[ExI] Greener Urban Environment

[Dave Sill]

On Sun, May 21, 2017 at 5:23 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

> Despite what you may hear from others, college is usually a worthwhile
> investment of time and money - so long as you major in something you
> will likely be using in your career.  (So: "fill-in-the-field
> engineering" yes, "fill-in-the-human-type studies" no.)
>

This blog posting details why I disagree.

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2017/05/how-higher-education-became-obscenely.html

*How Higher Education Became an Obscenely Profitable Racket That Enriches
the Few at the Expense of the Many (Student Debt-Serfs)*
*100+ oftwominds by Charles Hugh Smith  /  27d  //  keep unread  //  hide*
**
*Student loan lenders are skimming tens of billions in profits guaranteed
by the taxpayers.*
*"Legal" rackets have two essential components: a public-relations "cover"
that obscures the racket and the mechanism that extracts the wealth from
the "marks." The Higher Education Racket qualifies on both counts:*
*1. The PR cover is "you all need a college diploma, and we're here to make
that happen." Yea for more education!*
*2. The extraction mechanism is student loans. Here's a chart that shows
what happened relatively recently: your federal government began
guaranteeing obscene profits to student-loan lenders and debt-serfdom for
tens of millions of "marks" i.e. students.*
**
*Gordon Long has done some outstanding work clarifying the purposefully
obscure swamp of obscene profits reaped from student debt-serfs. Gordon and
I explain how the racket works in How College Has Become A Racket! (45 min.
video program).*

*The racket's foul core is the cartel structure of higher education: if you
want a college diploma, you must satisfy a cartel member--an accredited
institution.*

*The problem, as I elaborate in my book The Nearly Free University and the
Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education, accrediting the
school gives no indication to employers if the student learned anything
remotely useful, or indeed, anything at all.*

*Consider the study Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College
Campuses which concluded that "American higher education is characterized
by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students."*

*While the majority of students learn little or nothing of value, the
legions of overpaid administrators have expanded like rats on a verdant
island (i.e. an island with unlimited money via student loans).*

*New Analysis Shows Problematic Boom In Higher Ed Administrators:*
*In all, from 1987 until 2011-12--the most recent academic year for which
comparable figures are available—universities and colleges collectively
added 517,636 administrators and professional employees, according to the
analysis by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.*

*"There’s just a mind-boggling amount of money per student that’s being
spent on administration," said Andrew Gillen, a senior researcher at the
institutes. "It raises a question of priorities."*
*The ratio of nonacademic employees to faculty has also doubled. There are
now two nonacademic employees at public and two and a half at private
universities and colleges for every one full-time, tenure-track member of
the faculty.*
*The number of employees in central system offices has increased six-fold
since 1987, and the number of administrators in them by a factor of more
than 34.*
*Paying a bloated, overpaid-admin-heavy institution for the privilege of
sitting through four years of lectures, online courses and a few labs no
longer makes sense for the vast majority of students. What makes sense is
dispensing with the entire bureaucracy of the cartel and costly campuses
altogether, and designing directed apprenticeships which combine the best
of online coursework with on-the-job training in workplaces.*
*The vast majority of student are better served by mastering the 8
essential skills required in the emerging economy--skills that students can
acquire on their own, a process of accrediting yourself that I address in
detail in Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.*

*Forgiving skyrocketing student debt won't solve the real problem which is
the soaring costs imposed by a cartel that is failing to prepare students
for the economy of tomorrow.*

*As I explain in my books, the only real solution is accredit the student,
not the school.*

*These charts illustrate the soaring costs and diminishing returns of a
higher education diploma:*
**
*The yield (in earnings) on the increasingly unaffordable college degree is
declining sharply:*
**
*While the higher-ed status quo is failing the students, it's enriching
itself immensely. Assistant deans of student loans and thousands of other
administrators who we managed to do without a generation ago are raking in
huge salaries and fat benefits/pensions.*

*Meanwhile, over in the financial racket that's enabled functionaries to
skim $200,000 a year for doing essentially nothing remotely related to
students actually learning anything remotely applicable in the real-world
economy, student loan lenders are skimming tens of billions in profits
guaranteed by the taxpayers. Yes, tens of billions: $140 billion in pure
guaranteed profit has been skimmed off the hapless student debt-serfs
herded into the shearing machine known as higher education.*

*There is something Kafka-esque and Orwellian about calling this vast
machine for reaping taxpayer-guaranteed obscene profits "higher education."*
**
*I invite you to learn more about how our predatory, parasitic, neofeudal
nightmare "higher education" system enriches the few at the expense of the
many:*
**
*Of related interest:*
*Jobs data cannot prove that college is a "good investment"*
*Student Debt Grows Faster at Universities With Highest-Paid Leaders, Study
Finds*
*Even the Most Educated Workers Have Declining Wages*
*Everything I've Written On Education Comes Down To Cultural Capital And
Skills*

-Dave
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