Dear Daily Beast: Please fire Zac.

Dear Zac: The quality of writing and critical thinking produced even by our top colleges and Ivies is in need of great repair. I cannot imagine what sort of degradation two years of community college education will cause to our entry-level workforce. Stop blogging and go to the library (UMass consistently ranks high on Princeton Review's list of 'Students Who (Almost) Never Study').

When the price of gasoline goes up, politicians rage, hold hearings, and castigate the oil companies. When colleges
raise tuition year after year at double the rate of inflation, there is no such response. Strange, considering that families spend far more on college educations than they do on gasoline. I wonder if the reason is that the academic world is overwhelmingly Democratic, and the Pelosis and Reids of Congress do not want to offend their supporters.
The American college system is incredibly wasteful and inefficient, stretching out two years of work over four years, indulging students in pursuing causes unrelated to getting a degree, and faculty with minuscule teaching loads.
It is a disgraceful system crying out for reform.

As a transfer student to a state university, working full-time for the whole of my college career, I am still looking forward to $20,000 of debt when I graduate (before interest). That isn't nearly as much as some going to a private university full-time of course and I realize I am not in as deep - however, why should I be penalized for making more money to pay for college? Don't even get me started on the high cost of medical schools (with hardly any options for loan forgiveness programs). Not everyone is planning to be a star surgeon.

I voted for Obama, but for any economic plan to work, the nation's future earners cannot be paying back loans for their education for a good portion of their careers.

Excellent article, Zac. A couple of other points:
I've never heard one person attack the higher education industry (and it IS an industry) the way Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Box Stores or even Big Fast Food. Why is that? Why is higher ed still allowed to raise its rates like a cable company on meth? College campuses are the only places in the nation seemingly immune to the free market. While I'm struggling to pay my mortgage and can't refinance in a horribly down market, the local U is building more ivory towers.
Second, I went the community-college-first route, then to a small college I could afford, so I don't have nearly the debt that others do. However, those colleges were woefully lacking in connections to local and state businesses (y'know, the real world) and once I graduated I was fully on my own without a bit of follow-up or support -- and yet they still call every year wanting MORE money from me. If we're going to have to commit half our working life to paying them off, colleges and universities, along with spending regulation, should have to commit to five years of career counseling, providing networking opportunities, job placement and follow-up. That should be their moral and fiscal obligation; it's a foreign term called customer service -- something else that exists only in the real world.
Third, your points about the Baby Boomer generation spend-today-make-someone-else pay are only the tip of the iceberg. A century or two from now, historians will show that right after their parents, the Greatest Generation, the Boomers proved themselves to be the Worst Generation. It has not only squandered nearly everything it inherited, it is leaving a bigger mess for the next generation to clean up -- and I don't think we're going to be able to do it by the time we get done paying not only for our children (who live in a far more screwed up society than even we did when we became the first latchkey kids) but also for the overwhelming Social Security and Medicare entitlements that shouldn't have been so needed had Boomers saved a little bit. The excesses and selfishness of that generation are perfectly embodied in the two Boomer presidents we've had, Clinton and Bush. Those history books of the future will show that our American civilization began its downfall in the 16 years of their "leadership."

I agree that the focus needs to be changed from the status a college infers to an actual education which we can -and need to- supply affordably to large numbers of our citizenry. However, I STRONGY disagree that that we should take the position that only the strong who can struggle very hard should be educated at a higher level. We need to make education ACCESSABLE. As it stands, college represents class division far more than producing an educated citizenry to a. participate more fully in our democracy and b. become the most productive members of our society and strengthening our nation. So we have kids scrambling for position in society from a consumerist point of view, while those not in on the game are neglected entirely. Kids are essentially buying a lifestyle at all costs. From this vantage point it's no wonder that irresponsibility and immoderation is built in to the system. And, the major cost is that the focus on learning is lost as a goal. Community colleges don't beacon and a guiding light to learning but rather slouch by as a beacon of underachievement and disinterest. Who wants to go there? I remember switching from a gifted class in middle school to a "regular class" and being stunned by the level of disparity in the teaching. Lethargy, apathy are diseases that spread. When higher education reigns as a symbol of a sicker car, a deferential -or not contemptuous- look, rather than a way to better oneself, to become smarter, to engage more fully with the world, than by definition it is going to require exclusion, not inclusion. We can't afford that. The legacy of the baby boomer generation is more than just selfishness and debt and mismanagement. There was a lot of reasoned thought about the world around us, ideas that are being taught at the highest level of educational institutions today. The world is not "far more screwed up" than it was -people always want to think that. It's always been screwed up. Life is fluid and complex. Money is a symbol. We really make up the rules to life, collectively. Society shifts. It can break down -at any time. This is a dangerous lesson history has taught us. It can also progress to a more intelligent method of social structure. My point here is that we need to make education interesting -as it inherently is- rather than a means to look down our noses at other or not have others look down their noses at us (an advantage for which we'll tend to pay any amount if we can). Community colleges need inspired teachers who make learning inviting and don't just phone it in. There is the -maybe slim- possibility that Obama can inspire this in us - to make us ALL do a better job. To participate a little more fully. The funny thing is, it's actually a lot more enjoyable.

