This is the future of America. We're fucked.
Yesterday a friend of mine mentioned on Facebook that several people on her college campus in New York had been arrested as part of a nationwide organized protest.
The protest was against raising college tuitions and cutting of Professors and Programs.
My response to her? Your school doesn’t have a very good economics program does it? To which she replied: “Adam, you just don’t get it.”
Oh contraire, mon frere. I get a lot more than you think. I mean no disrespect to this friend. She’s a very smart girl. VERY. Though I met her when she was 18, I imagine her to have been the kind of child people label ‘precocious’. But between ‘young and smarter’ and ‘experienced and wiser’, I’ll take experience every time.
Not so long ago, I wasted a lot of time and money on a college education at a local accredited State commuter college. Over the 7 years that I drifted from class to class my tuition tripled. I made it to Senior year and finally decided that there was no point in torturing myself any further and blowing thousands more on something I didn’t really want. Additionally, I was smart enough to understand that there was no chance of me going to Grad School, and without that, a diploma was close enough to useless that it wasn’t worth any further effort. Now pay attention. I’m not saying college is useless. I’m saying a lot of what is taught is useless. I’m 30 years old, and I have yet to find a situation where college-level calculus applies. Ditto for Biology, foreign languages and Psychology 101- 103. In fact, the one thing I did learn from is history classes, and they’re trying to get rid of those in some schools.
In truth, almost nothing I learned in college has applied to anything.
Almost every bit of useful knowledge I have ever amassed was learned through private study and reading or by being around people smarter than myself.
So what I’m saying is, I get that students want lower tuition. I get that. But that isn’t what those protests are about. Consider the specifics. Low tuition and the retention of all programs and faculty. Well, sorry you can’t have it both ways. 1 in 10 Americans have lost their job. The economy isn’t just bad, it’s collapsing. The US Dollar itself is on the verge of collapse.
Furthermore (something a lot of people won’t tell you) colleges require a LOT more than your tuition to stay operational. I HATE football. HATE IT. But you will never hear me complain about college athletes getting scholarships over geniuses. Wanna know why? Do you have any idea how much revenue college football brings in for a school? Every time Tim Tebow (is he still in college?) scores a touchdown, your school stands a better chance of getting new computers. In other words, athletics is one way of keeping a school’s tuition low. They rely on multiple sources of revenue to keep faculty and programs. When those other revenue streams start to dry up –say, during a depression– tuition has to be raised or people get fired.
Granted it’s a little different when you’re talking about Ivy League schools. But the majority of college students don’t go to Stanford.
And thats one of the biggest problems with these protests. There are a certain amount of people -Progressives- who would like you to believe that colleges are created by greedy capitalists who are raising tuition just to line their pockets and keep you scum off their campus. Well- that’s great in theory. But for a small state or community college, it isn’t practical. By keeping education affordable, it allows more people to attend, thereby creating higher revenue streams. It’s the same with taxes. Lower taxes create more loose cash which is spent at businesses allowing more people to be hired who can then pay taxes which provides more money for government.
In other words, your schools aren’t doing this to be dicks. They WANT you to go to college. The last thing they want is for cost-prohibitive tuition hikes to make you drop out. But something has to give. Like I said- basic economics.
The other problem is illustrated in the picture at the top of the post. The sign in the right hand corner reads “UAW- Education is a right.” UAW is an umbrella Union. *Side note- Progressives and Unions in the same place at the same time? What a surprise.* According to their website, they have over 800 local unions with them. I suppose that includes teacher’s unions as well. The second part of the sign is the real point of all this. ’Eduction is a right.’
Only one problem with that. It isn’t. This essentially relates back to the Progressive message with Healthcare. Nowhere in the Constitution do you have a right to free Health Care or free Education. You have a right to access there things, but no guaranteed right to have it. And there’s a very good reason for that. EVERYTHING COSTS MONEY. There’s an entire segment of the American people who believe that the US Government is sitting on Scrooge McDuck‘s endless money bin. Money has to come from somewhere, and right now our country is drifting on a long line of credit. If the banks of China lose any more faith in us, Joss Whedon is going to be the greatest prophet in the history of Science Fiction.
If there was any practical way to add free health care and education to a democratic republic, our founders would have discovered it. They were a lot smarter than us.
You don’t have a right to free anything. ”Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Pursuit. Certainly medicine and books help to make you happier over the course of your life, but you don’t have a right to them. It’s up to you to amass those things. It is not the role of government to provide them for you. And when the government does attempt, it fails miserably. Go to any city funded highschool. Now go to a private school. Ask yourself what the difference is. Money. Public schools cannot compete with private ones because the local government cannot afford to provide competitive books, labs, computers or even staff. And these days, they need more money for metal detectors than anything else. The money has to come from somewhere.
The government is meant to be a watchdog against the boldness of our enemies, foreign and domestic. Progressivism is the enemy of the public welfare precisely because the Marxism its based on is anathema to a democratic republic. Free education and healthcare are elements of a Socialist government. And as I’ve suggested above, that doesn’t lead to anything worthwhile. It leads to children who can barely read shooting at each other in the hallway. It that really the standard we want for state schools and community colleges?
One final point as it relates to the teacher’s union. You might make an argument for the need for teacher’s unions in basic education. But college Professors make a lot more than K-12 teachers. In fact, if you want to lower the cost of education in college, teachers unions aren’t helping. Ever had a horrible Professor that has tenure? Thank your local teacher’s union for keeping him/ her in a job, possibly preventing more than one new teacher from being hired instead. Unions won’t relent to lower wages. And correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t the demands of dues and benefits make Union demands even more expensive?
We need to keep our teachers. And we need to keep our kids in school. But we also need to be realistic about those goals and how we go about achieving them. There is a lot wrong with our educational system, same a health care- and yes, we need to make some fundamental changes to the way that system operates. But the way to go about those changes is not through wild, baseless ideas.
Rather, we need more pragmatic solutions.
