To the Editor:
It’s a good idea only if you believe in the “American dream” – our children should live at least as well as we do, and hopefully better – and only if you believe that we live in a competitive world, and we need to ensure that young Americans get a first-rate education to compete with young people in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere.
The American right-wing recognizes that educated people do not vote for the right-wing. The statistics are stark: Of the top 20 states rated by educational attainment, only the bottom two – Kansas and Georgia – are more or less reliably Republican.
You can see this at the local level, as well. Cape May County ranks 14th in the quality of its public schools, and it’s the most Republican county in the state. Coincidence? I think not.
Of course, current and recent students, and their families, have been royally screwed by a fraudulent federal student loan system. It was designed by Republicans to make banks even richer at the cost of students and taxpayers.
Herald readers should know that student loans are guaranteed by “the full faith and credit” of the U.S. government, so there is no way the banks can lose a penny on a student loan.
Even so, rates charged for student loans are higher than those for loans that have no such guarantee, and to make things a whole lot worse, Republicans, including the current Secretary of Education Betsy Devos, blocked the government from helping students who have been bilked by fraudulent, for-profit “schools” to relieve them from their predatory creditors.
I agree that university education in America is too expensive. Of course, tuition of $50,000 and more at private universities means the kids must come from rich families, or they must qualify for some kind of charity from the school or some other eleemosynary institution, or they have to take out obscenely expensive student loans, but public universities are also way out of the price range for a huge percentage of Americans: Wisconsin, $12,000 in-state, $38,000 out of state; Berkeley, $14,000 in-state, $44,000 out of state; University of Virginia, $18,000 in-state, $51,000 out of state; and Rutgers, $12,000 in-state, and $28,000 out of state.
The phrase “world-envied system of private colleges and universities” simply has no validity. Nobody envies Americans paying upwards of $50,000 for a year at school.
The simple fact is that in Europe (except the UK, of course) only rich students who cannot compete at a high level would even think of attending a private college or university. Just to give one example, tuition at the University of Paris, for undergraduates, is about $300 a year.
How do they do that? One way is by focusing.
European universities don’t have football teams. They don’t have glee clubs. They don’t have rock-climbing walls. If students want to do such things, they find other places that offer them.
Of course, another way is by paying taxes. Europeans pay higher taxes than we do. They get a whale of a lot more from them than we do, including cradle to grave health care, and, in the end, they pay a whale of a lot less for things like education and health care than we do, and what they get for their money is a whole lot better.
To recite a common truism: You think education is expensive? Try ignorance.
As Republicans fully recognize, their future is dependent on stopping people from getting educated. Their only hope is that ignorance and poverty mean more Republican votes.