Great article. As a huge Obama supporter throughout his candidacy, I cringed when I heard him talk about a $4k tuition credit.
All that will do is make college cost $4k more per year. Part of the reason that college costs are spiraling is because more
and more people are entering the system ever year, which puts great demand on the system.
Another part is that more and more money is available (federal, state, private loans).
Have you noticed that the University of Phoenix (the bird, not the city) charges exactly as much as you can borrow from the federal government?
You recommend pushing community college. But that is because community colleges are cheaper.
What we need to do is find out how and why they are cheaper and copy that success into the four year programs in order to
make them competitive. One way might be to adjust the amount of federal money available inversly to how much the school tuition costs.
This would provide the incentive for large, expensive schools to cut costs. I was one of the suckers who borrowed his way through a small private school and will spend twenty
years of my life regretting it. I counsel everyone I know to go to the cheap schools, that one school is as good as another
as far as most employers are concerned.

Bravo Zac. Finally. I am adjunct at a University in Boston. I've been telling my students to get busy--organize--begin a grass roots campaign. I was busy in the 60's and I didn't have the Internet. You all can do it. The spotlight has to settle on this scandel which is every bit as big as Wall Street and the Health Insurance Industry. It's a huge story and unfortunately comes at a time when the media is essentially useless as the investigator for an uninformed public. There was however a very good article written in the Boston Globe Magazine (which should have been a news feature) on 10/5/08 by one Jon Marcus. It is full of information an statistics.

It's up to the grass roots to start this fix and while you are at it, go after the textbook industry.

I couldn't agree more. After spending a fortune on a four-year college degree, I realized my BA would get me nowhere. Now I'm taking CC classes and have an attainable career goal. I wish I had done it this way the first time around.
I think many high school students are shipping themselves off to college and not thinking about future debt without any real clue what they're doing. They don't know what they want to study, or what career, realistically, they want to work towards. When a four-year degree is an expectation, it's easy for these schools to continually increase their tuition, often times to help pay for non-education related expenditures (a new state of the arm gym...). I don't think it's a coincidence that as more and more high school kids see a four-year school as their only option, the number and cost of these schools increases. Education is great, and it's incredibly important, but it's also important to know what you want to get out of it, other than getting away from your parents and drinking yourself into a stupor on a regular basis.
(And I worked nights when I was in school! I worked hard, and I got up at 6am during the week to read Hobbes and Locke and Joyce! I see college kids with designer clothes and iPhones, girls with Prada bags, and I'm like, wait a minute, aren't you supposed to be poor college students?? )

Great write up. My wife step son, and step daughter have or are going to local community collage first then on to a state university. We each still have to take on some loan debt to cover all the cost, being I am disabled, she and two of her kids are full time students and one has a child. She raised her kids first and is now working on her life. She also is a 4.0 student who I am proud of. My own Daughter could not get any aid as her mother and step father would not help her and they make too much for her to get any. She is getting deep in debt besides working all the hours she can again holding a 4.0 GPA.

Now my thoughts on this and Obama's promise to collage bound students. On his web sight for the transition he has down that collage people will need to do 100 hours a year and for that they will get a $4,000.00 tax credit. Now I know that will not even cover one semester of cost at all here for one of student. During the campaign he said if you did volunteer work for two years you would have your tuition paid for. Now the truth is coming out as I am sure more will in the coming days and months. The youth that voted for him believed him and now they will get to taste his failure on his promises that they took at face value. now add to this mix a student in a internship, so you have 100 hours forced ops volunteer work on top of 100 plus hours internship added to you're full time class work. Then add in any hours you need to work to pay for what his promise to you now will not. I wonder how many will be able to keep that up or how many will drop out because they just can not do it and still keep up there grades.
The strange part in this is a few days back on the sight he had the word (required) when talking about the 50 hours for middle school and high school kids a year. That now has been removed from all the web blogging on it. So keep your eyes open so much promised and now the truth is coming so little fallow threw. Is 4 grand worth it? Did you vote because you were told you would have your tuition paid for? If so fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me! Remember that when you vote again based on promises and not a record of what a person has done. when looking forward we have to look back to see what they have done as that helps us see were they plan to go just like a road map.. So now what's next that he promised? tell we know as the writer of the article said cost just keep going up and up and up so there really is little very little help coming from Obama's promises. wonder what other things were promised and we will find out do not happen now that votes are no longer needed.

