By Professor
Doom
Confessions of a College Dean is a
surprisingly popular blog, as he never really confesses to anything. I’ve known
a few Deans that were downright criminal. I’ve shown many an upper level
administrator engaging in morally reprehensible acts that, even if the Dean
didn’t perform the acts as well, at least looked the other way. There really
should be a thing or two he could confess to.
Granted, he’s still working in
higher ed, and posting under his real name, so I don’t expect him to expose
much right now…but someday when he gets that golden parachute he’ll finally
start talking. I hope.
Nevertheless, a relatively recent
post came close to revealing what higher education is turning into:
Already many of our college kids are
stuck in debt slavery, with student loans too great to be realistically paid off
before death, but there’s a movement to place an even greater burden on our
students: residency requirements.
Now, capital is more mobile than ever, but we’re building
barriers to keep people in place. Both New York and Rhode Island have passed
“free college” programs that come with post-graduation in-state residency
requirements. Rhode Island is all of two counties; that’s pretty restrictive.
At this point, states are starting to look not only at institutions as tools to
accomplish policy goals, but at citizenry the same way. Why educate them, the
argument goes, if they’ll just up and leave?
I’ve written before that a
surprisingly easy way to escape student debt is to flee the country, and it’s sad that our former Land
of Opportunity is turning in a country people now escape. I can respect the
Federal government shutting down this way of escaping crushingly unfair student
debt, but now the state governments are getting involved.
We’ve had similar restrictions for a
while. For example, it’s common for state schools to have scholarship programs
in Education, offering free tuition in exchange for a guarantee of the student
to teach in the local schools for at least 2 years, or the like. I’m not wild
about indentured servitude, but, for a student dedicated to becoming a teacher,
this is an excellent way to avoid the debt, and at least the student ends up
with a degree that directly leads to some sort of job. State money for state
employees had a balance to it I can’t deny.
But now the deal is changing,
extending the deal to all sorts of degrees. So how do you justify enslaving the
serfs, forcing them to stay in-state even for cheapo community college degrees?
The Dean sees that the justifications will be coming soon enough:
The dangers of both policies are clear. At a really basic
level, they invite -- sometimes almost compel -- reciprocation. If New York
keeps its “human capital” but New Jersey doesn’t, at some point, someone in NJ
will notice the imbalance and try to right it. That may trigger Pennsylvania.
Then Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia. Then…
I’ve
certainly heard people complaining about “brain drain” where college graduates
in one state leave to head for greener pastures. A state government that cared
about its citizens could solve this problem, or at least attempt to do so, by
simply observing those greener pastures in other states and changing things so their
state is every bit as fertile.
That’s a hard field to plow, I know, and
certainly difficult work. The easy thing is just to erect walls and force the
serfs to stay on the state lands.
Can
the gentle reader imagine what our country will look like once these policies
are adopted in general? We’ll have “serf-catchers” grabbing people who escaped
into another state, seeking freedom. Eventually we’ll see history repeat itself
with Dredd Scott-like court cases.
The
Dean likewise has little trouble shredding the madness of residency
requirements:
Residency requirements, if they spread, would also greatly
shift the balance of power when companies play states off against each other in
bidding wars for relocations. As hard as it is to move for a job -- something I
know personally -- it’s that much harder to see the job move away and know that
you don’t have the option to follow it. That already happens between countries,
but moves between states are much more common. Allow capital to move but
tie workers to places, and I’d expect to see ever more public funding get
diverted -- whether directly, as through subsidies, or indirectly, as through
tax credits or abatements -- to owners, even as wages go down.
Please
now stand and applause as the Dean says something the likes of which I’ve never
heard an administrator say convincingly:
And at a really basic level, the idea confuses means with
ends. People aren’t supposed to be tools to realize goals of the state. The state
is supposed to be a tool to realize the goals of people.
Of
course, that’s where it ends. The Dean realizes residency requirements are
wrong, but doesn’t understand what happened to create such a draconian rule:
insanely high tuition forces students into serfdom. Similarly, he doesn’t
mention why tuition got so high: the Federal student loan program. And so, the
Dean won’t say what would obviously be self-destructive to his eventual golden
parachute plans. Being mere faculty, I have no hope of retirement, and so I’m
not corrupted by the student loan money, and can say the obvious here:
End the Federal Student Loan Scam
The
comments section has posters suggesting we should just make community college
free. While certainly not as harmful as turning our college students into serfs
for nothing (which in turn is arguably better than making them debt slaves for
nothing), it’s still a terrible idea, as I’ve shown in detail how most
community colleges are pure scams serving no benefit whatsoever to the
community. Honest, we just need to get government out of higher education at
all levels…but that option never seems to come up, even as literally every
piece of information you can find in community college is available, for free,
online and in most public libraries, and 90% of community college is already in the “free” public schools as
well.
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