College: What Exactly are You Paying For?

Without question, higher education in the US is too expensive, and this situation is only getting worse. Rising expenses fuels the secondary problem of rising student loan debt, which has become such an issue that it's now commonplace to question the very "value" of a college education.

For those who don't know anything about a university budget, it's easy to conjure a picture of elitist, tenured professors stretched out in leather recliners in their spacious offices, drifting off for afternoon naps, while students and their families go into unsustainable debt while struggling to pay for college. The repugnant Naomi Scheafer Riley plays upon this stereotype in the title of her book, The Faculty Lounges. But the idea that faculty salaries are fueling the increase in higher education expenses is simply untenable, easily disproved by a short look at any university budget throughout the country.

You'll perhaps notice that I'm favoring the word "expense" instead of "cost," because the truth is that a world-leading college education doesn't have to cost what it does; it's as expensive as it is currently because those who run universities are running them at a budget so far above the cost of their central mission that speaking of the "cost" of higher education is simply a misnomer.

Faculty pay has remained relatively stagnant for years, increasing below the rate of inflation and below the median wage increase for all US workers. At the same time, university expenditures on buildings, nonacademic resources, and administrative salaries have gone through the roof, increasing in some cases by hundreds of percentage points in recent decades. Even as universities try to trim their budgets in the face of high expenditures and growing student loan debt, administrative salaries grow while faculty salaries remain stagnant.

Anecdotally, many who have gone to college in the last decade or so will have noticed how little the pristine campus on visitors' day resembled the construction-engulfed campus on which you actually spent your college career. Outside the window of my university office the most common noises are jackhammers and football scores on the stadium loudspeaker, and the most common sights are cranes and orange blockades.

For someone of my generation, however, this is just life as usual at a US university. As a student I certainly enjoyed some of the amenities that, erected by the time I studied at my college, would have plagued students before me during a "quiet" afternoon of studying, just as the next generation of new building projects plagued my generation of students. As a faculty member today, then, I'm used to the jackhammering and the cranes beeping outside my window, but I'm still not convinced that this is always as necessary to a college education as I might have assumed in my youth.

But the question all along has been one of expense, never mind the cost of having such constant distractions on campus. When we talk about high tuition that only increases year to year, then, we're talking about these kinds of extraneous expenditures: a new dean or sub-dean or deputy-dean or tertiary dean of student affairs; a new director of this or that; a new, rent-seeking luxury student living complex; a new gym with televisions on the treadmills.

So if you're thinking about sending someone to college, and you're exploring the expenditures versus the rewards, pay close attention to what it is that you'd be paying for. And when you fret about the costs of higher education, think carefully about whether you're paying for an education or a four-year fantasy fun camp. Tragically, as a consumer, what you pay for will dictate what the college experience looks like. You have every right to complain about high tuition expenses, because tuition is needlessly expensive right now. But remember this, too, when you're getting your campus tour.

Election Recap: The Republicans' 'Minority Problem'

As I've been saying for quite some time, the Republicans had an opportunity (certainly as they would see it) in the Great Recession to establish themselves as a desirable alternative party to the party of Barack Obama; but they overreached extremely. They focused at both the state and federal levels not on 'economic' issues, but on attacking abortion, contraception, and gay marriage, demonizing and repealing the Affordable Care Act without proposing a viable alternative, slinging mud at the president as 'not an American,' and, curiously, constructing an entire political identity around being privileged, for which living on a golf course near a country club is the universal American dream.

That the American public rejected all of this in 2012 tells us something very important, beyond the obvious fact that the American public is not so fond of the cynical politics of the Romney-Ryan campaign and the wider GOP today: the American public cares about a lot more than 'economic' issues. And we should! And the fact that we've resisted the economic-issue pandering of a candidate selling himself as a businessman who can right the ship, and the fact that we've refused to let ourselves be held hostage to the idea that we must trade contraception, marriage equality, women's reproductive rights, and basic social provisions for the indigent and poor for a shot at a better 'economic' deal with 'job creation' shows a layer of good sense and fortitude in the American electorate that I was pleasantly surprised to witness. Witness Romney supporters' predictable turn to posting data on the futures market or imperiled quotes from small business owners and you can see that this is something Republicans today simply haven't figured out yet: it's not 'the economy,' after all; and maybe it never was.