The Xbox generation needs to stop whining about the so-called Boomers. If Xboxers think it was easy and cheap to get an education in the '60s and early '70s, think again. Many of these so-called hippy hedonists worked their way through school or used GI benefits for school after slogging through the idiocy of Vietnam. Loans were every bit as difficult and expensive; many of us paid off our loans over time just as you must. Here's a tip: stop playing "Kill Monsters All Over The Universe" with your thumbs, stop wasting your money on iPhones, iPods and iToilets and maybe you'll have enough for tuition. And start reading. Books. Know what they are? You don't have to plug them in or anything.

Hi,

Not every kid can work 80-hr weeks in the summer. Some have younger siblings or even ill parents to care for. Some have internships or study abroad or service programs to participate in that might not pay. I don't see why someone from an impoverished family should have to work 2-4 times as hard as someone from a privileged one. Though I do think we should stop penalizing people who work by reducing their need rating.

As for baby boomers being irresponsible and passing on debt... ha. I'm a boomer/Xer cusper and we always thought, growing up, that the Greatest Gen was leaving us with impossible debt, bankrupt social security, etc. Under Clinton, a boomer, all of that was righted. It's only recently that it's gone whacko again, but obviously that's not because of the boomers in general.

Each generation seems to feel this anger at its predecessors, so let's move beyond this very tedious cliche.

I'm not sure it's an issue that we'd be borrowing from younger generations if we extend Pell grants (or move to subsidize education in the way that European countries do). After all, those younger kids will also benefit from an expanded Pell program or reduced tuition overall.

I'm not thrilled about "thrifty" approaches to education, such as going to state or community colleges. (Though I don't think it's true that community colleges are as bad as some people have said in this discussion... in general, community college kids are there because they want to be, not just because college is the next step or because their parents sent them there on autopilot...I taught at a state university and the indifference and laziness there was unspeakable...) As a single parent I saved a lot of money to send my kid to college. I also limited my family size to one kid so that I could be sure to give him a private education. However, it's suddenly not enough. And we're unlikely to qualify for much aid. Which means he's likely to go to a state school. I resent that. I wanted him to be able to attend a small school with an emphasis on seminar-style classes, where he would be challenged by his peers. I feel that he'll be much more prepared for life and much more tightly networked for success if he attends a prestigious school. Plus, he'll have a more satisfying intellectual experience and will have more confidence if he's tested by his peers. (I went to a "flagship" state university, for financial reasons, after having attended an excellent high school. At the university, I got a great education content-wise, but was bored out of my mind, got straight As with zero effort and never had any real sense of how smart I really was... because no one was even close. It was quite a change from the competitive high school, and a total shock.) This is what I planned for his whole life and now it's out of reach.

As I said, I resent that.

I also don't want him to be saddled with much debt, as I want him to be able to choose what he *wants* to do, rather than what he *has* to do to pay off loans. I didn't raise a kid just to ship him straight to the cubicle gulag. If he doesn't want to be a doctor or a lawyer, per the Obamas, he shouldn't have to acquire a huge amount of debt. Smart, talented, well-educated people are also needed in teaching, in museum curation, in non-profit organizations, in research science. Graduates should be able to make these choices. Worst case, they should acquire debt in graduate or professional school, not at the undergraduate level.

On KFDart's post on writing quality and critical thinking: Dart's angry, personal rhetoric is hyperbolic to the point of muffling the message.

I would like to modify/qualify Dart's point, though. The community college solution will not do the job. I work at a public university where students often take this route; because of it, they are injected suddenly into a more rigorous program but with truly bad training, and become second-class citizens in their own university.

This goes double for students who are forced to work 80-hour weeks (!) while in college, and for students who pack their semesters in tight to expedite their educations. They lose out immensely, they don't get the training they need, and inevitably fall behind their peers.

The new system you're proposing should not reward the kind of obsessive, exhausting working that these students do. An education cannot be expedited -- if it is, it becomes increasingly commodifiable -- the divide between students who slack and students who work to the point of learning *nothing* (or retaining nothing, or seeing their education as a simple get-it-over-with means to an end) will only increase. I understand your desire to, well, punish those students who do not work as hard or as effectively as you do -- but I think it is misplaced.

