Biden Cancels Student Loan Debt

 

Joe Biden has unilaterally announced $300 million dollars in student loan forgiveness.

This is a bad idea. It takes from the poor and gives to the rich. Those who could not afford university in the first place must now pay for those who could. Shop hands and factory workers are subsidizing doctors and lawyers.

Further, we have too many people going to university. We need more skilled trades. Sending so many people to university simply unnecessarily raises the qualifications expected for white collar jobs. 

And more and more of what is taught at university now is useless. I do not mean the humanities, as such, not the proverbial degree in Ebnglish lit, which is of immense social value, but I do mean the social sciences, gender and cultural studies, which are purely political indoctrination, and then pop culture courses on things like the history of rap music, Armenians in film, or the like. Pop culture is worth studying, but in such courses, by trying to be contemporary, the students start out knowing more than the teacher. So they are a waste of time in the university setting. 

Many technical or scientific courses present the same problem, and are generally better suited to a technical college. When technology or science is moving fast, by the time one has finished a four-year degree, what one learned in years one and two is probably obsolete. Worse—your professor must have spent nine years or more getting a Ph.D. By then he is so out of touch that almost everything he knows is wrong.

The better approach is to snag two foundation years, then keep learning on the job. If necessary, night courses online.

With so many going to university who are not really suited to university and the life of the scholar, much taught in university could be, should be, and previously was taught in high school. Now there is almost always, for example, a first year remedial writing course.

On top of this, whenever the government puts more money into tuition or higher education subsidies, the universities have the temptation to simply raise their fees. If the average middle class family could afford $5,000, and the government will give them $5,000 for university, why not hike the fees to $10,000? The cost of tuition has been rising for years at an indefensible rate, far more than the rate of inflation. The money ends up not helping kids or families, but in the pockets of an army of university bureaucrats.

This may be exactly what is intended: this is the Democratic Party’s base. But a better plan, if this is not graft, would be a system of vouchers for two years at either university or technical college, along with carefully audited state schools that would provide education for no more than the vouchers pay.

The Poison of Credentialism

Our current society is afflicted with the disease of credentialism and professionalism. More and more specialized education is being demanded generation by generation for almost any job.

I have long thought this was mostly due to the GI Bill and its equivalents in the years after the Second World War. At about that point, going to college developed a huge new cachet.

But it occurs to me, in the recent controversy about private care homes in Canada, that there is a second factor, at least as important. The influence of the GI bill, after all, should have subsided in a generation or two. But credentialism and higher ed has only grown and grown.

I think a second factor, perhaps a more important factor, is the growth of government. And not just government growth, but the growing attractiveness of government work. This seems to me to have kicked off, in Canada, in the Sixties, when the Pearson government allowed government workers to unionize and to strike, and started giving them big pay raises at regular intervals. Similar things seemed to happen at about the same time in the US and UK.

This violated an ancient principle of democratic government. The traditional understanding was that, if you joined the government service, you were sacrificing the chance of high pay in return for job security. A fair enough trade.

As of Confederation, civil servants were actually not permitted to vote. To allow this was seen as self-dealing. Now they were not just allowed to vote, but allowed to set their own pay levels. For both sides at any negotiating table within the civil service are civil servants, and both benefit from a pay raise. In private industry, the employers will resist because they may lose profits, or market share. In government, there is no such annoying friction.

As a result, it has over the years since become significantly more profitable to work for the civil service than in the private sector. The civil service has become, in effect, the ruling class.

Traditionally, government jobs, not depending on meeting any customer’s or client’s needs, as private operations must, tend instead to hire based on “qualifications.” This is seemingly inevitable, and honourable: in ancient China, it produced the Confucian examination system. It is the way to hire on merit.

But it has produced its own problems, now that government work is so attractive. Since the pay is much higher, everyone wants to work for government, and so qualifications, and higher and higher qualifications, become greatly valued, even in the private sector. Because in any sector, people will still hold out hope for that possible government job.

As a result, for many jobs, perhaps virtually all, the required qualifications far exceed what is actually needed to competently do the job.

What happens in the case of a job, like caregiver in a rest home, for which any training of real practical value would take perhaps four weeks, yet the competition for the best jobs, those working in government-run homes, prompts the requirement for a two-year diploma or a four-year degree or more?

Several things. First, in the colleges and universities offering such formal qualifications, you must stretch four weeks of content over two years. You are therefore consistently pitching the job to the least naturally talented in the field. You are weeding out the more competent.

