Category: College

Raising children is in some ways like taking a long hike in the woods.  Each stage of childhood is a different part of the forest and parenthood is nothing if not a forest for the trees experience.  A parent can get so caught up in the minutiae of life – practices, appointments, homework, schedules – that he can miss the larger picture, see just how the forest has changed.  This is especially when the children are clustered close enough in age that there’s no reason to revisit a section to assess its change since last trekked.

In the PracticalDad household however, there is an eight year span between Eldest – now a wife and mother – and Youngest, now a high school junior.  This means that we have revisited multiple parts of the copse and are now trekking again through that part pertaining to life after high school, known as The Great College Search.  Such a span and trek begs the question, how has this area changed in the intervening eight years?  Where were we then and where are we now?

This is the first thing that comes to mind.  Don’t worry, it will make sense.

Attending college was mostly a no-brainer when Eldest was a junior in 2011.  After decades of economic growth and development, both business and academia pushed the concept that the United States was now a knowledge-based service economy.  Millions of manufacturing jobs were lost to competition or simply outsourced overseas so we no longer made things as much as provided needed services to both the rest of the world and one another.  Toss in data supporting the income differential between a high school and college, a liberal sprinkling of fairy dust about finding yourself and fulfilling your dreams and it was off to the races for the institution of Higher Education.  College enrollment rose over the decades as a growing number of students rushed down the cattle chute for a degree and the demand curve took over:  if you have relatively stable supply – and this one is stable because starting a college isn’t easy – then the uptick in demand shifts the price upwards.  Et voila!

How much upwards?  In the twenty year span prior to 2008, Eldest’s freshman year of high school, the cost of public tuition rose an average of 4.1% beyond the actual rate of inflation.  Even after the Financial Crisis of 2008 and the subsequent Great Recession, the cost of public tuition rose 3.1% beyond the rate of inflation.

Students were prompted heavily to attend college – Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame noted how his 1980’s guidance counselor actively demeaned trade school and promoted college – while a rip-current of economic factors undercut the students and their families themselves.  Medical care was increasingly offloaded to the family via declining coverage and disproportionately rising medical costs.  Retirement was likewise offloaded to the family  as company pensions were increasingly eliminated in favor of employee savings programs.  States began reducing budgetary funding for higher education as the conservative mantra of personal responsibility and fiscal prudence took hold.  Remember those millions of manufacturing jobs?  Yeah, about that…  The replacement jobs in the new knowledge-based service economy were usually at a reduced wage with neither medical benefits nor pension.  It sounds dry and academic in a single paragraph, but this grinding process has taken place over the course of decades.

Student debt by 2003 was approximately $250 billion and in less than 15 years had almost quintupled to $1.4 Trillion (Trillion deserves to be capitalized).  One crucial change emerged from the combination of the rip-currents and the damage caused by the Great Recession:  the burden of student debt shifted largely from the family unit to the student.

So, how have things changed between 2011 and 2019, the siblings’ respective junior years?

First, families and students are now asking is a traditional college degree even worth the cost?

I might disagree with Rush Limbaugh in many regards, but he is correct when he says that words have meaning.  One of the responses of higher ed proponents to the disproportionate rise in tuition was to change the terminology.  College was no longer a cost as much as it was an investment.  Elders have commented that decades ago, the price tag for college was such that a middle-class family could pay for it in a relatively short time frame.  In Accounting parlance, cost implies a short period of time.  But at some undetermined point, the price tag rose sufficiently to shift it to a longer time frame for repayment and this changed the terminology from cost to investment and that word, investment, means a longer repayment period.  The corollary was that the additional wages gained by the degree would outstrip that of the high school diploma but this ignored a simple reality cognizant to most good accountants:  wages concentrate on the cash flow of the individual and this is inherently short term in nature.

If people want a future that includes the prospect of a meaningful retirement – actually a relatively new concept since our great-great-grandparents usually died in the traces – then they must be able to accrue sufficient assets to support them.  That entails a long-term perspective.  Given everything that has already been offloaded to the family, the addition of student debt to the budget makes asset accumulation much more difficult.

Consider this.  The research arm of the St Louis Federal Bank studied available historical data to determine the wealth effect of a college or post-graduate degree versus a high school diploma from the 1930s to the 1980s.  There was a much larger impact on the wealth accumulation of our great-grandparents in the 1930’s and 1940’s than for the grandparents and parents of the later decades as the rate of accumulation declined over the decades.  And yes, there is a racial disparity between white and black graduates although the results for both races pale in comparison to their circa-1930’s elders.

The combination of factors – macroeconomic and debt – is leaving Millennials with a financial position far worse than their own parents at a similar age.  The median net worth of a Millennial is now -$1900, a drop of $9000 from only 2013.  This generation is like it’s predecessors in wanting to someday retire but they have to first climb out of a seven foot hole and even then, the value of the degree won’t propel them as much as it did with their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.

You’re bothered that Millennials want socialism?  Be happy that some wild-eyed, debt-laden lumbersexual doesn’t douse you with beard oil and set you alight.

Second, what demand giveth, demand taketh away.

The societal push to obtain a bachelor’s degree was the nitrous booster to the engine of increasing student population.  When Eldest was a junior in 2011, there was still a rising number of students available for the pool of prospective applicants.  That number had been increasing for the better part of 15 years as the high school graduation rate reached a peak of 83.2% before beginning to decline.  Couple that with an actual fewer number of high school seniors and except for an anticipated bump in the mid-2020’s, high school graduates will reach a level in 2032 less than that in 2013, the year after Eldest’s graduation.  The institution of Higher Ed has been hit twice.  The first was that great disturbance in the Force during the first half of the decade when millions of students and parents simultaneously uttered What the…?! on realizing the extent of student debt.  The second is simple math:  there just aren’t enough bodies to continue filling seats.

How Higher Ed is responding is drawn from the textbooks of any Marketing 101 class and it has appeared in this household.

