Bap Kennedy “Vampire”
Class War
The Pell grant, once the cornerstone of student aid, has plummeted from covering seventy-two percent of the cost of college to just thirty-two, tuition increases have skyrocketed into the double-digits as states balance their budgets by slashing higher education funding, two-thirds of students are taking out mortgage-sized loans to pay for college, sending the average borrower nearly twenty-five thousand dollars in debt at graduation, and, as with the rest of America, students continue to struggle in one of the worst job markets on record.
Education is a Right: A Different Kind of March Madness
I keep thinking about the sort of rhetorical age or moment we are living through, and I have to say it often leaves me feeling disappointed and more than a little bitter, especially when it comes to public discourse. Even National Public Radio is declining so rapidly that I wonder if I might finally give up on it. NPR’s lack of ambition and creativity when it comes to funding has turned it into another commercial medium rather than a public medium. It’s not just commercials, it’s commercials with periodic episodes of whiny begging.
What really gets my goat, though, is the way so much of the media– NPR included– panders to the worst sort of right-wing nonsense. They just don’t seem to want to do the work to find legitimate conservative critics, I think, so they simply take the easy way out and allow the nuttiest of the right wing to use the public air ways to say almost anything. I keep wondering if these mainstream journalist types have lost all judgment or if they are simply so desperately afraid of loosing their audience and so their meal ticket that they will try anything.
Meanwhile, while they dutifully repeat the Republican claim that health care reform is apocalyptic, they miss stories that have real substance and importance. There’s the long list of attacks on higher education listed by Education is a Right, to start, and an even longer list of attacks on public education financing (including in my own town, Charleston, Illinois) and on the teaching of history, as represented by the right wing nuts in Texas. And, of course, they are not covering the students who want to resist, either. Omission is as bad as commission.
The Cost of Class
College teachers, such as myself, are always telling our students that whatever else they get out of college, (and I hope they get a lot more) they can be confident that their investment of time and energy will underwrite a lifetime of relative economic prosperity. (Last night’s passage of the health reform bill may make an equally important contribution to the financial security of the middle class.) Doug Henwood’s recent costs and benefits analysis of education (“I’m borrowing my way through college…“) shows that this is still true.
Someone who doesn’t finish high school will on average earn only half as much as a high school graduate; if you earn a graduate degree, you can earn 2 to 3 times the income of a high school graduate. The caveat, and it’s a big caveat, is that students are leaving college with more and more debt. One reason is that college costs have risen dramatically, outpacing even medicine. And while there are grants available, the prohibitive costs have helped to ensure that class reproduction rather than class mobility is the new normal.
I see other limits to access in my classes, which are dominated by working class students; it’s particularly dramatic at the end of each session, when I’m thinking once more about the students who give up or, more mysteriously, sign up for the class but never show up, much less participate. There seems to be two main kinds of problems. One one side are students who don’t have the skills. Maybe they dropped out, or are non-native speakers, or just slipped through school without learning to write. They often mistrust teachers.
On the other side are students whose lives seem to be so chaotic and difficult that they can’t quite muster the discipline and focus. This is hard to judge accurately, of course; in any class there are always an alarming number of family deaths and catastrophes. (It’s more effective than “the dog ate my paper.”) But I know from my own family that too many of these stories are true and that if you don’t have much help (or money) to begin with, then every sort of problem is that much more draining and difficult and time consuming.