College Costs

I understand, completely and sympathetically, the anger of graduating from college and owing over $35,000—the average debt of college graduates in 2013.  I understand the pain because, when I graduated from college, I also owed a great deal of money.  I owed a whopping 3,000.

I can hear the snickers now—three thousand bucks?  Seriously?  Nowadays that wouldn't buy you a decent meal plan at most schools.  True.  And the key term in the snickering response is "nowadays."

Let's do a little cost comparison.  I was actually fortunate in what I owed.  The College Board says that in 1974-75 the average debt of college students was just over $5,000.[1]  According to the US Dept. of Energy, in 1974, the year I graduated from college, the average cost of a new automobile was $4,524.[2]  That is about 11% less than the average college debt in 1974.  USA Today indicates that in 2013, the average cost of a new automobile was $31,252.[3]  That is about ten percent less than the average college debt.  The numbers are remarkably close, aren't they?  The average college debt in 1974 could buy you a new car; and average college debt in 2013 could do the same.

Another way of accounting for the debt I accrued in my college years takes me to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and its Inflation Calculator.[4]  Plugging in the average debt in 1974, it turns out that the equivalent in 2013 would be about $23,000.  So yes, the relative price of a college education has risen more quickly than the consumer price index, and has done so by a significant amount.  But not outrageously so.

The comparison of automobile costs in 1974 compared to 2013 might suggest why college costs have risen so much more quickly than the general CPI.  What does a modern car give you that a car, even the most advanced car, could not begin to give you in 1974?  Well, there's keyless entry.  There's tremendously better fuel economy.  There's automated, computerized systems.  There's built-in GPS.  There's . . . .  The technological sophistication that a 21^st century car provides make a modern automobile close to an entirely different object than a car from the 1970s.  The cost of a car in 2013, as out of whack with the general CPI as college debt, can easily be associated with all of those tremendous changes.

The same is true for a college education.  I know that people tend to focus on the eye candy that, no doubt, adds to the cost of colleges.  Do we really need the marble floors or the climbing wall or the three Olympic sized pools or the row after row after row of exercise machines?  Well, students seem to think so, and I will not reject their estimate.  But the eye candy is, relatively speaking, not that significant.  Much more important are the changes in technology.  My school has something like four or five hundred computers in laboratories, not to mention a computer on every employee's desk.  Those computers have to be refreshed regularly, on at most a three-year cycle.  By contrast, when I was in college, the university had a mainframe.  It had had the mainframe for several years.  It continued to have the mainframe for several more years.  And the computers are only the tip of the technological iceberg.  Colleges have to have an on-line presence, not only a web page but also the utilities and facilities that allow the school to function.  Even the cheapest course management software arrangement is not cheap, and the subscription is an annual budget item.  Server space is also not cheap.  The T-3 lines are not cheap.  All colleges have a department of information technology—IT Services—that employs a cadre of technologically savvy, expensive workers.  None of that existed in 1974.

On top of costs that had not existed in 1974, colleges are also bound to pay for resources that have outpaced the general CPI.  I will mention only the cost of energy.  The US Energy Information Administration has a Real Price Viewer that provides figures back to 1977.[5]  In 1977, the average price of a gallon of gasoline was $.59.  In 2013 the same gallon cost an average of $3.51, almost six times as much.  Oil cost $14.53 per barrel in 1977, but $99.63 in 2013—almost seven times as much.  Figures for 1979 show that the average cost of electricity per kilowatt hour was $.0464, and in 2013 $.1220, two and a half as much.  Only the cost of electricity traces the rise in the general CPI.  Colleges use electricity, obviously, but they run on oil and gasoline.

But then, people say, there are salaries for all of those expensive professors.  Faculty are blamed not only for being lazy, but also for being paid exceedingly well for that laziness.

It is almost impossible to provide an average figure for faculty salaries that means anything.  The Chronicle of Higher Education indicates that in the 2011-12 academic year, the "average" full professor at Harvard earned almost $200,000 per year, whereas the "average" full professor at Villa Maria College earned only $42,000.[6]  A different set of distinctions produces equally sharp differences.  In 2011, a professor of law earned an average of $134,000 whereas a professor of English earned an average of $80,000.[7]  My discipline is English, so I will restrict myself to general figures for that discipline.  In 1974-75, the Association of Departments of English indicates that the average salary for a professor of English was about $25,000.[8]  Given the figures from 2011 that The Chronicle of Higher Educations reports, then, salaries for people like me have just about tripled from 1975 to the present.  In other words, we have not kept up with the general CPI.