First, a marketing professor will tell you that the key is to find a way to distinguish yourself from the competition.  In other words, develop a brand.  There are some standout institutions with a Brand – Harvard, Stanford, Penn and Yale.  But those are only four of literally thousands of colleges and universities nationwide and all of them need to fill seats.  What I’d noticed between Eldest and Youngest was in the amount of contact that colleges were having with the kids.  Eldest received her first mailer just before Thanksgiving of her freshman year in 2008 and over the ensuing two years, that volume increased almost exponentially until the attention span was exhausted, both for her and for us.  The mail simply began to stack up and we honestly stopped paying attention.  It was different for Youngest however.  He got a mailer from the same university his freshman year – ‘sup Washington University? – and then…nothing.  There was an occasional piece of mail but the absence of mail over the next two years was jarring.  I commented about this to him a year ago and he responded that there wasn’t much in the mailbox but his email account had been swamped with college solicitations since freshman year.  He was particularly irritated by the repetitive mails from several, who were akin to the insecure kids demanding approval.

There are two reasons for the shift.  The first is mundane in that it’s just cheaper.  Save money on the paper, the ink, the mailing costs that go into an effort with a minimal return.  The second is emblematic of big technology today and consequently more worrisome:  more institutions are data mining the youngsters.  Some of what’s occurring is simply a greater effort by the admissions staffs to understand their successful students, in terms of graduation rates and self-described satisfaction.  The consulting firm providing this service to Higher Education defends itself by saying that they are only gathering data obtained from students who respond to a link in an email they received or from personal information on the college sites that the students visited.  But in doing this, they open their browsers to be mined for information both on what other school sites were visited, how often, and the sites visited prior to and after that digital college “visit”.

So cost isn’t the big reason here.  In an effort to differentiate and gain competitive advantage, the colleges are taking a page from the corporate playbook.  Apart from the sheer issue of data mining, this approach puts parents at a disadvantage.  Most parents do not have a handle on their kids’ email account, let alone social media, and aren’t privy to what is being sent by colleges.  If your teen is entering her junior year and you’re only now gearing up for The Great College Search, gird your loins for some hard discussion because a half dozen colleges have pitched tents in her head and two are probably whispering sweet nothings in her ear.  But Daddy, they’re sooooo environmentally conscious…

They had damned well better be at $60000 annually.

The other lesson that comes from Marketing 101 is that when all else fails, you can differentiate yourself simply by cutting the price of your product.  It isn’t widespread yet but more institutions – all private – are cutting tuition.  They have found that they have neither the cachet nor the endowments of the brand universities and I suspect that they see the writing on the wall for the private colleges.  Their response is to ride the curve early:  who panics first, panics best.  At a college visit to Rosemont College in suburban Philadelphia, we had the opportunity to talk with it’s president, who joined us at our lunch table.  She was an alumnus who returned and had already led it’s transition from a Catholic liberal arts women’s college to a co-ed school when a marketing research survey found absolutely no interest among prospective students in a 90 mile radius of Philadelphia.  Despite some improvement, they still found demand wanting so she had led the effort to cut their tuition by almost a third the year before.  Since then, we’ve received other mailers from private colleges touting their tuition cuts.  One local college took out a full digital highway billboard promoting to every passing trucker that it was cutting tuition by a third.  They missed the irony that the lower tuition was still beyond the reach of the average trucker’s kid.

The demand curve affects state-supported public education as well.  Their situation is different from the private colleges in that they are charged in their state charters to provide an affordable higher education for the residents of their states.  They have been charged with holding the line on costs and have not succumbed to the Mongolian Grills and climbing walls that have hit the private colleges; that said, they have developed the athletic departments as economic ventures that leave the privates in the dust.  Their bind is that despite the charters, they have to provide an education with modern facilities and declining state funding.  How to manage?  The admissions departments have started to monkey with the fine print of the charters, aka what the big print giveth, the little print taketh away.  The charter requires that the in-state rates are lower for residents but it says nothing about how many residents have to compose the incoming class; the result is that state institutions are shifting the class composition to increase the tuition revenue.  The result?  A state’s poorest students are being squeezed out of their final options to obtain a degree.

Price competition isn’t as much of  an option for the state institutions since they’ve already kept their rates much lower than many of the private colleges and universities.  What other options are there short of begging the legislature for more?

Another marketing professor would recommend looking at the state’s system as an on-going concern and each individual university within that system as a separate product.  Let’s use Pennsylvania as an example.  The state university system is known as PASSHE (Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education) and is responsible for the overall administration of fourteen separate state universities; note that Penn State is not a member of PASSHE and is best thought of Schrodinger’s University since it’s a public university and yet, it’s not.  The professor would assign a grad assistant to look at the entire portfolio of universities and suggest that the least profitable and economical be consolidated; it’s what auto manufacturers have done through the years and has led to the demise of such estimable brands as Oldsmobile and Pontiac.  An Ag Science professor would simply refer to it as “culling the herd”.  That’s the theory and unfortunately, that’s precisely what the Pennsylvania legislature did in 2017 when it contracted with the RAND Corporation to “review and assess” the health and feasibility of PASSHE.  There were multiple options recommended but consolidation was one, at least the one, that grabbed everybody’s attention.

Can’t control the price?  Cull the herd.

That’s where we’re at now.  Both the Millennials and Higher Ed have reached their respective Wile E Coyote moments of going off of the cliff and the only difference between those moments is the distance that each has traveled since the plummet began.  Millennials took the plunge years ago and are much closer to bottoming than Higher Ed, which is giving that pie-eyed stare as it recognizes its predicament.  We’ll have to see where that’s at when their population bottoms in 2032.

Before he departed for his freshman year in college, Middle and I were talking about student debt and the high cost of a college degree.  He looked at me and asked “How in the hell did this happen?”  This article is the third in a series that tries to make sense of what in the hell did happen to so disproportionately ratchet up the costs of higher education.

The cost of a degree didn’t just skyrocket willy-nilly over the course of decades, much as the shuttle Challenger didn’t just explode and the Titanic didn’t just sink.  In each instance, there were a variety of reasons that came together to set the stage for the events in question by guaranteeing that higher education now had a far more massive demand for its services than ever existed previously in American history.  In terms of the demand for higher education, the first factor was globalization and the knowledge-based economy.  The theory was that the lower-end and unpleasant manufacturing would be farmed out overseas and the Americans would, in their wisdom and foresight (and for those with Asperger’s, this is sarcasm), keep the higher-end technical manufacturing, administrative and service functions here.  The second factor – and the one that we’ll explore here – is also business-related:  starting in the 1970s and afterwards, the business community shifted the educational baseline for employment from the high school diploma to the college degree.

