End College Athletics Now

The Historiann finds out that her university, Colorado, is giving its new football coach 1.5 million per year because that's the market and is outraged. She's right. Higher Education is supposed to be about education and yet some how or another the professional administrators and those who are assimilated to their bizarro world view "successful" athletics, climbing walls, CETLs, and other "learner" success crap means excellence in education.

We are going the wrong way. It's time to end technocratisme and end the notion that teachers and other educators don't know how to educate.

The Headless Horseman

I've mentioned on more than one occasion that one of the real problems of higher education is  bloated and over-paid administrations. From Marc Bousquet comes the news that some high schools are doing away with their administrations in an attempt to democratize school governance. This tactic and/or strategy needs to be implemented more widely.

It's not just that administrators are grossly overpaid, have used their power to increase the number of administrators at the expense of educators, and generally louse up the joint; it's that they are more interested in showing the necessity of administration by introducing all manner of badly thought ought blueprints for the future, which don't work and cause the rest of endless agony. It's also that they are just so damned bad at administering. Seriously, I know of various ad hoc faculty who are waiting to find out if they will teach next semester when their current semester ends in three weeks because the administrator hasn't contacted them. Even worse, when asked directly when it might please the king do deign and tell his vassals when he and or she will make the decision no definite answer is forth coming.

This state of uncertainty, as you might imagine, means that morale is low as the semester draws to a close and that there will be only limited time to prepare for next semester's courses. Indeed, the deadline, so I am told, for ordering next semester's books was November 1.

Think about that if you would.

This situation and others like it are whats missing in the discussion of educational reform: The very real harm caused by increasing the power and authority of administrators over educators. If Arne Duncan and President Obama want to do something positive, as opposed to doing something because something needs to be done, they should work on re-balancing the power differential between administrators and educators.

I said this before and I'll say it again, all you educational reformer professionals tell us how you  plan on giving educators as educators a seat at the table when the discussion turns to reforming schools? Until administrators and know-nothing do-gooders, like Bill Gates, are forced to include educators in the process of reform, nothing beneficial is going to come of it.

Bloat and Rot Start at the Top

There is a faculty strike out in California. The faculty are on strike because 1) they have been denied raises previously negotiated 2) higher fees and fewer classes for students. Who is responsible for this mess? Also:

There is also residual anger over the hiring of San Diego State president Elliot Hirshman last summer at a salary of $400,000 -- $350,000 in state funds and $50,000 from the school's fundraising foundation -- as well as a $1,000 monthly car allowance and free housing. Hirshman's predecessor was paid about $300,000 a year.

However

Jane Wellman, of the nonprofit Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, said, "These are tough times for higher education. The reality is that there is just not enough money to meet all the demands. It is a function of what happened with public revenues.

"Nothing is sacred in this environment," she said. "But cutting the chancellor's office will not solve money problems of this magnitude. No way."

Sure, but of course, it's a first step. let's say they cut all administrative leadership staff, president, chancellor, provost, deans, assistant deans, vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, junior assistant vice provost, etc, by 50% and take away half of their program assistants and reassign them to faculty, plus no car allowances, no free housing, and no guaranteed travel grants, they'd have to compete just like faculty do.

These steps would be an important first step in reigning in an out of control administration and its unnatural "compensation" packets, which would, or -- in any event -- could, foster a sense of shared responsibility and sacrifice between and among students, faculty, staff, and admin. The next step, obviously, is to raise taxes and fund higher education at an appropriate level.  

Administrative Bloat and Incompetence

This post on the role of administrative bloat as a destructive force in higher education is right on target; I would add that, in my experience howsoever good at gaming the system administrators are they are not smart. Small minded and vindictive, more like.

