In the university context, such an inquiry might explore why student debt has gone up from $300 billion in 2000 to $2 trillion today. The cop-out answer is that the $2 trillion of student debt went to pay for $2 trillion worth of lies about how great education is. In my view this reading is too generous. How much of that $2 trillion actually went to education as opposed to room and board? If you analyze the universities in economic terms, you might even conclude that the dorms and residences are the profit center driving an elaborate real-estate racket. And this is not to mention the web of offices and administrators tasked with overseeing not education but “student life.” Scale this model up, and you begin to understand why it’s so hard to exist outside of a big city in the United States—a vast country with swaths of empty space and lots of affordable housing—and why those deplorables who leave the reservation are viewed with such disdain.
When I was walking around the local university, with the very-nice-looking dorms with racy slogans in the windows, I was reflecting on how much the university experience has become a kind of con. Take out the student loans, and you get to start your adult life -- the first time you live away from home -- in a nice little apartment with excellent gym facilities, trash pick-up, plumbing and utilities included, nicely kept grounds, football games and other sporting events available, regular plays and a cheap/free cinema, etc., etc. Your introduction to adult life in America leads you to believe that this is what life is like.
Then you get out and you have to start paying those debts back. Cheap housing in the cities is increasingly impossible to find. Even outside the cities, AirBnB and other short-term rentals have made even small towns expensive places to live, if you can find rentable spaces at all. (Just try it in Jackson, WY -- or even out this way in one of the little towns like Cashiers or Sylva).
Can you get a job with that degree you got? Maybe, if you were savvy in choosing your major. If not, you can always go to grad school and try to get a doctorate so you can teach whatever it was -- for another six figures in student loans, that is, entering into a job market for Ph.D.s that often sees hundreds of applicants for every tenure track position. Nobody explains this to the prospective students, who are sold the line that 'if you choose to do something you love, you'll never work a day in your life.' That may be true in the ironic sense that you'll never find a job!
Even for those who succeed in getting a white-collar position that pays reasonably well, it's going to be hard to recapture the quality of life that they became accustomed to in college life. Setting their expectations that campus life was what adult life is like -- and with all these attendant luxuries now, paid for by those ever-increasing fees they can charge because they are covered by student loans -- sets them up for disappointment, anger, and a lifelong load of debt that is functionally just another tax they have to pay to the government (who now owns all student loans).
The promises of the university are increasingly fraudulent. It's still possible to go to school and get a job and life a decent life that way, but only if you dodge the system they have set up for you and are very choosy about the parts you accept. The cost of even that successful model is also going to be a lot higher than anyone will explain to you.
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So that's why I keep wanting to relive my college days! I have a college friend who says he recognised right off that this was a Golden Ghetto. You didn't have much money, but you didn't much mind, because you had a lot of what you wanted anyway. And this was in 1971! He noticed that very few classmates seemed to have figured this out, even in the Business department. I am reminded (again) of Garrison Keillor's line from 30-40 years ago: "We think life was simpler then, because we were children, and our needs were looked after by others."
No wonder they like socialism so much in that group.
I will continue this conversation over at my site with a new bit.
Yes, socialism is like college forever, except nobody has to pay back their student loans.
Oddly enough, though I spent my career in academia, I haven't been in a student dorm room more than once in that time--and that was my daughter's, shared with three others. She was a student type of student.
Yes, I too have spent a lot of time in college but never in a dorm. I lived with my parents and commuted; and so, with the Hope scholarship I received, graduated as a Bachelor of Arts without having student loans.
I lived in the dorms - we had to. They ranged from snug and bare to old, roomier, and bare (built in 1890s). Grad school was different. I finished my PhD just as the job market for my specialty and training tanked. After going 0-80 on applications for tenure track slots, I shifted my job search parameters. At the time (2010), in my field, it was running about 120 applications before you got hired. Really bad odds, in other words. I don't think it's gotten better.
It's a racket, unless you are in a hard science field that you need the labs and facilities to learn. Then college makes sense financially, IF you go to the right school. Not an Ivy or some of the elite private colleges.
LittleRed1
Can you get a job with that degree you got? Maybe, if you were savvy in choosing your major
Cdl. Newman suggested that a University should teach one how to live life, not how to make money.
He's still right, of course. The vast majority of professional (even non-professional) jobs do not require a college education, except that GE made it so back in the early 1960's--and all the sheeple corporations followed them. (The obvious exceptions are MD's and certain Engineering (Ch.E., EE, and ME slots.)
“Cdl. Newman suggested that a University should teach one how to live life, not how to make money. He's still right, of course.”
