Tag: education

Student Loan Debt – A Crushing Burden

On By southwerkIn business ethics

Student loans are how most American students finance their education. They seldom have any other choice. This article I am quoting comes from Edufactory. It is interesting web site. It looks at the world from the vantage point of a college student, more European than American. But I like to hear what Europeans have to say about U.S. issues. I find the common thought pattern of the “beltway boys” to be irritating. This is a very large article. This is the opening.

Debt has had a crushing impact on the lives of those who must take student loans to finance their university education in the US. For tuition fees that have been so notoriously high in private universities now are rising in public universities so quickly they are far out-pacing inflation. Student loan debt in the US has been much higher than in Europe (with the exception of Sweden), though recent developments there would indicate that this gap may soon no longer exist (Usher).

We should also take into account the fraudulent way in which the loans have been administered by the banks and the vindictiveness with which those who have been unable to pay back have been pursued by collection agents. The most frustrating aspect of student loan debt being the legally toothless position the debtor is in, because government policy has relentlessly vested all the bargaining power in the hands of the creditors.

Student loans are a strange philosophical creature here at the beginning of the 21st century. Daily, the newspapers and television are filled with talk about the need for highly educated workers. States with low ratios of college graduates to the general population are considered poor sites for new factories and development. A nation’s competitiveness, perhaps in the long term, its very existence, may depend on the level of education of its population.

So, how does discouraging people from going to college make sense? Isn’t that a form of slow societal suicide?

And what is the effect on those who bear that debt for decades? It’s pretty obvious it forces students away from any job that isn’t well paid. That debt makes sure that the debtor works all the time, year after year. It never stops. There is no opportunity to write that novel, travel or simply live a life free from constant financial pressure.

Why do we finance education this way?  The philosophy of secure investment and low interest rates, a product of the Chicago School of Economics, epitomized by the policies of the International Monetary Fund are the root cause. To make investments maximally secure, government spending must be minimized and wage pressure limited. Spending must be limited because taxation, any taxation, for any purpose is inimical to maximum profit. Wage pressure produces inflation which reduces the value of debt. If debt decreases in value, once again, investment security is threatened. Therefore expenditures on education must be carefully limited.

Of course, from a banking stand point, subjecting millions of Americans to continuous debt during the entire course of their lives with the full support of the federal and state government to collect the money might seem advantageous.

Many of you have already realized the problem with this. In the long term, investments in a nation with a gradually decreasing educational level endangers investment. That is easily explained. You are only damaged by a poor long term investment, if once you have maximized profit you can’t move your investment elsewhere. When the United States becomes unprofitable, the money will simply move. By then the process can go on in, perhaps, Russia or some country in Western Europe.

Americans to preserve their country’s international standing, future prosperity and in the long term the existence of the nation might want to consider how to maximize the graduation rate as well as prioritizing the fields where we want graduates. Training tens of thousands of students each year in broadcast journalism when there are only a few openings does no one any good except those holding the educational loans.

Let’s read a bit more from the article –

As typical of  “invisible” movements, statistics fail us in drawing its proportions. We have no estimate, for instance, of how many have been driven to suicide or how many have been forced to go into exile due to their student debts. Nor do we have a measure of the social impact of the growing de-legitimation of the student debt machine. We can only speculate about the consequences of disclosures concerning the collusion between the university administrations (especially in the case of “for profit” institutions) and the banks, now commonly acknowledged in the media as well as in congressional investigations. For sure, blogs and web-groups are forming to share experiences and voice anger about student loan companies like the biggest one, the Student Loan Marketing Association (nicknamed “Sallie Mae”). On Google alone, there are about 9,000 entries under the rubric “Sallie Mae Sucks,” and another 9,000 under “Fuck Sallie Mae.”  Browsing through the chat rooms, with their harrowing stories of wrecked lives and mounting frustration against the operations of Sallie Mae, makes it clear that the potential for a debt abolition movement is high. So far, however, most attempts that have been made to give an organizational form to this anger have largely demanded the application of consumer protection norms to the management of the debt.