A reasonable part of the shift during the last quarter of the twentieth century was objective.  The baseline for academic performance – rightly or wrongly – is the SAT and since the the Golden Era of the 1960s, the average SAT scores on both the verbal and math components had dropped consistently.  There was also continuing criticism of the public school system and its apparent inability to prepare young people to compete in the workplace.  No, folks, what we discuss today has been around in one form or another for decades.  American business through the 1970s and 1980s was in the process of having its lunch eaten by the Japanese and Germans and entire industries were simply being destroyed.  Remember the textile industry?  Foreign competition was hungrier and the sense was that the former Axis powers had lost the Second World War but were well into the process of winning the peace.  Given these factors, the push was on in the business world to recruit more and more college graduates to work instead of those with potentially suspect high school diplomas.  Hey, our high schoolers might be idiots but the good ones go through the still-respected college system and are ready to roll in the workforce was the attitude.  If you are old enough to recall the stories about Ford Pintos catching fire and Chrysler employees sending cars out the factory doors with empty bottles rattling around inside the car doors, it actually made sense.  This gave the kids another four years to mature and gain a better education in preparation for the world.

But increasing global competitiveness wasn’t the only reason that businesses shifted their baselines upwards.  The other reason was simply a question of cosmetics and I was privileged to be intimately acquainted with two separate instances of cosmetic baseline changes.  The first instance was cosmetic in terms of appearance to other businesses.  My first real job was when an employer hired me as part of its first group of college-educated “professional” hires for a particular operational area.  It was the job that actually paid me enough money to allow myself to move out of the family household, where I’d lived for a year after my own college graduation and it pertained to ceded reinsurance.  You can certainly refer back to the link, but the best real-world example is that of a bookie laying off bets with other bookies so that he isn’t wiped out should that million-to-one shot actually pay off.  Many insurance policies were written with reinsurance provisions that allowed a company with a large loss to be reimbursed by other companies and it was my job, along with the others, to review all of these losses and first ascertain if a reinsurance provision existed, then determine the amount to be billed and finally to get the money back from them.  It is an arcane, technical arena of insurance and the hubs for such work are all in major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Munich, Atlanta and London.  My hire came about because the operations director for my new employer had looked around and noticed that everyone with whom his department interacted to retrieve the monies had, at the minimum, a bachelor’s degree and in his mind, they’d be more willing to pay if they had faith in the competence of the people doing the billing.  It made sense cosmetically.  But the reality was that with adequate training, the job didn’t actually require a college degree as much as the capacity to focus and a simple willingness to learn and this was something that the majority of the existing non-college staff had in abundance.  We new hires did have to undergo two full weeks of classroom training before the director even allowed us onto the floor to shadow our non-degreed trainers and to say that it was uncomfortable was an understatement.  The demand for a degree was further fueled when these same staffers were told that if they wanted to go anywhere else within the company at or above their pay-grade, they would now require a college degree.

The second instance of a cosmetic baseline change was to demonstrate perceived competence to prospective customers, even if the job again didn’t require a college degree.  Hey, we’re better!  Our people have college degrees!  I left the reinsurance position to move to a smaller city where my better half was in school.  There was no hope of another reinsurance job but I managed to swing another hire as a commercial claims adjuster for a regional insurance carrier.  It is a mystery greater than the disappearance of Amelia Earhart that the claims manager and supervisor actually hired me since I had no actual experience doing this and simply had to learn on the spot, absorbing information and settling claims across a spectrum of insurance lines – workers’ compensation, commercial and auto liability.  But it was also another uncomfortable situation since that company had instituted a college-degree requirement for all claims adjusters.  That meant that any future hires into adjusting positions had to be college graduates and that any future promotion for an adjuster was predicated upon the completion of a degree; another increase in the aggregate demand for a degree.  Because I didn’t receive the home office training received by new hires with a degree, I was literally dependent upon the goodwill of those around me, most especially those non-degreed adjusters now locked into a position.  When one of these adjusters – Bette – asked me to help clarify her purported confusion about a liability case, I agreed to do so and then smuggled the file out of the office to study it that evening to find the appropriate response.  When I gave her my response the following morning, I passed her test.

Bette was the perfect microcosm for the debate on whether a degree was truly necessary.  A claims adjuster is the person who proverbially walks behind cleaning up after the elephant parade; the adjuster is dealing with those who have had a loss and it’s not uncommon to take undeserved heat arising from misplaced anger.  The questions that arise also beg answers that don’t come from calculators:  How do you compensate someone for damage to an arm or leg?  Does a person who is considered ugly deserve less for a scar than someone who isn’t considered ugly?  How much does someone deserve for pain and suffering?  It was Bette’s handling of a particular case that taught me a life lesson in assessing value, detail and negotiation.  Our insured store’s security had publicly and wrongly detained an African-American educator in a neighborhood store for alleged shoplifting, immediately afterwards releasing him when the manager realized his innocence.  A claim was filed for wrongful detention and the insured wanted to see it negotiated promptly so as to avoid a publicly humiliating trial.  The case was assigned to Bette and she visited the educator and his wife, departing their home with the skeleton of what became a mutually satisfactory settlement after only the first visit.  What she noticed on the visit was a variety of travel magazines on the coffee and end tables and she used that as a departure point for cordial conversation.  After they began to discuss their claim, it became the segue to a settlement when she tied a potential amount to the cost of a vacation in their dream locale.  The upshot was that the couple happily had a two week vacation for considerably less than a possible jury verdict.  This case demonstrated more than anything that the college degree was utterly irrelevant to performance of the job at hand.  There was nothing about 120 credits of academia that could have successfully concluded this case, or almost any other for that matter.  What was required for a successful career was simply native intelligence, good people skills and an acute ability to observe.

