Yesterday's Solution is Today's Problem (17 Sept. 2013)

            For a while during my academic career, before the Reagan Revolution stomped into submission the American labor movement, I was among a small group of activists trying to organize a faculty union at Miami University in. As we neared the vote on collective bargaining, one of my conservative colleagues said to me, "Come on, Rich! You know that five years after we get a union, you'll be fighting it"; and I said, "Probably," and quoted the old saying I may've just made up, "Yesterday's solution is today's problem."

            Less good as a comeback but more exact would be, "Yesterday's solutions are often today's issues, and, enacted improperly, tomorrow's problems."

            If you have heard of Robert Michels and "The Iron Law of Oligarchy" you know the basic rules with any large organization, snarkily but accurately summarized by Darcy K. Leach —as Wikipedia on Michels saith — as, "Bureaucracy happens. If bureaucracy happens, power rises. Power corrupts." A union would definitely have been a good idea for the Miami University faculty, but, yeah, after a few years it probably would've grown bureaucratic, at least mildly corrupt, and I'd have had my problems with it.

            Indeed, an arresting irony on solutions and problems is the fact that early bureaucracies were formed in order to increase efficiency and fairness. Think about that: a sentence with the words "bureaucracy," "efficiency," and "fairness," and not a single "not" or other negation. Efficient, effective, and fair bureaucracy: what a concept! Or maybe, we'd think, a perverse fantasy. Ah, but if your choice was either (a) some royal autocrat or his semi-literate second-cousin once removed finally getting around to handling your petition and deciding whether or not he liked you and whether or not you'd sucked up enough and bribed enough, on the one hand, or (b) on the other hand a more or less trained, more or less disinterested professional government official following set rules — hell, yes, go with the bureaucrat.

            The system of bureaucracy — complex administrative organization —solved a number of problems and still solves problems; but we don't often hear praise for bureaucratic efficiency, effectiveness, and fairness.

            Another example, from both earlier and later.

            When I was growing up, we increasingly heard horror stories of large state-run mental institutions as incarnations of The Snake Pit (a movie title from 1948) or some "Hotel California" where people were more gently, but permanently,  trapped. Large state mental hospitals, we were told, and some private ones, too, were hell-holes and abominations on the face of the Earth (including the asylum in Camarillo, California, just down he road from where I live). And after the perfecting, sort of, of a range of anti-psychotic drugs, various do-gooders could argue persuasively to close down the large mental hospitals and distribute most of the patients to small local treatment centers and hostels and half-way houses, where they could heal and learn to function in American society.

            By the time I was a young adult, state legislators were thrilled and delighted to vote to shut down the large mental hospitals and did so: there was little political cost from the closings, and the State saved money. More exactly, the State saved money closing down the large hospitals; setting up a large-scale system of local treatment centers and hostels and halfway houses would have cost figurative political capital and a lot of money. The first times I recall hearing the acronym NIMBY — "Not in My Back Yard" — was with resistance to setting up mini-asylums in anyone's neighborhood; and, of course, extensive, labor-intensive, humane care of small groups of crazy people is expensive.

            The upshot over the next few years was that the large institutions were shut down, the patients given their meds and some referrals, and then pretty much sent away.

            I'm overgeneralizing and oversimplifying here, but fuck it: the upshot for us today includes substantial numbers of insane people living with family and among friends unable to take care of them adequately — or homeless and on the streets.

            A major example comes from the excellent research of David Eisenman, a very bright young man at the time who, among other things, served as a number-crunching analyst for Richard Ogilvie, Gov. of the State of Illinois in the late 1960s. As John W. McCarter, Jr. recounts in an oral-history memoir of his years at the University of Illinois, "David worked the tuition issue very hard [… concluding] that low tuitions are a massive subsidy to middle class and upper middle class families. If you really wanted to assure equal access to educational opportunity, what you should be doing is charging high tuitions and then using the Scholarship Commission as a vehicle for providing assistance above tuition and fees to low income families to get their kids in the university system. And really all that the low tuition was doing was providing […] a massive subsidy to the middle class, and secondly it was creating a market system where you had private institutions with extremely high tuition and public institutions with low ones and it was driving the private institutions out of business."