Well, indeed: though if you check the numbers, philosophy degrees actually pay off in cash as well as wisdom.
https://dailynous.com/2019/01/03/philosophy-majors-make-money-majors-humanities-field/
How much of that $2 trillion actually went to education as opposed to room and board?
A lot of that money went to pay for administrators. The faculty-student ratio has remained about the same for years. In terms of money spent is probably less lower $ faculty money per student because of the lower incidence of tenure-track profs and the much greater use of adjunct "profs" paid peanuts.
By contrast, the administrator-student ratio ratio has greatly increased in recent decades.
And a great many of those administrators are there to enforce WOKEness.
I believe that dorms are posher now. My freshman year in the '60s was at an Ivy League cover school. The very utilitarian freshman dorms had linoleum floors and cinderblock walls-painted a horrendous pink in my dorm . That wouldn't attract students today.
I thought a college degree was the requirement to compete for a place in the elite. Sometime in the last seven generations owning a horse was replaced by owning a parchment.
Neither horse nor sheepskin guaranteed success but the absence all but destined a person to the ranks of the commoners. The occasional strike it rich unsinkable Molly Brown type might emerge but were never considered equal to actual superior type persons.
For the life of me, I can’t remember the court case that established companies could not train their employees because of (fill in the injustice), which removed all the obstacles to the explosive growth of the education industry. Factory towns with inhabitant housing and recreational facilities. If I am misremembering it may be mead bad.
@anonymous, I suspect you might be thinking of Griggs v Duke Power. It didn't outlaw training but it did make occupational testing for employment subject to 'disparate impact' challenges which effectively outlawed it. A case can be made that employers then outsourced such testing, however imperfectly done, to post-secondary education establishments. Thus also the drive to make sure the right groups get their share of college credentials even if they can't complete college work.
A whole concept / option for residences has more or less disappeared in our culture: "lodging". The Greek System of fraternities and sororities were an example at one, high, end of the social scale, while at the other we had "rooming houses".* In both cases older larger structures once intended for a family with a bunch of servants was re-purposed into rooms, often shared, for single residents. Bathrooms, shared, down the hall. Maybe one shared meal per day. House rules required the lodger to be OUT of the house for most of mid-day so the owner/operator/"house mother" could do daily chores and maintenance.
Dorms, now, as noted are more apartment like. Maybe two or as many as four residents sharing a suite that has an enclosed bathroom... Mini-bar/coffee nook with a micro-fridge. Cooking facilities in the dorm do not obviate the perceived need for a cafeteria serving not only dinner, but at least three meals per day and maybe being staffed to serve most waking hours. And the Greek Houses tend to be purpose-built in the "dorm" model rather than salvaging the old manor homes from older eras.
I suspect whether a fraternity or an individual, attempting today to set up a rooming house/ lodging community would be in violation of city codes.
* The era of rooming houses coincided with open-bay "barracks" in the military -- latrines at one end of the Quonset Hut and a mess hall down the road.
Griggs vs Duke Power, in addition to establishing the disparate impact & job relevance test standard for testing, ALSO established the same standard for educational requirements...in the specific case, a high school diploma. I don't know what ever happened to the second part of that ruling.
Student life as a con? Hell Look at the Military life. Its the biggest con of all.
Providing cover for insuferable knowitall busybodies for like ever
Greg
“Sometime in the last seven generations owning a horse was replaced by owning a parchment. Neither horse nor sheepskin guaranteed success but the absence all but destined a person to the ranks of the commoners.”
That’s a good insight, although there’s a lot to be said for what you learn from riding a horse.
Greg, that’s the sort of comment that is more safely made on the internet than in person. We have a few vets here. If you don’t like the company, I’m sure none of them would mind if you leave.
Corporate raider Carl Icahn has a philosophy degree...though he says he can't understand his thesis anymore.
I didn't appreciate dorm life in the all-female tower, a little too Mrs. Grundy, so I lived off-campus for the next 3 years in the cheapest fleabag apartments I could find roommates to share with me.
Not that I didn't enjoy college life, but I wasn't there for the parties or the gym or the cafeteria. My mind was fully engaged for the first time, among a group of peers to whom that was important as well--also a new experience--and I was trying to figure out how one goes about making a living and achieving independence.
It's sad to see students who go through college in a cocoon. More than one acquaintance has mystified me with stories of offspring who can't make the transition from the very nice apartment Mommy and Daddy provided until they were 27 to whatever they could possibly afford with a basket-weaving graduate degree and not a trace of even part-time job experience. These parents actually worried about whether they would ever be able to stop supporting their children in the kind of luxurious standard they'd grown up in.
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