There is a time and a place for higher education.  I want my bridge-builder and aircraft designer to have a good basis in engineering, which can only come from concentrated study.  I want my Family Practitioner and medical researcher to likewise have skills that only arise from concentrated study.  But the simple reality is that we’ve allowed ourselves to be told that the only route to financial success is via a college degree and business hiring has now cast that into cement and again, the only winner is the institution of higher education.

A short while back, my middle child and eldest son – aka “Middle” – asked me how college costs managed to rise so disproportionately over the past several decades.  The resulting article was a response to his question and looked at five different factors, each of which contributed to the present mess in the cost of a college degree.  The first of these factors was Globalization and this article is the first of a series examining the factors in greater detail.

Globalization wouldn’t be the first thing that springs to mind when you think about why the cost of higher education has risen so dramatically in the past three decades.  It frankly wouldn’t be the second or third thing either, since the effect upon the cost of a college degree isn’t primary.  The impact is derivative instead, yet it’s still important because it helped to pave the road for the persistent annual tuition increases as the institutions of higher education realized that there was now a massive and sustained rise in demand for their product:  a college degree.

Globalization is the economic principle that economic progress and advancement is improved for everyone when there is a free-flow of capital, technology, resources and labor across the globe and unhampered by national borders.  It is supposed to be a sort of rising tide lifts all boats effect as the aforementioned inputs flow to that global region best able to utilize them to produce in the most efficient and effective manner.  It is the linchpin concept behind the fiercely debated North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 and the World Trade Organization, which was instituted by treaty in 1995.  It’s actually a reasonable concept and one that I didn’t oppose when the debates occurred two decades ago.  But where the issue had an impact on higher education was a subsidiary concept:  the Knowledge-Based Economy.

The Knowledge-Based Economy is of more amorphous origin, but the principle is predicated upon the notion that global resources are allocated where they can be most efficiently used until they can be brought to market as a final good or product.  Since one of the basic variable costs in production is labor, it makes intellectual sense to shift lower-end manufacturing – requiring little education and training – to third world locations where a peasant can be paid a small fraction of what’s earned by an American laborer.  This would continue and the First World nations would be left to utilize their own resources in the conceptual, design and engineering aspects of the production.  Higher-end and technical manufacturing would stay in the First World, at least until such time as the tides had lifted the other nations enough that they also had the intellectual and technical capabilities to support the design and engineering components.  Corollary to the Knowledge-Based Economy was the Service Economy, where American workers would be spending their time providing higher end services to run and support the now-displaced production aspects elsewhere across the globe.  I expect that some corporate visionaries envisioned a society in which the great mass of Americans became mandarin-like technocrats in a great machine that churned out profits enriching the lives of all privileged enough to participate.  But I also now expect that there was another group of corporate visionaries who saw this as the opportunity to offshore all manner of labor costs so that unions could be undercut and profits grown.  Understand one small yet highly significant fact from the early and mid-1980s:  there was a shift in how corporate senior executives were paid and stock packages and options now became even more potentially lucrative than salaries authorized by a Board of Directors.

So now start to think of higher education in terms of supply and demand and this is probably where these principles began to have an impact upon the cost of a college degree.  Preceding generations of young Americans had other alternatives to higher education so that there was less demand for it.  Young males could be drawn off into the military via the demands of the draft and the Cold War.  They also had options in sustainable, living-wage manufacturing and trades that did not require a degree.  Fewer women pursued a college degree since there were fewer, then-socially acceptable career paths available to them.  All of these factors meant that there was lesser demand for college, even though the GI Bill of 1944 had opened the spigot to higher education.  But then changes began.  The draft ended and the military shifted to an all-volunteer basis, followed two decades later by the end of the Cold War.  Women began to achieve greater opportunities for careers and there was a decided societal push for women to obtain an education and then a career.  And through the last three or more decades, the trickling shift of American jobs began and then became a torrent.

It was now here, at the end of the 20th century, that Globalization and the Knowledge-Based Economy became fully enunciated as guiding principles and the offshoring of American manufacturing began wholesale.  The resultant demand for a college degree turned the college marketing and admission process into a literal cattle chute and the colleges and universities realized that they had become – for many Americans hopeful for a future – the only game in town.  Even before this point, parents and guidance counselors pushed their kids to go to college so that they could have a better, more fulfilling future.  Mike Rowe, of Dirty Jobs fame, wrote about this in Popular Mechanics in August, 2013.  He described a conversation with his high school guidance counselor in which the counselor touted the value of a college degree, even to a kid who wasn’t certain of what he wanted except for the understanding that his own skill set might be more technical and practical than intellectual.  I can attest to this type of conversation as well in my own experience.  So there was already a presumptuous mindset about the value of college:   but the increased demand that came from social change and the simple removal of other viable options simply drove everybody to the chutes.

But here’s the thing about cattle chutes.  Some of them lead to slaughter pens.

PracticalDad note:  The pace of writing over the past number of months slowed significantly, even to a crawl, but the conversations with the kids have continued regardless.  Late this past summer, prior to his own departure to freshman year of college, I was talking with Middle about college costs and he looked at me and asked “how in the hell did this happen?”  It’s a great question deserving of an answer, but like so many others, not one that has an easy answer.  What follows is a series of articles looking at the interconnected factors that have contributed to the disproportionately high cost of college.

Higher Education is a hot, steaming mess.  If you look at the number of colleges and programs offered, you might not think so, but in terms of actually obtaining that college degree, it really is a hot, steaming mess.  When you actually review the data, you find that the cost of tuition has risen more than 1100% since 1978 and what’s even more food for thought is that the linked article was published four years ago, in 2012.  Comparatively, the median American family income has risen only 269% in nominal dollars – a not-quite three fold increase over that same 1978 – 2012 timespan.  Factor in the disproportionate rise in the cost of healthcare by 601% over the same period and acknowledge the fact that more of the burden of these same costs are now borne by the American family than in 1978 and you begin to understand why it’s become such a hot-button issue.

