Showing posts with label Leftist college professors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Leftist college professors. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

GOVERNMENT DRIVES UP COST OF COLLEGE


Having worked very hard to put myself through college and then taking out loans to help my wife and children do the same, and then working many years to pay them off, I surely do not want to pay on other people’s loans as well. If Democrats follow through with their promises to “forgive” $1.5 trillion in student debt, I’ll be very pissed — and I won’t be alone.

A WWII vet I knew told me he could work his way through the University of Iowa just by working summers. His summer jobs paid all his tuition, books, and fees just prior to Pearl Harbor — and then he joined the Army Air Corps as an officer. Then he finished graduate school on the GI Bill and finally retired as a Professor of English at Boston University.


I too was able to pay my own way through college by working. My parents couldn’t afford to help me other than letting me live with them through my first year. After that I was on my own. I worked summers and also after school during the year, so it was harder for me than for my WWII friend. While my fellow students lived in frat houses and dorms, did sports and partied, I paid rent for a tenement apartment and worked full-time. Thus I finished undergraduate and graduate school with no debt.



By the time my own children were going to college, it had gotten more expensive. For many years I was writing checks for two daughters and my wife to earn degrees. I told the kids I could pay them what it cost for tuition, books, and fees at a state university in Maine but if they wanted to go somewhere else, they had to make up the difference. I worked three jobs; they all worked too, but it still wasn’t enough. I had to take out loans and so did they. 



For years after they had all finished I was still making payments — my last one about fifteen years ago I think. One daughter still has payments but then she chose to attend college out west. So, why have college costs gone up so much since my WWII friend and I went? Because they could. And why could they? Because government started “helping.” That began with Sputnik in 1957 when our federal government panicked and started lending money to promising STEM students to help Americans catch up to Soviet scientists. That program paid off all around, but subsequent student aid programs are what really drove up costs.



Those programs started in 1965 with the Higher Education Act. Other subsidies too numerous to mention piled on from there. Before government got involved, college tuition had remained fairly stable for decades. Ordinary people could work their way through as I did, but when virtually every student could get federally subsidized loans, colleges could get away with jacking up tuition and fees. In competition with each other to attract students, they added expensive frills unrelated to learning. In the fifty years between 1969 to 2019, the price of a college education in America went up over 3000%! Why? Because it could.



Maine is among the poorest states, usually competing with Alabama or Mississippi for the lowest per capita income in the country, yet the median salary for college president in Maine is almost $300,000 a year. When Senator Elizabeth Warren of neighboring Massachusetts ran for president, she complained about college costs, yet she made over $400,000 for teaching part-time at Harvard. Some claim she taught only one class, but her apologists like those at Politifact say: “[University] salaries are determined principally by research output and associated reputation, rather than the number of students the professor teaches,” and “she taught two classes, not one.”



While numbers for teaching staff have remained fairly stable over the past forty years, the number of university administrators has skyrocketed. So have their salaries — especially “diversity coordinators” who average over $103,000. There were no “diversity coordinators” when I went to college, but they’re everywhere now. The University of Michigan alone has nearly 100 working full time and one has a salary higher than President Biden’s.



With Covid 19 restrictions over the past year, few students actually attend classes, yet tuition charges have not gone down. I suspect salaries haven’t either. Academic rigor, however, has certainly been reduced from its already declining pre-Covid levels. As college costs have increased astronomically during my lifetime, academic standards has declined precipitously. As we pay more and get less, students, their parents, and taxpayers are suspecting college isn’t worth the cost anymore.



With the exception of STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering & Math] programs, and perhaps law school, many conclude that it isn’t. Government should consider eliminating grants and loans to students who want to study anything else — and never even think about forgiving loans already made.


Friday, July 24, 2020

LEFT & RIGHT SHOW WEDNESDAY, JULY 23, 2020



David Jones, history teacher at Fryeburg Academy and instructor at Granite State College, sits in the left chair this week. I invited him on the show after he wrote a letter to the editor criticizing one of my columns. His letter is one of our topics.

As usual, we open with a question from the producer concerning recent arrests by federal officers protecting federal property in Portland, Oregon. It asks whether we agree that federal officials should be there to quell protests, and questions their tactics, allegedly including arrests without informing those arrests of the charges against them.

I’m against quelling protests, but believe strongly that resulting riots, arson, and looting must be quelled. Local, Democrat mayors and governors are sanctioning these crimes and that’s dangerous. If, as claimed, people are arrested and held without being informed of the charges, it’s a violation of their due process rights. Federal officials are constitutionally allowed to protect federal property no matter where it is.

David believes Trump might be playing to his base in this election year by deploying federal officials to confront rioters. It remains to be seen if that is politically efficacious for him. Citing effectiveness of the sixties civil rights protests in swaying public opinion, he suggests today’s swing voters are with Black Lives Matter protestors. 

From there we opine about President Trump and his policies, with me supporting the latter and David supporting neither.

At the end of the show we address David’s letter about my column’s claims that college professors are overwhelming leftist. I cite various sources including a wide-ranging statistical study indicating that the Democrat to Republican ratio of college professors and their political contributions in an election year is as high as 95:1.

David counters that the National Association of Scholars who did the study favors traditional study of western civilization. He asserts the more important question would be: does that bias manifest in biased teaching?

I cite the books used most in our prestigious graduate schools of education (like Columbia) as being overwhelmingly leftist. The best-selling book of them all is by Bill Ayers, an unapologetic, radical revolutionary who is proud of bombing banks and military installations during the sixties and seventies. He teaches teachers at the University of Illinois Chicago and he advocates “teaching for social responsibility” which he believes means turning out little revolutionaries across the country in our public schools.

David suggests that part of academic inquiry is reading those books that are on the fringe. He takes issue with the terms “anarchist” and “radical Marxist” and says there are no working definitions for them.

I say a Marxist is an anti-capitalist at least before we run out of time.