Our Children’s Future

It would be wrong to leave our children with the enormous debt and to allow our government to steal liberties we have taken for granted from future generations.

Today college graduates face a 1 in 2 chance of securing employment. Young, well educated men and women are graduating with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans. In face our Nation Student Loans debt just surpassed all credit card debt, and yet there are no jobs.

The problem in our universities stem from two issues: No downward pressure on tuition costs and no accountability for graduate outcomes. If universities were to be cut from federal funds and instead received a small portion of a graduate’s income out of college with any job found through the university’s career placement center or a similar arrangement in lieu of that, they would have an incentive to push students into careers that offer skills useful to the economy. Removal from a steady source of government income would also require them to offer courses at a more competitive rate because their primary funding mechanisms would be the tuition of students, donations from alumni, and their small cut from successful graduates. It would also require them to keep their program costs down to maximize their endowment.

Rather than focus on useful life skills, colleges in the past decade have increasingly emphasized humanities and specialty studies that are little more than a feeder program into those specialty studies. These programs impart only one unique and useful skill to their graduates: The skill necessary to become a staffer for or the dean of that department in another university. In the business world, it would be nonsensical to have a department whose sole purpose is to perpetually justify its own existence by increasing its future size, yet that is what many of these specialty programs do. This is excellent training for a government bureaucracy, but not for work in the private sector.

These subjects provide an amazing opportunity for professors as a research mill, but it costs every student in the college more money. It is not that these are unworthy topics of inquiry or should not be part of college offerings, but institutionalizing them serves only the interests of permanent academics, not a society with increasingly complex labor requirements and technical demands. They are free to continue these programs, as is their right, but they would now be incentivized to look at the potential cost to both the student and the school to operate these programs, and be somewhat responsible for the outcomes of their graduates. Linking educational offerings with alumni performance will better suit the needs of our economy, and give universities an incentive structure that suits the educational requirements of our modern society.

Without making some of these changes, graduates with Masters Degrees will continue to face paying their student loans while waiting tables. The cost of an education has grown 700% since 1980 and yet that education offers only a 50/50 chance for employment. To strap our children with this burden is unthinkable. If a doctor told me he was going to perform a tonsillectomy on your child with a 50% chance of success you’d never let him operate. Yet President Obama and liberal politicians want to use tax dollars continue feeding an education bubble rather than putting the onus on universities to educate towards meaningful employment. They present a false choice between “doing it for the children” and obliterating education entirely, when in truth education does not need to be a federal function, and federal funding has removed the incentive for higher education’s true purpose: Providing an opportunity for students to learn useful life skills that enhance society for everyone.

For anyone who wants to keep President Obama in office or put Joe Kennedy III, who has promised to work along the same lines as the president, I respectfully say: “We can’t afford them!” I graduated with student loans and was fortunate enough to pay the back. Few of our children today are on a course to say the same, at least not until far later in their lives. We cannot afford a Congressman who only moved into this district mere months before he pulled papers, who has never had to worry about either money or the cost of education, and endorses policies that will continue fueling the education bubble. Our children deserve better.