I remember how it was -- JR
Colleges Spending, Students Paying
Since 2002, most colleges and universities across the U.S. have had an exponential increase in tuition prices. According to a Wall Street Journal report of 50 flagship schools — the oldest public university in each state — the median price increase over the course of 20 years for students is 64%. Only the cost of healthcare and gas have risen more than tuition rates. Forbes points out that between 1980 and 2020, there was a 169% increase in tuition costs.
The question is: Why are most higher-education institutions putting the onus on students to foot the ever-growing bill? Aren’t most of them getting funding from the federal government?
The answer is yes … and no. According to the Journal: “Three-fourths of states did cut their support, undermining a longstanding principle that schools educated the populace with government backing. But universities generally didn’t tighten their belts as a result. Rather, they raised prices far beyond what was needed to fill the hole.”
Apparently, the people who are supposed to be the best and the brightest running our universities are clueless as to how budgeting and money work. It’s either that, or they — like the federal government — are practitioners of modern monetary theory. The average school over the course of the past 20 years increased its spending by 34%.
The majority of schools are investing their money into illustrious sports programs, additional (and arguably unnecessary) admin and staff, and offering state-of-the-art facilities to attract the wealthiest students. It is the rare school that has been savvy and caring enough to try to keep prices low for its students. Idaho is one of the exceptions. Purdue is another.
Parents, and eventually students (because few low- to middle-income students can afford not to take student loans), continue to take on years and years of debt, all to pay for the feckless spending of their alma maters.
Many are still beholden to companies that won’t hire people who don’t have a college degree. For others, it’s a matter of family legacy or the pride of being the first college graduate that drives them into this debt. Still for others, it’s just the next expected step in the plan they have for their lives. Very few students at 18 years of age go to college with a specific vocational purpose like lawyer, doctor, or scientist. These young adults end up wasting precious dollars and years trying to “figure out what they want to do.”
And because they are only 18, they have very little understanding of what that amount of debt does to future credit scores and budgeting. Many are so ill-equipped to face the loan payments that they end up continuing to get higher and higher degrees, all to forestall their eventual massive bill payments. CNBC points out that while tuition costs have gone up 169% since the 1980s, income for young workers has increased only 19%.
It is truly a scandal how much these universities are asking students to pay to attend.
There have been some positives, however. Many universities are starting to cull their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) dead-weight hires from the payroll. Others are attempting to keep their enrollment about the same as pre-COVID pandemic. And people like Dr. Jordan Peterson are developing affordable online schools.
Most, however, are spending more than they earn — and doing so with little public accountability and with little regard for the plight of the students they are wantonly impoverishing
https://patriotpost.us/articles/99605-colleges-spending-students-paying-2023-08-14
*****************************************************The Decline of a NYC Christian College Reflects Western Civilizational Decay
Earlier this month the King’s College in New York City announced it was canceling classes for the fall semester, laying off most of its faculty and staff, and struggling to recover its recently revoked academic accreditation. The fate of Manhattan’s most prominent Christian Evangelical college — a school rooted in the political and literary canon of Western civilization — is uncertain.
Nevertheless, the decline of the King’s College is bound up not only with the ills of higher education, but also with the deeper cultural crisis affecting America and the West.
Having served as a professor of history at King’s for more than a decade, I am aware of the college’s challenges and self-inflicted wounds. But if the college fails, its failure cannot be blamed exclusively on the impact of Covid-19, rising crime rates, declining enrollment, or tangle-footed leadership. Something much deeper, and more debilitating, is at work: a collective indifference about the remarkable inheritance of our Judeo-Christian civilization and our moral obligation to preserve it for each generation.
On the political and cultural Left, this indifference often amounts to contempt. Western civilization, we are told, is a conceit. Our traditional beliefs and institutions are merely a social construction: tools of the oppressor against the oppressed. The United States, as the lead country in the West, is the embodiment of all its failings.Thus, courses on Western civilization have virtually disappeared in higher education, and the history of the United States is retold as a tale of unremitting racism and exploitation.