But there's something else going on here that helps explain why Americans seemed not to have voted on (the incumbent's) 'economy' this election. Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, among other conservative pundits on the media circuit last night, candidly named this factor the 'minority problem,' or the fact that, as O'Reilly put it on Fox, 'the white establishment is now the minority.' He went further to say that the 50% of the American people--not those representing 'traditional [white] America,' but those voting for Obama, 'want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama.' Following up on this, Republican pundit Mike Huckabee noted, rightly, 'I think Republicans have done a pathetic job reaching out to people of color.'

In an election in which significant majorities, some of them quite staggering, of voters under 30, women, African-Americans, and Latinos voted for Obama, Huckabee's comment rings true. The more interesting question, though, is why doesn't the Republican party reach out and find ways to appeal to minority voters, given that the minority vote turnout wasn't all that hard to predict?

My speculative answer is that, as O'Reilly's tone and association of 'traditional' America with 'white' America suggest, Republicans truly are the party of the white establishment, unconcerned (at least, perhaps, until this election) with the concerns of US minorities. A quick sample of Republican issue stances that affect, Latinos, African-Americans, and women disproportionately reflect as much: opposition to the Dream Act and the idea that illegal immigrants should be squeezed and marginalized to the point at which they 'self deport'; opposition to basic health, unemployment, food assistance, and education programs that benefit the (disproportionately black) urban poor; and the twisted approach to abortion and contraception that denies women the agency to make health decisions on their own (to say nothing of how a contorted discussion of rape was regularly brought into this conversation as a kind of blessing if it resulted in impregnation). If we bring marriage equality and minorities of sexual orientation into this conversation, we can see that the Republicans have even further shunned a growing majority of Americans.

The Republican response to being at severe odds with all of these demographics was not to reach out and compromise or find common ground on policy, but to (candidly) try to suppress voter turnout, noting blithely that higher voter turnout in general, and voter turnout from a more demographically representative portion of the American public, will almost always yield a Republican loss. This choice to try to suppress the minority vote rather than reach out to minority voters was a deliberate ideological choice by Republicans, not a miscalculation or accident.

What this all suggests to me is that the Republican party is one that wants to pull up the drawbridge of white establishment privilege, comprised as such primarily of people who are rather happy with their institutionalized privilege, and have found a way to justify ideologically--by this every man for himself, social darwinist mentality--the fact that being sensitive to the needs of people who haven't historically had that kind of privilege in US society might mean facing their own.

My late grandfather, for example, was a Democrat, but probably agreed with most of the principles of today's Republicans. In his youth, as part of a family of Irish immigrants in a period in American history in which establishment types were wary of immigrant families like his disrupting the social order, requiring or wanting assistance, and taking jobs away from 'real' Americans, there would have been a similar kind of (Republican) attitude, despite that my grandfather still looked like the people who would question his role in American society. Urban Democrats surely pandered to people like him--an Irish steelworker--while post-New-Deal establishment Republicans worried that they were the ones without a voice. We have a new wave of US immigrants now, as well as a progressing minority population that fights hard with incremental gains to achieve that elusive 'American dream.' Pity that my grandfather's generation and their children would so readily fight to pull up the drawbridge now. This is America; this kind of change is kind of the whole point of it all. And the great thing about America is that, despite those who look upon the progression of this nation as a potential threat to establishment privilege, we find ways to continually broaden that access to privilege. This election reflects just such a sentiment. A breadth of Americans do want 'stuff' and 'things.' But these 'things' are not government handouts in the crude way O'Reilly assumes. What Americans want is an even playing field, not a game fixed for the likes of the presidential candidate we turned away last night.