Bah

Adjunctivitis in spades. Posting will be light

It's Only Business

Biddy Martin, Chancellor of the UW-Madison, leaves soon for the presidency of Amherst. She recently was conniving with Gov. Walker to radically alter the UW's governance. The idea was, I think, bad enough under any circumstance but it was ruinously reckless under the crooked and incompetent Walker Administration. In any event, the move failed. Martin claims this failure has nothing whatsoever to do with her leaving. Either she is a liar or a rotten human being. If her intent was regardless of the outcome of the changes to the UW system to leave, she really oughtn't have undertaken a radical reform she had no intention of overseeing. If, on the other hand, she was stringing Amherst along in the hopes that the changes would take place, she lied. Either way good riddance.

She earned 437k here plus perks and will get 500k there plus perks. That's an absurdly large salary to say nothing of the perks. She is everything that is wrong with higher education and education more generally: inflated salaries for disingenuous administrators whose every move is undertaken with an eye toward their next and higher paying position. Meanwhile, the worker bees laboring in the classrooms find their security disappearing and the salaries either stagnating or in decline.

Cat Out of The Bag

We all know that reading and education are bad for you and unnecessary for the least amongst us. And we know that

[w]hile government and laws take care of the security and the well being of men in groups, the sciences, letters, and the arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains which weigh men down, snuffing out in them the feeling of that original liberty for which they appear to have been born, and make them love their slavery by turning them into what are called civilized people.  Need has raised thrones; the sciences and the arts have strengthened them. You earthly powers, cherish talents and protect those who nurture them (1).  Civilized people, cultivate them.  Happy slaves, to them you owe that refined and delicate taste you take pride in, that softness of character and that urbanity of habits which make dealings among you so sociable and easy, in a word, the appearance of all the virtues without the possession of any.

Matthew Yglesias has the solution for the next generation of cooks and gardeners:

[t]his is where I think education does get back into the picture. Most of these are jobs that require some skills. Personal services generally exist on a spectrum between “things a person might hire someone else to do because it’s a pain in the ass” and “things a person might hire someone else to do because it’s difficult to do it well.” You hire a maid because you don’t want to clean the toilet. You go to Komi because you can’t cook as well as Johnny Monis. There’s more money and prestige to be had as you move up the maid-Monis spectrum and there’s a need for some kind of mechanism to help people move up it. That sounds like “education” to me, though not necessarily the kind of education we’re handing out.

If we would just stop teaching people to read and write they could accept that they need to train themselves to take ever better care of the rich and the hive would be without grumbling.

Eduction Reform

This post does a nice job of illustrating the kind of magical thinking involved in reforming the non-broken system of higher education evidenced in this WaPo article.  It's unclear to me who wrote the last but who ever it was does seem a bit confused.  I'll only add that I have worked in CCs and remediation efforts pay huge dividends and face-to-face instruction is always preferable.

Snake Oil Effect

Over the weekend I finished reading Richard Overy's The Twilight Years, a very well-done discussion of intellectual movements in interwar Britain. One of his points is that the response to the perceived crises during this period relied on  all manner of ill-informed and inapt use of science in the hopes of finding solutions.  Eugenics relied on misunderstood notions of race and biology, for example.[1] Overy sheds a great deal of light on this tendency in a variety of contexts rand the books is well worth reading.

In this vein, Matthew Yglesias, whose grasp of economics is open to debate, argues of people interested in educational reform in response its "crisis" that he

know[s] a lot of people, especially people working in or around academia, find this kind of talk unpleasant. But people thinking about education really do need to confront the Baumol problem.

The Baumol Effect or Disease, as it is actually called, for those not interesting in clicking, is that educators', artists', and others' salaries rise without any connection to increased productivity. Leaving aside, except for this comment, the fact that there is no connection between increased productivity and increased salaries as evidenced by the stagnant wages among more "productive" workers, there is no reason on earth to think of education as an issue whose reform is best served by the application of economists' paradigms.

Indeed, given that the rise of thinking about social and political arrangements like an MBA or an economist hasn't been especially helpful, see, for example, the current state of America's economy, which -- after thirty years or so of Neoliberalism -- is a mess. There is every reason to accept that thinking about social and political arrangements in this manner is counter productive, if your goal is a more equatable and substantively democratic society.