Second, and often as an alternative, you find the need to pad out the curriculum with irrelevancies. But what irrelevancies? Politics is the natural remedy. The politics of the field. Since those designing the curriculum will be those already in the field, this is what will seem most useful to them. Most of the trainee’s time in class may therefore be spent on an ideological indoctrination, into positions that favour the interests of that occupational group. Into class consciousness, and an awareness of class interests.

This is what is known elsewhere as a cartel, a conspiracy against the interests of the general public. Just putting two tradesmen together in a room, Adam Smith observes, is going to produce such schemes. Imagine putting hundreds together in a classroom for several years.

Third, the cost of getting an unnecessary education tends to exclude the poor from the given field. Not only do the poor therefore get poorer, while the rich get richer; this also means that the field is selecting not on competence, but on inherited privilege. The public suffers poorer service.

This is surely a problem in any profession. It is an especially serious problem in professions that in reality require special talents rather than significant formal training: in the vocations. For example, professionalizing has been visibly devastating for journalism. In the old days, kids became journalists out of high school, because they were independent-minded and could write. And they were worth reading. Now these bright poor kids have nowhere to go, and the rest of us have nothing to read worth reading.

Professionalism has been equally devastating to teaching. The ability to teach, like the ability to write, is not something that can be taught. It is a gift of the spirit.

I expect the same is happening with nursing and caregiving. Compassion cannot be learned in a classroom.

Medical doctors no doubt need their specialized knowledge; but perhaps nowhere is creeping professionalism more damaging than among the social sciences. Among social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and the like.

Happily, there are definite signs that the high-tech revolution is breaking this pervasive form of priestcraft. At the same time, it seems necessary to end the right to strike within the civil service, and have civil service pay rates set by an independent panel to be a fixed percentage of private sector salaries for the same job description.

The Post-Education Academy

I see my old alma mater, Queen’s University, is advertising for two new faculty members in my old department, Religion. One is for an expert in “Religion and Social Justice.” A full faculty position—that means at least three courses per term. The other is for an authority on “Contemporary Jewish Religion and Globalized Identities.”

Back in my day, when you took a course in religion, you studied religion: Buddhism, Judaism, Islam. Now you study politics.

I find this entirely disturbing. To be honest, it makes me feel physically ill. One of the reasons I majored in religion when I did was because it seemed to be the one place where you could escape contemporary political jive and groupthink and cultural biases and study the eternal things, the things that are really important, from a crosscultural perspective. Now that last portal to true learning is apparently slammed shut.

Not incidentally, when you study “Religion and Social Justice,” you are studying religion from an entirely modern and Western perspective.

This is especially troublesome because academia is profoundly conservative. If you set up a chair or a department in some area, that area will necessarily persist for the rest of that person's career, because their career depends on it. And they have tenure. And they then get to choose their own replacement. Accordingly, once a bad idea is bought into, it is hugely hard to get it out. Marxism continues to be all the rage in academia, and still growing in influence, forty years after the Berlin Wall fell, and 65 years after Khrushchev publicly revealed the sins of Stalin. Nobody takes Freud seriously in the real world of psychiatry--yet his theories, long disproved, still dominate whole departments in the Humanities.

It will take generations to repair this blunder, if we ever do.

And the last sentence on the Religion department web page is “We are situated on traditional Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territory.”

Which is an ahistorical lie. When the French founded Fort Frontenac, the nearest Anishinaabe (Algonquin) settlement would have been over 160 km away, in Quebec past Renfrew. The nearest Hadenosaunee (Iroquois) settlement would have been over 130 km in the opposite direction, around Syracuse, NY. Either group might have passed through, but it would have been a very long journey, of weeks, on foot without roads or by canoe. So they would not have come by often. Certainly neither would have recognized any rights of the latter to the land.

I see other departments have gone just as political, and, apparently, hard left. Geography is seeking a faculty member who can teach “Black Geographies,” a cross-appointment with the department of Gender Studies. The Philosophy department is advertising a position in “Philosophy of Race.” As if there ever was such a thing, outside of Nazi Germany. Political Studies wants profs in the areas of “Indigenous Politics,” “Gender and Politics,” and “Politics of Race and US Politics.”

It is not as though these are just the most egregious examples picked from a larger list, either. In each of these departments, these are the ONLY positions advertised.