Not Just the Left
It is not only the radical Left, however, that ignores our inheritance in the ideals and institutions of the West.Today there are voices on the political and religious Right that seem unaware of this legacy and its impact on the American political order. National conservatives, among others, portray the liberal tradition — from John Locke to James Madison — as morally toxic. In doing so, they fail to grasp how Christian ideas about freedom, forgiveness, charity, equality, and justice were able to permeate our culture — and how easily these ideas become corrupted or discarded.
Ironically, both the progressive Left and the new Right fail to comprehend the crucial educational task of transmission. As the American Founders put it in the Northwest Ordinance (1787): “Religion, morality and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”
This helps to explain the plight of the King’s College. Its students tend to be risk-takers, and the setting of New York City separates the wheat from the chaff pretty quickly. Since its move to Manhattan in 1999, the college has sent its graduates into the fields of law, journalism, finance, business, education, and the arts. Many have gone to top-tier graduate and professional schools, such as Harvard, Yale, New York University, Columbia, Northwestern, and the University of Chicago. They are some of the most entrepreneurial, mission-oriented young people you will meet. And their sense of vocation, refined in the crucible of New York City, is nurtured in an academic environment where the cultivation of the mind — alongside the cultivation of Christian character — is taken seriously.
Thus the question, Where are the conservative and Christian foundations and philanthropists who understand the critical role of education in cultural renewal? Where are they investing their treasures? More and more of it is going into political campaigns: The idolization of politics now cuts across partisan lines.
Where are the Resources?
In the 2020 presidential election, for example, conservative and Republican donors gave the Trump campaign a staggering $1.96 billion — and to what effect? Just 1 percent of that amount — nearly $20 million — would reopen and reinvigorate the King’s College overnight. Ten percent, roughly $200 million, could create a flagship Christian research institution with state-of-the-art facilities in New York City. It would establish a beachhead of intellectual and spiritual sanity in one of the most strategic cultural centers in the world.
Often it requires the perspective of those deprived of the achievements of our liberal democratic tradition to appreciate its unrivaled importance to human flourishing. Yeonmi Park, who escaped from North Korea at the age of 13, describes her bizarre experience after arriving in the United States and moving to New York City. In an essay for the Free Press, she explains that she wanted to free herself of the mental outlook of the typical North Korean — the habit of not being able to think for herself. But she found that the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and her education at Columbia were of no help to her.
Why? Because of the drumbeat of self-loathing that she encountered in the liberal media and in her circle of progressive friends. She identified the Western canon as her lifeline:
It wasn’t the education I received at Columbia, or following the American press, that helped me. I was reading old books… . I started to believe, as I still do now, that the only way to think for yourself is to ignore the mainstream media, and largely forget the daily news cycle, and connect instead with the great minds of the past, who know all of our problems better than we do ourselves. There is a reason why the great books of Western civilization are all banned in dictatorships.
Park is talking about the humanities: the disciplines of history, literature, politics, philosophy, economics, the arts, and religion. These subjects once formed the lifeblood of our greatest academic institutions. They were the safe harbor where the most important questions could be asked and debated: questions about justice and virtue, about politics and the good society, and about the meaning and purpose of our mortal lives. It is through the study of the humanities that the collective wisdom of the West in grappling with those questions is transmitted.
Loss of Appreciation for the Humanities
This has been the mission of the King’s College, in a city that seems increasingly cut off from the spiritual inheritance of our Judeo-Christian civilization. The school has been sustained financially by a relatively small group of generous donors. Its struggles reflect the fact that too many conservatives are as detached from the value of its educational purpose as is the woke Left. With a handful of wonderful exceptions, we cannot depend on the current leadership in the conservative Christian community to appreciate the depth of the problem.
More than 40 years ago, Charles Malik, the Lebanese diplomat and an Arab Christian, saw it clearly. He issued a challenge to Evangelicals during a speech at the dedication of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. “If Christians do not care for the intellectual health of their own children and for the fate of their own civilization,” he asked, “a health and fate so inextricably bound up with the state of the mind and the spirit in the universities, who is going to care?”
