College Education––Public or Private...or For-Profit?

Bernie’s free tuition proposal is only “radical” and “unrealistic” if you reject the policies that worked very well from Truman through Carter and accept and want to keep all of the rich-favoring tax breaks that came about since Reagan reset our economy. It was Reagan that set us on the road to dysfunction and unfairness.

This appeared in my news feed a minute ago from the Bernie campaign. Kind of puts the whole thing in context.

Bill Moyers explains some of the new tricks the for-profit college "industry" uses to fleece college students. This is why certain things don't lend themselves to the profit model. When you are focused on profit above all you are obligated to deliver profits when colleges should be obligated to deliver education.

"Citigroup College" has a vulgar ring to it

It doesn't sound any better to name the college after Mr. and Mrs. Sandy Weill, the Citigroup billionaires. NPR reported this story. Sandy and Joan Weill wanted to give $20 million to a struggling small college in upstate New York. The one condition was that the college be renamed after them. How modest the rich are!

How did we get here? Colleges are starved for a reason: the college age population is poorer than ever after three decades of declining middle class incomes. Colleges rely more and more on part time professors who are very poorly paid. Many need public assistance to make ends meet. That is poor advertising for the idea of college, and putting a billionaire's name on the college's football jerseys won't erase it.

The tax deduction given for a donation should be less if your “gift” demands naming rights, or if something is named after you. Maybe the naming should cancel the deduction altogether. There are ways of placing a dollar value on the publicity value of naming an institution after oneself. How much do corporate brands pay to put their name on major league venues? They don’t do it out of public spiritedness. They do it for crass reasons of value. If thousands of college football fans wear your name on their chest and more thousands of graduates put your name in the back window of their car, each iteration of this publicity should subtract from your tax deduction. At some point the institution should be able to demand you pony up more money or be free to remove your name. Maybe cash-starved public institutions should publish the petty-minded negotiations the “donors” engaged in over the size of their name and it’s prominence. It would be good to know exactly how starved for attention rich people can be.

The rich people who give generously because they believe in it far outnumber the ones who are greedy for praise. Most who give to their alma mater do so with a sense of humility, recognizing that the names of the people they learned from are far more important than the names of the rich people who paid their salaries. Better still, name the college after a philosopher who influenced centuries of humanity. He or she never got rich from the search for knowledge. Naming a college after a billionaire suggests that wealth accumulation is the best measure of a civilization. That is a bad message to send young people who are going to school. Why worship the few who become rich by keeping the rest of us poor

College Dystopia

How do you define "dystopia"? OK, it's the opposite of utopia. What if some of the people living in it think it is utopia, perfect as far as they're concerned.

What would American colleges look like in a dystopian model? Like this:

Elite students are jetted around the country by colleges and given luxury living while enrolled…

(The Guardian posted an article about that very thing. All students are equal, but some students are more equal than others, as Orwell would have put it.)

Meanwhile professors work at adjunct level and live on public assistance...

(SLATE posted a story today describing how many working professors and instructors at college level, college graduates in other words, with degrees and abilities, are actually living in poverty.)

A few decades ago such a picture would have made us sick. But we just file it with all of the other stories about the dystopia America has become.

There are many ironies here. The most profound irony is that the party that hates elites has dedicated itself to creating them and insulating them. That would be the Republican Party. Irony evolved into hypocrisy some time ago.