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NationofChange / Op-Ed
Published: Friday 9 December 2011
“Between 1980 and 2008, the share of public higher education expenditures allocated by the government fell by almost 19%.”
Degrees of Debt
In a forceful critique against the single mindedness of late-capitalism Frankfurt School, theorist Theodor Adorno once said that happiness is obsolete because it’s uneconomic, but had he lived past 1969 he may have theorized “the public sphere” in the same way. As I have written before, “the public sphere theoretically remains a space punctuated by elements of universality, openness, and accessibility.” But the accountable and accessible nature of public institutions— and explicitly, public higher education— upon which the economically marginalized and the racially oppressed often rely, has been systematically disemboweled by corporatists who confuse course credit with credit cards, private investment with public engagement. To paraphrase Marx, it seems as though all that is public has melted into air.
Against this historical backcloth, Forbes recently projected that total U.S. student loan debt is expected to exceed $1 trillion by early 2012. And just weeks ago the U.S. Federal Reserve reported that the total amount of student loan debt finally surpassed that of credit cards. According to their figures, Americans owed $826.5 billion in credit card debt while outstanding student loans, both federal and private, totaled $830 billion.
Much closer to home, the Regents of the University of California have for months been debating a multi-year funding proposal that will likely result in a series of substantial tuition increases over the next few years. The Regents report that elements of a multi-year plan will include a proposal that “would call for eight percent annual increases each in State funds and intuition and fees through 2015-16. If the State is unable to meet its share of this cost, student fees would be raised further to compensate for the State’s deficit. Thus, if the State provides only four percent increases each year,student tuition and fees would increase by 12 percent annually. If the State provides no increase, student tuition and fees would increase by 16 percent annually. Incorporating this principle into a multi-year plan will make clear to all stakeholders that a failure to invest in the University will directly increase the amount students and their families pay to attend.” According to their report, if the State of California does not increase funding over the next four years, tuition will rise 16% each year for a cumulative total of 81%.
The near-complete evisceration of the public sphere spells trouble for social sites premised on the possibility of non-commoditized value structures and non-commercialized critical exchange. These spaces are gradually undergoing privatization for the purpose of entering “under-penetrated markets.” Public higher education, at its best, then, offers the possibility of critical thought and a viable form of opposition to market-driven policies, institutions, ideologies, and values. Critical theorist, Henry Giroux, moreover, characterizes public higher education as a sphere in which “students learn that democracy, entails ruptures, relentless critique, and dialogue about official power, its institutions, and its never-ending attempts to silent dissent.”
Unfortunately, widespread taxpayer disinvestment has forced the cost of public higher education to burgeon at rates previously thought unimaginable. (Here’s an example of what has happened in Washington State over the last half a century) As a result of public divestment, inflation in college tuition has seen a staggering increase. Since 1980 the overall consumer price index has increased by 179%, but during the same time college tuition and fees increased by 827%. In addition, such rates of inflation continue to outstrip median family wages which have been falling steadily since the mid-1970s. According to the College Board, annual costs for attending a private four-year institution increased from 26% of average (median) family incomes in 1979 to 58% in 2009. For public four-year institutions, the proportion grew by over 100%, from 12% to 25% of average incomes over the same period.
The bursting price of public higher education is attributable to sharp declines in public support. Contrary to the well worn conservative mantra, the rising cost of college education cannot be explained by salary increases for tenured professors or even by growth among those achieving tenure. Much to the opposite, academic labor has become casualized in recent years. As universities adopt models of corporate governance, they uncompromisingly seek to eliminate tenure positions, increase part-time and full-time positions without the guarantee of tenure, and accost faculty unions. In fact, a number of state legislatures (Ohio, Utah, Arizona…) have passed bills prohibiting tenure, while in Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has sabotaged the bargaining rights of state university faculty and staff.
At a time when higher education is becoming increasingly de-skilled, the ranks of tenure-track faculty are in palpable decline. Currently, only 27% of faculty members are either on a tenure track or in a full-time tenure position. Further, as faculty are relegated to contingent and unstable forms of labor, they lose their power to influence the conditions of their work and often see their course load increase, their pay drop, and, most significantly, in the words of critical theorist Henry Giroux, they become “subject to policies that allow them to be fired at will.”