Student loans may well be justified as part of the mix that pays for education. But it should be determined at what level it deters significant numbers from college. It should be determined when it goes to institutions primarily set up to collect that money with little benefit from the education paid for. The proportion of the educational expense paid for these loans increases year by year. Is that healthy for the educational system in the long term or for the citizens in this country?

It takes intelligence to make good decisions about what we as a nation need from education. It takes intelligence to measure the effects of this debt on the society as a whole. It takes intelligence to challenge the strange doctrines of the Chicago School and its many adherents.

I don’t see our leadership rising to the challenge.

James Pilant

Opinion: The Looming Student Loan Crisis (via AOL News)

On By southwerkIn Government Failure

For many student loans are a continuing crisis in their lives. Is this kind of debt for millions of Americans sustainable? What are the social effects?

Does the student loan burden keep students away from running for public office, pursuing jobs valuable to society like police, fire and military?

Is this the way, we as a nation should finance our children’s education when that education is so critical to national success and competition?

Read this article and see what you think.

James Pilant

Like home ownership, a college degree used to be perceived as one of the keys to success. Unfortunately, these days it’s starting to look like a gateway to financial ruin.

The Federal Reserve has confirmed that as of June 2010, consumers now owe more on their student loans than on their credit cards.

A separate report reveals that one in five people can’t make their monthly payments.

As a result, Sallie Mae and Citibank have become the arch nemesis of millions, and the country as a whole faces what some warn is America’s next “mortgage meltdown.”

..Read More …

One-Third of Students Don’t Learn Much in College!! (Part 3-Our Society, Business and the Liberal Arts)

On By southwerkIn Teaching4 Comments

Part 3 of my series on American Higher Education. (Part 1 is here.) (Part 2 is here.)

For those of you who are new to these postings, I include the brief recap below.

From CBS Money Watch –

A new study suggests more than one third of parents aren’t necessarily getting a great return on their investment in their kids’ college education. Two college professors tracked more than 2,300 college students at 24 colleges and universities from their freshman year in 2005 through senior year, testing them along the way to gauge their critical and analytical thinking. According to the authors of a new book based on the study, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, 36 percent of college students did not learn much in the way of those cognitive skills.

But at least that was an improvement over the learning curve through sophomore year: In the first two years of school, 45 percent of college students had no significant improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing.

Part 3 –

We live in a time where thinking “from the gut” is popular. Where the President of the United States (President Bush) can brag about his low grades and get laughs rather than looks of disapproval. This is a country where a likely presidential candidate’s favored means of communicating with her followers are twitter postings seldom more than one sentence long. Does this encourage students to believe that there success is based on the skills acquired in college? Or does it clearly indicate to them that success is based on personality and a fast quip?

There is no more obvious place to find the American contempt for education than the field of science. We live in an era where the government has been censoring scientific data and findings from public web sites and official documents. What’s the message here? If you are learned and you say the wrong things, your writings disappear. What message does that sent to young people entering college? Don’t disagree. Don’t think.

If you want to be on the front lines of the culture wars, indicate a belief in global warming or evolution.  One of the most disgusting public spectacles I have to endure is some person telling another “Look at all the global warming.” whenever it gets cold. If there is anything more indicative of sloppy mindless thinking, there it is. By the time, you can feel global warming in the temperate zones, most of human life has perished. If the most plebian mundane mindless joke preempts years of careful research, does that inspire students to rigorous study?

But the business world wants critical thinkers, don’t they?

Don’t be silly. They want people with a “practical” education. That means business school. Business schools have several functions as far as the business world is concerned. The first is an education in the philosophical doctrines friendly to business operations and profit. The second is what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior in the world of financial endeavor. The third is critical thinking into carefully designated zones: markets, government regulations, banking practices etc.

And we’re not talking about a lot of critical thinking. This is critical thinking in specified areas. Businesses do not encourage thinking outside these areas. It is troublesome to them.