So why has the debt load of college students outpaced the general CPI?  The technological sophistication of the modern campus is a big reason for the greater increase.  I would add as well the unfortunate political reality that states have reduced appropriations for colleges and for education generally by a tremendous amount, so that students have had to put up more and more of the cost.  The problem, in other words, is almost entirely a matter of political will.

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[1] http://trends.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/student-aid-2012-source-data_01122013.xls

[2] https://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/2008_fotw520.html

[3] http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/09/04/record-price-new-car-august/2761341/

[4] http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

[5] http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/realprices/

[6] http://chronicle.com/article/faculty-salaries-table-2012/131433

[7] http://chronicle.com/article/Average-Faculty-Salaries-by/126586/

[8] www.mla.org/adefl_bulletin_d_ade_43_50.pdf

Latinos

I've been thinking about Latinos in the United States, mostly because I have so often heard complaints about them—us, I should say, since I am one of them.  One complaint is the criminal activity associated with Latinos.  If only we would go away, the crime rate would plummet.  The Chicago Post agrees:  "Putting them on a boat and sending them home would end crime in this country."  But then, the Post was complaining about Irish immigrants in 1870, not Latinos in 2014.

As is true for Latinos nowadays, Irish poverty and criminality went together.  The Post affirmed the connection:  "Scratch a convict or a pauper, and the chances are that you tickle the skin of an Irish Catholic."  The religious prejudice was more notable in the 19^th than it is in the 21^st century, but Latinos too are tarred with the religious brush, albeit indirectly, as in the complaint that we breed like rabbits.  In fact, we breed like Catholics.

The poverty of Latinos, like the poverty of the Irish in the 19^th century, has at least two roots.  First, immigrants then as now came to the U. S. because they were dirt poor in the old country.  Second, once we were in the U. S., the work that immigrants got, then as now, was the lowest paying, least desirable of jobs.  After the Civil War, when the country was flexing its transcontinental muscles, the Irish did work that other Americans, except for the newly enfranchised African Americans, simply would not do.

As if echoing the racially charged comments by so many conservative commentators, Jim Kinsella points out on his web page that the Irish in the 19^th century, "became chamber maids, cooks, and the caretakers of children.  Early Americans disdained this type of work, fit only for servants."  As a result, continues Kinsella, the Irish immigrants came into economic conflict with African Americans, who "were the first to call the Irish 'white nigger.'"  As time passed, the Irish became politically and socially powerful, and finally economically successful.  Noel Ignatiev traces the process in How the Irish Became White.  The vicious racism of the 19^th century aside, one expects that Latinos will follow the same trajectory, and that the criminality of the present will become the dignified success of the Irish have in America for the last sixty years.

In my first trip to downtown Reading, back in 1989, I learned another element of the complaint against Latinos:  "Why don't they learn English?"  Fortunately for the Irish, most of them spoke English, so they were not subject to this complaint.  That was not true for the Italian immigrants who started arriving in the U. S. in large numbers in the 1870s.  For them, as the Virtualitalia web page puts it, "Overcoming the language barrier was a difficult obstacle."  Michael Musmanno explains the consequences of the language barriers in The Story of Italians in America:  because Italians could not speak English, "Many people were under the misconception that an Italian possessed only limited abilities for unskilled labor."  Given only the poorest of jobs, Italians fell into the same cycle of poverty and criminality that the Irish had earlier in the 19^th century and that the Latinos have more recently.

Feeling excluded from the dominant culture, Italians formed organizations that provided continuity with their Italian cultural and linguistic past.  As Musmanno says, "The organizations also served as places for social gathering at which the culture, language, and food of Italy could be shared."  Just as Latinos do now, the Italian immigrants celebrated their culture and spoke their native language.

And then the Italian immigrants set about learning English.  Second language acquisition is not easy.  Study after study shows that it takes about seven years to become proficient enough in a second language to use it with ease, and that's true specifically for people who are well educated in their native language.  For the poverty-stricken and for the most part illiterate Italian immigrants of the early 20^th century, it took longer.  In some cases, if the person was too old, it never took place at all.

