Higher education claims a higher and higher percentage of the nation's resources. No longer the land of the underpaid, it is routine for administrators to make high six figure incomes and many university presidents make well over seven figures. Sounds like Wall Street, only better. The work hours typically include six months vacation every year. Not a bad deal.
But not good enough, apparently, as colleges and universities demand more and more with higher tuitions and higher expenditures from government at all levels.
One of the more insidious parts of this disgraceful situation is the expansion of student loans by the Obama Administration. The main thrust of this is to increase the tuition levels at all schools to take advantage of this new source of funding. Knowing that students can borrow, schools have created internal departments that are designed to educate and encourage students to take on debt so that the schools can further boost their own tuition charges. Keep increasing the availability of student loans and the colleges and universities will continue to escalate tuition.
The results of all of this government largesse is the creation of a huge underclass in America -- young people strangled by student loan debt that they are increasingly unable to pay. Check out the Wall Street Journal story today on the rising default levels by young people on their student debt. This problem will soon rival the mortgage crisis.
This is the ultimate squeeze play. Strangle the economy so that job opportunities for young people disappear and jack up tuition to absurd levels and force students to take on debt that they have no real chance of paying off. This is the compassion of modern politics.
No one asks: why are college costs rising faster than any other cost in the economy. Are colleges doing something that involves increasing costs? If so, what? The colleges and universities have very successfully kept this question under wraps while they demand more and more resources to fund an elite group of employees who have huge incomes and net wealth and work less and less.
Not only are our youth saddled with massive debts to cover current recipients of social security and medicare, but now, as if that weren't enough, we are pushing them into massive indebtedness and an economy that provides no way out for them.
These kind of cruel policies often are cloaked by phrases like: "investing in education" or "investing in the future." But, what is really going on is a transfer of resources from our young people to elite, protected, typically tenured people who see themselves as entitled to massive income, benefits, and an ever-declining work load.
