What really happened to college dream?
Ten years after the financial crisis, banks may be safer and the economy recovered, but intolerable burdens have been hoisted on our youth. Too many are handicapped by horrendous student debt, forcing them to delay marriage, children and first homes.
Faced with massive unemployment and the failure of his $831 billion stimulus package, President Barack Obama urged more young people to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars to attend college and graduate school. That took millions off the jobless rolls.
Obama propagated false reasoning: College grads earn on average much more than high school grads, hence sending most young people to college would assure most above average incomes. That’s sadly akin to Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, where every child is above average.
To send most everyone to college, nearly everyone needs a college preparatory high school education. Pressures to “pass them through” resulted in what even The New York Times admits are counterfeit high school diplomas. Fewer than 40 percent of secondary school graduates have the math and reading skills to do college-level work.
State governments pressured by rocketing Medicaid costs, the needs of K-12 education and flagging tax revenues slashed support and jacked up tuition at public colleges. That enabled private colleges to do the same and compelled bigger student loans.
Facing tight budgets, limited pools of qualified applicants and Obama administration pressures to increase diversity, colleges and universities lowered admission requirements and gutted curriculums.
Obama’s legacy: About 70 percent of high school grads now enroll in twoor four-year programs, student loan balances now top $1.5 trillion and most young people don’t get the quality education they are promised. Standardized tests indicate four years of college often adds little to students’ analytical abilities, and four in 10 college grads lack the critical thinking skills necessary for entrylevel professional work.
Consequently, more than 40 percent of young college graduates remain stuck in jobs that don’t require a college education, and more than 3.6 million graduates live below the poverty line.
President Donald Trump gets good and bad grades. His emphasis on apprenticeships that pay students, leave them without debt and provide most with opportunities that pay better than the $50,000 the average new college grad earns are admirable. But his efforts to roll back Obama’s crackdown on for-profit colleges are not flattering.
To clean up the mess, it’s time for some good old-fashioned debt forgiveness. If Obama could bail out the banks, Trump could do the same for students sold on a lousy idea by their government. And he can finance some of that by going after the resources of for-profit colleges and mainstream universities.
A few bankruptcy auctions for properties of second-rate schools and tort judgments against endowments of revered institutions that have exploited all this fraud — and indoctrinated students instead of educating them — would have the same reformative consequences as suing negligent corporations that hawk shoddy products.
Threaten the job security of cosseted, intolerant professors and see how fast they relearn how to teach Chaucer, calculus and critical thinking skills. Academics always lecture us to hold greedy businesses to account. The time has come to hold them to account. Peter Morici is an economist and business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.