Over half of Gens Y and Z have at least some post-secondary-school formal training or education. But we make young minds pay through the nose for those opportunities at such exorbitant rates that we are beginning to question the value of that education. As the July 17th CNN notes: “College tuition has increased almost 750% since 1963, and it's only getting more expensive. At highly rated or selective schools — like Harvard — undergraduates can expect to pay more than $95,000 a year, including housing and other expenses.” These costs have been rising at three or more times the cost-of-living over that same time period!
And costs continue to rise. Student loan debt, $1.6 trillion, exceeds consumer debt. Those entering the job market are facing absurd housing costs, jobs that pay “OK” but with limited opportunities for advancement and soaring costs for everything else that matters to them, from food to electronics. Many are postponing marriage or having children, and for those living in crowded but job-rich urban centers, buying a car is no longer part of the American dream.
The social consequences of these forces are staggering. The live-birth-replacement rate (2.1 births per couple) is plunging, looking very much as if it will settle at 1.6. The political climate is profoundly against former immigration policies, and exclusion is the new watchword. As Fareed Zacharia announced on this July 16th telecast on CNN, our new exclusionary immigration policies will cost our economy $5 trillion a year, in the very near term.
AI notwithstanding, we have and will continue to have millions of unfilled STEM jobs, and the cost of ordinary labor will continue to push costs through the roof… even as we have settled on a 3% annualized inflation rate. The rising generations, who do not have an ownership stake in their homes, are in their earliest earning years and are bearing the brunt of these policies. If companies depend on a growing population to generate business, the numbers are not looking very good.
You can get an excellent college education in Germany for literally the cost of books and a token registration fee. They have enough engineers and doctors. We do not. Nicole Goodkind, writing for the July 16th CNN.com, drills down on our absurdly and rapidly rising cost of a college education: “[B]etween 1980 and 2020, the average price of tuition, fees, room and board for an undergraduate degree increased by 169%, according to a report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce… That far outpaces wage increases.
“Over the same 40-year period, earnings for workers ages 22 to 27 only increased by 19%, the report found… That might explain why Americans’ confidence in higher education has dropped to a record low, according to a Gallup poll released this week. The June poll found that just 36% of Americans have confidence in higher education, down more than 20 percentage points from eight years ago… ‘While Gallup did not probe for reasons behind the recent drop in confidence, the rising costs of postsecondary education likely play a significant role,’ said Megan Brenan, a research consultant at Gallup…
“Real wages for US skilled workers have outpaced inflation by a couple of percentage points for long periods of time, but other industries have been able to offset those labor costs through productivity advances that reduce their reliance on skilled labor — things like AI and robotics… But there aren’t many robots teaching college classes. You still need professors with expensive degrees to do that.
“‘We pretty much produce higher education the way we used to, which is a faculty member in front of a class of anywhere from 20 to 40 students,’ said [Catharine Hill, an economist with the education nonprofit organization Ithaka S&R and the former president of Vassar College]. ‘That means that there haven’t been efficiency gains to reduce that cost.’
“Some universities have been leaning more heavily on contingent, non-tenure track faculty with low pay and no access to employer-ee benefits in an attempt to save money. The higher education system has become increasingly dependent on this temporary labor, according to the National Education Association. Nearly 70% of US faculty members held a contingent position in fall 2021, up from 47% in 1987.”
Lower quality, underpaid faculty, disillusioned and disincented, have taken over responsibility for the next generations of educated Americans? All the while, conservative forces at both the state and federal levels are pressing to cut educational budgets, particularly to state colleges and universities, and pushing to increase student loan burdens to unsustainable levels, fighting federal loan forgiveness tooth and nail. “The average American saved $5,011 last year. That means it would take them about 75 years to save up enough cash to send one child to a top-rated US university.” Goodkind.
To make matters so much worse, there are too many red states prioritizing anti-CRT culture wars in state institutions, rather than spending money improving the quality of their instructional programs. But while these MAGA politicians will not raise taxes against the absurd income-inequality wealthiest, they make every one else bear the cost of the rising deficit and the plunging quality of life for the rest of the country. “In 2021, the top 10% of Americans held nearly 70% of US wealth, up from about 61% at the end of 1989, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. The top 1% of earners in the United States now takes home 21% of all the income in the United States, according to the Economic Policy Institute.” Goodkind.
So let me get this right. We are a contracting population with serious labor issues cutting off economy-saving immigration, and we are providing a declining level of college education as we need so many more STEM-skilled workers to create economic growth and upgraded job opportunities for us all. We have cut the quality of our most needed education to accelerate income inequality and kick our federal deficit into the stratosphere. What an amazing self-destructive path to a much lower standard of living with severely curtailed opportunities. Indeed, upward mobility has left the building.
I’m Peter Dekom, and that these negative vectors are being led by a political party that was once seen as a champion of economic growth and opportunity is nothing short of amazing… in a very, very bad and self-destructive way.
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