The same is true for the current crop of immigrants.  Depending on their sophistication in their native language, like Italians, Greeks, Poles, Hungarians, or Swedes, Latinos will take somewhere between seven and ten years to learn English well.  Because Latino immigrants are constantly entering the country, however, it may seem that they never learn to speak English.  But in fact, like previous groups of immigrants, Latinos struggle to learn English.  As that process unfolds, and as was true for previous immigrant groups, the struggle is reflected in the economic difficulties that afflict Latinos generally and the academic problems that affect Latino children in particular.

A nostalgic sense of the past makes it Gospel truth that our Latvian, Norwegian, Slovenian, German ancestors were quick to learn English, and that their success as Americans was a consequence of their advanced language skills and, no doubt, superior intelligence.  They, it seems, were just far more adept and capable than are current immigrants.  In fact, as Judie Haynes points out on her Everything ESL web page, "In 1911, the U.S. Immigration Service found that 77% of Italian, 60% of Russian, and 51% of German immigrant children were one or more grade levels behind in school compared to 28% of American born children."  In short, our ancestors were no quicker, and no more adept, at learning English than are today's Latinos.

Haynes notes that second language acquisition is easier for children who hear their native language spoken at home.  The reasons for this phenomenon are many, but most significant is the fact that adults speak in more sophisticated and more challenging ways in their native language than they do in a new language.  The greater sophistication stimulates their children to develop language skills generally, and that is what makes acquisition of a second language easier.  So next time you hear an older Latino speaking in Spanish to his or her child, don't ask when they will learn English.  Instead, pay attention to the unsurprising fact that the child is responding in English.

A Modest Proposal

A Modest Proposal

For the Improvement of the Public School System;

Together with a Solution to the Economic Difficulties

Incident to Doing Away with Illegal Immigration;

And an Inducement to Responsible Parenting

by

Isaac Bickerstaff, Jr.

It is a melancholy reality of contemporary American society that the halls of our public schools swarm with children who, sharp, smart, and quick witted though they are by nature, resist the educational pap proffered by their teachers in response to No Child Left Behind, Climb to the Top, the Great Educational Leap Forward, and all other such schemes to improve the educational system. And so the children grow up to hate learning, and end up ignorant of the most elementary facts of life.  Failing in the diligent application of repeated drilling to have their students learn which circle to fill in the Scantron forms of standardized exams, teachers find themselves frustrated into leaving the teaching profession and, incapable of any other kind of work, must either flip hamburgers at their local McDonalds, their livelihood supplemented by public funds for health and welfare, or leave their native country in order to find employment for themselves teaching English in a foreign land, thus becoming a drain either on the economy or on the population of the United States.  Used to the solicitous attention of desperate adults, moreover, the children themselves grow up to become a drag on the economy as they expect public funds to support a life made frivolous by willful ignorance and indolent by the largesse of the public coffer.

I think it is agreed by all parties, that the prodigious number of children who do not learn has a common characteristic.  They are the litter of indigent parents who are themselves the product of a failed educational system, and whose income from honest labor never rises above mere poverty.  From dishonest endeavors, such as theft, robbery, or the selling of illicit drugs, the parents can often derive a larger income, but to the degree that they come by such funds illegitimately, to the same degree they misuse the money on frivolity and dissipation, advantaging themselves and their offspring not at all.  A dismaying consequence of this way of life is that there is no one to take the low paying jobs that would go a-begging in this country were it not for the flood of illegal immigrants who, willing to work for next to nothing and to make a living from their pittance, make a mockery of our national boundaries and of the security system that in theory protects us all.

I am certain that whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and
 easy method of making the children of the indigent sound and useful members of
 the commonwealth, would deserve so well of the public, as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation.  My goal, however, is not just to find useful employment for such children, but also to solve the economic problem entailed by stopping the entrance of the many million illegal immigrants into the country, and in performing both of those services, also to serve as an encouragement to parents to attend to their primary job of ensuring the welfare of their children.

I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration, that it become the policy of this nation that any child born to parents who earn under the national median for household incomes be sent to school only to his or her tenth year of life, after which all such children should enter the labor force at a level of pay half of what is now provided to illegal immigrants, lesser amounts of course offered to female children.  In the four years of schooling that these children would acquire, moreover, I propose that they receive a practical education.  Some skill in reading is necessary so that the child can follow plain instructions; and by the same token some elementary computational skills are essential to determining how many fruit, at so many per box, have been picked in the course of a day's labor.  But schools should endeavor no further intellectual lessons beyond those basic accomplishments.  Instead, teachers should be charged with ensuring that children learn the discipline of hard work.  It is therefore essential that the schools provide children with exercise in picking fruit and vegetables as well as in the mechanism of spinning cotton and wool and of sewing and darning.  Children should become accustomed to the heft of pickaxes and to the exercises essential to mowing lawns, folding clothes, picking up trash, and so many of the other essential tasks of life.

