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| via NYT |
thinks paying too much for a college education is ridiculous. He's right. Here's why.
Almost three years ago, I wrote a blog post for Street Carnage (included here below) criticizing anyone (and their parents) stupid enough to pay $40,000+ a year for their undergrad education. I think the points I made there still hold true, but the sort of extravagance I was criticizing then is distinctly pre-Great Recession. In expectance of 2012′s economic / Mayan hell-scape, the issue at hand isn’t ridiculously overpaying for college, but paying even one cent more for it.
Yesterday, there was a rally held at my alma mater, Baruch College, to protest a proposed tuition hike of $300 each year for the next four years. The amount may not seem like much compared to Baruch College’s current tuition (nearly $6,000 a year) and especially compared to that of private universities in New York ($40,000+), yet hundreds turned out. That was partially due to the events of last week, when a smaller group of peaceful protestors were violently confronted by NYPD, but also due to the feeling that the tuition increase just wasn’t right.
Baruch College is part of the City University of New York (CUNY), a collection of public schools of higher education that were founded as a state-funded alternative to the city’s private universities, which many New Yorkers could not afford. Initially, CUNY schools were completely free and served as a means of socio-economic mobilization for the city’s working class — the manifestation of the democratic spirit and the American Dream if there ever was one.
During the 1970s, New York City went broke and funding for CUNY schools evaporated, forcing them to charge students tuition for the first time. Since then, tuition has been on the rise, regularly justified by the CUNY Board of Trustees with complaints of funding cuts from the Mayor’s Office, or Albany, or Washington D.C.
But, like I said, when the latest rounds of tuition hikes were up for consideration by the CUNY Board of Trustees, hundreds of people showed up to say they wouldn’t have it. They were inspired by the recent Occupy Wall Street protests, but, more importantly, they realized that they shouldn’t have to pay more, not even $300 more — and they’re right.
They shouldn’t have to pay more because CUNY is state funded, meaning New Yorkers already pay for it with their taxes. The amount of taxes the average New Yorker pays hasn’t dropped in line with the tuition hikes, so why has the funding for CUNY suddenly disappeared? True, New York State’s tax coffers have shrunken overall due to Wall Street’s economic slump, but that doesn’t mean that CUNY’s budget should be on the cutting block nor that the working class, who already sacrifice by paying a higher real tax rate, should be asked to sacrifice even more when simply trying to educate themselves — especially when millionaires in New York have just been given a huge break.
Students in particular should not be made to pay more. Kids didn’t cause the global financial crisis, they didn’t fuck up the state’s tax revenues, they didn’t create this stagnant unemployment, and they didn’t cripple the economic climate of the near future so as to make paying off student loans that much harder. These aren’t their crimes.
Ultimately, it’s a question of justice. Find the criminals; make them pay.
WHY DO YOUR PARENTS SPEND A PORSCHE A YEAR TO SEND YOU TO SCHOOL?
I attended Rutgers University in Jersey for a year before I had to leave. I was paying $6,000 on top of $3,000 in loans, so when they told me they were going to up my tuition, I told them to fuck off. I came back to the city, pissed away six months of my life, then started attending Baruch College. The cost of my education went from $9,000 a year to -$4,000. I was getting paid to go to class, and the only real difference was instead of drinking in a 12×12 concrete cell of a dorm in New Brunswick, I was drinking in a bar around the corner from my school in Gramercy.
Taking all this into consideration leads me to a poignant question: Exactly what the fuck was I paying for during that first year?
With full tuition at $21,776, Rutgers isn’t even that bad. New York University is $37,372 and can go as high as $60k — which is, as has been said here before, the equivalent of buying a brand new Porsche and driving it off a cliff again and again every year. If a millionaire did that four years in a row, he’d be worldwide news. Compared to Baruch ($5,760), NYU is at least seven times more expensive, but what exactly is the difference?
PROFESSORS
In the late ’80s, NYU decided to act like the NY Yankees and just buy the most expensive staff they could possibly find. They didn’t have the money to do it, so they just jacked tuition fees through the roof. It was a fucking stupid and reckless move, but it worked. Kids saw people like Derek Jeter teaching Madonna “21st Century Fucking” and assumed the price was right. Problem is, these teachers also freelance at the cheap colleges — sometimes they even teach the same fucking course! Last semester I had a class with the writer Francine Prose, who simultaneously taught the same course at both Baruch and NYU. Also, there are a ton of great teachers who end up working solely for public colleges because of the lax obligations, white liberal guilt or sheer repugnance of NYU kids.