Let me give you an example. I teach business ethics. I was given a variety of business ethics text books to examine for possible use in my class. I went through them, tossed them and wrote my own class. Why? The books offered a pathway to ethical thinking carefully designed to limit choices. There was only a very limited discussion of ethical systems. By avoiding this, the textbooks avoided giving the students ethical choices outside of a few limited ones acceptable to the business world. My introduction of Christian and other moral systems as subjects of discussion in the realm of business ethics was almost revolutionary but long needed.

How do you get critical thinking?

We know how. It’s been embedded in Western culture for six hundred years. It is the kind of education that the founding fathers had. It is the kind of education that has inspired and ennobled human development. It is the kind of education that is the basis of the idea that humans are not limited in station to that of their fathers and that kings do not rule based on authority given by God.

That type of education is called the liberal arts.

There are seven liberal arts, the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy and the trivium: grammar, logic and rhetoric.

Over time, these have evolved into the study of a separate subjects, philosophy, literature, art, music, English, etc.

These “impractical” subjects are the basis of learning critical thinking skills and living life as a whole human being capable of fulfilling the duties of citizen.

My son’s school gives students money awards for success in early college classes just as long as the classes are in practical subjects not the liberal arts.

I think that illustration sums up business thinking about education in the United States.

So there you have it. Critical thinking. Society despises it. Businesses don’t want it save in small inoffensive pieces and we are no longer interested in teaching the subjects that develop it.

This society wants uneducated, highly emotional bloviators to dominate television commentary. This society wants science as long as it is producing an amusing new game. Once science says something about the beginnings of humanity or the dangers of our country’s addiction to fossil fuels, the Attorney General of Virginia is talking law suit. Business want smooth operations unhindered by dissent and are willing to finance college success only in areas not inclined toward critical thinking.

And what are many of those commenting on these findings saying, “These students are lazy.”

We live in a time and place of such blatant hypocrisy the we can blame the students for the failures of No Child Left Behind, the way undergraduates are taught in universities and colleges, the business community’s preference for vocational teaching and our society’s disdain for learning.

James Pilant

An Education Of Greed Destroys Nations

On By southwerkIn business ethics2 Comments
From the Independent.ie (Ireland), Anto Kerins writes –
Our graduates need an understanding of, and a facility for, effective regulations, appropriate rules and ethical frameworks to guide organisational behaviour so as to ensure the safety and vibrancy of our economy and society.
 
 

 

From producing graduates who absorbed the mantra of deregulation and light-touch rules, we must now imbue them with the importance of ethical and regulatory frameworks and the ability to distinguish between rules that keep us safe, solvent and effective and those that just take up time.
 
 
 

 

 

 

Ireland has just experienced an ethics meltdown in the financial sector. I believe they are taking much stronger action than we have contemplated to solve the problem. I do not believe their anger is leaving any time soon. They have no beltway “wisdom” that is everything is okay except for those whiny unemployed. There is a determination for this to never happen again.

Read further –

While the economic and regulatory wings of Government are now desperately trying to get us out of the hole we are in, it is mainly to education that we look to ensure this crisis never happens again. Although the Government and its agencies are feverishly working to bed down a powerful and effective regulatory regime to keep us afloat, it is to education that we look to encourage the long-term development and sustenance of this framework.

I’m reading through the Hunt Report. It is not like anything I have seen in the United States. We have been all about job training and getting rid of those annoying history, philosophy, art and literature classes. The Hunt Report emphasizes the need for more of these, not less. I’ll be posting on this later.


James Pilant

Is A College Education Worth $800,000?

On By southwerkIn Economic measurement, Teaching4 Comments

The number, 800,000 dollars, has been used often to describe the advantage of a college education over a high school diploma. However according to new data, the actual value is $450,000 dollars. If that isn’t bad enough, according to the American Institutes for Research, it’s only worth $279,893.

