Higher Education Inquirer : elites

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

A Trump v Harris Decision

The US has never been a true democracy. Since its inception, it has systematically disenfranchised entire groups of people because of their race, class, gender, and national origin. Some of those undemocratic levers have been reduced over time as more folks have become enfranchised through waves of legislation, at the state and federal level. By the mid-1960s, with the Voting Rights Act, progressives believed that a more perfect union was possible. But those times seem so long ago.

In 2000, the Supreme Court, in Bush v Gore, decided for George Bush despite irregularities in Florida. And the rest is recent history. 9-11 and the Great Recession followed. Mass surveillance is now taken for granted. And bank bailouts are considered the antidote to economic crises.

In 2016, Donald Trump was elected with millions fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, because Trump received more Electoral College votes. During Trump's term, hundreds of thousands of people died from the poorly managed Covid pandemic. And unemployment reached Depression level numbers before massive bailouts were enacted. Bailouts that put a huge hole in the federal government debt.

Democracy in America has not been a straightforward path. Dred Scott (1857) and Plessy v Ferguson (1896) were Supreme Court decisions that took America backward. The Hayes/Tilden compromise (1877) brought the end to the Reconstruction Era, and the US took several steps back in racial equality.

In the weeks ahead, the US Supreme Court may be tasked with deciding the election in what cannot be called democratic. A body of twelve men and women, all with elite degrees, interpreting the Constitution and the law as they see it. And their decision could affect not just the 330 million folks living in the US, but the entire human world. Will this august body make the decision in good faith and with due respect to the People? Let us pray, and organize peacefully, so that if the case comes to the Supreme Court, the justices make the right decision.

Chronicling the College Meltdown

Since 2016, the Higher Education Inquirer has documented the College Meltdown as a series of demographic and business trends leading to lower enrollments and making higher education of decreasing value to working-class and middle-class folks. This despite the commonly-held belief that college is the only way to improve social mobility.

For more than a dozen years, the College Meltdown has been most visible at for-profit colleges and community colleges, but other non-elite schools and for-profit edtech businesses have also been affected. Some regions, states, and counties have been harder hit than others. Non-elite state universities are becoming increasingly vulnerable.

Elite schools, on the other hand, do not need students for revenues, at least in the short run. They depend more on endowments, donations, real estate, government grants, corporate grants, and other sources of income. Elite schools also have more than enough demand for their product even after receiving bad press.

The perceived value and highly variable real value of higher education has made college less attractive to many working-class consumers and to an increasing number of middle-class consumers--who see it as a risky proposition. Degrees in the humanities and social sciences are becoming a tough sell. Even some STEM degrees may not be valuable for too long. Public opinion about higher education and the value of higher education has been waning and many degrees, especially graduate degrees, have a negative return on investment.

Tuition and room and board costs have skyrocketed. Online learning has become more prominent, despite persistent questions about its educational value.

While college degrees have worked for millions of graduates, student loans have mired millions of other former students, and their families, in long-term debt, doing work in fields they aren't happy with.

Elite degrees for people in the upper class still make sense though, as status symbols and social sorters. And there are some professions that require degrees for inclusion. But those degrees and the lucrative jobs accompanying them disproportionately go to foreigners and immigrants, and their children--a demographic wave that may draw the ire of folks who have lived in the US for generations and who may have not enjoyed the same opportunities.

Starting Sooner and Ending Worse

The latest phase of the College Meltdown was supposed to result from a declining number of high school graduates in 2025, something Nathan Grawe projected from lower birth rates following the 2008-2009 recession.

But problems with the federal government's financial aid system may mean that a significant decline in enrollment at non-elite schools starts this fall instead of 2025.

The College Meltdown may become even worse than planned, in terms of lower enrollment and declining revenues to non-elite schools. Enrollment numbers most assuredly will be worse than Department of Education projections of slow growth until 2030.

In 2023, we wrote about something few others reported on: that community colleges and state universities would feel more financial pressure from by the flip-side of the Baby Boom: the enormous costs of taking care of the elderly which could drain public coffers that subsidize higher education. This was a phenomenon that should also have been anticipated by higher education policy makers, but is still rarely discussed. Suzanne Mettler graphed this out in Degrees of Inequality a decade ago--and the Government Accountability Office noted the huge projected costs in 2002.

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Wednesday, October 30, 2024

A Trump v Harris Decision

Tuesday, May 14, 2024

College Meltdown 3.0 Could Start Earlier (And End Worse) Than Planned