What needs to change, and I think you know this, is the level of fear that causes such obsessive behavior: fear that all of this money will go to waste as you graduate into a worsening economy with rising debt. In that case, focus on the reform and accountability aspects of your plan. The amount of money skimmed off the top by greedy administrators (at public and private universities) is astronomical; use Obama's proverbial scalpel (not hatchet) to fix that problem, and the rest will fall together. And community colleges should be held to a level of accountability too -- they are still colleges, but they often rush their students through with high-school level training at best. This decline in critical thinking/writing is visible at the private/public university level, too -- any system which further rushes or commodifies that process will be devastating (and produce more video-game zombies than you realize -- though there's nothing inherently wrong with gaming, of course).

And if you do form that grassroots movement (and I think you should), do enlist graduate students. At UC Berkeley, one of the main ways that the administration has gotten away with murder is by keeping grads and undergrads ignorant of each other's situation (cutting our funding only after the undergrads have left for the summer, etc). Most graduate instructors -- and indeed, many full faculty -- are paid below a living wage. And we're most often the ones who take on most of the teaching. If we line up together, the question "wait -- where does all this increased tuition *go*?" will have to be asked.

Anyway, back to my grading. Thanks for this article, and good work.

KFDart05, I couldn't agree more.
LizzieV, that is your own fault for getting an unrealistic degree.

Zac, Sweetheart, I want to know why AOL Money and Finance is so desperate, they're willing to vomit your ignorant, brain-washed thoughts all over the internet. Not only did you memorize a bunch of useless garbage about loans, you didn't stop to think about the actual value of an education. Have you been to any community college recently and seen the variation between their idea of a 10th grade educational review and an actual college? Have you worked an 80-hour a week summer? Exactly how much of this weed are you smoking to create this financial pit and get these ideas implanted in others' brains. Why are you suggesting that we should pay for the Baby Boomers' mistakes, rather than push it on kids, who'll just push it on theirs. National debt will be there forever, it was actually a plan of Hamilton's to eliminate the possibility of secession, in case your community college education is lacking. Personal debt, however, is not something I'm going to impose on my children. Yes, I agree that frivolous spending, when knee-deep in loans, is ridiculous. Yes, if the possibility of working while in school is an option, it should be taken. And, yes, prices for schools are getting outrageous. There are other options. If you've got the brains to make it in college, you've got the brains for scholarships and no, they're not all affirmative action or based on minorities. Personally, I'm a white girl from an upper-middle class family who could and did pay my way through school. That doesn't mean that I didn't fill out over 50 scholarships to help out with my 30k a year tuition fees. I had a 4.0 in high school, and found it beyond aggravating to be punished for the color of my skin. But, I still found the scholarships, and due to my involvement and grades, helped pay for a lot of my schooling. My best friend in college had the same predicament, but her family couldn't afford the 30k. Luckily for her, she had smaller loans, did the research to make sure she wasn't getting screwed over in the long-run, worked her way through, and got the scholarships she needed. She maintained a social life, and a GPA of above a 4.0, and didn't have to wave any white flag of ill-poverty, accepting any fate of going to a community college because she had to work for it.

Get a work ethic, Zac. It'll work better than laying flat and playing dead.

Zac--Ignore the diatribes about how expensive it was in the 60s and 70s and the woeful state of critical thinking and writing and the pros and cons of Community College. You are on to something and there is value in many of the comments that I hope you can draw from. Read the Jon Marcus article. http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2008/10/05/up_up_and_aw ay/

I agree that there are huge issues in how this country funds higher education but to say that Obama's hurting future generations is just ludicrous (the title "How Obama's College Plan Hurts My Generation"). The author seems to assume that universities are raising tuitions for the heck of it. Education is getting more expensive at least partially because everything is getting more expensive. And it doesn't help that the federal budget is not keeping up with inflation. Public universities across the nation are not getting funded by the federal government the way they used to. And the students pay with higher tuition. So to say that Obama's not doing anything to keep the costs down is pretty short-sighted. Unlike McCain, Bush, and almost every other Republican, Obama has come out more dedicated to funding the NIH and NSF. And since so many university budgets are partially reliant on the science and engineering discoveries, increasing the research budget helps keep universities solvent and tuition lower. Of course this is just one line of reasoning why I call BS on the author of this article. There are a lot of other reasons why Obama is not disregarding education.