Since 1980 state and local funding for higher public education has fallen dramatically. Between 1980 and 2008, the share of public higher education expenditures allocated by the government fell by almost 19%. And who picks up the tab? College students. Perhaps this helps to explain why, according to the Project on Student Debt, students who graduated in 2009 carry an average debt load of $24,000?
Paradoxically, during a time when the disinvestment in public higher education has become fashionable, I maintain that the federal government could easily subsidize higher education for all interested students with little difficulty. Why? In 2010 the total cost of public higher education was equivalent to 1/3 of the income collected by the wealthiest 10,000 households. The wealthiest 10,000 households in the country represent less than one-tenth of one percent (.01) of a total 78 million households in the country. If each of these families were to pay an additional 25-30% in federal income taxes—a proportion commensurable to the top marginal tax rate from 1933-1980—then every single person in the United states could attend a four-year public institution for free. The math is simple.
Ours is more than a debt-bubble; it’s a democracy bubble, and it’s about to burst.
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ABOUT Christopher Petrella
Christopher Petrella is a NationofChange contributing author and a doctoral candidate in African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He writes on the contradictions of modernity and teaches at San Quentin State Prison. His work has appeared in such publications as Monthly Review, Truthout, Axis of Logic, NationofChange, and The Real Cost of Prisons. Christopher also holds degrees from Bates College and Harvard University.
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9 comments on "Degrees of Debt"
December 15, 2011 1:09am
Student demands for goods and services are equally to blame. Students (some old establishments excepted) used to expect fairly spartan goods and services - now many demand a lifestyle many working-folk do not have. It is no wonder that those who graduate and get good jobs go on to high-consumption lifestyles and feel no empathy for the poor who do not. Students and administrators need to see the economic downturn as a time to readjust expectations and go back to basics. Excellent education need not cost a fortune, and should not teach wasteful consumption as an entitlement.
December 10, 2011 11:29pm
If tenured track comp was cut in half and related faculty were forced into the classroom, college tuition could EASILY be cut in half.
December 10, 2011 2:33pm
But wait, folks. What about the abominable decline in the actual QUALITY of the education and students themselves? The schools are accepting lesser quality students and feeding them a lesser quality education WHILE the cost of that lesser quality education continues going up. The bottom line is that the Boomers are starting to get old and their priority for age-related health care costs is simply higher than voting for competing funding to go to education for the younger generations.JOIN THE RESISTANCE!www.mortgageresistanceofamerica.comwww.studentloanresistanceofamerica.com
December 10, 2011 10:55am
[Forgive if this appears twice. I hope it won't. Thought I'd posted it yesterday but when I checked now, all I found was my name. Must have pressed a wrong key. Sorry.]
There are developed countries -- most European countries -- where university education is free or almost free. So, by the way, is full universal health care. I obtained an MA in Germany in the 70s for a total of maybe $ 500 in fees -- most of them for Student Union Membership, health and accident insurance and a few other fees such as a fee for final examinations But the $ 500 covered the whole course, not just a semester.
Though I was born and raised in Germany, I was not a German citizen any more when I obtained my degree, but that made no difference. In Canada, foreign students pay roughly twice as much as natives. Not in Germany. There is no such discrimination. Whether you are German or foreign, the cost of higher education is next to nothing even today.
When I tell people in Canada -- never mind the US -- that university education is free in most European countries, my listeners inevitably ask "How can those countries afford that?"
The answe is simple: A country can afford what it wants to afford. If it wants to blow billions up the arses of the superrich 1%. it can do so. If it wants to spend billions on fighter jets it does not need, it will find ways to do so. If it wants to offer FULL universal health care to its people, it can do so. If it wants to offer its young free education, it can afford to do so. But it cannot do all these things at the same time..
A civilized society feels that it owes its young a free education cuz before long those young will be running the show. A civilized society feels it owes all its members full and free universal health care. Now Canada is about halfway there, halfway towards qualifying as a civilized country in that respect. The US is light years away from it.
In Canada, doctors’ services and hospital stays are free. That’s an admirable step in the right direction. But just about everything else connected with health care – ambulances, crutches, eye glasses, dental care, drugs, transportation to a distant health care center, etc. – you pay for it out of your own pocket. In most European countries – certainly in Germany -- this is all covered by the national health plan.
