(2023-01-22) Hunt: Yay College Part1 The Smiley-face Supervillainy Of American Higher Education

Ben Hunt: "Yay, College!" Part 1: The Smiley-Face Super-Villainy of American Higher Education.

The “Yay, College!” Series
Part 1: The Smiley-Face Super-Villainy of American Higher Education
Part 2: The Big Short of American Higher Education
Part 3: Making American Higher Education Great Again

A little more than 6% of the American economy, about $1.6 trillion per year based on current GDP levels, is spent on education. That’s more than national defense (about 3% of GDP) and less than healthcare (about 18%), but haha! everything is less than healthcare.

But the power and political importance of these two institutional pillars of American society go far beyond their economic scale.

Both of these institutional systems – schools and hospitals – enjoy intensely positive narratives, particularly at the higher end of those systems

In narrative-world, American colleges and universities – especially our most prominent ones – are our Superman, our most powerful and respected institutional superhero. They are at the core of our common knowledge of truth, justice and the American way.

The Boys is a dystopian comic book series brought to TV by Amazon, where the ‘superheroes’ are all debauched bullies

The modern American system of higher education – especially its most prominent public and private universities – is less our Superman than our Homelander, a smiley-faced faux superhero who does The Man’s dirty work in exchange for wealth, privilege and … our cheers.

The Man has two sides – a corporate side (what we call the Nudging Oligarchy in Epsilon-speak) and a political side (what we call the Nudging State) – and they each have a nasty itch that only our colleges and universities can scratch.

In service to the Nudging Oligarchy, our colleges and universities have created an occupational caste system of enormous power and universal acceptance.

In service to the Nudging State, our colleges and universities have created a luxury consumption economy of higher education so that the non-rich FEEL RICH even as they stay non-rich. ((2013-01-13) Hipsters College Employability And Meaning)

Even more than an IQ test (another sorting function traditionally fulfilled by American higher education), employers want to know if a job applicant is ‘one of us’.

educational class

this stratification has little to no bearing on the actual education delivered by the college or university in question

this stratification is absolutely real and absolutely sets the path of at least your first ten years of adult life. And yes, this stratification is a largely hereditary status that is mostly determined by the educational class of your parents

This common knowledge of “Yay, College!” is why we put such enormous pressure on our children to get into a ‘good’ college, and it’s why so many of our children are damaged by that pursuit.

the truth – that our world is organized as a largely hereditary, educational class-based pecking order – cannot be imposed from above, but must be accepted from below.

College education is insanely expensive today because colleges and universities have worked in tandem with the US government to jack up prices with one hand and provide infinite amounts of easy college debt financing with the other.

your college education today is no better than your college education 40 years ago. It just costs 13.5 times as much!

Relative to our incomes, college is 3.4 times more expensive today than it was in 1980.

These tuition cost accelerations match directly with the legislative timeline of federal direct lending programs and, even more importantly, the narrative timeline of efforts to politicize federal direct lending.

consumer borrowing for college increased dramatically in 2003

Student loan debt grew from $220 billion in 2003 to $1.6 trillion in 2022 – the largest single-purpose amount of non-mortgage consumer debt ever taken on in the history of man.

Today, more than 90% of the $1.6 trillion in outstanding student loans is lent directly by the US government.

These trillions of dollars in public support have been used for a singular purpose by America’s colleges and universities: the expansion and administration of an ever more lavish, ever more well-compensated institutional empire.

one recent article making the rounds was about Yale now having a one-to-one ratio of administrators to students. Not faculty to students, that ratio is basically unchanged for 30 years except that much more of the instruction is done by graduate students and not faculty at all, but administrators to students

Here’s a link to the Fall 2020 list of employees and salaries, organized by department and office, for the University of Florida, our fifth largest single-campus public university with 58,000 students. This document is 1,035 pages long.

President Fuchs can’t complain about the additional $500,000 he received in benefits and bonuses above and beyond his $926,000 salary.

office of 11 people, averaging about $140,000 per year in salary, and they are the lobbyists for the University of Florida.

The University of Florida has a lot more pretty buildings and a lot more administrators than it did 20 years ago, and the tuition for the University of Florida, both in-state and out-of-state, has tripled over the past 20 years.