USING TITLE IV HEA TO FORCE COLLEGE EDUCATIONAL REFORM

I wrote the following as a response to the call by the U.S. Department of Education for new ideas and innovations in higher education to combat rising college costs, of course, I did not submit it. It should be obvious to the Secretary of Education that our higher education system in the United States is severely broken. There is no system change in the Title IV HEA program that will allow lending institutions to make more money off students and their parents than they will do now—the economic institutions through lobbying have maximized profits for themselves at the expense of education. What truly should be done is to raise taxes, but increasing taxes is impossible with the current political situation. Changing Title IV will not have any real positive effect. The changes needed are more fundamental than that. The only alternative is to change the nature of institution by loaning money only to students that are attending good programs, which opens up the question, what is a “good program”.

The lending institutions have the working poor as their target population; the economic elite do not borrow tuition money. The government, in the social-capitalist democracy we fashioned for ourselves in 1776, exists to insure fair and equitable distribution of the wealth in the form of salaries, taxes, and in this specific case, college tuition to insure educations of all who want it receive it. It should be obvious to all that federal and state subsidies to educational institutions have decreased in all states, not just in K – 12 but also K through PHD. The decline is directly related to a shift in the tax burden from corporations to the working class. The decrease in government subsidies to educational institutions is dramatic, as demonstrated by the percentage drops of over 50%, a figure leaned from the limited information available on line. This change has forced universities and colleges to do several things, none of them for the good of education; first, force professors to apply for federal and private research grants that will support their own salaries; second, to dramatically raise tuition to meet expenses; and third, force administrators to cut institutional expenses.

As a caveat, many of my remarks focus on material and medical sciences. When I write about cuts in subsides for a university, it applies to all of the departments in that a university. There are some great biology departments, social science departments, etc and even some surviving engineering departments, but the take away is that they all could do a better job of educations students and for a lot less money.    

The decrease in subsidies is due to a decrease in government tax income. The shift in the tax burden has been from the economic elite to the working class, the very people who need but cannot afford to send their children to be educated. The moneylenders have responded with Title IV remedies, some of which are hideous in nature, which is why there is the call for innovative ideas. The Obama administration, much to its credit, has recognized this and is trying to correct it. The moneylenders, being in the lobbying position they are in, will insure that changes in student loan programs will fail to change anything, except to increase their profits. These people charge market rates even when government guarantees remove the risk and they are the ones who changed the bankruptcy protection laws to exempt student loan debt.

The decrease in federal and state subsidies has forced university administrators to ask their professors to seek outside salary support in the form of grants. Industrialist, including universities, openly corrupted government research grants with the 1980 Bayh-Dole amendment, which allows private ownership of federally funded research results. This amendment was an echo of the urgencies that grew out of past wars that first opened the doors of educational institutions to government money for military needs then kept the doors open to industrialists with hands full of cash. CEO’s learned how to profitable use taxpayers subsidized state institutions to do their profit oriented industrial research. In essence, this slow evolution turned emphasis away from education and educational oriented basic research to patentable research. In addition, this decrease and misuse of tax subsidies forced professors to seek salary support from the government or a private entity, which not only shifted institutional loyalties but shifted work objectives from teaching to research. Yes, university professors should do research but not for economic gain. Retire Cornell President F. H. T. Rhodes in his book Creation of the Future, which is probably the worst book about education that I have ever read. This ex-college presidents advocates allowing industrialist to have a say in who is hired and who is fired as a professor. The University of Minnesota has a non-educator president, a chemical engineer, who thinks he has done a great thing by making a young professor’s contributions to “entrepreneur adventures” part of the professorial tenure question for faculty.

There are more professors and staff in some major universities that there are students. The class sizes are expanding at a rapid rate while the people who teach these classes are lower and lower in professorial rank. University administrators hire professors to do research and not to teach; if you hire researcher you get researchers; if you hire teachers, you get teachers. As undergraduate education deteriorates, graduates students are becoming cheap labor. We have grade inflation and degree inflations. We have a shift from professional to technician training. Postgraduate education has deteriorated to an apprenticeship program. In an era when basic science knowledge is expanding exponentially, medical and veterinary medical schools are expanding clinical exposure and cutting basic science exposure.

Universities become bigger, building more and more research laboratories and buildings, and hiring new professors to do the industrial research, not teaching. The cost of higher “education” skyrocketed but the “dirty little secret” was that cost escalation for state institutions was not for education. The educational cost usually paid for by state subsidies is now paid by tuition; tax supported subsidy money went to support research. Students will not go to college because it is too expensive and if they do go, they graduate with such tremendous debt that they cannot recover. Fifty thousand dollars year tuition for medical school, for example, is ridiculous. What is happening is that the foreign economic elite join U.S. economic elite in our higher educational institution. They are the only ones who can afford the costs. As the second alternative, our U.S. industries are hiring students educated in foreign countries and come to the U.S. to fill jobs not filled by American students.

If the state is not willing to support an institution with tax subsidies, the federal government should not support students who attend that institution. Chase the “money changers” out of the “temple of learning” by repealing the Bayh-Dole amendment. If the state wants to support a research institute fine; if the federal government wants to support a research institute fine,  but the federal government should not loan money to students to go to “college” in a research institute were education is clearly deteriorating. Allow Title IV student loans only where the administration of the university is distinctly different from that of a research institute. Only allow loans for students who are taught by assistant, associate, and full professor hired as teachers and are taught in small classes. Use the title for assistant associate and full scientists for researchers or medical scientist as I was when working for the Atomic Energy Commission; it didn’t hurt my ego a bit.. To allow students to put themselves in deep debt to earn a worthless degree is amoral; allowing them to be uneducated.

If you are one of those people who think our higher educational institutions measure up, then these suggest would change nothing, but I bet if these suggestions were followed, they would empty the halls of many department in many institutions. The only think I feel bad about these proposals is that I am suggesting that the government use students to do what university administrators should do. In my own defense, I say the students motivated by a desire to be educated apparently are the only adults in the room filled by people with profit motives. 

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