With such useful accomplishments in their skill sets, and without the molly coddling of officious teachers intent on teaching them what is too dull to learn, the children would be ready for the workplace.  Furthermore, the effects of physical training on the health and prowess of the children cannot be underestimated.  With such training, at age ten I would expect a hearty young boy to be an adequate substitute for the illegal laborer, strong enough to lift without much difficulty a fifty pound bag of potatoes fresh from the field in Idaho, or a bushel of apples straight from the orchard in Washington State.  Similarly, I expect a young girl to be adept at all of the household chores now undertaken by foreign and illegal nannies.

A very worthy friend of mine, a true lover of his country, and whose virtues I highly esteem, was lately pleased, in discoursing on this matter, to offer a refinement upon my scheme.  He suggested that insofar as illegal immigrants have recently served as objects of entertainment for hunters along our national borders, it would be possible to reserve some children, trained for two years beyond their tenth, to serve as human prey to substitute for the illegal immigrants whom the nation would no longer need.  It is not improbable that some scrupulous people might be apt to censure such a practice, (although indeed very unjustly) as a little bordering upon cruelty, but I protest that a twelve-year old's being able to range freely through the deserts of the southwest is so signal a privilege and pleasure that it outweighs whatever shadow of cruelty there might be in his being hunted, shot, and mounted for display.

Having responded to the only credible argument against deporting all illegal immigrants and sealing our borders against further incursions by such immigrants—I mean the economic argument succinctly represented by the question, "Who else would do the work?"—I further propose that the Federal Government make better use of the funds now misspent in the effort to teach children how to fill in Scantron forms.  The nation must redirect those funds to the project of policing our borders, building walls, searching out tunnels, and establishing impregnable perimeters.  Such work is far worthier of national attention than the hopeless task of compelling children to learn standard answers to repetitive problems presented via insipid assignments intended to routinize responses on Scantron forms, and would suitably employ all those who under current circumstances become teachers and who, in the scheme thus proposed would no longer be required to perform that thankless task, or leave these shores for employment.

I think the advantages of the proposal which I have made are obvious and many, as well as of the highest importance.  First, it would lessen the need to prepare an army of teachers capable of doing nothing much beyond riding herd on rambunctious children.  Second, it would provide adequate and useful employment to a population of children who now are a mere drag on the national economy.  Third, it would nullify our dependence on foreign workers to do jobs that no one who has gone through our current educational system is willing to undertake.  Fourth, it would enable the nation to redirect its energies to the truly productive task of ensuring the security of our borders.  Equally important, moreover, is a fifth benefit, that it would encourage parents to work so as to raise their income above the national median, thus ensuring that their children will enjoy the new, more homogenous and intellectually challenging educational experience that the schools will provide.

I can think of no one objection, that will possibly be raised against this proposal, unless it should be urged, that the number of people will be thereby much lessened in the nation as the number of immigrants falls to near zero, and as the children die from overwork, malnutrition, and hunting.  This I freely own, and it was indeed one principal design in offering it to the world.  I desire the reader will observe, that I calculate my remedy for this one individual nation of America, and for no other that ever was, is, or, I think, ever can be upon Earth.  Therefore let no man talk to me of other expedients to solve our educational conundrums:  of funding all schools at an equitable level so that the children of the poor are as well served as the children of the rich; of limiting the size of classes so that teachers in poor school districts do not have forty or fifty children per class; of providing aides to teachers in poor school districts where often the population of special needs students is nearly as large as the population of ordinary students; of offering students in poor school districts opportunities to go to museums and theaters, to travel to foreign countries, to engage in the cultural and social life of the nation; of giving students in poor school districts curricula that ask them to think beyond rote responses, and texts and tasks that engage them in real world experiences rather than in stories and problems constructed specifically to exercise the minimal skills tested in standardized tests.

Such visionary approaches to teaching are the detritus of past modes of education that are discarded on the ash heap of history.  Therefore let no person talk to me of these and the like expedients, until he has at least some glimpse of hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them into practice once again.