BLAME YOURSELVES, MOM AND DAD

Everyone is up and arms over the big increases in tuition announced by most of the state’s public universities over the past couple of weeks.  Even Guv Jen is irked, enough to denounce the schools for doing so.  The tuition hikes run as high as 18.5% at Wayne State University.  The increases at our two biggest schools are pretty stiff, too:  Michigan State and U-M are sticking freshmen with 13.5% and 12.3% boosts, respectively, in the price for each credit.  There’s even sticker shock at nearby public universities:  Central Michigan 9.2%, Ferris 8.9%, and Grand Valley 7.6%.  (Western Michigan has not yet announced its tuition increase.)

The schools are blaming the cuts in taxpayer funding that Guv Jen and the state legislature pushed through to help cure the state’s budget deficit.  Of course, none of the schools are blaming the bloated costs of lifetime tenure for their professors, under the rubric of protecting their academic freedom for a herd mentality, and the never-ending building programs, an example of which is the recent multi-million remodeling of the residence of Eastern Michigan’s president.  The idea that any of our public universities would cut their well-padded costs to make the education of our kids more affordable doesn’t even exist as a consideration.

Why?  In the end, it’s your fault, Mom and Dad.  You have bought into this insane mantra that anyone who wants a good job has got to have a college education.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  About half of the jobs that pay over forty grand a year do not require a four-year degree.  To the extent that a large part of the other half does demand a sheepskin, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that any kid with a head on his shoulders should be able to get a degree.  In other words, employers really do not want to hire a resume, they want to hire a good employee – something that a college education does nothing to create.

Yet, Mom and Dad, you pillage your savings or encourage your children to go deep into debt to pay for four, five, six years of schooling larded with drinking, sex, and drugs (why do you think they call those years “school daze”?) so that some mediocre professor can afford his-and-her Volvos and a summer home on the lake.  By the way, that professor is not even teaching your kids.  She has one of her wage-slave grad students doing that while she’s busy writing her seminal academic work on the feminist interpretation of quantum mechanics and the patriarchal oppression manifest in the study of physics.

OK, I’m having some fun.  There’s no question that a college education is the right track for students who aspire to enter into certain professions.  But just what head start in the world does a business degree give a kid?  I’m not talking about a Harvard MBA that lands junior a six-figure starting salary on Wall Street.  I’m talking about a bachelor’s from Central Michigan that might help your pride-and-joy get a sales rep job.  Instead of your kid starting his adult life with as much as thirty or forty grand of student debt, how much further ahead financially would he have been to take out of high school an entry-level job in the industry or business he likes and showed his employers over the next four years his moxie and smarts?

One thing is certain.  Our colleges and universities will never stop raising their prices so long as we continue to pay them.

Comments

[Whats Your Problem?]

Seriously man... whats with the hostility towards the teacher/professor? GRCC pays their profs better than GVSU, but tuition stays low. I think very little of it rests on the shoulders of prof salaries- I have yet to see any of the profs I've had at either school drive home in a volvo.

Chill the hell out. If you want to attack something about education, by all means attack the state universities obsessive focus on athletics and athletic spending. Get pissy over the lead administrator's salaries, but don't blame the teacher/prof who is in most cases the little guy in the whole ordeal.

If you want to blame someone for our states budget crisis, why not blame John Engler and his $90 million in lost funds. $90 million would be really nice to invest into public ed and state universities, but where'd it go? Nobody knows, and nobody asked Engler any questions.

[The Executive Director]

Dear Anonymous,

The problem with teachers and professors is that there positions have turned into sinecures. That's not acceptable when their salaries are paid or subsidized by taxpayers.

That said, the biggest reason why college professors are generally overpaid is because parents have bought into the idea that a college education should cost a king's ransom. Hence I put the blame on them and not the professors.

Regards,
Bill Tingley
Executive Director