STUDENTS
While NYU is full of rich, white douche bags playing Ché, Baruch is packed to the brim with minorities. That’s not to say NYU doesn’t have any minorities; it’s just that NYU has the ones whose parents already own a deli, corner store or bodega, and Baruch has the ones who just got here. Either way, an Advanced Calculus course at NYU or Baruch is going to look like it’s being taught in Beijing or Calcutta, so who cares? Also, while Baruch is full of FOBs learning, NYU has fobs teaching. No highly educated person is going to cross an ocean to work for the packets of Ramen and plastic sporks that Baruch passes off as professors’ salaries. It’s one thing when the kid next to you smells like he bathes in curry; it’s another when you can’t make out what your English teacher said because he can’t get his Rs and Ls straight.
REPUTATION
People inevitably resort to the argument that NYU’s reputation warrants its price tag, that someone with an NYU degree will get picked for a job over someone else with a plebeian diploma.
That’s bullshit. If you’re applying to a job that only requires a Bachelor’s degree, the person who’s hiring you doesn’t care about the name on the diploma as long as it isn’t Ashwood University. The person hiring you only cares about: A. how you act during the interview (guys), and B. what you’re wearing (girls). And if you’re going on to one of those grad schools that weigh GPAs from “top tier” universities more than community colleges, it matters even less. Community colleges are easier, so your GPA will be higher anyway. (That’s the whole point of weighing them differently.)
Lastly, most people don’t even end up going into the same field they studied in college, thus making their degree moot. I mean, look at Gavin and Derrick. They both have degrees, but they spend their time .
-ARV
WHY DO YOUR PARENTS SPEND A PORSCHE A YEAR TO SEND YOU TO SCHOOL?
I attended Rutgers University in Jersey for a year before I had to leave. I was paying $6,000 on top of $3,000 in loans, so when they told me they were going to up my tuition, I told them to fuck off. I came back to the city, pissed away six months of my life, then started attending Baruch College. The cost of my education went from $9,000 a year to -$4,000. I was getting paid to go to class, and the only real difference was instead of drinking in a 12×12 concrete cell of a dorm in New Brunswick, I was drinking in a bar around the corner from my school in Gramercy.
Taking all this into consideration leads me to a poignant question: Exactly what the fuck was I paying for during that first year?
With full tuition at $21,776, Rutgers isn’t even that bad. New York University is $37,372 and can go as high as $60k — which is, as has been said here before, the equivalent of buying a brand new Porsche and driving it off a cliff again and again every year. If a millionaire did that four years in a row, he’d be worldwide news. Compared to Baruch ($5,760), NYU is at least seven times more expensive, but what exactly is the difference?
PROFESSORS
In the late ’80s, NYU decided to act like the NY Yankees and just buy the most expensive staff they could possibly find. They didn’t have the money to do it, so they just jacked tuition fees through the roof. It was a fucking stupid and reckless move, but it worked. Kids saw people like Derek Jeter teaching Madonna “21st Century Fucking” and assumed the price was right. Problem is, these teachers also freelance at the cheap colleges — sometimes they even teach the same fucking course! Last semester I had a class with the writer Francine Prose, who simultaneously taught the same course at both Baruch and NYU. Also, there are a ton of great teachers who end up working solely for public colleges because of the lax obligations, white liberal guilt or sheer repugnance of NYU kids.
STUDENTS
While NYU is full of rich, white douche bags playing Ché, Baruch is packed to the brim with minorities. That’s not to say NYU doesn’t have any minorities; it’s just that NYU has the ones whose parents already own a deli, corner store or bodega, and Baruch has the ones who just got here. Either way, an Advanced Calculus course at NYU or Baruch is going to look like it’s being taught in Beijing or Calcutta, so who cares? Also, while Baruch is full of FOBs learning, NYU has fobs teaching. No highly educated person is going to cross an ocean to work for the packets of Ramen and plastic sporks that Baruch passes off as professors’ salaries. It’s one thing when the kid next to you smells like he bathes in curry; it’s another when you can’t make out what your English teacher said because he can’t get his Rs and Ls straight.
REPUTATION
People inevitably resort to the argument that NYU’s reputation warrants its price tag, that someone with an NYU degree will get picked for a job over someone else with a plebeian diploma.
That’s bullshit. If you’re applying to a job that only requires a Bachelor’s degree, the person who’s hiring you doesn’t care about the name on the diploma as long as it isn’t Ashwood University. The person hiring you only cares about: A. how you act during the interview (guys), and B. what you’re wearing (girls). And if you’re going on to one of those grad schools that weigh GPAs from “top tier” universities more than community colleges, it matters even less. Community colleges are easier, so your GPA will be higher anyway. (That’s the whole point of weighing them differently.)