It is also the case that as applied to higher education the assumption here is that educators' salaries drive costs. It is now no secret that, particularly in the humanities, administrators rely increasingly on adjunct faculty to lower costs, the number of students per teacher continues to rise, faculty are increasingly pressured to use "distance" learning to increased their "productivity," resources dedicated to faculty research is in decline, even as faculty members are expected to engage in more service and administrative tasks without any decrease in their other responsibilities.

It's not, in other words, that people find this kind of argument "unpleasant" but rather they find it to one side of the problem and one more example of people who know nothing about education guiding its reform in ways that are counter productive.

When you get right down to it, rather like Scott Walker, Yglesias, and his ilk are blaming the workers for most of the problems people like Walker, Yglesias, and his ilk caused and offering more of the same snake oil as the necessary cure.

[1] For a really useful discussion of Nazi racial science and eugenics more generally see Eric Ehrenreich's The Nazi Ancestral Proof. In the interest of full disclosure, I know Ehrenreich and spent a great deal of time with him in Berlin while he was researching and am mentioned in the acknowledgments.

A Truly Progressive Solution

Unlike some people's pretend concerns for make believe problems, real progressive focus on historical success and solutions that work:



Or more bikes and less blather.

Video via. Bikes and liberation via, which I used for my second favorite 19th century lecture: Women on Bicycles.

Jonah Goldberg Still Dumb

Recently, Goldberg attempts to make sense of the relationship between Liberalism and the failure of American Education.  He claims that

[i]n 2008-2009, the  District of Columbia spent $1.3 billion dollars on 45,858 students. That is slightly less than the entire GDP of Belize. In 2007, 8 percent of DC eighth graders were able to do math at the eighth grade level. Clearly what’s needed is more money!

According to this

 the DC Public Schools gross budget for fiscal year 2008 as of October 1, 2007

was $949,087,062. Goldberg doesn't provide a link for his claim so  maybe there is another number out there, but he appears to have misplaced a decimal or so.

He continues

Yes, yes, the horrid state of American education is an American problem, and to that extent we’re all to blame in some abstract sort of way. But is there another major area of American public policy that is more screwed up and more completely the fault of one ideological side? 

 In 1980 Milwaukee began an experiment with charter schools, vouchers and all that right wing gobbledygook. The system created redundant schools, drained funding from the public schools, and more generally, sought to use market-based reforms to fix something that isn't a market.  The net result? Vouchers and the rest don't work.  How many school districts have had to deal with this kind of nonsense day after day? How much of the Conservative rage about education has funneled itself into this specific set of policy prescriptions? All of it.  The news that vouchers et alia didn't work led long timer supporter, Diane Ravich, of vouchers and similar reforms to conclude that these kinds of reforms don't work and are actually undermining successful reform efforts.

Ravich also argues that

Teachers feel, with justification, that they are being scapegoated and blamed whenever test scores don't go up. My book appeared at a time when there was only one narrative about school reform, which privileged the views of businessmen, lawyers, politicians, foundation executives, and government officials who are imposing their ideas without regard to the wisdom and experience of those who must implement them.

While Goldberg frets that 

[i]n the last few presidential elections I’ve heard more from Democrats — by far — complaining about leaky school roofs, cracking paint, and the need for more computers in the classroom than I’ve heard about the fact it’s easier to find and train a brontosaurus than it is to fire a horrible teacher.

It really is all the teachers fault and we need more market based solutions.

He then fumes that

I’m sure not that many people follow the DC education controversy, but in a nutshell: Mayor Adrian Fenty lost his reelection bid in large part because he tried, through Michelle Rhee the education chancellor, to fix the schools over the objections of the teachers’ unions. Fenty’s opponent and the liberal black establishment turned it into a racial issue (surprise!) and now education reform in DC is seriously in doubt. 

Rhee's favored solution was firing teachers.  The Teacher's Union, indeed any union, has as one of its main priorities protecting its members from being fired.  Goldberg seems not to have paid attention to the past 30 years of American history, during which the lessons of PATCO went unlearned by "centrists" while movement conservatives sought to destroy more unions, deregulate more industries, and, in the end, succeeded in screwing up the country.