7 Simple Reasons I'm Not Voting Republican (and Neither Should You)

1) A Republican-run government says gay people can't get married.

Marriage can be a wonderful thing. But if I had it my way, the government would have nothing to do with marriage, and people wouldn't get special benefits just for getting married (and, statistically, divorced shortly after). Marriage is for some people a sacrament or a religious ceremony, and for others a practical or "worldly" expression of love and commitment. But in any case, for everybody, marriage is a private affair. So long as we're treating it as government business, however, according special privileges to the married, the government has no right to say that some people can have access to those privileges through marriage and others cannot. Republicans support restrictions on marriage equality, or the ability of all Americans to marry who we love, regardless of gender or sexual orientation. I think that stance is backward, misguided, hypocritical, and antithetical to the most fundamentally important and profound principles of the Constitution, the idea that we're all created equal.

2) Republicans want to make it harder for you to vote.

Despite an overwhelming lack of evidence that voter fraud is an issue in US elections, Republicans are using the boogeyman of widespread voter fraud to justify making it harder for people to vote. Some have even been rather candid about which specific people they'd prefer wouldn't make it to the polls: people who are poor, black, and likely to vote against Republicans. From Ohio to Pennsylvania to Florida, Republican officials have passed or attempted to pass restrictive voter ID laws at the last minute before the election. They have also shortened early voting periods despite high demand and long lines for voting during this period. I have always been a proponent of Blackstone's formulation that it's better to have 10 guilty people walk free than to hang one innocent person. I would apply the same to voting: even if there were marginal voter fraud (which hasn't been demonstrated), preventing people who have the right to vote from voting is a greater crime. Why should we elect Republican officials who demonstrate such a level of crude cynicism at the expense of perhaps the most sacred democratic right, the right that makes democracy possible?

3) Republicans want the government to control women's reproductive health decisions.

Putting aside what we're told are the extremes of the Republican party, like those who invoke God's will to justify their beliefs that a woman who is raped and impregnated should be forced by the state to carry the child to term, or risk being punished in the court of law for failing to do so, Republicans have taken a hard-line stance on what they understand to be the beginning of life: life begins at conception. Putting aside also the logical and philosophical quagmire of why, if the "potential" of human life is enough to start life at conception, life can't also start at ejaculation, or perhaps even the registering of the intention of procreation in the mind of a man or a woman, the real-life consequences of this ill-thought-out position on contraception and abortion are dire. If life begins at conception, such that terminating a fertilized egg becomes murder under criminal law, will we prosecute women for having miscarriages? Will we ban condoms and the pill? Will we force couples and women to launch themselves down the stairs, or to perform risky, do-it-yourself home abortions to rid themselves of the remnants of a rape? Will we outlaw stem-cell research? If we follow the Republican argument on women's reproductive rights to its logical terminus, all of these things become real. Not only that, but what is our justification for going down this path? What is our argument for imposing such restrictions on the bodies of female citizens in a secular democratic republic? If we're imposing a religious argument, it's the wrong thing to do, since individuals have the right to do and believe as they will according to their religions, but the rest of us shouldn't have to follow suit. If we're imposing these restrictions based on scientific reasoning and evidence, then we're misunderstanding the science. In either case, though the situation is messy, a woman, in consultation with her doctors, should have the ultimate right to make decisions about what's going on in her own body. Republicans disagree.

4) Republicans hold education and educators in contempt.

