SAD COMMENTARY ON U. S. UNIVERSITY EDUCATION

Certain politicians talk about immigration reform in terms of allowing people with professional or advanced degree such as PhD’s to be given green cards—allowed to become U.S. Citizens. In my mind, this is a shortsighted action taken to make a quick profit, good old America greed, and dollar above country, or in terms of recent events, Romney’s Bain capital logic. Human minds are not like some natural resource in a foreign country we can exploit such as oils and minerals. We cannot exhaust the supply of minds in another country by importing highly trained minds thus making us smarter and them dumber. By doing so, we make them better than we are.  My point is to call the attention of politicians to the fact that it takes a lot of work to develop minds and that we as a country have dropped the ball. Even though it takes time and taxpayers dollars, we must develop our own young minds; that is the old Socratic log most of thought we had.  Yes, Tea Party Hacks, it takes tax dollars. The suggestion to import educated people should prove to all of us that education wise; we are in a bad way.

My point is simple; the first and most important thing we must do, as a nation, is to concentrate on developing an educational system to produce the best professional minds in the world and not just import educated people—restoring it to what it had been in the past. We should strive to develop an excess of the best minds so we can export a surplus and not have to import them. The green card suggestion acknowledging that we have destroying much of our higher education system by selling it out to industry. Why is it that our graduates cannot seem to compete with foreign graduates? Why are professional schools having trouble-hiring professors to teach? Why do we have great universities with more staff than they have students? Why are tuition costs so high that most people cannot afford to attend universities? Why do state legislatures collect taxes to pay for higher educations at these schools? Why is annual tuition for medical school in excess of $50,000 per year—in excess of $200,000 for an MD degree not counting pre med? Why are student loans so expensive?  Why is competition to get into a university based on tuition first and not IQ?  Why do we have great universities hiring professional fundraisers to gather money from alumni when they have off-book endowments in the billions? Where is all the money going? Why do we have so many off-shore for profit colleges? Why do we support the farce of professional sports in leading universities?  The whole picture I so petty, it get down to the question of why is it I am not recognized as an alumni of a big ten university unless their “for profit” alumni association says I am an alumni?

The very idea that we have to “import” educated people to the United States, professionals and PhDs, is proof that we have given up on educating our own youth to fill these empty positions. What all of this means to me is that our universities have sold out to industrial greed—University Industrial Complex—and look at where it has gotten us?