To 1 in 9, a Waste

To be globally competitive, you need a combination of efficiency-supporting infrastructure, a predictable commercial legal system, cutting-edge research and technology and a highly trained/educated workforce. By those measures, the United States is unraveling. 

Our infrastructure is woefully inadequate and worn out. Our legal system seems to allow the whims of one man to set import tariffs completely on his own, make up immigration requirements without consulting Congress (excluding or deterring high-value engineers and other STEM workers from entering) and change financial and environmental regulation creating effective inconsistencies and business chaos. Federal research has been slashed and burned, as our patent applications are falling fast while China’s are rising faster; other countries are way ahead of us in developing artificial intelligence applications and lowering the cost of renewable energy resources and technologies (especially Germany and China).

And then there’s education. We went from first to nineteenth at the secondary school level according to global standardized test scores, and that doesn’t even measure special intensive educational standards that are embraced in some individual cities and school districts overseas. Our hodgepodge of over 13 thousand individual school districts further distorts our performance numbers.

But what really stands out, what has become a political football that will definitely be a high-priority issue in the 2020 elections (if younger American voters turn out): the unjustifiably high cost of post-secondary school education. Corrected for inflation, U.S. college/university tuition costs have increased fivefold since the 1970s, and well over half of American college-aged young people get at least some college education.

But with an administration hostile to federal support for higher education, represented by the funding cuts and denials led by uber-right-wing Education Secretary and billionaire, Betsy DeVos, abating costs and eliminating the $30-$40 thousand average debt load of today’s college graduates seem almost irrelevant. Add the austerity cuts to state education budgets under the guise of fiscal responsibility and tax cuts to motivate the rich to hire people and you have a financial disaster.

You can get a first-rate college education virtually for free in Germany, even in English and even if you are not German citizen or even a German resident. China subsidizes its best and brightest, even for overseas study, and is expanding the free or virtually free high-end college system all over the county. The United States does have its top-end universities, but by definition, most of our students never get there.

But what is happening is particularly hurtful for those graduates of lesser institutions, particularly the “for-profit” trade schools and colleges, who enter a job market where jobs may be plentiful but appropriate pay for the level of education is not. LA Times/Bloomberg writers, Katia Dmitrieva and Alex Tanzi (June 2^nd), bring home the hard facts: “In the U.S., a college degree has usually meant financial security. But increased competition and overwhelming student debt are making that outcome less of a given… That has spurred a feeling among many graduates that the qualification wasn’t worth the time, effort or money.

“The brewing anxiety may burst into the open during the 2020 U.S. election campaign, when student finances are likely to be a key issue for Democrats. Among the party’s presidential contenders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is promoting a plan that would make tuition free at all public colleges and universities, an idea also backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Legislation on those lines has been introduced in the Senate and House, and has support from 2020 candidates Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand.

“In recent years, more Americans have completed college degrees — lowering their rarity in the workplace and eroding the wage premium they can command… Americans with a bachelor’s degree earned less in real terms last year than in 1990, according to New York Federal Reserve Bank data. That has probably contributed to one of the findings from the Federal Reserve Board’s annual survey of household economics: Just two-thirds of those graduates believe their investment in education paid off.

“The Fed data show that a degree still makes an important contribution to financial stability. Adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher are more likely to be on solid footing, with 87% saying they’re doing at least OK financially. That compares with only 64% of those with a high school education or less… Sentiment also splits by age: About 8 in 10 boomer-age adults say that the benefits of their bachelor’s degree outweigh the costs, while only about half of respondents younger than 30 — a generation in which degrees were more widespread — feel the same…

“The Fed survey found increasing levels of financial stability among whites and Hispanics with a college degree. That wasn’t the case for black Americans: 61% with a high school degree or less say they’re financially stable, and that reading remains the same for those who attended college. For whites, though, there’s an eight-point increase in financial stability — and it’s a 14-point gain for Hispanics…

“High costs are still keeping people out of higher education… ‘Financial considerations, including costs being too expensive or a need to earn money, are the most common reasons’ cited by two-thirds of young adults who didn’t attend college and 62% who didn’t complete their degree, the Fed found… With the benefit of hindsight, 1 in 9 would have chosen not to attend college.” If we care about our future as a nation, it does not simply “happen” without planning, preparation and investment. And that has to start with government. But then, people like Betsy DeVos think public education at any level is socialism.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s hard to watch your national unravel where some of the solutions are so obvious.