Real Clear Politics
April 5, 2012
Colleges Skimp on Science, Spend Big on Diversity
By _Michael Barone_ (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/auth
ors/?author=Michael+Barone&id=14827)
How many times have you heard Barack Obama talk about "investing" in
education? Quite a few, if you've been listening to the president at all.
In fact, Americans have been investing more and more in education over the
years, led by presidents Democratic and Republican. But it's become
glaringly clear that we're getting pretty lousy return on these investments.
That's been evident at the K-12 level for a long time. Teacher unions and
education-school types have had custody of most of our public schools for
more than three decades, during which test results and high school graduation
rates have been mostly stagnant.
It has come to the point that Democratic politicians like former New York
City Superintendent Joel Klein, past and current Chicago Mayors Richard M.
Daley and Rahm Emanuel, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Newark
Mayor Cory Booker have taken on the teacher unions.
Obama's education secretary, Arne Duncan, deserves credit for doing a bit
of this, as well. All this, despite the fact that teacher unions funnel
millions of taxpayer-funded dollars into Democratic campaigns.
On higher education, Democrats and many Republicans as well have followed
the same course as on public schools: Shovel in more money, in this case in
the form of Pell grants and subsidized student loans.
College and university administrators have been happy to scoop up all the
money by rapidly raising tuitions and fees. Higher-ed expenses have been
rising much more rapidly than inflation for three decades.
And what has the money been spent on? Some of it presumably goes to
professors in the hard sciences and the great scholars who have made American
universities the best in the world. Well and good.
But many university administrators have other priorities. The University of
California system has been raising tuitions and cutting departments. But,
reports John Leo in the invaluable Minding the Campus blog, its San Diego
campus found the money to create a new post of "vice chancellor for equity,
diversity and inclusion."
That's in addition to what the Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald
calls its "already massive diversity apparatus." It takes Mac Donald 103 words
just to list the titles of UCSD's diversitycrats.
The money for the new vice chancellorship could have supported two of the
three cancer researchers that the campus lost to Rice University in Houston,
a private school that apparently takes the strange view that hard science
is more important than diversity facilitators.
This doesn't just happen on the Left Coast. The University of North
Carolina at Wilmington saved some money by lumping together two science
departments and raised spending on its five diversity-multicultural offices.
But, to quote George W. Bush, is our students learning? Not very much,
concludes the California Association of Scholars in its 87-page study of the
University of California system.
Students aren't required to study American history or Western civilization.
But they're subjected to a lot of political indoctrination by leftist
activists. "Far too many" have not learned to write effectively to read "a
reasonably complex book."
"In recent years, study after study has found that a college education no
longer does what it once did and should do," the report concludes. "Students
are being asked to pay considerably more and get considerably less."
That's the sort of thing that happens when you pump money into an insular
system and don't hold its leaders accountable for results.
Many politicians' instinctive response is to pump in more money. But if
you're stuck in a hole, it's a good idea to quit digging.
Millions of young Americans are living with the results. In a time of
economic stagnation, the degrees they've earned haven't equipped them with
basic
work skills, much less expert knowledge that can command a premium even in
a sluggish market.
And they're saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt,
which -- darn it! -- turns out not to be dischargeable in bankruptcy. They
can get by on partial payments for a while, but interest keeps
accumulating, to the point that Social Security checks may get dunned to pay
for
college.
Glenn Reynolds, proprietor of instapundit.com and a law professor at the
University of Tennessee, says we're watching a higher education bubble that's
just about to pop. That's what happens when you throw a lot of money at
college and university administrators who don't have much common sense.
--
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