I now hear the loudspeaker voice lead the kids in reciting the pledge of allegiance at the junior high school here in the land of Colonel Baker. The first couple of days of this ritual echo always takes me by surprise when I'm out skimming the pool and watering the plants. When I went to public school in this town, back in the days when a nickel was still worth a penny, the semester always began after Labor Day, but now classes for the masses convene in August. Everyone involved in education still gets Labor Day off, but now it comes about two weeks into the school year. God knows people need a break from each after getting just recently introduced.
My lads have been out of school for awhile now. They may have been the last pair to actually have gotten a decent deal in the California higher education arcade. They made the usual stops in the book gaming halls for the cash strapped, popping quarters into various junior college machines before ending their obligatory stay at two California State University campuses where the final level school-game bosses punched them out their hard fought prize, the paper diploma of no cache.
September always brings out the ranking lists of America's finest colleges from the self serving periodicals promoting themselves as the arbiters of academic taste for the discriminating parent, the worried collegiate administrator, or for the dental office patient stuck waiting in a tight fitting chair with a handful of mags to peruse while some root canal procedure in the back spaces runs long. The lists I saw this year waiting for my tooth cleaning came from Forbes and U.S. News & World Report.
Forbes could find no public college or university in their Top 25 list of best academic places. UC Berkeley and UCLA made the U.S. News & World Report Top 25 at numbers 22 and 25 respectively. Cal and UCLA could not break the Top 50 for Forbes. You can check the criteria on how the lists were made through the links if you wish. They both read like Charlie Brown's teacher sounds to me.
All this windup for the obvious pitch, which finds the wealthy taking their dollars directly to where their familial descendants will go- to a carefully cultivated private school where a building might have the same last name as a well heeled rush student or two of year 2022. When you see what the endowment picture for some of the top tier private colleges and universities on the Forbes and U.S. News & World Report lists look like compared to what the public universities total you get a clearer idea of how class warfare is truly waged in this world.
Stanford University serving about 19,000 students showed an endowment fund of $12.6 billion at the end of 2009 . The University of California system serving ten times the number of students (191,000) carried an endowment fund of just under $5 billion by the end of 2009 for its 10 campuses, but none of that money can go to pay salaries for teachers or defray other education costs. The California State University system, which serves more than 400,000 students, possessed an endowment fund of just under $900 million at the end of 2007, and given what the typical losses have been for the past two years a conservative estimate would put that figure at about $750 million for the end of 2009. Cal Tech (California Institute of Technology) in Pasadena has a private endowment fund almost twice the size of the largest public university system in the nation.
With all that endowment money (gift dollars as tax write-offs opposed to tax dollars for public benefit) at so many institutions of higher learning a person might start to wonder why student fees keep going ever higher. I ask myself the same question concerning my energy bills as I keep setting the thermometer higher in the summers and lower in the winters but even with lower usage pay a much higher cost each month over the previous year.
Harvard made a big splash a few years back by utilizing their huge endowment fund to underwrite qualified students at their school with a free ride for all those admitted whose families earned $60,000 per year or less. About 20% of the student body at Harvard utilizes this benefit today, but do not think those who chose this path feel all that comfortable while attending this very elite school.The gulf between the rich and poor today now seems as vast a distance as separate galaxies are from each other throughout the universe.
You certainly do not see the U.C. system, or the California State University system, underwriting the poor any longer, although more than 50% of C.S.U. students do receive some financial aid. The citizens of my home state now spit fire in full tax revolt, and have no desire to help underwrite a college education for their neighbors children at this time. These modern Libertarians either will send their brood to a private school, or on the other side of the socio-economic door will never send any family member to any college. Fees have skyrocketed the past couple of years at both California higher learning institutions where the cost of education for students spiked up more than 30% over the last couple of years. KCET reported that state supported per student aid has plummeted 50% this decade for college students while the cost of tuition rose $2,500 over the same time frame.
The sad fact for the world remains that we create many more poor each day than we do the very wealthy. At some point, and that point may be nearer than anyone imagines, the poor are going to revolt against the current economic and social systems that have created such huge earnings discrepancies between the chosen few and the neglected multitudes. The likelihood becomes so much greater for violent upheaval when all opportunities for advancement have been taken away from the lower class. Lottery scratch tickets may not convince enough folks that they too can have untold wealth and happiness. Drugs and alcohol may no longer pacify all those trapped in meaningless low paying occupations. In truth no one needs a college education to make these assumptions. It is the law of physics when you apply too much pressure for too long a time the reaction can be rather messy.
A thoughtful electorate might try to remove some of that pressure, and particularly those who fly in the gilded skies above the masses, and who might have the most to lose. Chip in a little more for tax purposes to ease the pressure. Allow the dollar disadvantaged some hope through affordable higher education costs without years of debt to tie them down and dispirit their dreams. Let the Bush tax cuts expire on the top 2% of earners, and allow a tax rate of 20% on capital gains. Instead of having the biggest portions of government money go to the few defense contractors and data stream computer-spy companies, allow some public money to go to places and people where unemployment sits at 15% or above with median per capita earnings at close to poverty. Maybe those shiny gated communities might be saved, instead of potentially becoming little prisons surrounded by mobs of angry unemployed and uneducated gun-toting freedom fighters searching for the good life, or at the very least the slightly used high-def 50-inch monitor of their choice.
Roger Waters may have been on to something about those walls and bricks thirty years ago.
Thanks for stopping by.
