11 or 12, but I didn't learn the game until I was at college. My mentor was a Jesuit priest by the name of Hacker Fagot, now dead. As it turned out, he was not that strong a player, but he had a passionate interest in the game and he knew the basics about strategy. It came as a revelation to me at the time that chess games can be won or lost on the position of the pawns, the element of time (too many moves with one piece, for example, loses time), and a whole bunch of the strategic principles. The key lesson is that every move is crucial, from move one on.
Anyway, below is a chess playing machine you might like to see. I ran across it here. It's more an engineering feat than anything else. It's got some kind of chess engine in the guts of the thing. But this is certainly not the best way to play a computer. For starters, this machine is really clunky. And sslllllooooooowwwww. The perfect metaphor for those billions of people who think that what they see as a glacial pace in the game means nothing is happening. Between good players, something is always happening during a game. You cannot be expected to watch the whole thing . . . but I will observe that White doesn't play a very effective opening. No, the way to play chess is either to get a computer program like Fritz or Rybka and play on screen. Or you can play for free with real humans at Chess.com, FICS, or any number of other places.
Today is my daughter's birthday. She's 43. Happy birthday, Tanya, my all-grown-up girl! Right now, she's in Europe (Turkey, Greece) with the other dear lady in my life, her mom Susan.
I found this site stumbling around in RefDesk. Says every five minutes what the most popular subjects people are probing on the Internet. I'm doing this blog entry about five days before it will ever be seen by anyone, so all of the most popular sites you will see are all going to be different. But just in case you're curious, these were the four most popular topics at 7:45 p.m. on Monday, May 23.
Jennifer Anniston's new haircut (what??)
Arnold Schwartzenegger
Selena Gomez (who?)
Joplin tornado (the first thing on the list that actually matters)
As my friend Bob puts it, now that I've reached "advanced middle age," i.e., that would be pressing almost 7 decades on this planet, I can't remember shit. There's a wide, real wide, variety of health issues that people have at this stage of life, but there's one complaint that's universal. The older you get, the less you can remember. What's clear is stuff that happened years and years ago. What happened yesterday . . . well, not so much. This piece I ran across offers an explanation.
According to Michael Yassa, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University, the reason things get tougher to remember as we get older is because the pathways leading to the hippocampus degrade over the years. Since the hippocampus is where memories are stored, it makes sense that with age our brains just find it more and more difficult to process information we receive into things we remember.
In essence, it's not that our brains are "filling up" with information; it's just that our brains get less effective at writing and storing that information as we get older. It's the reason, according to Yassa, why we're so nostalgic as we get older: it's just easier to look back on memories our brains have already stored than to create new ones that are just as vivid. At the same time, Yassa's research doesn't suggest how we can fix the process; only that the research could be useful in treating Alzheimer's in the future.
"Are we never going to learn that the flotsam of our invincible ignorance will always come back to haunt us on a rising tide?"
A quote from Paul VanDevelder's book Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America's Road to Empire Through Indian Territory, which won the 2011 Oregon Book Award.
How many ignorant things of the nation variety can you think of that have been done in your lifetime? I can think of several, but the first that comes to mind is getting militarily involved in the Middle East. Those wars will haunt us . . . and our children's children.
Yesterday was Bob Dylan's 70th birthday. I'm just discovering that today. I copy this entire section from yesterday's Writer's Almanac. I've grown up with Bob Dylan. He's been a constant companion, and I've passed him on to my kids. All these many years--since the early '60s--I've marveled at his talent, delighted in his poetry, pondered his contradictions, and loved his music. There's none like him. His influence on music and my generation is unmeasurable.
It's the 70th birthday of Bob Dylan (books by this author), born Robert Zimmerman in 1941. He was born in Duluth, Minnesota, and grew up in nearby Hibbing, just off the road that ran all the way up from New Orleans and lent its name to his sixth album, 1965'sHighway 61 Revisited. He moved down to Minneapolis and studied art at the University of Minnesota, and though he'd started out his musical career with a rock 'n' roll band, he soon converted to folk, playing gigs at a coffeehouse, the 10 O'clock Scholar, in the Dinkytown neighborhood north of campus. Rock was catchy, but it wasn't deep enough to satisfy him, and he later said: "I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings." He left Dinkytown for New York and became the darling of Greenwich Village's folk community.