He concludes with anguished cry over the unfairness of it all.  Because  if

you listen to these endless seminars and interviews on NBC and its various platforms, I never seem to hear Matt Lauer or David Gregory ask “Isn’t the education crisis a failure of liberalism?” After all, liberals insist all social problems can be reduced to root causes. Well, they’ve been in charge of the roots for generations and look at the mess they’ve made. Look at it.
Largely because of the Iraq war,  Katrina and Bush’s unpopularity,  a host of liberal intellectuals pronounced conservatism to be dead. The decrepit state of American education is a far more sweeping, profound and lasting indictment of the very heart of liberalism and yet the response from everyone is “Let’s give these guys another try!”

Actually, no. The problems we face today are  the result of the Neoliberal, Reaganite, Glibbertarian, and Thatcherite crap that has dominated policy making for the past 30 years. Starve the state of revenue, destroy unions, blame workers, traduce the state's ability to do what it has been doing successfully for since at least 1933, and deregulate.  What has this led to?  Look out your window.

In a sign of their seriousness about tackling education reform, when a recent study came out that showed that Head Start made little or no difference in academic achievement, Conservative demanded its immediate dismantlement and used as a stick to beat the stupid Liberals and the Liberal Liberalness.  Of course, they missed the fact that individuals who had the pleasure of Head Start did better by other measure, time in jail, etc, than their peers who did not benefit.


Can we all do better in the process of continuing to reform our educational system?  Yes we can.  Does this require jettisoning Neoliberal, Reaganite, Glibbertarian, and Thatcherite critiques of a by and large successful system?  Yes, it does.  We cannot afford to let these flying monkeys back into power. No, we can't

And as a bonus, remember that Yglesias wants the same market-based, Olive-Gardenesque reforms and thinks that firing teachers is the first step to nirvana.  It ain't.


UPDATE:
Goldberg's claim about 8% is in error.  In their self assessment DC schools have a 48% in "elementary math" on a nationally administered test they have, for 2008-09, 11%.  They did, it's true, have 8% on the nation test in 2007-08, but they improved their scores.

Remember "Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance"

Professors as Profiteers

Megan McArdle blames the high and increasing cost of higher education on state intervention into the market.  Who would have thought.  She also writes that

[b]ut beyond the high default rates[on student loans], consider what a student loan does.  In the past, college degrees conferred higher incomes on those who earned them.  But almost all of that surplus went to the student rather than the college, because aside from a small number of extremely affluent families, the students were young and did not have that much cash.  If colleges wanted to expand their market, college tuition was constrained to what an average student, or their family, could pay.

Introducing subsidized loans into the picture allowed students to monetize that future income now. It's hardly surprising that colleges began to claim more and more of the surplus created by their college degree. Think about it this way: if colleges create an extra million in lifetime salary, you're theoretically better off if you pay them the discounted present value of $999,999 in order to earn that extra million.

What does a student loan do?  Pays for an education which sometimes leads to a better paying job but the "surplus" created by the better paying job isn't returned to the university so tuition had to go up to pre-capture the potential surplus and this was only possible because the state guaranteed student loans.

Have I got that right? McArdly is blaming the capitalist drive for profit maximization for increasing tuition costs? Sure the state had to step in to allow the capitalists' desire for more profit to work, which is a big glibertarian sin, but the universities are acting like good capitalists.

Am I the only one who finds this less than compelling?

Here's a slightly different suggestion about why the costs of education have gone up at least at state schools declining state support, increased enrollment, etc combined with an increase  in the size of university administrations.

Thoughtful Critique

After  rehashing a brief blog post on, among other things, a documentary about education that, for all Yeglesias knows, either does or doesn't improperly compare Finnish students to American students, Yglesias pivots to with a now patented

That said, this kind of thing can be taken too far.

What is being taken to far?  Reading blog posts? Making inapt comparison? Running down the teaching profession? Concern about syntax? Making informed critiques of badly thought out arguments about education reform?

