Hennessy's View

While everyone was screaming about the rising cost of medical treatment, America’s leftist incubation chambers—colleges and universities—robbed us of our economic future. And the federal government’s misguided student aid program is to blame.

What allows this growth? 

• Increased per student government funding
• Massive private and public debt

Who benefits?

• College administrators
• Unions working on college campuses
• Political causes that college administrators like (liberal)

Who pays?

• Taxpayers (who else?)

Check out these statistics:

• College tuition increased 799% between 1978 and 2007 (source)
• Student loan debt has increased 511% since 1999 (source)
• Government per student increased 246% between 1978 and 2007
• In the past 20 years, college tuition has increased about twice as fast medical costs
• The education bubble makes the housing bubble look like a pimple (source)
• Recent college graduates are no smarter than graduates of 40 years ago (observation)

On that last point, I’m not alone.  From contraryinvesting.com, Brett writes:

Did this increase in spending do any good? Not on the available evidence. Test scores — measuring achievement — have not budged in 40 years. In other words, the additional investment over the last 40 years has been wasted. We might as well have thrown the money down a well.

Read Brett’s piece in its entirety.  The arguments against everyone going to college are important.  Seth Godin raised similar questions in 2010.

Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students.

Check out these graphs from www.mymoneyblog.com:

And Tuition vs. Healthcare

There is great value in a college education, but not at any price.  Not when the lifetime economic value of an education is about to become a net negative.  According to the rating agency Moody’s:

Unless students limit their debt burdens, choose fields of study that are in demand, and successfully complete their degrees on time, they will find themselves in worse financial positions and unable to earn the projected income that justified taking out their loans in the first place.”

Personal finance coach Dave Ramsey shows families how a child can complete a 4-year degree without a penny of debt.  But that formula might not work today. Tuition has gone up 16 percent in the two years since I first heard of Ramsey’s plan.

So what’s Obama’s prescription? 

You guessed it: Obama wants more government spending.  More borrowing.  More forgiveness of debt. 

While some on the right want to vilify students, in most cases, I disagree. Kids born near or after me grew up with “college education” pounded into our heads. 

“You’ll be nothing! without a degree,” we heard.

We scorn people who don’t go to college.  (Look at the recent flap involving St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley.) 

But the government has encouraged colleges to drive their costs through roof. For years, the federal government promised to fill the gap between what a student could afford (according to the government) and what a college charged. 

Seriously.  What if the government made the same deal with car buyers?

The solution isn’t simple.  There’s a big bubble in the higher education market, and it has to burst. Families, students, and governments have no more money to lend.  The ROI on a degree is falling fast. 

Kirsten Winkler of the blog big think shares one alternative to college degrees as credentials.

I see only two possible solutions: we continue to bail out colleges by feeding borrowed money to the bubble, or we unwind our addiction to traditional higher education.

Exit question:  Do we do as Obama says and borrow more money to endow colleges, or do we begin dismantling the “college or death” mantra? Or is there a third way out?

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This is an important conversation in an important race.  Please watch.

Ed talks about regulation, taxes, debt, Race to the Top, and more.

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There’s a “special” school in St. Louis County. Its seniors graduated on last Friday.

How sad it must be for those kids. They’re not graduating from the district’s “normal” schools with their peers. For various reasons, they’ve been relegated to a school for misfits.

Seeing the building makes the bad feelings worse.  It’s a former grade school, crammed inconveniently behind a bank and a Taco Bell. Its Eisenhower era architecture stands out  amidst its Mortgage Boom surroundings like a dandelion on golf course. And the high school kids—some in their early 20s—appear freakishly large in the building.

The clown car impression intensifies inside the gymnasium. Its small, undersized basketball court barely holds the families of sixty or so graduates.

The scene was such a contrast for me.

I graduated with almost 600 other kids. Of them, I knew only a small percentage, really. At my high school graduation in the cavernous Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis – which I and all locals will forever call “The New Cathedral” – we sat in alphabetical order for the first time ever.  I had never met the two girls sandwiching me.  (One of them I would have remembered, trust me.)