The current state of the academy, it seems, is beyond parody. And this is an old established school with supposedly high standards, not some diploma mill.

Where is one to go any more to get an education?

And how did we come to be so racist that race (and gender) is now the only thing we see? 

Dead Poets' Society

Students at Yale have just presented a petition complaining that too many of the poets in the English literature curriculum are dead white males. Students at Seattle University have just succeeded in forcing the Dean of Western Civ to go on administrative leave, on the grounds that Western Civ involves too much Western Civ.

I almost want to agree with them. I sometimes think of myself as the original protestor at how culturally narrow the traditional humanities curriculum is—I was arguing this way back in the early Seventies. That's why I ended up, having started as an English major, majoring in Comparative Religion. Comparative Religion was the only strategy allowing me to study perhaps ninety percent of the best thoughts of mankind. Anywhere else, you were effectively limited to post-Renaissance Europe. A rather tiny corner of the world.

I believe we are failing to educate ourselves, or our future generations, if the typical humanities curriculum does not include full majors, let alone courses, in the Chinese classics, the Vedas, and the Talmud. In any one of them, there is a hell of a lot more worth knowing, studying, and thinking about, there than in any given subject in the social sciences. Plus, of course, the valuable intellectual exercise of trying t ocome to terms with a foreign culture. Why, other than laziness or chauvinism, this obsession with only the Greeks?

But still I cannot agree with these present protests. They are moving in exactly the opposite direction. Instead of adding the study of other cultures, they are actually subtacting the study of any cultures at all.

Witness what has come to be called “culture studies.” They include no study whatever of the named culture. Instead, they deal only with modern politics. It is as if there was no China until Westerners appeared at the ports, no India before Clive, no Arabia before T.E. Lawrence.

So why does that appeal to “minority” students? I guess it's because it's an easy degree. It limits everything effectively to the twentieth century and its views; it limits everything to familiar issues. It limits things by and large to things they might well already know. The more so since they can then generally hand in essays based only on their personal experience as a “minority.” No thinking, no reading involved. And they cannot be challenged—everyone is the final authority on their own life.

And easy for the profs—they don't have to learn anything either. They just have to be.

Yet it is a special kind of madness to complain that English literature should cut out all the dead white males. That's like demanding that English studies drop the English.

In one of the bitter ironies of nature, the English turn out to be white of skin. And the major you sign up for is, after all, English, not Hindi or Swahili. English has become an international language over the past hundred years or so, and you begin to see contributions from folks of other ethnic backgrounds. But if you are going to study English literature, inevitably, something like ninety-nine percent of available authors will be white.

Insist on something like the demographics of the American present, and you are going to force-feed random junk, if anything. But then, what the protestors really want is that the course be limited to current authors. Much easier to read, if perhaps of much less educational value.

As for women, since women have not traditionally had to earn a living, there were, until recently, far fewer women spending the blood, sweat, and tears to get published. To insist on proportions reflecting their proportion of the population, instead of their proportion of actual published authors, would again force us either to read only random junk, or current authors.

If current authors are easier to read, they are not English literature. First of all, we cannot communaly judge their quality until they have stood a test of time. The top-grossing novels, or movies, of any given year are rarely the best-remembered. I despair of Dan Brown's chances.

And, too, in literature, the dead get a vote. Writing is immortal by its nature; everyone who ever wrote in English is still in the conversation. To read only the living would be the greatest discrimination.

Against Tulip Subsidies

This is a good piece.

I think he misses the simplest and fairest solution to the problem, however: award degrees solely on the basis of challenge tests, or the submission of a thesis.

If a person demonstrably has the knowledge, who should care how he acquired it, or how quickly he acquired it.

Insisting on a set number of hours and years in school before awarding the degree is just affirmative action for dummies. That, and a good way to enforce the class system.

As to businesses insisting on more education than is really needed for a job, this should not be a problem in a free market. If a guy with less education can do the same job, no competent business is going to require the higher degree. The current degree inflation is largely due to people being passed through the system at every level for time served, without objective standards of knowledge acquired. Desperate businesses now feel they need to see at least a bachelors degree to feel confident the employee is minimally literate and well-spoken. 

Sailing to Byzantium

Christ Pantocrator, Hagia Sophia

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon‐falls, the mackerel‐crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing‐masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

-- W.B. Yeats

Because we take all our formal education when young, the most important things in our cultural heritage never get properly studied. We learn by and large only what is important to young people; we do not learn what is important to the old.

