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.