There is also the issue of discrimination. In North America, poor students can go for an arts degree with the help of student loans but not for a degree in Medicine or Law. No bank would grant a poor student the kind of student loan it would take to complete a degree in those discipines. By and large, therefore, only children of doctors can go into Medicine and only children of rich lawyers can go into Law. In most Eeropean countries, children of the poorest families can go in for Medcine or Law if they have shown on their journey through high school that they have what it takes academically to do the work. And if they are too poor to pay for living expenses in a University City away from home, the government offers them cost-of-living allowances.
The difference? In those countries the superrich -- the billionaires -- pay a fair share of the taxes. They will still be superrich AFTER they do so, but the poor get a fairer share of the national pie.
I have read several stories of Americans who, having gone to Germany for other reasons, decided to stay there because of the for-North-Americans-unimaginable social benefits they get there.
The very thought of the barbarian university tuition fees in the US and in Canada makes my blood boil. The thought of an albatross of $ 100,000 or more in student-loan debt hanging from the neck of a kid just starting out is quite unthinkable for me.
Super-angry,
Ambros Prechtl MA PhD ND
PS: Having taught in Canada (9 years), in Europe (4 years) in West Africa (7 years), in the Middle East (7 years), in the Far East (1 year)., I can claim that I have not been blinded by the brain-washing of just one society – the US comes to mind; I can claim a fair basis of comparison. People who have not been out of their corner of our world – many of the US Republicans come to mind – tend to take what holds in their corner as nothing less than universally acceptable.
December 09, 2011 11:14pm
I'll bet employers and their industries have been very happy with what's been going on - of course they reap the rewards of their workers paying for their own education without it costing them a penny. If they had to pay for all the training from birth or had to foot the health care bill themselves for all their current and future employees, they would no doubt call for much greater social reform and welfare, championing free universal education and health care for the greater good! How ironic....
December 09, 2011 6:34pm
Why not have free education and living allowance the best students advance if they wish. There would be no interest to pay on loans and the poor do not have to borrow funds. I would think the interest on this debt is a great deal.
December 09, 2011 4:16pm
with all cuts to k-12 USA is now ranked 2nd in $ per student but i do not have number on college
December 09, 2011 2:33pm
Talk about National Security issues. What these saboteurs & traitors to America have accomplished in making not only 'higher' education but K-12 more unattainable for we, the people is a sin to our national soul.
They, the 2%ers have fixed all the games while we, the 98%ers scrambled for the crumbs from their feasting of the last three decades. Before then the test & trends all pointed in the opposite direction, up.
They understand better than we, the people that by keeping us in debt, ignorant, fearful of shadows & boogie men, but veracious consumers still, keep them in power & profit.
Do we accept this new Dark Ages they course us too? Why?
All levels of education should be free to every American citizen. Here in California it was once, ha! We even legalized gambling (Lotto) to fix our educational funding, seems that worked out, less education for the public, more profits for the lotto owners.
An integral part of the ignition of the ‘Protestant Reformation’ was the innate human hunger & need to read, think & understand the abstract word. These 2%ers fear our children being able to read interpret & think, not only in the physical world but the abstract ones too. Where only the chosen may be able to do better than the masses, by doing their bidding. Not unlike the Roman Catholic Church of the time. Guess who won that fight?
What new cures, wonders & technologies are being hidden from us? Soon, only their anointed priests can interpret for us their approved gospels & tenets on what being an American is all about or what behavior or thoughts will be allowed in civil society.
It is time. We, the people must shake off this lethargy and strike forward into the fray. The cost will be unrealistic & horrifying, but need be paid none the less.
America cries out, we cannot cover our ears, nor shut our eyes to the onslaught any longer.
I’m grateful most at least for now know how to read a bit, now let’s labor on the thinking part. Thinking about the education of all of us, our children & where & how they will face the world the 2%ers have shaped while we gorged away in our consumerism intoxication.
Growing up we used a phrase,’ I’d rather owe you than cheat you out of it.’ They cheat all of us we owe them nothing but a cleansing.
God don’t bless America! ‘We, the people’…do!
December 09, 2011 12:29pm
does anyone have actual amout spent per student? and how much is from gov