There’s a newish library branch in my neighborhood that’s quite nice looking. I don’t think anyone expects its existence to transform the radically transform the educational experience of children living in the area.

No, of course not.  All kids have access to the computers, books, research material, low-cost or free enrichment programs, magazines, professional aid in finding books that libraries provide.  Well maybe one or two don't.  I betcha that the none of the parents of the kids will  benefit from the various programs the library runs for adult literacy, aiding non-native speakers of English improve their language skills, that tiny fraction of adults without computer skills gain them, or whatever other unnecessary public goods libraries provide their patrons.

And I bet reasonable people could disagree as to whether or not it made any real sense to build the library in the first place. But the library is there nonetheless, and the city is running it.

Damn it, if only the reasonable people who stood on either side of the issue had the opportunity to discuss the library it might not even be there to not provide the unneeded benefits to kids and adults.  Instead, the busybodies downtown crammed the library down his throat and then they have the temerity to run the damn thing; run it right into the ground, I bet.

So given that the city is running the library, we should try to run the library well. From the little things to the big things to the things that are core to the library’s function (deciding which books to stock) to the things that are peripheral (cleaning the floors in the bathroom) it all makes some kind of difference.

Yeah, hear that downtown busybodies no more reductions in funding due to Neoliberal, Reaganite, and Glibertarian tax policies.  Hire a janitor or two.  Oh and as by the way, I betcha that all those fancy rules and regulations about who is and who isn't a librarian are just to protect the librarian industry from fair competition.

And for any given quantity of resources allocated to the library, we should be doing our best to ensure that those resources are well spent. Whether or not there are other problems in the community that it’s beyond the capacity of the library to overcome, the public is still well within its rights to demand that the library be the best library it can be.

Yes, yes they are right to demand that. Although, as seems obvious from Yglesias' tone here, the state will screw it up because of, no doubt, its ignorance of market forces.

And that’s the real issue here. It’s great for skeptics about this or that proposed reform to how public schools operate to challenge the ideas on the merits. But the idea that it’s somehow unfair to be pressing for a more optimal allocation of resources is the flipside of destructive libertarian nihilism about the possibility of better-managed public agencies. And it actually makes less sense. If you want to argue (as I think liberals do) that it’s worth investing money in public schools, then you have to accept the corollary that the quality of the schools is important independently from other social issues.

Hear that Strawmen Liberals  whose voices ring in the confines of Yglesias' brain pan?  If you want to fix things stop just throwing money at things and start being more respectful of arguments for educational reform that hinge on turning schools into Olive Gardens.

Or get with the technology gurus, like Bill Gates who predicts that

Five years from now on the Web for free you'll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university."
A year at a university costs an average $50,000, the Microsoft founder and Harvard dropout said last month. The Web can deliver the same quality education for $2,000.

 Don't just sit back and point to all the non-Harvards where education is cheaper or worry about who or what will be giving the lecture, hint: Robots, or what canned lectures might mean to the future of education:

Or point out that in any number of classrooms all across this land of waving wheat hard-working teachers, administrators, professors, and others are working to improve education through theory and praxis.  Be respectful, damn it.

He starts off with someone else's informed critique of a program for educational reform and then sternly warns of the dangers of spending on social goods without the stern discipline of market forces, and concludes that people who are concerned about educational reform need to be more knowledgeably when they criticize educational reform. See how it all hangs together?  I don't either.

Tour Guides

You know why regulating tour guides is worth the effort?  Because the people who make use of their services are, generally speaking, from out of town and are not going to be in a position, more often than not, to wait around and file complaints and then come back to testify at the trials of those who have engaged in "abusive practices."  This means, it seems to me, that the abusive practices will be in play for much longer than they ought, if not forever.  If the regulators are underfunded, regulations rarely enforced or badly written this is an argument for funding, enforcement, and rewriting not for babies and bath waters.