Caring About the Christian University is Caring About Young People
To care about the Christian university is to care about our young people — which requires a supreme commitment to caring about the future. Historically, this was the motive force behind the transformation of the Greco-Roman world by the teachings of Jesus and his disciples. Tom Holland, a classical historian and the author of Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, has acknowledged his own surprise at “what it was that made Christianity so subversive and disruptive” of the ethical norms and assumptions of classical culture. “So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization,” he writes,“that it has come to be hidden from view.”
There are in the West today powerful forces dedicated to keeping Christianity’s impact hidden in the shadows. But the Christian academy, like no other institution, can chase away the shadows with Light: the light of young minds illuminated by Truths that have built and sustained our civilization over the centuries.
A civilization that does not care very much about these things gets exactly what it deserves.
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/99636 ?
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What if there’s a simple way to close the gap?
It is one of the ironies of life that those whe need high quality education the least are also the ones most likely to get it. Private schools undoubtedly help kids to learn and develop more effectively than do government schools. Yet the kids in private schools usually come from wealthy homes where talent is passed on both genetically and via a more learning-oriented environment
So it is a rather obvious idea to turn that on its head and give a quality education for the bottom rather than the top end of the social scale. And the example below would seemto have reaped rich rewards from that approach. It is likely however that the kids selected to benefit from the program were a carefully selected bunch and you can always get better reults from selective admissions. The success of the strategy might in other words be limitred to a small subset of poor students who were capable of using expanded opportunities. Poor students can in some cases be quite bright. I was one myself
Andrew Penfold’s ears pricked up last week when he heard federal Education Minister Jason Clare observing young Indigenous men are more likely to go to jail than university.
Clare said university costs taxpayers about $11,000 per year on average, per student. Jail costs taxpayers $148,000 per prisoner, per year. For juvenile justice, it‘s $1 million a year, per kid.
Penfold got out his calculator.
To send an Indigenous child to one of the nation’s most prestigious schools costs his Australian Indigenous Education Foundation approximately $150,000.
That’s for six years – the entirety of high school.
And the 1200 students who’ve won an AIEF scholarship over the organisation’s 15-year history have an average 90 per cent school completion rate. This year it’s 93 per cent, with 50 bright young things to be celebrated at a graduation celebration on Monday night.
“Every single kid who goes to school, completes Year 12 and goes on to do something productive with their life, they then become an incredible role model in their family. And each time you change your family one by one, you change your whole community. The ripple effect of that is you actually are changing the country,” Penfold says.
That brings Penfold – who has a gift for making big things seem simple – to some intimidating numbers.
The Closing The Gap targets for education are that by 2031, 96 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people should have completed Year 12, and 70 per cent should have a tertiary qualification.
“We know from evidence that where Indigenous people are well-educated, including university and 12 completion, there really is no gap,” says Penfold, who with his wife Michelle quit a finance career in the late 2000s to devote himself to Indigenous education.
But, he says, “there needs to be an upstream supply”.
“If you don‘t have more kids completing year 12, you’re not going to be having the kids to go to university. Some years ago I saw some data that said to achieve the Year 12 Closing The Gap target only involves educating to Year 12 an additional 10,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids.
“So when you move away from talking in percentages and start talking about the number of students, it actually feels quite achievable. Of course we (AIEF) can’t do 10,000 on our own. But collectively there’s enough organisations out there that have got the track record to demonstrate that if there was further investment given, they would be able to close that gap.
“And literally the only thing holding that back is the funding.”
Indigenous graduates are now working as police officers, teachers, lawyers, doctors and academics.
And, like Brianna Dennis, community leaders. Now 36, Dennis left Walgett, in NSW’s central west, in 1999 for St Scholastica’s in Sydney‘s Glebe.
“I was really, really excited, actually, for this new opportunity. I was only 11 years old.
