Should student loan debt be reduced or forgiven?

“Before any great things are accomplished, a memorable change must be made in the system of education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of society nearer to the higher. The education of a nation instead of being confined to a few schools and universities for the instruction of the few, must become the national care and expense for the formation of the many.” ~John  Adams

There was a time when the greater purpose of higher education in the United States was creating informed citizens who could find a place and engage in a participatory democracy.  Americans have always prided themselves on being a beacon of democracy to the rest of the world; an example to counter dictatorial, totalitarian, or fascist regimes. We as a nation have promoted democracy as the way forward for countries who wanted to throw off the political and economic shackles of repression.

One of the instruments of promoting democracy took the form of access to higher education. Higher learning was seen as a bastion of everything from enlightenment thought to industrialization. We built cathedrals to higher education; Harvard University, for example, was founded 140 years before the American Revolution. The development of creative thinkers with a well-rounded education that included the Arts and Humanities was held in high regard as a moral, cultural and economic imperative.

After the Second World War, the GI Bill allowed millions of veterans to pursue higher education; for the first time in the nation’s history, higher learning was accessible to virtually all classes of people. This was truly a transformational moment in American history; most of the men and women who benefited from the GI Bill were the first in their family to go to college. These events coincided with a temporary spike in civic engagement that lasted well into the 1960s; voter participation was particularly strong at this time (Pintor, Gratschew & Sullivan, 2003).

It is clear from John Adams’ quote that the Founders intended a role for the Federal Government in the education of our nation. However, if Adams’ were transported from his time to the present, he would not recognize anything in our current education policy that demonstrated this priority. In fact, for the last thirty years or so, public education, including higher education, has either been under attack for supposed inefficiencies while continuously finding its funding subject to cuts; or has been commodified by corporate interests to be little more than vocational education factories to supply their too often temporary, low-paying, benefits-poor labor force. But perhaps the most telling aspect of the shift in the curriculum emphasis in higher education is the sharp rise in tuition, with the concomitant need for ever larger student loans. Student loan debt has exploded in recent years, with solutions to the problem ranging from forgiving most or all of the debt to abolishing the program altogether (Raum, 2012). The question is: should student loan debt be reduced or forgiven? As someone who believes that we cannot call ourselves a fully functioning democracy if every citizen does not have equality of opportunity, I argue that not only should student loan debt be reduced or forgiven, but also that tuition costs should be reduced and that all of this can be paid for if our national priorities are in order. In this paper I will show how our priorities have been skewed away from a democratic notion of education to one that largely benefits corporations and university administrators.

If we are to comprehend what the Founders intended for educating the American populace, and how education can feed the soul of democracy, it is instructive to understand the forces behind the psychology and measures employed to undermine democracy (while disguised as pro-democracy), bifurcate our education system along class lines, and blur the distinction between the economic (capitalism) and the political (democracy) in order to maintain the balance of power in the direction of big business and away from the average citizen and their voting voice.

In the 1920s, government, PR and advertising firms, and business leaders, spurred by the success of President Woodrow Wilson’s World War I propaganda service, banded together to form public opinion and habits around “creating artificial wants, imagined needs, a device recognized to be an effective technique of control” (Chomsky, 2004). Edward Bernays, a member of Wilson’s propaganda service and one of the founders of the PR industry, claimed that “the general public are ignorant and meddlesome outsiders whose role in a democracy is to be spectators, not participants” (Chomsky, 2004). These business and government leaders sought to create a “philosophy of futility” and “lack of purpose in life” (Chomsky, 2004) through the focus on meaningless and superficial consumption. They knew that, just as in Adolf Hitler’s Germany, a passive, disinterested public is one that is also easy to control and manipulate; one that will turn command of their lives over to presumably better educated, business-savvy men of property. Though the New Deal cultural programs and introduction of the GI Bill served to ameliorate some of the darker aspects of this form of brainwashing, the process of cultivating a passive American public has continued mostly unabated ever since.

