During the reign of the Ayn Rand Free Marketeers we had Alan Greenspan, who made these huge predictions that were almost always wrong about the ability of the “Market” to regulate itself.
The “Market” is made up of crooks, liars and thieves. A better argument could be made for allowing the Mafia to self-regulate.
Then there is the efficiency argument based on mainly having non-union workers who are paid less. Except they never mention how the people at the top are paid far more as are the “share holders”, who are almost never the workers.
One of the more disturbing trends since the 1950s has been the right wing assault on public education, that has been going on since Brown vs The Topeka Board of Education. There was never, not in a single district any where, racially based separate but equal education. What we had was educational apartheid, and the neo-Confederates liked it just fine.
The neo-Confederate efforts to defund education started with integration. And the good liberals with their niceness and politeness didn’t want to stoop as low as those nasty right wingers because fighting them would have meant being like them rather than trying to understand them.
As early as the 1960s you had the grand daddy of many of today’s “conservative” organizations, The John Birch Society, ranting about John Dewey’s and Francis Bellamy’s “socialism” because of their role in creating public education in America.
Add to this the Christo-Nazi movement, which views education to be about indoctrination rather than teaching students to think, and you have a toxic movement undermining American Education.
The elite are always well educated, the working people… not so much…
But prior to the 1970s we had access to cheap publicly funded higher education.
After the 1960s, well more factually from the end of WW II when the GI Bill brought many thousand working class people to the campuses, there has been a constant effort to defund public higher education.
Conservatives believe in education for the wealthy elites and training for everyone else. I should add with a good dose of indoctrination.
I have watched with disgust as the Washington Post, the paper that brought us the Watergate Scandal has prostituted itself in support of Kaplan “University”. The Post seems to have recused itself of its proper role as a journalistic institution, confused itself with being a content provider around which advertising can be wrapped.
And like a long dead fish wrapped in a Washington Post, that plan stinks.
It turns out most students would be better off attending publicly funded junior colleges and colleges. The big pitch of these for profit schools is they will help one obtain a career that doesn’t involve lifting heavy objects or standing for long hours on a concrete floor getting abused by shoppers.
Unfortunately these schools don’t give a shit about the people they are fleecing and encouraging to go into debt. Often times the degree or certificate one gets from one of these institutions is of little or no value in moving up the economic scale as those who went to traditional public or private schools tend to view those degrees as inferior to even Associate degrees from traditional junior colleges.
What we have is a combined attack on funding of public education K-Bachelor’s degree (that is regulated) combined with a selling of private sector, for profit education that is unregulated.
The core ideology of the right wing conservative movement is elitist and classist. The wealthy exist to rule in glory those not of the elite exist to slave for a pittance and generate yet more wealth for the already obscenely wealthy.
Three articles worth reading at Huffington Post:
As one might expect from an unregulated business selling a dubious produce many purchasing that product wind up defaulting on the money they borrowed to purchase it.
12/23/2010
A whopping 46.3 percent of federal loans distributed to students at for-profit colleges in 2008 would go into default, according to new Education Department data.
This figure is significantly larger than the rate of default on student loans overall, which in 2008 amounted to 15.8 percent.
The staggering percentage of defaulted loans at proprietary institutions may garner support for federal efforts to regulate such colleges and provide a boost for the DoE’s proposed “gainful employment” rule, which would screen for-profit institutions according to their students’ ability to repay loans. Essentially, the rule would test the likelihood that students will graduate and then become gainfully employed.
If approved, “gainful employment” would mandate a two-part test for colleges, including an analysis of their students’ debt to income ratio and a determination of whether those students are paying down principals on loans.
Colleges that fail the tests will not be allowed to receive tuition in the form of federal aid — which is the source of up to 90 percent of most proprietary institutions’ current revenue.
Continue reading at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/23/46-percent-default-rate-o_n_800283.html
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