From a local ad in one of the Dakotas criticizing a Democratic candidate running for an environment-related government position for having been educated at Cambridge University and living and working on environment issues abroad, to Republican presidential candidates calling people with college degrees "snobs" or attacking Barack Obama for having graduated from Harvard Law School, the Republican strategy on education is to paint it as something that puts us out of touch with the "average American." The logic of this strategy, of course, suggests that the "average American" is an uneducated buffoon who would look upon getting into Harvard not as an achievement, but as some kind of personality defect. In Republican political discourse, teachers are represented not as public servants working long hours for little pay to educate our children (many of whom go home to parents who couldn't care less about their education, making it that much harder on teachers), but as evil liberal indoctrinators, or, by way of synechdoche, as a union lobby. If there is to be anything resembling the "American dream" of social mobility and self-betterment, education plays a crucial role in this. Yet Republicans like to insist, quixotically, that elbow grease is enough to turn a poor, inner-city kid into a success story. They want to cut education to the bone, do nothing about the increasingly insurmountable costs of higher education, and score cheap political points by labeling educators and the educated "snobs" and "elitists." One way of preserving a true elite ruling class, however, is by assuring that the population is too poor or too proud to pursue an education, a path to a better financial future to be sure, but much more importantly a path to a better society with better, more responsible citizens.

5) Republicans think America is the best at everything.

If you already think your country is the greatest at everything, from health care to social mobility to foreign policy, even when there is ample evidence to the contrary, how can you begin to understand how to make things better? Republicans aren't well positioned to address the glaring problems we face because their brand of stubborn American exceptionalism blinds them to the reality of these problems. Further, the rest of the world is not blind to this blindness, and knows that it will have a more difficult time working alongside America, and pulling weight on global issues that Americans can't address alone, if Republicans are running the show.

6) Republicans favor aggressive business and corporate welfare.

One Republican idea I can get behind is that coddling people is often a poor way to instill the motivation necessary for people to help themselves. Republicans think this way when it comes to poor people (notably I don't think basic social welfare constitutes "coddling"), but magically reverse this most central philosophical stance when it comes to treating businesses. Nevermind the public servants, the public services, the educators, and the military, who all work tirelessly to provide the best possible conditions for a thriving business--paved roads and infrastructure, safe streets and government stability, an educated and well-trained work force, etc.--Republicans believe that all the credit for anything from a strong economy to low unemployment to more efficient solutions to military and environmental challenges should go to businesses. As a consequence, one of the biggest Republican selling points in this election season has been "talk to small business owners about how they feel; they're scared!" Curiously no one in the Republican party cares about how anyone else is "feeling" right now; we're supposed to let the "feelings" of small business owners--whatever a "small business" is--define not just our fiscal policy, but our entire budget and the whole election. This is to say nothing of corporate access to the electoral and legislative systems, and huge tax loopholes and benefits for companies that literally make billions of dollars each year. Business is important, and the economy--whatever that means--is important too; but we have other important challenges that need to be addressed by serious people in serious ways. Republicans are guided by the need to coddle and acquiesce to business needs, which diverts crucial attention from the rest of our issues, some of which I've noted above.

7) Republicans think you, the voter, are an idiot.

All politicians lie and manipulate words and data to get themselves elected. But Republicans--one very important one in particular--will say anything they think you want to hear on all major issues. The Republican presidential candidate has not only launched a campaign attacking the very health system he himself created; he's changed his tune radically and in the space of mere months on issues from climate change and abortion to foreign policy in the Middle East. He's outwardly lied about simple, provable things, then doubled-down on his lies well after being caught. He's made up scary stories to influence voters in Ohio who fear for the loss of their jobs (and those of their friends and family); and he's outwardly admitted, via his campaign officials, that this is precisely the strategy, which will not be affected by fact-checkers: say what you need to say, regardless of its relationship to the truth, or his own personal convictions, if, indeed, he has any. What this says to voters is simple: you're too stupid to remember that just last week I said the opposite thing I'm saying now, too lazy to care, not likely to catch me in my lies, and unwilling to investigate the specifics of my proposals, the disclosure of which I've rigorously avoided. Something interesting to consider in this presidential election is the huge difference of means and objectives between running a business successfully and running a government successfully. The Republican candidate might have been a savvy businessman by lying to and manipulating people around him, always keeping his cards close to his chest; but in pubic affairs, all of these lies and tactics are exposed, scrutinized, and laid bare before the world. When we can see your cards, Mr. Romney, you can't play that hand as effectively as you might have in the past.