But costs don’t rise in such a fashion because they just levitate like so many feathers carried in the wind.  There are reasons for this and the reasons are multi-fold and interconnected, one playing out upon another over the course of decades, unnoticed by the mass of people because they’re engrossed in the very short-term necessities of either raising a family and living a life, or just binging on Netflix.  From this perspective, there are five factors that have contributed to our present situation:

First, the effects of globalization and the shift to a “knowledge-based” economy.  It used to be that entry into the fabled American middle class was predicated upon a sustainable, living wage job that could be had with just a high-school degree.  That it was in a factory was acceptable since the employee could raise a family in a standard that was undreamed of during the Great Depression years, and it didn’t require additional education unless the employee wanted it.  But starting in the 1980s, companies and Wall Street began touting globalization, a principle whereby American corporations maximized their their profit for shareholders by shifting the lower-rung manufacturing overseas and retaining the higher-end positions here.  In this model, Americans would design and engineer the goods that the world needed while the little brown and yellow people elsewhere would have to contend with the workplace drudgery and pollution that came with manufacturing.  That you didn’t need to provide a sustainable living wage and could get a ‘tween-ager to manufacture a high-end pair of sneakers for pennies?  For the win, baby!

Second, there was a purposeful effort by companies in the late 20th century to alter their job requirements so that the baseline for hiring in a wide variety of positions was now a college degree instead of a high school diploma.  That these same positions were now already successfully filled by capable high school graduates was irrelevant, a degree replaced the diploma as the baseline.  There’s certainly an argument for some of that being the result of a desire to move beyond what was perceived to be a failing public education system incapable of turning out satisfactory candidates.  But I can speak from experience that there were other factors as well.  The predominant reason was that as businesses made this move to a degree the hiring baseline, it created a ripple effect as their competitors felt compelled to do so in order to maintain the semblance of competitiveness, particularly in the eyes of their customers.

Third, the effects of shifts in the funding paradigm for higher education.  Where a significant support previously was provided by the government, the burden of educating young people has shifted first to the family and within the last decade, to the student.  I don’t believe that people truly understand the impact of the state and federal governments in the middle of the Twentieth Century upon higher education.  On the one side of the house, the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 – aka The GI Bill – made significant educational funding available to millions of servicemen who returned home from the Second World War and literally provided higher education for an entire generation of young adults.  On the other side of the house, state governments boosted spending for their state institutions through the next several decades until the amount spent per student climaxed and then began to decline in the 1980s.  The ebbing has occurred in that while there are still educational benefits for veterans, we now have a volunteer military and the numbers of available recipients is far less than in the decade immediately following the end of World War Two.  Likewise, purposeful budgetary funding per student by most, if not all, state legislatures has declined in the three decades since the Reagan Administration.

Fourth, the shift to self funding by first the family and then the student was greased by years of low interest rates and the easy availability of credit.  What’s occurred with the funding of higher education is a microcosm of what’s occurred within public society as well.  As the Congress and Executive began two decades of vicious sniping and attack, it has devolved into a farcical situation in which there is no longer an agreed upon budget but instead a lengthy trail of continuing spending authorizations and debt limit increases.  Because decisions can’t be made and the debt continues to rise, the Federal Reserve has – and I hate to say it, but it’s true – stepped into the breach to delay a day of reckoning by maintaining artificially low interest rates.  So the financial role of government in higher education has shifted from fiscal policy laid out in conscious budgetary decisions to monetary policy as demonstrated by the low cost of borrowing money.  Here’s the difference between fiscal and monetary policy:  fiscal policy is made by consensus, which is often messy and combative as issues are threshed through.  Monetary policy however, simply acts to delay any decisions because there is no perceived cost to borrowing and hence, no need to actually make a decision; can’t make a decision because it’s too unpleasant to hash through?  Don’t worry, we can hold off because it won’t cost much.  On the micro-level of the student and family, the story line for years was that borrowing to finance your education was wise because it was investing in yourself and would pay off in the long-run.

Fifth, all of the preceding factors braided together neatly to create an entitlement sense amongst higher education that it simply now had a captive market.  And based upon the ways in which some of the institutions have spent their money, their perception has seemed to be that the market was in the French Quarter as college presidents and administrators strolled down the Rue amidst a shower of cash screaming out laissez les bon temps rouler!  There was no perceived need to keep the spending down – apart from paying for pesky things like permanent faculty – since the money flowed and the steady flow of students continued.  Money was spent on increasing administration, extraneous and honestly unnecessary programs of study and physical plant and student options that are high-end accessories as many of the institutions competed with one another.  And yes, when your brochures are showing photos of climbing walls and Mongolian Grills as student dining options, then that would arguably qualify as high-end.

So that’s the short version.  Like much else in America, we’ve gotten use to having plenty of options and choices without remembering that these options come with a price tag.  As my father used to comment from time to time:  champagne taste, beer budget.  Over the next several weeks, I’ll expand upon these factors individually because honestly, there’s some fascinating stuff out there.

I think that the kids need to have some skin in the game…

       Tech Guy and Father to the PracticalDad

This comment was made to me several days ago, just a day after both Middle and another posted a video about Bernie Sanders proposing free college tuition for all Americans.  Taped in a conference room at his Burlington, Vermont campaign headquarters, candidate Sanders restates the issue – higher education is unaffordable to hundreds of thousands of young Americans – and follows with both a plan and a plea.  Since I’m unable to find this video outside of Facebook, I’m providing a link to a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer in which the same proposal is discussed.  Please understand that you have to get through a short segment on Hillary Clinton as a setup for the interview.

As full disclosure, I like Bernie Sanders even though I’m nowhere near a socialist in my leanings.  When he gave a filibuster in late 2010, I made it a point to have the kids watch – even if only for a few minutes – so that they could see a filibuster in action and his name has come up in later discussions with the kids.  The problem is painfully and correctly obvious.  We’ve allowed a system to be created that predicates supposed achievement and financial security upon the acquisition of a degree that can cripple a young adult’s prospects for more than a few years and the cumulative level of student debt now surpasses the national level of credit card debt.  The mantra in the PracticalDad household for the past eight years has been we need to get you through college with as little debt as humanly possible and Eldest is almost at that point now.  So how do we make this happen for the millions of other young Americans?

