COLLEGE GRADUATES ARE INDENTURED SERVANTS

I don’t remember exactly who it was on Morning Joe who used the expression “college graduates are indentured servants”. The guest was William Bennett the ex-secretary of education. It could have been him because he is where ever he sees green grass. I remember him as an anomaly: the anti education secretary of education. He served without credibility; one of his first statements was that we should cut student loans, made 10 days after Ronald Reagan appointed him. Think about how he must have felt when Ronald Reagan appointed him of head a Department of Education, a department the President publically said he wanted to destroy.

This morning’s statement about indentured servants makes me set bolt upright. It was not only accurate but for me it solidified the problem of education in the United States as the fruits of Republican efforts. It marks a huge win for them in destroying the middle class. Here is why I think that way.

University administrators have turned their institutions into research institutes designed to funnel taxpayer’s dollars to fund private research. University presidents, who are usually non-educators, are paid multi million dollar salaries to drive these “entrepreneurial efforts”. Case in point is the chemical engineer at the University of Minnesota. As readers of this blog site understand, high paid university administrators—multimillion-dollar salaries—do these things at the expense of teaching. More money going into research and less money went into teaching: non-qualified teachers, bigger class sizes, fewer subject offerings. Quality of education fell and the tuitions skyrocketed. In that context, students have to borrow huge, huge sums of money to receive the education needed by workers in modern industries.

It should not surprise the reader to hear that Republicans wanted to double interest on tuition while Obama wanted to cut interests rates on student loans. Think about this. Tuitions are sharply increasing, so students have to borrow more money to go to school: hundreds of thousand of dollars. Interest rates are high and banks are the ones loaning students the money; therefore, the rich are the ones profiting from the high tuition rates. Industry is profiting because they have educated workers to fill the jobs for which United States graduates are not properly trained so they, the CEOs go to Indian and China to hire the highest paid workers—the much-touted meritocracy in the modern work place.

The graduates with huge loans have to pay back them back. Therefore, even if they are receiving a huge salary, which they do not because they have to bow and scrape for jobs, is how CEO’s benefit from unemployment.  The college graduates have to live a lower middle class life style for a good share of their working lives. They are self-indentured to banks and loan companies; they are honorable people who have pledged to pay back their loans: they are indentured servants. They are Democrats who have made a deal with the greedy and will pay the price because it is the honorable thing to do. The unprincipled selfish have won.

Some of the more important backlash affects are that students become reluctant to go to college because of the daunting expenses for them and their parents. When they do go they have to be vocational students; they are not in college to be educated they are there to get a job. Liberal arts education enrollment falls and America is “dumbed” down. The objective of this post is to point out that this is class warfare. Rich parents can send their children to college without having to pay big interest rates because they do not have to borrow money. They can have their children educated in the private liberal arts colleges or the best of universities because they do not need to work to pay back big loans. Professional, such as dentists, physicians, veterinarians, and lawyers, have to charge more and more to pay back loans while the working class has to beg and scrap to pay them for needed medical and legal essentials. The old adage holds, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer”.

I read Albion’s Seeds by historian David Hackett Fischer in which he describes how in the New World, Virginia colonies to be more exact, the immigrating royalty excluded the middle class and brought their indentured servants with them and in addition bought slaves. Many of these people—white and black—fought hard to shake the bonds of servitude and became middle class; that is our beautiful egalitarian America. Now, four centuries later, those who feel they are royalty are busy making their indentured servants out of the middle class and some of us help them by voting for them—only in this century we don’t call the royalty, we call them Republican. 

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