Inside American Education (42 page)

The constitutionality of parental choice plans that would allow public money to be used to pay for children to attend private, religiously affiliated schools is a legal question for the courts. The courts already allow some federal money to be spent in religiously affiliated educational institutions. However, even under a worst-case scenario, the worst that could happen would be that expanded options would not be as wide as they could be—but they would nevertheless be wider than they are today.

Finally, the most unfounded claim of all is that parental choice plans would be costlier than the present public school education. In reality, the average cost of educating students in private schools is less than the cost of educating them in the public schools. The Catholic schools tend to be especially low-cost. In Oakland, for example, the Catholic schools spent only about one-third as much per pupil as the public schools in the same city.
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It has been commonplace for private schools to produce better education for less money.

The opposition of the educational establishment to school choice proposals has not been limited to presenting arguments. They have also used their political muscle to get choice plans scaled back, under-financed, or encumbered with red tape, where they have been unable to stop such plans completely. For example, almost never do such plans for parental choice allow the student who transfers out of the system to take along as much money as the system spends per pupil. Having done as much as possible to cripple the choice actually offered to parents, the educational establishment then points triumphantly to the fact that parents have not been as enthusiastic for the shriveled options presented to them as choice advocates had suggested when advocating a full-bodied set of options. Moreover, the National Education Association engages in tricky manipulations of statistics, in order to understate how much use is made of parental choice. Although the whole point of allowing parental choice is to permit a selection among
schools
, the N.E.A. measures the usage of such choice by how many transfers take place out of the school
district
.
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Obviously, few parents are going to send their children great distances from home, but the N.E.A.’s tricky statistics conceal how many transfer among schools within the district.

COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES

Critics of American colleges and universities have made four principal criticisms—that (1) the quality of American college education has declined and is unacceptably low, that (2) ideology has supplanted academic skills in too many social science and humanities courses, that (3) campus racial policies have had disastrous consequences, and that (4) free speech has been sacrificed to the ideological conformity of “politically correct” thinking.

By and large, academic leaders have not confronted any of these arguments, but have instead sidestepped them and then struck back in various ways. These ways include claims that “the public made me do it,” radical redefinitions of words to create a protective academic Newspeak, and a general burying of specific issues in larger and more innocuous generalities. Among the things the academic establishment defends in this
way are ideological double standards on campus, the declining quality of college education, the price-fixing cartel which set tuition for decades, and the tenure system at the heart of so much academic irresponsibility. That academic spokesmen should seek to defend colleges and universities from critics is understandable. That they so often resort to tactical responses rather than substantive arguments makes those defenses suspect.

The Demands of “Society”

The public school administrators’ claim that “the public made me do it” is echoed in higher education as well. Former Harvard University President Derek Bok has called most of the charges by critics of academia “flawed” because “they ignore basic conflicts and contradictions in the demands society makes on universities.”
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Yet almost all the academic policies attacked by critics—propaganda courses, racial double standards, the erosion of curriculum requirements, skyrocketing tuition, and ideological intolerance—are responses to
internal pressures
generated by various constituencies within the academic world itself.

Preferential admissions policies, for example, are not demanded by the public. Indeed, they have even been repudiated by a majority of black students
⁵³
—a majority ignored by academic administrators, who respond instead to organized, vocal, and threatening minority “spokesmen.” The public has not demanded that people who attempt to speak on campus be shouted down or be assaulted by those who disagree with them, that students in their dormitories be targets of officially sanctioned thought-police, or that campus disciplinary procedures become kangaroo courts when ideological issues are involved. The public has certainly not demanded higher tuition or the reduced teaching loads and expanded boondoggles which make them necessary, nor the academic cartel arrangements which made possible charging all that the traffic will bear.

These developments in American higher education exist precisely because academic decision-making under faculty self-governance is so insulated from the public’s knowledge or influence. The panic in academia when alternative, uncontrolled
channels of information about campus events open up to the public—a small newspaper published periodically by Accuracy in Academia, or weekly or monthly independent student newspapers—suggests that academics know all too well that what they are doing is not at all in line with what the public wants, and will come under increasing pressure if the public finds out about it. Saying “the public made me do it” would not be a valid excuse, even if the public did in fact favor the things being done. Its falsity only highlights the absence of an argument.

Sometimes it is not the general public but a student constituency to whom the academic establishment claims to be responding. Harvard’s Dean Henry Rosovsky, as well as its former president Derek Bok, has made the argument that believers in a free market are inconsistent in criticizing colleges and universities, which are responding to what students want and are willing to pay for.
⁵⁴
This was said by officials of an institution at the center of a cartel that has been meeting annually, for decades, precisely in order to
prevent
this from being a free market.

Organized coordination of tuition-setting and of financial aid is further abetted by the magnitude and mechanisms of government financial aid programs. Part of what is called “financial aid” in academia is simply a fancy name for a discount on paper, as it would be called more plainly and more honestly in ordinary commercial transactions, even transactions with used-car dealers. Where there is real money changing hands on behalf of students, that financial aid is largely provided by, or guaranteed by, the federal government. In academic year 1988-89, for example, the federal government either directly or indirectly provided nearly $20 billion out of a total of nearly $27 billion in student financial aid nationwide, including the paper discounts of the colleges and universities themselves.
⁵⁵
The “free market” of which Messieurs Bok and Rosovsky speak is this government-subsidized academic cartel.

