David B. Shemano wrote: > I will agree with you [i.e., yours truly] as follows. Much of the behavior > we see at college campuses, whether public or private, subsidized or > unsubsidized, is simply a reflection of the age cohort of 18-22 year olds > leaving home and with little responsiblity. Comparatively, we do not see > such behavior in professional programs, where the students are significantly > older.<
That's true. It's unfortunate that this kind of irresponsibility is encouraged, cultivated, and rewarded in some walks of life, e.g., high finance. Some people can earn megabucks by acting like drunken sophomores, using other people's money rather than alcohol. However, I hear they use a lot of cocaine... (I wouldn't know. That drug has always been far out of my league. It seems like god's way of telling you you're too rich.) > However, the point about educational subsidization is about the student on > the margin, the 18-year old who must decide whether to enter the adult world > or go to college.< There's a real problem with this proposition. It presumes that we know who the "marginal student" is ahead of time (just as ignorant employers often assume that they know who the "marginal worker" is ahead of time). The fact is that for large numbers -- perhaps a majority -- of students, no-one knows if they're marginal or not until _after_ they attend a semester or a year of college. Cutting off financial aid to the allegedly marginal masses (as David seems to be advocating) would prevent these students from making this discovery. Note that cutting off this aid would involve cutting off subsidies at the junior and community colleges, which would effectively kill one of the great institutions in the US: people can go to community colleges as a way of cleaning their high school records, getting a fresh start at any point in their lives. Instead of allowing only the well-to-do "marginal" students into college (as David's financial rationing scheme would do), what we should do is to have a special RDK tax, a special levy to prevent the richer marginal students from wasting the time and effort of the people who work at colleges and universities. The richer kids who weren't dumb, lazy, feckless, and otherwise Dubya-like could be given special scholarships, based on merit (e.g., for helping the homeless). The less well-to-do "marginal" students would be discouraged from going to college by the fact that they really need to have income to survive (they can't live off of Daddy's wealth) and going to college is costly in terms of time, preventing them from earning that income. This last part of this plan is how it works at present. A less controversial plan is to allow both the well-to-do and the poorer folks in and then weed them out using higher _academic_ standards. It's like the University of Illinois when I was in high school: they let in everyone who met some minimal criterion and charged rock-bottom fees[*] and then flunked out large numbers during the first semester of the frosh year. I think this system worked pretty well. The more irresponsible students -- the heavy drinkers, etc. -- left quickly. Of course, back then, people didn't want to leave college because the alternative was being drafted. But there are other inducements to going to college nowadays, including an extreme emphasis on getting credentials to gain high salaries. >Furthermore, educational subsidization has the effect of not only distorting >the decision-making for the student on the margin, but also is the major >factor in education cost inflation, which raises the price of college for >everybody and creates debilitating student indebtedness. The point here, to >emphasize, is that when you subsidize something, whether education, mortgages, >unemployment,, etc. there is going to be a tradeoff, and mocking those who >recognize the tradeoff is not going to prove your point.< I mocked only Milton Friedman.[**] He did not believe in trade-offs. There was only _one_ acceptable unemployment rate in his thinking (the so-called "natural" one), for example. If Thatcher hadn't said it first, MF would have shouted out the basic slogan of free-market totalitarianism loud and often: "there is no alternative!" (no alternative to bowing down to the Almighty Dollar). The main reasons for academic price inflation have nothing to do with admitting the less-than-wealthy marginal students into college. It has to do with overhead (legal costs[***] & insurance, etc., etc.) and what William Baumol called the "cost disease of the service sector." On the latter, salaries and wages in academia largely rise in step with those in other sectors (because of competition in the labor-power market) but as in other service sectors, it is very hard to raise labor productivity. This means that unit labor costs ([total wages and benefits and related costs]/[output] = [wage, etc. per worker]/[labor productivity]) rises more than in other sectors. -- Jim Devine / "If heart-aches were commercials, we'd all be on TV." -- John Prine [*] This meant that almost everyone at my relatively well-to-do public high school could claim to go to college, which raised that high school's status. [**] Making fun of Dubya is at this time not mocking him. Rather, it is giving him attention he does not deserve. He should be facing prosecution instead. [***] Perhaps a big tax on lawyers would be a good idea. It could be used to finance public education. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