“If I’d stayed back home – our family really struggled. I was lucky enough to grow up in a loving home. But the exposure from the educational opportunities presented to me have been critical.”
Dennis went to university and travelled the world after school – and was the first in her family to buy a home. She now lives in Dubbo as the district manager for MacKillop Family Service.
Dennis takes immense pride in seeing opportunity light up her girls Orani, eight and Nhalara, three.
“Both my daughters participate in gymnastics, something I always wanted to do as a child but didn’t have the opportunity locally, plus my family wouldn’t have been able to afford it. I am glad my children get to experience what I never could.”
Dennis knows sometimes parents are reluctant to let children leave home, for fear they may never return, but firmly believes connection to country cannot be extinguished.
“These educational opportunities are not something for communities to fear.
“Some kids will go away and then come back, and some will stay home and take other opportunities. And both are now enriching community life – in their own ways.”
Kodie Mason is one AIEF grad who has come home.
After St Vincent’s College in Sydney’s Potts Point, and a degree at UNSW, Mason is back in the vibrant Dharawal community around La Perouse, on Botany Bay’s northern edge.
She has started her own business, Malima, teaching traditional weaving techniques passed down in her family’s direct descent from the Dharawal people who first came into contact with the Endeavour‘s crew.
Through her community work, Mason was invited to write the Australian Dictionary of Biography entry for her distant great-grandmother Biyarung ‘Biddy’ Giles, an expert fisherwoman and hunter who also founded her own business.
“She had a couple of boats, she was running fishing and hunting tours around Botany Bay, having her own business at a time when Aboriginal people were thought incapable.
“So looking at my life – I’ve got my own business, practising my culture, and sharing my knowledge.”
Between these two lives, two centuries apart, came the NSW Aborigines Protection Act, which allowed wholesale child removal and the dislocation of communities from traditional lands.
“We still feel those impacts today,” Mason says. “So to be able to go out and get a great education, and finish high school, go to university; I just feel so privileged.”
Mason is excited about the possibility of an Indigenous voice to parliament, and recently got to meet Anthony Albanese at the Garma festival in Arnhem Land.
“Our grandparents and great-grandparents; they’ve all been fighting to have a say in what happens and how they’re treated. I definitely think it will make a huge impact in Aboriginal communities across Australia, and we’ll start to see more positive outcomes for our people.”
If Andrew Penfold is the father of AIEF, Paul Hough is its godfather. The Marist brother was strongly influenced by Shirley ‘Mum Shirl’ Smith, the famous Redfern matriarch and prisoner advocate who raised scores of children in her own home, and reconciliation activist and priest Ted Kennedy.
In the 1970s Kennedy asked Hough to come and work with him in Redfern. “I remember one night Father Ted looked across the table at me and said: ‘Why don’t you give all that (teaching) stuff away and come and work with us?’ “And I said ‘Ted, I appreciate your confidence but as Marists, we do it through education.”
That remark rang through Hough’s career for the next five decades as he pioneered Indigenous education programs from St Augustine’s in Cairns to St Gregory’s in Campbelltown.
He was leading St Joseph’s in Sydney’s Hunters Hill in the 2000s when Andrew Penfold, a Joey’s old boy, approached him with the wild idea to give up his job and volunteer at St Joseph’s in a bid to grow Indigenous enrolment.
“He came up with the idea of setting up a fund which would be $8 million,” Hough says. “We thought that was probably the last we’d see of him for a while. Anyway, he came back in about 15 months’ time and said: ‘Guess what? I’ve got it.’ He went straight to the big end of town. “He’s got the business brain, and he’s got the head that knows how to work it.”
Penfold is confident AIEF, which presently takes 350 students per annum, could grow to take 1000 a year on its present model of seeking Government funding which is matched dollar-for-dollar by fundraising.
Penfold is unashamedly “interested in scale”. “It’s not because we are trying to be famous,“ Penfold says. The more students we have, the more impact we make on changing the country.“
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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