Topic: Liberal Fascism
In this article for NRO, Rich Lowry makes an excellent point about the Occupy Wall Street protestors:
College students and recent graduates are overrepresented. Their complaint comes down to too much debt, and too few job opportunities to get out from under it. There’s the guy with the master’s from Harvard who owes $60,000 and lives off temp jobs. There’s the woman who is paying her own $50,000 in debt plus $20,000 in debt for her 22-year-old daughter. There’s the graduate with a master’s from “a major U.S university” who is unemployed and $92,000 in hock. And on and on.
The representatives of these debt-burdened graduates shouldn’t be at Zuccotti Park, but at the American Association of University Professors or some other arm of the academic complex that gouges students. College tuition has been increasing at a rapid clip. Does anyone believe that higher ed is getting constantly better? It’s an inflationary spiral, partly driven by a federal student-loan program that feeds the maw of the beast regardless of quality or outcomes.
I’ve been making this argument for years. Exactly why is it that the cost of college is so high? Do the princely salaries and benefits of tenured faculty, proliferating campus administrative staffs, costly sports programs and opulent campus buildings justify the price tag of an undergraduate degree? Though I find it difficult to sympathize with someone who borrowed $50,000 to obtain a bachelor of fine arts degree that’s useless in today’s job market, individual gullibility and cluelessness still do not excuse this egregious price gouging. And as Lowry points out, the federal government’s student-loan program underwrites Big Education’s greed.
A college education is still a good investment—the current unemployment rate for college grades is 4.3%, compared with the national rate of 9.1%. The sob stories alluded to by Lowry—you can read them here—should therefore be viewed in perspective. But these people do have a legitimate gripe. The problem is that they’ve selected the wrong villain. “Wall Street” didn’t screw them. Their alma maters did.