What Sanders proposes is a popular two-fer, free tuition for all young Americans to be funded by a transaction tax upon each stock trade made on all equity markets across the country.  Get the youngsters excited while simultaneously sticking it to Wall Street.  The transaction tax specifically is a $.50 fee made upon each market transaction by all entities that trade in the exchanges and is what is referred to generically as a Tobin Tax, in honor of the man who first proposed the concept several years ago.  It is partially based upon the number of shares in any particular transaction, so a hedge fund moving 100,000 shares of a company would pay the tax while Joe Six-pack moving 100 shares of the same company in his own transaction would not.  The fees would be aggregated and then used to fund the tuition for any college student in the country, at any public school.

But here’s where the Tobin Tax concept becomes interesting.  The equity markets have reached the point at which more than 2/3 of all transactions are now done via HFT – High Frequency Trading – aka what is now nicknamed Skynet.  In other words, high speed algorhythmic programs running out of the TBTF banks and hedge funds across what is considered Wall Street.  The key idea behind the original concept was to somehow curb the amount of HFT trading so that that small group of investors would no longer have an outsized advantage on the rest of the public; by the time that Joe Six-pack can place a single sell order, an algorhythmic HFT program can execute dozens for a distinct advantage.  HFT wouldn’t be outlawed but it would be curbed.  The potential tax revenue on this would, by estimate of 2008 transactional data for all forms of financial instrument trades – stocks, bonds, swaps, etc – amount to greater than $300 Billion and even if the result of the transaction tax is a 50% reduction in the number of trades, the proceeds would approximate $175 Billion.  And that’s with a five year old report based upon trade data from 2008.  As angry as Main Street has become with Wall Street’s predation and apparent control of the levers of political power via campaign contributions, Sanders’ proposal has the potential for some serious popular legs.

But after thinking about the proposal, I have two issues with it and neither pertains to the Tobin Tax, but instead the notion of free tuition itself.  The first concern is more pragmatic – what’s the point of paying for every young American’s tuition if there’s no real, sustainable-living wage job available for him or her upon completion?  It’s a lovely notion that Junior can achieve a more affordable education but at the end of the day, the point of higher education is ultimately to prepare people to take their places as productive members of society.  It’s hard to be productive if there isn’t enough economic activity to support said jobs and the end result is that the youngsters continually return to gather even more credits because there’s nothing else to do.  Taken to it’s logical conclusion, the program eventually costs even more because the kids just go to school instead of being gainfully employed.  Without sustainable, living-wage jobs for them, this is akin to nothing more than refueling airplanes so that they can maintain holding patterns instead of being able to land and letting the passengers get on with their lives.  Sanders is correct in that he makes this a concrete proposal as part of a larger package of actions that have to occur.

The other issue is more philosophic.  Should we put together and sponsor a package in which something such as the tuition for higher education is free or should we, as a society, make the statement that it has sufficient value that the student and/or family should still put something towards it?  In other words, assure that the student has some skin in the game, as the other father stated to me later.  I believe that it’s human nature that we have more appreciation for that in which we’ve had a personal stake.  How many of us parents have seen kids take greater care of those items where there’s a personal investment?  If you want to make it a sliding scale tuition based upon income, then so be it; but society can still absorb sufficient of the cost that the amount owed isn’t punitive or exhausting to the payer.  Part and parcel of the philosophy piece – dark as it is – is the notion that there is no such thing as a free lunch (TINSTAAFL).  Even if there’s no ticketed monetary cost to be paid, there exists the prospect that the price will be paid in other forms and in this case, the prospect of some form of compulsory national service via a re-institution of the military draft and/or form of civilian service.  It’s an old idea that has been kicked around first by one side and then another but as funds go to one particular group and others believe their ox to be gored, the resultant clamor could result in such a deal being reached.  Hey, the kids are getting free tuition and money’s tight elsewhere…why not let them pay it back another way?  Some can disagree that it might ever happen and some can disagree that it’s a bad thing, but the prospect exists and it needs to be out there before any final decision is reached.

The issue might seem insurmountable given the barrage of commentary from one side and another amidst a 24/7 newscycle.  But it’s good to remember that our country has made such statements about the value of public higher education before and each in times more troubled than these.  The great land-grant universities – Berkeley, Purdue, Penn State and the like – arose out of legislation passed during the Civil War and the GI Bill arose out of the ashes of the Second World War.  And these were far greater fights than what would be faced with the Wall Street crowd.

It was an audible what the f*#% that escaped my lips as I read a NY Times article that explained how President Obama was now proposing to eliminate tax-free withdrawals from 529 college savings plans.  Under the proposed changes, the money earned from any new contributions to 529 accounts would lose the capital gains tax protections that have made 529 plans a decent tool in the belt for paying for higher education.  In addition to the loss of the capital gains tax forgiveness – if the money is used for qualified educational expenses – the money earned via the accounts investments would actually be taxed at the much higher ordinary income rate.  Incredibly enough, the proposal is part of a much broader package that a White House official described as designed to consolidate a variety of educational tax breaks and also funnel more money to middle-class families.

Let’s take a few minutes to actually parse through the proposed changes since this strikes me as a measure with multiple intents.  First, I have no doubt that this is tied to the floated proposal to fund free community college for eligible students..  While the tuition proposal is the carrot however, this measure would be the stick to help herd even more young people into the community college track.  We already know that the disparity between the stagnant income and the wildly inflative tuition rates has led to a shifting of family income levels downwards through the college system.  What I mean by this is that as tuition rates have risen far faster than family incomes, what a family could afford for their children has shifted downwards from private non-profit institutions (Yale or Pacific Lutheran for example) to state supported institutions (any of the SUNY institutions or your local state college).  So while a solidly middle class family could get the kids through a Pacific Lutheran in 1980, the same family would be hard-pressed to do so in 2015 and would be more likely to have the kid attending the local state college or university instead.  Even if the states are, as a group, funding less on a per student basis than in the past decades, state schools are still more affordable and the 529 plans are a legitimate tool in saving for that alternative.  Remove the 529 plans as an effective savings instrument and even the public institutions become more unaffordable; the result is that if the youngsters are going to be educated, then one of the few alternatives is to utilize the community college for an associate degree or if a bachelor’s degree is sought, the first two years of general education requirements.