Lastly, most people don’t even end up going into the same field they studied in college, thus making their degree moot. I mean, look at Gavin and Derrick. They both have degrees, but they spend their time .
-ARV
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17 comments:
Realize this is not the point, but what was Francine Prose like as a professor!?
I honestly have no idea how that college on your resume thing works anymore, but granted,I graduated from college in a completely different world. I think I might have gotten my first job because of the college I went to. The rest from there is up to you innit? Not worth 100K+ though. OR WAS IT? No. Maybe.
@Anonymous: Francine Prose was intelligent, political and a bit of a bitch at times. Wonderful class.
@Luke: I studied journalism and now work in marketing, meaning most of the hard details I learned in college are basically useless to me now. I started at my current office as an intern, and learning WordPress while working at Street Carnage did more to win me that internship than anything related to school.
A college degree is more like a pre-req than anything now. It's like a high school degree: You have to have one to get a job, but no one gives a shit where you got it from.
Not sure I agree practically, although I do theoretically, that it doesn't matter at all where you went to school.
Not particularly relevant, but for comparison sake, I got my degree in Europe from a well-respected institution, and it was free. I even got a stipend from the government while I was in school.
$200k for a degree is bonkers.
--Sn
The only problem with me complaining about the money I paid for my degree, is that since it was in literature, and now I write for a living, it sort of worked. :/ Not sure what that means.
I'm not saying that everything you learn in school is useless, just that it most definitely isn't worth $200K. I think that's obvious from every single person who struggles to pay back their student loans or the fact that rising rates of college achievement aren't producing rising rates of employment.
Right, I think it's worth about 50k for a private school education.
Luke, are you talking about your undergrad or grad degree as maybe being somewhat worthwhile? Or both?
Also, isn't it weird how I did the Luke+comma thing like an old timey letter, but you still probably know what I mean and it still uses the same amount of characters as the @ thing?
While I most certainly wouldn't be where I am now, (wherever that is), if it weren't for my experience at Emerson, I did go there to learn how to write literature after all, and I don't see much of that going on around here.
re the @: I see what you did there.
i got my master's degree in education at umass boston. the school in boston that everyone talks about for education is lesley but umass is way cheaper.
i also worked at a school while i was getting my master's and that is 100% the only reason i was interviewed and hired for my position when i was finished with my program. the people hiring me could have cared less where i went. however, parents always ask, "Did you go to Lesley?" and they seem kind of disappointed when i say umass...
i have found that the secret to getting/keeping any job is to show up consistently, don't complain, and don't be fucking annoying. That's all.
"i have found that the secret to getting/keeping any job is to show up consistently, don't complain, and don't be fucking annoying. That's all"
Ha. Pro tip^
There are some pros to raising college fees.
The more students have to pay, the less likely (I assume) they are to enroll in stupid programs. "Ergo," universities will start junking stupid programs. I think we can all agree that universities really need to start doing this.
Since the UK got rid of free fees, British universities have started slashing "non-competitive" programs. So, instead of having state-educated interpretive dancers and graphic artists complaining that they can't find work, we'll just have no state-educated interpretive dancers and graphic artists. Good, good.
To cut costs, universities should FIRE people involved in retard-research.
While I think, say, interpretive dance is a joke, it makes me a little uncomfortable to cut things like that because I can see something like, oh, literature and reading, being lumped into that same artsy shit bin.
Ideal world:
Liberal Arts Colleges: English, Philosophy, History, etc. (basically all the old stuff - not Cultural Studies et al.)
Fine Arts Colleges: For people who like to draw, I guess.
Technical Institutes: Where people can train to be Electricians, Dentists, Lawyers, etc.
Universities: For the 5 to 10% percent of the current university population that are intelligent enough to conduct research in the Hard Sciences.
Social "scientists" can take a time machine back to the CCCP, and economists... do we need them? Probably. I have to write an exam in "Economics of Financial Markets" on Tuesday (hence I'm spewing bullshit comments right now). I'll likely get an A, but still don't really know or care what the ECB does, or how the EFSF works.
I went to a private college that is almost $50K/year. Never took out a student loan, and graduated debt free. My strategy for success? Grow up poor, get good grades, and pretty much every college will offer you a free education. Sry, no advice for wealthy dumb kids.
guess who went to NYU.
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