Let’s figure it up. The number of working years used is forty. So if we divide 800,000 by forty, we get 20,000 dollars a year in advantage over someone with a high school diploma. Now let’s look at the revised figures. At 450,000 dollars, a college degree adds 11,250 dollars, which is much less impressive than 20,000 dollars. But if the American Institutes for Research is correct, it is only worth about 7,000 dollars.

Now, none of this takes into consideration, the costs of college itself, in particular the burden of paying off students loans which can easily get into the tens of thousands.

Am I discouraging you from pursuing a higher education? Certainly not, there are many advantages, intellectual and otherwise for going to college. I do want you to be aware that we might want to contemplate some kind of structural change in how we pay for education and how education is rewarded in the job market.

And be cautious about these kinds of statistics. The first decade of the twenty first century was cruel to the middle and lower classes. They lost a lot of economic ground. One of the things that was hit hard was earning power. Whole classes of jobs disappeared. The very, very few new jobs carried much lower salaries and reduced benefits.

Take a look at this film on college costs:

James Pilant

(This is a repost of a column I wrote some months ago.)

Educating My Students – To What End?

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, Economic measurement, ethics, Government Failure, Teaching2 Comments

I have students. I am college professor. Generally speaking in these very tough economic times, they come to school not for an education but to get that piece of paper they have been grandly told over and over again will get them a job. Oh, yeah, I guess that is confusing, going to school but not for an education. Let me explain.

We have a thing in America called No Child Left Behind, which makes the mammoth and bizarre claim that we can measure progress based on tests. That’s right, bizarre. I might agree with you if had some numbers correlating success with grades (and you don’t). Oh, there are some university studies, which since they develop their very own concept of what we might call success, don’t amount to anything useful. (If you get to decide what determines success for your own programs, you have a tendency to win.)

No Child Left Behind means that for a school to be determined to be successful (worthy of money from the State and the Feds), it has to have good test scores generated by its students. So, in pursuit of this, students are drilled relentlessly in the subjects to be tested. The school that drills its students longer and harder than the others is supposed to be improving. Since the primary indicator of grades is social and economic class, the scores fall into utterly predictable categories. Obviously there are variations. An inspired group of teachers can pump up test scores with skill and effort. But inspired teachers are just like inspired politicians, inspired architects, inspired pediatricians, etc. There are only so many per profession.

Now, you will find that there are people who say we can train teacher to be inspired in large numbers. That enthusiasm and a willingness to go beyond requirements should be the standard. This is nonsense. There are only so many inspired, truly dedicated individuals on earth and that’s it.

The effect over time of teaching to large scale tests is devastating. Students are conditioned not to think but to remember. The advent of the internet solves many problems of remembering and great deal of remembering is useless trivia. America needs thinkers and it’s as if we wish to exterminate them that we do this crazy testing. We have perverted the idea of education from developing human beings to the production of standard products as if on an assembly line. My students aren’t products, they are people. Human achievement is not measured by tests. No test will ever be a substitute for the real life measurements of success these people will produce.

It fills me with rage to look at what has been done to my students. I want thinkers, doers and patriots. What I get are rote learners, good passive students and bumper sticker patriots whose knowledge of the greatness of this nation is limited to the most trivial.

You see, there is a funny thing about these people, these students; they’re magnificent. When I look over my classes I don’t see A and B and C students. I see these people waiting to be told of the enormous power, potential and talent they each carry within them.

My students are the heart and soul of America. They are leaders of the next generation. They work hard. I don’t see the government of the United States lavishing care on these most vital people for the future of this country. There is more an attitude of how much we can make them financially obligated for the rest of their lives and make sure that they don’t escape paying a dime of it.

We need to figure out our priorities. If you truly desire a second rate society of “information” workers, if you truly believe that this country is merely a corporate resource to be disdained if the money is too dear and that only the “right” people should have a say in what happens, this educational system is perfect for you.

This is the United States of American. We can do better.

James Alan Pilant