Second, make no mistake that there’s an almost punitive intent in this proposal.  It would be one thing to make the 529 less attractive by simply removing the preferred tax status of capital gains forgiveness and there are more than a few people who would probably look at the 529 and say meh, moving on to other alternatives.  But this proposal moves far beyond that: this actually turns standard taxation and accounting measures on their heads by taking what monies have been made from a capital gain status – which is precisely what they are – and wholesale shifting them to an income status with a concomitant increase in taxes.  The authors of this proposal are doing the old west equivalent of dumping dead animals in the water hole to poison it for anyone else.

Third, there is signifcant debate over what income level is, in the eyes of the authors, the middle class.  The class card is played by the notion that the 529 plans “primarily provide a subsidy to people who would save in other forms anyway”, according to Sandy Baum of the Urban Institute.  Yes, it does provide extra bang for the proverbial buck over other investment vehicles.  But that tax provision was an intentional public policy message that higher education did matter and this program was an effort to help offset what even then was recognized as an oncoming problem.  The notion that the 529 is simply another investment vehicle, akin to the standard mutual fund or whatever, is also not true since anybody who’s investing in the 529 plan understands that use of the funds for any other purposes means that there’s going to be a tax penalty for withdrawal.  If this is just another savings vehicle, then just take the money and dump into a consistent money-losing fund that costs you 10% annually.  The class argument is also offset by the fact that the average 529 account only has about $19770 and the average regular monthly contribution is $175.  This isn’t the kind of investor that’s looking to get subsidized; this is the kind of investor that’s hoping to squirrel away enough money to get the kids through a state institution.  The GAO notes that while only a small percentage of families utilize 529 accounts, the median income of those families with 529 accounts is three times that of those without 529 accounts.  I believe that would actually be true, apart from the fact that it’s coming from the GAO.  The simple fact however, is that it’s common knowledge that higher incomes simply remove the possibility of any grant or need-based scholarship for the student, leaving the costs to be either borne by the family and/or student with savings and debt.

The Obama Administration notes that it has other incentives to more than adequately offset the 529 change.  These include making the American Opportunity Tax Credit permanent, with a maximum credit of $2500 annually, subject to income requirements.  The other notable action put forward by the administration is that the tax bill on any student forgiven (yes, they’ll forgive the debt but you have to pay taxes as though it was an income) would be eliminated.  The reality there is that unless you are engaged in a program that eliminates student debt in return for service of some kind, it’s damned hard to get the student debt forgiven.  The onus is upon the borrower and the person has to demonstrably show that it is indeed a hardship for self and family; that is a steep hill to climb and few are able to do so.

The families utilizing the 529 plans are the ones who are looking ahead to the future and making an effort to save for it.  Eliminating the benefits of the 529 is as much a penalty for savers as are the other policies of the government, most especially the ridiculous rates on various savings accounts.  The message from the power structure is that we aren’t to worry, that there will be other options and if nothing else, we can always just borrow more when the time comes…precisely the last thing that savers and responsible parents want to hear.

There is also another aspect to this entire matter that bothers me, but it’s something that I frankly have to work through before I put it out there.  Suffice it to say, there will something more on this when I’m comfortable that I’ve thought it through.

I was sitting with my Better Half when there was an online article about President Obama’s recently announced plan for free community college tuition.  As we read the article and then followed up with other sites, the commentary flowed.  On the one hand, it can be trolled as yet another spending program with dubious results but there are some other aspects to consider.

Our conversation was framed by a discussion earlier at dinner with one of Middle’s friends, who is presently a college junior at a state university.  As he explained his course load, he commented that the very first Gen Ed class that he took on Day One was a math course, which started with the concept of counting.  Both of us looked at him and my wife stopped and asked for clarification and he confirmed that it started with simple counting before moving on to more complex topics such as addition.  This was on top of stories from others of his contemporaries, which led us to the conclusion that much of the early college course load is simply remedial and if this is indeed the case, then there is actually some value in the President’s proposal.

But before that, what is the core of the proposal? When you read the brief articles – and yes, the devil is in the details – there are requirements of all parties involved for this to work.  First, the students – those who are eligible and I smell income requirements in the air – are required to maintain a GPA of 2.5 and must be in school for at least half-time.  They must also show continuing progress towards their program goal, whatever that may be.  For their own part, the community colleges will have to offer programs that are either fully transferrable to a local four-year public university or occupational training programs for which there is high demand (and oh yeah, actual job opportunities).  The government part of the deal is that the Federal Government will put up three-quarters of the money and the states will put up the other quarter of the funding; in the ideal theoretical world, the student would be able to save $3800 in tuition each year.

Now let’s pick this apart as we did on the sofa.  The reality facing America is that our students, as a whole, are performing poorly versus their peers across the globe.  Our students are behind in science and math, critical in today’s technological society.  But look at the cost differential of the same type of course taught at both the community college and local state university.  A basic three credit Math 100 course at my local community college (and I’ve verified the numbers via the respective tuition website pages) would cost a student $458 while a basic three credit Math 100 course at the local state university would cost $792, a differential of $334.  Since these basic courses would be generally identical in scope, it makes no sense on a societal level to duplicate the courses with some students paying the higher amount and effectively wasting the resources.  This is clearly an effort to bring about some relief to the issue of student debt, which now is in excess of $1.2 Trillion, more than the amount of outstanding credit card debt.  It is also a concrete effort to combat the several decade mantra that the college route is the route to take after high school; it’s a mantra that has now sucked in enough people to swell the rolls of student debt holders to more than 40 million young adults.  The inclusion of the word local is also meaningful to students.  Part of the message sold over the past several decades is loosely reminiscent of Bluto Blutarsky’s infamous line from the movie Animal House: …the best seven years of my life.  The community college proposal is squarely saying that a quality higher education doesn’t have to include the now-expected time away from home.  I understand that there are plenty of young people who crave that – God knows that I did – but that was a different time with a different set of circumstances.  With the job market being what it is in terms of wages, would you rather live away from home now and take on debt or clear your decks now and then proceed with your life?