By the mid-1960s, he'd gone electric, forsaking folk and returning to his rock roots. It wasn't a popular move among his fans, and at a show in England they booed him and called him "Judas." He responded by cranking the amps even louder, never one to worry about a rapport with his audience.
His lyrics evolved too, from protest songs into more literary undertakings, influenced by Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and John Keats (to say nothing of Dylan Thomas, who inspired Zimmerman's name change). He's been called one of America's great contemporary poets, and his lyrics are studied in college poetry classes, stripped of the music. Boston University lecturer Kevin Barents directs students to consider the iambic and ballad meter on Dylan's album John Wesley Harding. Oxford professor Christopher Ricks puts him on a par with Milton, Keats, and Tennyson. He's been nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature every year since 1996. He wrote a volume of poetry and prose calledTarantula in 1966 (published in 1971), even though he had famously proclaimed himself "a song-and-dance man" in 1965, when asked outright if he was a songwriter or a poet; The New Yorker published two of his poems from that period in 2008. Perhaps it's best to draw the distinction where he did, in the liner notes for The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan: "Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can't sing, I call a poem."
He's also kept up with his art, drawing and painting to fill the time when he's on the road. Some critics compare his style to Degas, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Matisse. Others say he is "spasmodically brilliant," and one art history professor said he "paints like any other amateur." The artist himself says, in his typically laconic style: "I just draw what's interesting to me and then I paint it. Rows of houses, orchard acres, lines of tree trunks, could be anything. I can turn it into a life and death drama."
. . . in USA Today that caught my eye this morning:
First, this editorial cartoon. What can I say? This is right on the money. I won't be voting for Obama in 2012. You can take that to the bank.
Speaking of banks, apparently over 3,700 federal contractors got $24 billion in stimulus money who owed at least $750 million in back taxes, and probably a lot more according to the GAO. What's the matter with this administration? This is intolerable.
Defaults on student loans are increasing. The average debt load for graduating seniors is $24,000. Holy cow! This is almost eight thousand dollars more than Susan and I paid for our first house. Trends are "disturbing." Half of the students at for-profit schools like University of Phoenix will default; one-third of the students at community colleges; and one-quarter of those in four-year schools. Observation: I've taught at all three of the these kinds of institutions, and this does not surprise me at all. Purist that I am, I discovered--although I admit to being a real slow learner about this--that the purpose of what used to be called higher education is not to educate anybody about anything; it's to keep the money flowing. Especially at for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix. After several years teaching for them both on-ground and online, I got fired from both jobs because I expected students to perform and to actually do the assignments. Hell, even at the University of Oklahoma, I had a graduate student tell me that he had "paid good money for this course" and he deserved an A.
A new sex survey by the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention, described as "prestigious," by the way, finds that far from the common one in ten reckoning for the number of homosexuals in the population, the actual figure is between two and five percent. There are all kinds of other data--for some it is "preference" rather than "orientation"--but this one is the most striking to me. To tell the truth, I never thought that ten percent of the population was gay. It always struck me as a ridiculously high number. Now we've got some hard data.
This English group is called Keane . . . I can't help it. I like this sweet-sounding stuff. And I cannot help but observe, from the vantage point of all these years, that the singer appears to be not a day over 16.
Did you know that the U.S. consumes 8 percent of the world's olive oil, yet produces only about 1 percent of it? I'm not at all surprised to see that Spain is hands down leader in olive oil. When Susan and I visited there, we would go for miles on the train when all you could see on both sides of the track were olive groves. For miles and miles.
Another lesson here: big consumers of olive oil live longer and have far less heart disease. More proof that what God put here for us to begin with beats any improvement we've attempted.