Another aspect of this anti-Democratic agenda was to champion the notion of two sets of standards for education as it related to democratic participation. Journalist Walter Lippman, in concert with the aforementioned parties, reported on his version of “democracy” in the 1920s, stating “…representative democracy entailed creating two modes of education – one mode would be for the elite, who would rule the country and be the true participants in the democratic process, and the other branch of education would be designed for the masses, whose education would train them to be obedient workers and passive spectators rather than participants in shaping democratic public life” (Giroux, 2004).  On the other hand, in the tradition of John Adams and the Founders, Henry Giroux makes the case that “Progressives like W.E.B. Dubois, John Dewey and Jane Addams rejected such a divergence of educational opportunity outright. They believed that education for a democratic citizenry was an essential condition of equality and social justice and had to be provided through public and higher education” (Giroux, 2004).

In 1964, Mario Savio, a leader of the Free Speech Movement, recognized what was happening to higher education and to students hoping to benefit from it. Before his now-famous comments on “the operation of the machine,” he told his audience that University of California at Berkeley President Kerr compared the Board of Regents to shareholders in a corporation and himself to the manager of said corporation, which for Savio meant that the students are raw materials, to be sold in the market place; Savio strenuously objected to this characterization, stating, “we are not employees, we are human beings!” (Savio, 1964).

The commodification (we as individuals are a commodity, and our entrance to a higher social class will cost us) and vocationalization (shift from humanities to a business-oriented or corporate training model) of higher education has resulted in ever-rising tuition costs. University presidents are hired from the ranks of the corporate world and are paid accordingly (as long as they are generating the appropriate amount of revenue). Universities and corporations are teaming up to build entire degree programs around entrance directly into that corporation’s work force, going as far as including the corporate name in the title of the programs and courses; surely these firms are looking for a financial payoff. The direct influence of corporations on college and university curriculum and administration is a recent phenomenon, but it is no coincidence that its appearance on the scene coincides with the steep rise in tuition. In the 1980-81 school year, the average tuition fees, for both public and private four-year colleges and universities, were $8,672; in the 2009-10 school year, they were $20,986 (What are the…2011). During that same span, median family income was virtually stagnant, ranging from approximately $37,000 in 1980 to approximately $46,000 in 2008 (Median household income, 2009). Clearly, for the vast majority of Americans, college tuition is not affordable.

Perhaps one is not convinced that there is a connection between corporate influence at universities and higher tuition fees. I would like to introduce an additional tack, then. In France, there are no university tuition fees; in Germany, students or their families pay only $1,000 per year to attend university (Sheng, 2010). One argument that occasionally surfaces when arguing for reduced fees or free college education is, “Not one French university appears in the top forty of world universities; you get what you pay for” (Sheng, 2010). According to this line of reasoning, there is a correlation between higher tuition fees and a better education. Then why are American companies going out of their way to hire foreign workers (Bort, 2011), often paying them less than they would have to pay an American worker?; and these workers are supposed to be arriving here after attending inferior schools, whether from Asia or Europe, because higher tuition fees signal a better education! So we pay higher tuitions to ostensibly have the best university education, yet there are no jobs for us when we have completed that education/training and people who have studied in other countries, presumably with lesser standards and rigor because they pay little or nothing for it compared to us, are being paid less to do the jobs we have trained for at supposedly better colleges and universities.

In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News, the chief executive of Intel, Craig Barrett, discussed the integration of India, China, and Russia into the new global economy this way: “I don’t think this has been fully understood in the United States. If you look at India, China, and Russia, they all have strong educational heritages…The big change today from what’s happened over the last 30 years is that it’s no longer just low-cost labor that you are looking at. It’s well educated labor that can effectively do any job that can be done in the United States (Herbert, 2004). What about American educational heritage? Long before the student loan debt problem reared its ugly head, Americans had been led to believe that we have the best educational system in the world; now we’re supposed to believe that it’s a good thing to have corporate logos plastered all over campuses, professors and administrators more concerned about the bottom line than educating future citizens, and college sports programs (sponsored by corporations) raking in hundreds of millions while tuitions skyrocket; and all of this to see good-paying jobs either shipped out of the country, or filled with foreign workers from “strong educational heritages?”