There are other points to make here.  It’s a message to community colleges that they need to take greater care in offering programs that are indeed timely and of value.  As costs drive more away from any higher education, the message is that the money will be there for students if there are programs that make sense; so cull away the nonsense and put together curricula that meets society’s demands.  It also sends a message that there has to be a greater effort by both the community colleges and four year institutions to mesh what’s offered so that money isn’t wasted on credits that won’t transfer to the four year university.  There have been several instances in which I’ve been told by someone that their kid or neighbor’s kid won’t have credits transferred, meaning that the resources are wasted.  Multiply this across – at least – several hundred thousand students and that’s considerable money simply down the tubes.  There’s likewise a message to the four year institutions that perhaps there are other options to the public and that in a period of declining resources, they’re best served putting the money into that which truly does train, educate and enlighten.

Since I began this article two days ago, other information about the proposed cost has been issued by the administration, assuming that you actually believe them.  According to the Press Secretary, the President’s program would cost about $60 Billion over the course of a decade…so call it roughly $6 Billion annually.  The knives will come out and it’s going to be decried as budget-busting, although the concept that an outlay of $6 Billion – nah, since we’re all of going on $20 Trillion in debt, let’s use the lower case and call it billions – is actually laughable in the greater scheme of things.  There’s actually the argument that this type of spending would actually be an investment.  According to the Federal Education Budget Project, produced by the New America Foundation, the collective student default rate for federal student loans as of 2011 was approximately 18%.  Yes, this is 2011 data but let’s apply this default rate to the 2014 student loans issued in the amount of almost $100 billion; this is a default of approximately $18 billion.  The same article from FEBP shows that the net recovery of defaulted money is approximately 80% for a net loss of $3.6 billion.  The net differential on the $6 billion average annual outlay is a loss of $2.4 billion.  The important thing is that as the system begins to change over time, the defaults should lessen and the money begin to flow to where it’s most effective.  This doesn’t even address the psychic and emotional toll on young adults who are stuck with a debt albatross around their neck as they start out in their adult life, nor does it address the delayed creation of households, which is actually important for the national economic health.

There’s one other point from both our conversation and a review of the information.  There’s a collective failure when the colleges – community and four-year – are forced to offer such utterly ridiculous course offerings as taken by Middle’s friend.  This information is certainly offered by at the secondary – hell, even the primary – level and it’s a complete failure that the information isn’t being collectively learned.  And that’s on us.

This weekend saw yet another college visit for Middle, who is now in his senior year of high school.  It occurred at a major urban east coast university and naturally, the place was festooned for the thousands of visiting prospects and parents, who were respectively excited and terrified.  Before the breakout sessions for the Admissions/Aid and then the various individual academic schools within the university structure, there was the obligatory reach-‘n-grab for all manner of flyers, pens and cheap lanyards as the herd milled past the tables set up in the arena concourse.  For all of the obligatory rah-rah however, there was a session of clarity and honesty in the early afternoon and it was eye-opening for the handful who were in attendance.

Middle is an arts kid – creative and talented, someone who appreciates the poetry of E.E. Cummings more than the need to subtract – and in his element, he’s a wonder to behold.  All of the paternal gush now aside, we joined dozens of students and parents for the Theatre Department’s information session.  It was hosted by the Theatre Department’s Assistant Chair as well as the graduate theatre program director, each with years of experience running this nationally recognized program and it occurred in the front rows before a stage undergoing transformation to the mythical Scottish village of Brigadoon.  The department chair spoke about the program and it’s structure, as well as the various concentrations and where the graduates were getting work.  He then however, commented that if the students were hoping to come here and then simply make it into the big-time, they were suffering from a notion that was preposterous; they would work diligently and hard to learn a craft that might earn them a weekly wage of $150 to start.  As he discussed the capabilities of the various adjunct faculty, he told of a graduate who had been on Broadway but was now back and teaching as her mother was helping care for the graduate’s child since the typical Broadway salary didn’t allow for the burden of childcare expenses.  I glanced at Middle, who was silently digesting all of the information that was more telling of reality than he’d get from the glossy brochures that inundate the mailbox.  The two of them also acknowledged that they were glad that it was far more affordable for the in-state kids and they didn’t blink when a mother later asked about the state residency requirements; this woman was a heavily-accented immigrant who would be willing to move to make this work for her child, even if it meant that her child would have to wait a year for the opportunity.

When it was over, we joined a group who were waiting to make personal comments or ask questions.  I thanked the gentleman for his candor and he remarked that he very much understood the issue of tuition.  When he himself was in high school, he had the opportunity to attend a college for free and his own father decreed you will go here.  He then touched his index finger to his thumb to make a small circle that he placed before his eye, and commented that it made a huge difference for him, allowing him to take advantage of opportunities that paid nothing yet provided real dividends for his career.  Middle stood nearby listening, taking all of this in and it was invaluable since it wasn’t coming from the ‘rents.

The old reality of college – the best seven years of my life, as Bluto Blutarsky once commented – is dead.  I don’t know where Middle will ultimately wind up or what he’ll do and I know that the decision will be hashed out in the coming months.  But there were three lessons that I believe he took with him from the sessions.  The first is that beneath the glossy exteriors and play to the emotions, this is a difficult first lesson in finding the balance between the dreams and the adult realities of the present-day world.  The second lesson is probably more important, and that is that this is a decision that will be made with the parents; indeed, the folks might just be more far-sighted than he realizes as he comes to terms with the reality that you can’t have it all, despite what it proclaimed in advertising.  The third lesson is that it’s not just his own Mom and Dad who are asking hard questions, ones that he simply doesn’t yet grasp as a teenager.

This coming weekend will see yet another college visit and this time, we’ll go as a family and bring Youngest along. He’ll be bored at moments and that’s fine, he’s old and disciplined enough to suffer well for the short duration.  But my hope is that even years away from this decision, he’ll take enough in to see the process so that he’s not so swayed by the marketing that’s printed to sway the kids.  Because last week, he – now in seventh grade – looked at a brochure sitting on the kitchen island and stated man, I wanna go here ’cause everyone looks so friendly.  Yes, the boy’s coming along.