Now that we are supposedly living longer, and have the institution of retirement, wouldn’t it make sense to create courses for the old in what is most valuable to them in the accumulated thought of the ages? After all, they now have the time to study and to reflect. Now is the time for the Humanities!

In fact, in many traditions—the Jewish, the Hindu—you are not supposed to look at the deeper philosophical questions until you are at least 40.

What Needs to be Done to Fix Universities

Victor David Hanson nails it.

Racism in Minneapolis

My question is this: this woman is an English professor. How can it be pedagogically necessary to talk about "structural racism" in an English class?

She ought to be booked for professional malpractice, quite apart from any racial harassment.

The Higher Education Bubble: A Brief History

The Four Aging Lads in 1969.

This piece argues that the higher education bubble in the US—if you agree that there is a bubble—is caused by a shortage of suitable jobs, driving the price of admission for those jobs up.

I don’t think that is the real story.

The history suggests that the movement has been mostly on the supply, not the demand side. As Anne Coulter has pointed out, at the time of the Second World War, the average American had a grade eight education. But immediately after the Second World War, there was the GI Bill, causing a flood of 2.2 extra students who might well not otherwise have been able to afford a higher education. You can see the immediate effects on the culture. Pop culture began to assume a mass market with a college education: The Lettermen, The Four Freshmen, The Four Lads with “Moments to Remember,” the folk boom, the Bohemian musings of Salinger’s short stories.

While the GI Bill was US legislation, the influence of American culture was so great that its effects were felt everywhere; going to college became the normal thing. So too with further US legislation.

The GI Bill sent through a second wave of 1.2 million students after Korea. Add in the “Sputnik Crisis” of 1957. The US’s immediate response to this demonstration of Soviet scientific prowess was to funnel, in the National Defense Education Act, billions of additional dollars into colleges across the US. College funding in the US increased sixfold.

Actually, he had cause.

And then there were the Sixties. The GI Bill was extended to all veterans in the Sixties, and their families: 6.8 million extra collegians. Then there is the issue of the draft deferment given to college students during Vietnam. This too must have had the effect of convincing a huge cohort of young people who would not otherwise have considered it to hang on and get a college degree, or two, or even three.

And so, over a generation or so, 1945-1975, the Baby Boom generation, we have a wholesale manufacturing of new degrees and degree-holders—a glut on the supply side, regardless of demand.

That alone might account for the Sixties. Suddenly you had a whole lot of people going to college who in earlier generations would not have gone to college. People who did not necessarily have a great interest in scholarship or study or the intellectual enterprise.

This was probably a lousy idea.

First, this painfully extended period of dependency is cruel to youth. No wonder, then, that we saw stirrings of rebellion almost immediately, in the 50s, with the emergence of the disaffected teenager and the generation gap; reaching full bore in the 60s. The painfully extended adolescence also surely called forth, almost demanded, the sexual revolution. Since young people could not afford to marry, they sought release in casual sex. It was and is unreasonable to expect otherwise. Societies that really expect celibacy also permit marriage during adolescence. Hence the breakdown of the modern family.

Second, it probably caused the demographic winter we now face throughout the developed world, which really threatens to destroy Western civilization. On the one hand, couples are discouraged from having children by the knowledge that they will now have to support them well into adulthood, in addition to the crippling burdens of tuition. On the other, young people going through their multiple degrees must put off marriage and childbearing for longer. They cannot yet afford it.

Thirdly, the effect on higher education itself has been awful. This one really is a zero-sum game: you cannot raise IQs. More people coming into higher education means the average quality of college graduates and college courses must decline. Rather than raise the general standard of education, for the most part all we have really managed to do is to begin to do in 16 years what we used to do in 12. In particular, the draft deferment has prompted a lot of people to go into graduate school, and then college teaching, who are not themselves scholarly by nature.

This has led in turn to a growing class consciousness. We saw it almost immediately in the 50s: a divide between greasers, who did not go to college, and listened to doo-wop and rock and roll, and the college kids, who listened to folk and jazz and read beatnik poetry. This original divide has blossomed since into the full-scale “culture wars.” Weirdly, during their formative younger years ,the upper class had no money, while the lower class had some, because they already held jobs. This has caused an odd distortion in our politics, so that the rich professionals see themselves as "leftist," while the working poor, the "rednecks," are supposed to be "right-wing."