The specific terms under which the government provides student financial aid virtually guarantees tuition escalation to unaffordable levels in private colleges and universities. (State colleges and universities are under political pressures to keep tuition low.) The federal formula for determining how much aid a student gets first determines the “expected family contribution,” based upon family income, assets, number of children,
and other measures of ability to pay. Federal aid begins where tuition and other charges exceed this “expected family contribution.”
⁵⁶
A private college or university which kept its tuition affordable—that is, no greater than the “expected family contribution”—could forfeit millions of dollars annually in federal money. For example, if College
X
can provide a good education at a tuition of $8,000 a year, while its average student’s family can afford $9,000, then it loses opportunities to receive federal money. By raising its tuition to $12,000, it not only gets an additional $1,000 per student from their families but also an additional $3,000 per student from the government. In short, there is no incentive to keep tuition affordable and every incentive to make it unaffordable.

Dean Rosovsky, an economist, surely knows that government subsidies to agriculture make food more expensive than it would be in a free market, and government subsidies to the maritime industry make shipping more expensive than it would be in a free market, so it can hardly be surprising that government subsidies of college tuition make these tuitions higher than they would be in a free market. Moreover, in any sector of the economy where price competition is reduced or eliminated, there is also a common economic phenomenon called “non-price competition,” in the form of frills added to the basic product or service being sold, in order to woo customers. Professor Chester E. Finn, Jr., of Vanderbilt University, a noted authority on education, has described this phenomenon in the academic world:

Instead of vying to offer the best, trimmest product at the lowest possible price, colleges compete to erect elaborate facilities, to offer trendy new programs, and to dangle before prospective students the gaudiest array of special services, off-campus options, extra-curricular activities, snazzy dorms, and yuppified dining-hall menus…. A Mount Holyoke dean terms this the “Chivas Regal strategy.”
⁵⁷

Such frills are not a response to a free market but are common symptoms of non-price competition in a market that is
not
free. Before commercial airlines were deregulated, their passengers were much more likely to receive various kinds of frills. But the advent of price competition after deregulation meant that passengers received what they wanted more than
they wanted frills—that is, to get where they were going at a lower cost. If the academic world ever becomes the “free market” of which Rosovsky and Bok speak, many academic frills can be expected to fall by the wayside as well, as institutions compete to keep tuition within students’ ability to pay—instead of having incentives under present conditions to make sure that tuition exceeds what most people can afford.

Another prominent member of the education establishment, Harold Howe II, former U.S. Commissioner of Education and Ford Foundation executive, has likewise argued that the long list of ancillary services provided by colleges help justify “obviously necessary tuition increases.” This was said in response to what he called “grousing” by former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett concerning tuition increases. According to Howe, college education today is “a bargain.” Nothing, however, is a bargain unless it supplies what the consumers most want at a price representing its cost of production. But because tuition payments are supplemented by endowment income, government subsidies, and other sources of money, the price of education is able to rise far beyond the costs necessary to produce it.

In the absence of stockholders, who could receive the excess as dividends, this excess is absorbed by the kinds of ancillary activities which Harold Howe lists, as well as by many other expansions of administrative bureaucracy and faculty perquisites. Nor is the government financial aid, which is so much a part of this process, primarily a matter of helping “needy students,” as Howe claims.
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That is the image of the past but the reality of today is large-scale price discrimination and a government subsidy system which rewards colleges for making tuition unaffordable.

So-called “need-based” financial aid can be as oblivious to academic ability as it is to ability to pay. Some colleges in deep financial trouble have staved off bankruptcy by admitting semiliterate derelicts and other unlikely “students” whose tuitions, paid through government financial aid programs, would enable the college to survive. At least one free-lance recruiter has made a lucrative career out of performing this service for several colleges and numerous “students.” Many of these “students” have simply taken the expense money from their government-guaranteed loans and disappeared into the streets from which
they came.
⁵⁹
While these are extreme cases, they illustrate a principle at work in less extreme cases: Scholarships are no longer a reward for being a scholar. They are part of a larger scheme of price discrimination and subsidization of colleges. Scholarships earmarked for minority students are a further extension of the principle of funnelling money into colleges without safeguards, for the students in question need not be either poor or deserving.

A remarkable example of the education empire striking back occurred when a U.S. Department of Education ruling in 1990 called into question the legality of race-based financial aid. A chorus of outcries from academics and politicians prompted a quick reversal, on the self-contradictory ground that poor minority students would be denied an education. Obviously minority students who were poor would be eligible for
need-based
aid, rather than race-based aid. Indeed, most minority students on financial aid were in fact receiving that aid on income grounds rather than racial grounds.
⁶⁰
Yet the knee-jerk response of the media, academia, and politicians enabled money to continue flowing to individuals without any demonstrated financial need, nor any other entitlement besides their ancestry.

Academic Newspeak

Among the many academic substitutes for argument is the special use of words, redefined like Orwellian Newspeak, to mean something wholly different from what virtually everyone else understands these words to mean. As already noted, the word “opportunity” is widely used to describe compulsory assignments in psychological-conditioning programs in the public schools. At leading colleges across the country, the word “harassment” is used in a similarly dishonest way to include the expression of any adverse opinion about any behavior, group or organization that the college views favorably, whether or not that expression occurs within sight or earshot of those criticized, and even when it involves no personal contact whatever.