Furthermore, it seems to me that if you want to make the argument that neither the state nor the tour guide industry has an interest in seeing to it that visitors to the seat of the Federal Government in these United States are not screwed, blued, and tattooed by incompetent tour guides, you might maybe want to consider the importance of visiting the seat of the Federal Government in these United States as it concerns continuing education in matters of some relevance, to say nothing of the blow to the Federal Government of these United States' reputation by those who were screwed, tattooed, and blued as well as those they related the tale of being screwed, tattooed, and blued.

You might also consider that, oddly enough despite their general failure to be like Olive Garden, our non-Olive-Garden institutions of higher education have been busy training individuals in public history for lo these many years, almost as if these institutions of higher learning were aware that there was a need for individuals trained in providing accurate, assessable, and interesting histories of the various sites of historical interest scattered hither and yon.

Granted, of course, that if the tour guide industry were to set about recruiting well-trained and well-educated tour guides their bottom lines might suffer, which is to say it might not be economically efficient to hire well-trained and well-educated tour guides, but, then again, having well-trained and well-educated tour guides might prove to be a boost for the tour guide industry. And, additionally, when did economic efficiency become the be all and end all of life on earth?  1976? 1980?

Attacks on regulatory regimes that rely on the "universal acid" arguments of Cato, AEI, etc, legitimate the universal acid of Cato, AEI, etc. The topic under consideration here is the need and ability of the state to intervene in the market to reduce abusive, incompetent, or dangerous practices and, in so doing, protect workers as workers and citizens as consumers. Should an industry capture the state, which oddly enough seems almost never to result in regulations that provide protection for either workers or citizens, then -- by golly -- let's rewrite the regulations.

Then again in a Ygelsian world retrospective prosecution is better than prophylactic regulation because the free market might work and if it doesn't other underfunded enforcement agencies might maybe prosecute. Unless, of course, they have been captured by the wealthy and the powerful, which -- of course -- won't happen.

And, relatedly, economic efficiency is not the proper measure of the rationality of having more than one, two or even three quality quarterbacks or nearly anything else of importance.  Consider, for example, the Pittsburgh  Steelers or poets. Indeed, it is possible to argue that focusing on economic efficiency when it is inapt, which it almost always is, is a Neoliberal, Reaganite, and (perhaps) Glibertarian attempt to convince folks that all issues are best debated and understood in terms of economic efficiency when, in fact, many, if not all, issues large and small have nothing whatsoever to do with economic efficiency. Consider the death penalty or whether your butt looks big in those jeans.

Being Absurdly Rich is Not the Same as Being Super Absurdly Rich

Some guy who makes a bunch of money complains that he doesn't make enough money to live like somebody who makes considerably more money than he makes because Obama is a poopy-head, or something like that.  In the various tooing and frooing of the intertubes and their related webs lots of people are accused of being looters and lots of other people are doubled over in laughter at the oddness of some guy who makes a great deal of money complaining that he can't afford the stuff that some other guy who makes a lot more money has.  Some other other guy makes the wholly obvious point:

September 18, 2010 at 11:39 am I had to rewrite this post so you could read it directly Mr. Henderson. I originally had it as a reply to a guy named Justin Case, but I feel the need to say it to you and the people who follow your logic directly. It’s actually more adressed to them in fact:
Read the article again, people. The gist of it is this guy is whining that his GARDENER and his HOUSEKEEPER will suffer and you are CRYING for him??? Shame on your greedy little hearts. He’s going to have to give up extra lessons for his kid? He may have to *gasp* enroll them in PUBLIC SCHOOL??? Will the tragedy never end for him? I love the (implied) impossibility of finding a home with a lower mortgage in a less chic area (by the way, before you hop on your fear stallions, not everything that is “less chic” is a “cesspool of seething drug crime”. Even in Chicago). I adore the attack on “Marxism”.
There’s been an argument that the rest of us attack guys like Henderson because we are jealous; because we ENVY them. No one ENVIES this putz. We PITY him for his tremendous effort to cling to his undeserved entitlement issues. This isn’t an “increase” in taxes. It’s a roll back.
Let me explain a “roll back” like this (in hopes to put the whole argument to bed): you get a coupon from the supermarket and now cereal is cheaper. You love your coupon, but it has an expiration date printed on it. One day the coupon EXPIRES. Naturally, you cry “Marxism!!!” at the top of your lungs and sue the supermarket, smearing them at every turn for their massive unfairness. Wait… you DON’T cry “Marxism!!!” at the top of your lungs and sue the supermarket, smearing them at every turn for their massive unfairness? Then, please, shut up. Whiner. The tax rate is going BACK to what it WAS. Was this guy BORN in 2001? If not, he survived prior to the roll back.
Lastly… turbo tax? How much crack is he smoking? Invest in an accountant (they are deductible, you know) and learn how to make your money create something as far as jobs (involve friends, assuming you have some, it’ll be fun) and guess what? Your tax deductions will magically offset the losses at this “Marxian” (really? None of you readers see this sloganism as tired and lazy? Really?) “increase”. I mean, I don’t make 250k a year. I only make a fraction of that. Yet I have the common sense to employ an accountant (not a fancy one either. Nice implication, there, that those are the only kind worth having)for the hard stuff. I’ve gone from paying taxes for my contract work to (QUITE legally) getting refunds.
The real takeaway here is this guy Henderson spent a big wad on a good education, got a worthy job with it, then decided his education was over. He didn’t need to adapt. He didn’t need to learn how to manage his money. He was all set because he was better than the rabble in college and he is by default better now. He’s the high school jock who is still living his winning TD while working at the Jiffy Lube; the 275 pound homecoming queen who is watching Oprah. He’s lazy about adapting his ACTUAL life by CONTINUING to learn.
And you who pity him are equally lazy. Keep pointing your fingers at us who don’t, but we make FRACTIONS of what he’s making, work just as many hours (if not more often doing physically taxing labour) and make ends meet without crying. This is pathetic to listen to. OUR money goes to ACTUAL survival and you want to cry because his GARDENER is possibly going to suffer? Perspective. Please.

 There are other equally highlarryious rejoinders and comment threads strewn from one end of the Intertubes to the other. It is, in short, a battle to the death between John Galt and the looters.  For what it is worth the looters win the argument but not the policies put in place.

Higher Education and The Perils of Profit

Let's call it the Rockefeller rule:

 The Senate investigates:

"There is much that we don't know," the Iowa Democrat said, citing gaps in the data surrounding graduation and employment rates, spending, and student-loan defaults. 

The industry starts to clean up its act:

As federal scrutiny of for-profit colleges tightens, two prominent proprietary institutions have decided to discontinue the practice of enrolling students who do not have a high-school diploma or a GED but who pass a basic-skills test that allows them to qualify for federal student aid.

 Partnerships collapse

California's community-college system has canceled a controversial agreement that would have allowed students at some colleges to earn credit for discounted online courses at Kaplan University.
The 112-campus community-college system is severely overcrowded, and officials saw the November agreement as a way to make it easier for students to get classes they need. For Kaplan, the agreement promised a boost of credibility and a ready pool of new students, who would be able to take certain online courses at a 42-percent discount.
But at a time of intense scrutiny of for-profit colleges, the arrangement between the nation's largest public-college system and a prominent for-profit college drew complaints from faculty groups and others. Critics argued the system was endorsing Kaplan, and they said it could be difficult for students who transferred to the state's public universities to receive credit for Kaplan courses.
. . .
Some who had criticized the agreement cheered the decision to cancel it, saying that even at a discount, the Kaplan courses were a bad deal for students. Community-college courses in California cost $26 per credit hour, the lowest in the country, while Kaplan's discounted courses would have cost about $216 per credit hour.

 The two colleges are Corinthian and Kaplan.  Kaplan is part of the Washington Post empire and the only part that is profitable.  Recently, and I am sure there is no connection, the Post came out in favor more private education and less regulation of the same.


Image via.
There is a, no doubt better, discussion of the same issue here.