Meet the new upper class

Now that college is no longer about scholarship or the pursuit of knowledge, it has had to redefine itself, essentially, as a kind of initiation procedure into membership into the broad upper class, the clerical or professional class. One gets a college degree, and especially a higher degree, not by hard work or intelligence, but by conforming to the imposed consensus, to the group interest.

This is the value of the college degree now, and it explains why they are still preferred by employees, even though the actual skills and knowledge gained can seem irrelevant to the job. It demonstrates a reliable commitment to the class/profession. One is going to go along and is not going to rock the boat.

Of all these ill effects, the college tuition bubble, and the college debt bubble, are probably the last and least. But it seems about to make the whole edifice unsustainable.

Thank God.

University as an Investment

This table is an interesting study of the financial value of a university education.

The return on investment seems rather low for most schools. That kind of money could probably do better invested elsewhere. This is a good indication that there is a bubble here likely to burst. Even when the investment looks good, at the top schools, this investment is going to require a lot more hard work than most others. Not everyone can hack Harvard's academic requirements.

There is a solution to this mess, of course: on-line, for profit, higher education.

Higher Education: An Obituary

From the New Criterion.

Murder in the Ivory Tower

Minerva among the Muses. Thinking panty raid?

What this study primarily demonstrates is that students really don’t learn very much in college: “45 percent of students did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning during the first two years of college; 36 percent of students did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning over four years of college.”

The study evaluates only critical thinking and reasoning skills. But the knowledge gains are even worse. Other studies suggest that the typical student at an Ivy League college actually graduates with less general knowledge than when he entered—he forgets more than he learns over the four years.

But notice that there is one bright spot. “Students majoring in liberal arts fields see significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study."

The bad news is, the liberal arts are dying everywhere. They are being taken over or replaced by the social sciences.

So which discipline scores the lowest skills and knowledge gains over four years of college?

You guessed it: social sciences. “Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the smallest gains.”

Another interesting finding: “Students who study by themselves for more hours each week gain more knowledge -- while those who spend more time studying in peer groups see diminishing gains.” So why is it that current educational methods insist on group work at all times and under all circumstances?

It almost seems as though there is a plan to destroy education.

And I suspect that is exactly right. Not a conscious conspiracy. But somehow (and I suspect affirmative action has at least something to do with it), relatively stupid people have been given the reins of the educational establishment, and they have set out over time to destroy anything in it that might reveal their stupidity. It’s a matter of instinctive self-preservation, I suppose; but the effects on the culture are bound to be devastating. They will kill what they do not understand.

The New Model for Higher Education

Harvard Square and Harvard Yard. Might make a good theme park.

The solution to the “higher education bubble” is obvious and close at hand. The cost of college tuition, as many have observed, is becoming insupportable, especially in the US. This is going to force a sudden shift to a new model, probably very soon. "If something cannot go on forever, it won't."

The new model, of course, is free instruction through the Internet. There is no longer any need for a physical community of scholars. Instruction in anything can be broadcast into everyone’s home on the Internet: with recorded lectures, one really good prof can serve millions, rather than dozens, of students. Students might then write challenge exams, or submit projects, to earn credits towards any given degree.

How much would it all cost? The instruction could easily be free, supported by advertising or government, or cost only a small fee, since the costs could be spread out among so many students. No need to pay for moving to or living in a college town. Also, in principle, no need to stop working in order to attend school. One could just as well do a course at a time in the evenings.

Indeed, this is another vital reason to go to this online education model. Things are changing too quickly; any education that is job-specific is going to become obsolete almost faster than anyone can earn the current credentials for it, and certainly will be obsolete by the end of that graduate’s working life. Far better, then, to keep learning by slow degrees throughout, while also working.

Another advantage of this new system would be that students really can learn at their own pace. The very bright, currently, are penalized, and bored to death. Never mind if they can get the gist of the subject in two weeks; they are still tied down to a three month course. On the other end of the spectrum, if it takes someone two years instead of three months, who cares, so long as he knows his stuff in the end? No more one-size-fits-all.

So the cost of an education, now of escalating beyond control, suddenly becomes nominal, and no borrowing or debt should be involved. I like the thought, too, that students might be able to enter the workforce, and be self-sustaining, earlier. It will, as they say, keep them out of the pool halls—the long current adolescence is a form of torture.