            Then there is the matter of our colleges and universities becoming increasingly more vocational. This is not working out very well for Americans, either. The few manufacturing jobs left in this country are now often filled by workers who went to college, where in the past most of these positions were filled by less educated workers. Does a college education make them more productive? It appears not. Productivity levels in most of Europe are higher than the U.S. (including France); number of hours worked in manufacturing in Europe has trended higher for several years; and workers are better paid in these countries (International comparisons of…2011). If vocationalizing higher education was supposed to improve the corporate bottom line, it appears it might not be working so well for anyone (unless the company moved the jobs overseas); especially workers, some who are paying those high tuitions. We are paying higher tuitions to work longer hours at lower paying jobs. And we often can’t afford to pay back the student loans.

“Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education? Free medical care? Free whatever? It comes from Moscow. From Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell” (Moyers, 2003).

Perhaps the mindset that Texas State Representative Debbie Riddle demonstrates in this statement is at the root of many of our society’s ills; it also brings us back to Edward Bernays and Walter Lippman and the indoctrination of the American public to a condition of apathy. What kind of a society do we want? Do we believe in democracy, or just pay lip service to the ideology? Do we want to educate our people to compete in a global economy? If our priority is to educate Americans toward full participation in democracy and compete globally, nothing less than a complete shift in how we organize our society is in order. I am sure the people in Europe and all around the world, whose way of life comes “straight from the pit of hell” yet who are better educated and more productive than us, would agree that a good place to start would be to reduce or forgive student loan debt, lower college tuition substantially, and place more emphasis on a humanities-driven, well-rounded higher education. No less than the future of the country is at stake.

References

Bort, J. (2011, December 06). Despite high unemployment, u.s. companies are hiring from overseas at record pace. Business insider, Retrieved from http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-12-06/news/30481039_1_h-1b-h1b-visa-petitions-visa-program

Chomsky, N. (2004). On nature and language. (pp. 182-183). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Giroux, H., & Searls Giroux, S. (2004). Take back higher education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Herbert, B. (2004, January 26). Education is no protection. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/26/opinion/education-is-no-protection.html

Median household income. (2009). Unpublished raw data, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. Retrieved from http://www.stanford.edu/class/polisci120a/immigration/Median Household Income.pdf

Moyers, B. (2003, May 14). [Video Tape Recording]. Now with bill moyers. , Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript220_full.html

Pintor, R., Gratschew, M., & Sullivan, K. (2003, January). Voter turnout rates from a comparative perspective. Retrieved from http://www.idea.int/publications/vt/upload/Voter turnout.pdf

Raum, T. (2012, April 03). Explosion in student loan debt reaching crisis proportions, but largely flying under radar. Coast reporter. Retrieved from http://www.coastreporter.net/article/GB/20120403/CP01/304039992/-1/sechelt/explosion-in-student-loan-debt-reaching-crisis-proportions-but&template=cpArt

Savio, M. (Performer) (1964). Mario savio on the operation of the machine [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhFvZRT7Ds0

Sheng, J. (2010). [Web log message]. Retrieved from http://jimsheng.hubpages.com/hub/Comparison-of-cost-of-higher-education-around-the-world

U.S. department of education, National center for education statistics. (2011). What are the trends in the cost of college education? (NCES 2011-015). Retrieved from Institute of education sciences website: http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76

U.S. department of labor, Division of international labor comparisons. (2011). International comparisons of manufacturing productivity and unit labor cost trends. Retrieved from Bureau of labor statistics website: http://www.bls.gov/web/prod4.supp.toc.htm