It should have been obvious to anyone with any sense that loaning vast amounts of money to poor and working-class people during the real-estate boom wasn’t going to turn out well, but still there were armies of enthusiastic promoters out there dragging anyone they could in to sign on the dotted line.
Now, as students with dubious degrees rack up tens – even hundreds – of thousands of dollars of debt, it’s time people started pointing out the obvious problems here. The top problem is that the United States cannot afford another massive bailout, but without one there are going to be a lot of impoverished young people as soon as the party ends.
However, just like the real-estate boom, there are legions of enthusiastic shills out there, including universities themselves, which have become increasingly parasitic as they have grown addicted to government funding.
The following article is about a program, known as the “dream project,” in which University of Washington students teach high school kids how to apply for financial aid and student loans. The pictures really say it all. The middle class UW students are telling working-class students in the poorer suburbs around Seattle what a great opportunity school will be for them, and getting them used to the idea of indebting themselves to pay for school before they’ve even been accepted anywhere.
One day in mid-December, a purple-clad army of college students prepared to sweep through Renton High School, bringing snacks, drinks and most of all, information.
Laura McDowell marshaled the forces — about 50 University of Washington students — in the school’s counseling center, making sure they were all working on the same thing before they fanned out across the building.
“Have your students go to fafsa-dot-gov,” McDowell rapped out in a commanding voice. “Can anyone tell me what it stands for? Anybody?”
“Free Application for Federal Student Aid,” the students responded, not exactly in unison. Filling out the form is a necessary step to getting financial aid for college.
“Why do you have to fill it out?” McDowell asked.
The response was immediate: “Money!”
The “dream project” reminds me of the American Dream Downpayment Initiative, which the Bush administration used to encourage low-income people to buy houses. The federal government would provide downpayment assistance, and then the buyers took on loans to finance the rest. These new homeowners, unfortunately (although predictably), had a much higher rate of foreclosure than those who did not receive assistance.
The same thing will happen with student aid and loans. First, the students will be enticed into college with student aid, then they will take out loans as their expenses grow. It will keep schools propped up for a while, but eventually they will have to pay back these loans, and not all students will be able to do so, as there is already a glut of “credentialed” workers.
The parallels between higher education and the mortgage crisis are starting to become uncomfortably clear, but as usual politicians and educators are planting their heads firmly in the sand. A better solution would be to give students realistic, useful and affordable alternatives to the typical college education. Most Americans do not need a four-year degree, and many are simply wasting four or more years in school that would be better spent learning a trade at a vocational or technical school and starting work within two years. It’s time we started asking ourselves whether it’s more important to keep gender studies professors on the job, or to provide young Americans with the means to make an honest, productive living.
For an alternative, perhaps we should look to Germany, which has one of the lowest college graduation rates of all developed, Western countries, yet has far lower unemployment than the US, and has managed to keep a healthy industrial and manufacturing base. One of the keys to its success is worker training — not useless degrees.
There’s a lot to be said for a university education, but it really isn’t for everyone, and it shouldn’t be pushed on those who can’t make good use of it. That so many females are in college, for example, says little about their real productive potential, whereas the men who are avoiding college are, for the most part, making a reasonable decision. Unfortunately, there are signs that when the education bubble bursts, men will shoulder the burden as always.