I was lucky.  I graduated on time with my peers. I was never set back. I got by with a lot—a lot of misbehavior that earned expulsion for other kids. Like I said, I was lucky.

Or was I?

The ceremony at Fern Ridge High School moved me. Me and everyone around me.

Mr. Chris Oliver, an English teacher moving onto a new career after this year, served as the key note speaker. He talked about the wretched state of factory education in America, of course. He talked about the graduating seniors, too.

And he cried.  He paused to compose himself three, four, five times.

I cried, too.  It’s been a while since I’ve had a job that moved me. Chris’s job surely does.

Or did.

Chris said, “Fern Ridge should be a model for all schools in America.” I think he might be right.

At Fern Ridge, Chris was freed from the strictures of a “safe” curriculum handed down like divine instructions on granite tablets. Instead, this school expected him to use his skills and his heart to reach the students—students who have already rejected the factory model of education.

Chris was free, as he said, to “say something crazy” in his classroom.

That means Chris’s students were free to learn and to think. Fernies, as they’re called, do not memorize and regurgitate. 

After his talk, Chris kicked off a Fern Ridge tradition. Teachers stood, one by one, and read an original Tanka to a student.

More tears, but lots of laughs.

(You can’t read Tankas to every student in a class of 600.)

The administrators and teachers on the dais beamed throughout the ceremony. Why shouldn’t they? I said that this was no factory high school. The kids were no factory products. They were, as one of the Tankas described a girl in the class, round pegs in a square world.

America’s education system couldn’t hold these kids.  Most were too intelligent and passionate to make it in regular schools where conformity, anonymity, and banality earn non-descript praise from a faceless bureaucrat.

Education in America—regular, factory education—banished creativity, expression, and brilliance long ago.  Like all socialist schemes, public education “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd [source].”

Students with the courage to cut through that network of rules and stand above the crowd are sentenced to places like Fern Ridge,  or to Missouri’s Options program, where they can earn a diploma without corrupting the numb kids in the regular schools.

When my son accepted his diploma from the principal, I was proud, of course. I was even more humbled and a embarrassed. Not because my son graduated from an alternative school for kids who refused to conform, but because I didn’t.

Way to go, Ben.

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Register today for Vacation Liberty School.  Here’s 3 reasons why you should:

3.  Most school systems don’t care about liberty; they care about conformity.  The only way kids will learn an appreciation for the blessings of liberty is if their parents send them to schools that put liberty at the center of the cirriculum.  That’s what Vacation Liberty School does.

2.  Many teachers would love to teach more about the blessings of liberty to their skulls full of mush, but they can’t. School boards and idiotic testing mandates prevent them.  So parents who care about liberty need to teach kids about it on their own.  That’s where Vacation Liberty School can help.

1.  Liberty is never more than one generation away from extinction.  So send your kids to Vacation Liberty School this summer. 

* * *

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Politicians don’t seek money.  They seek power.  They use money to acquire power.  Once they have the power, money becomes irrelevant. 

Did you see how states behaved last summer? The “Race to the Top” is all you need to know about the relationship between government money, power, and degradation.

The Race to the Top education initiative dangled cash in front of states.  Most states, including Missouri, bit.  They competed against each other for the privilege of surrendering their sovereignty over education to a DoE overlord.

The fiasco reminded me of a submarine patrol.  We got underway a day early—before our Sea Store cigarettes arrived.  About half the crew smoked.  About ten percent brought their own brands, not available through Sea Stores at $3.00 a carton. 

Cigarettes became very valuable. Those with cigarettes sometimes degraded those who craved cigarettes.  I once saw my Chief Petty Officer perched on a chair barking like a dog for a Benson & Hedges 100. 

Secretaries of US Government departments like seeing the states beg and degrade themselves, too.  The states that demonstrated the most pathetic, degrading, obsequious groveling got the money.  Obama got their school districts.

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