            Variations on this analysis and subsequent policy recommendation replaced scholarship commissions with mechanisms for students to borrow money for college and then repay the loan through a Pay As You Earn (PAYE) program, in what was known as "the Yale Plan" or, in honor or Ohio Governor John J. Gilligan — who pushed for the program — "The Gilligan Plan."

            PAYE currently exists in the US in miniscule form, and there are significant programs in Australia and the UK, and suggestions for private versions for the US.

            Ideally, such a plan would operate on the Federal level, with loans paid back as a surtax on one's income tax, and such an approach would offer a number of advantages.

                        * As a surtax on income tax, people would pay back what they could when they could, through a system that's already established — the IRS — and highly efficient at collecting money. Those who went on to make good money could pay back a bit more than they borrowed, making up for those who couldn't pay back much, or at all. The system could be set up to not quite break even, with the Federal Government and the States pitching in a bit as a public investment. (And "State and Society" would pay for capital expenditures and the research and service functions of the system: the non-educational expenses that serve the public generally.)
                        * Making student pay for their educations would encourage them to take their schooling more seriously.
                        * Cutting parents out of the equation would get rid of a real weirdness in US funding for schools. It's at best odd for the State to pay for educating minor children and then expect parents to pay to school their adult offspring.
                        * PAYE programs would allow more people to go to school fairly easily later in life than "traditional college age." Eighteen to twenty-two is a fine age for school for many people but clearly not for all, not if you believe "College is for grownups."
                        * Most important, one of the results of the upheavals of the 1960s, was that older folk became much less willing to pay for college for "kids" who weren't theirs; increasingly, older folk came to see college students as privileged, ungrateful White children, or (increasingly) not White. PAYE would put the onus of paying for college on what angry White old people (and others) saw as those ungrateful, increasingly darker and more alien undergraduate thugs and graduate-school parasites.

            Anyway, Eisenman and his fellow policy wonks demonstrated quite convincingly that in any State with a regressive tax system — pretty much all of them —low-cost public higher education transferred money from richer people to poorer people. Obviously, this needed to be reformed; and there were several obvious ways such reforms could be accomplished.

            As things turned out, of course, as with mental health, so with education.

            State governments have indeed reduced sharply their subsidies to public higher education. Indeed, faculty and administrators used to joke at Miami U that as the subsidy per student decreased we went from a State University to State Supported to State Subsidized to State Assisted to State Located to "State Annoyed": with the wise and sovereign People of Ohio chipping in only a small percentage of what it cost to run the University.

            And, as Eisenman et al. wanted — and was and is right and just — tuition and fees increased, and increased far more and far faster than the reformers intended.

            What has not happened is compensating increases in no-strings scholarship money nor nation-wide PAYE nor anything like it.

            The 1970s solution to the unjust wealth transfers of low-tuition higher education became the issue of overly rapid increases in tuition in the years following, moving into today's problem and tomorrow's crisis of student debt.

            High student debt lacks the outright cruelty of pretty much throwing large numbers of mentally ill people onto the street, but crushing debt is bad enough.

            Even with the best of will, in a complex world, yesterday's solutions will often become problems. With stingy aging voters, avaricious bankers, and irresponsible legislators getting into the act, attempts at reform can be twisted into low-key horror shows. 

Tuition, Fees, and Students from the PRC in Oxford, OH (11 Nov. 2014)

[In the USA], public four-year colleges have increased

tuition and fees by 4.2% annually for the past decade ….

            Back East from where I now live, in "The Heart of It All" in Oxford, Ohio, in John Boehner's Congressional District, early November 2014 saw a bit of a tussle occasioned by a guest column in The Miami Student running under the headline "Admitting international students for the wrong reasons brings down the university."
            Apparently after a fair amount of student-journalistic soul searching, the editors ran the column over the signature "A Concerned Faculty Member" and gave the writer's I.D. line as "Anonymous | Miami University | Faculty Member." The author's status as a faculty member was questioned on a Miami U ListServ by at least one of my former colleagues, but that suspicion may do an injustice to the Student's student editors, and I'll accept the explanation that the author was "sen[d]ing this letter of concern anonymously as I am concerned that revealing my name could harm my [career] trajectory within Miami." The author ends with "Incidentally, it is a sad fact that faculty is made to feel unsafe to bring concerns such as these to the attention of the university for fear of being labeled 'racist' or 'anti-equal opportunity.' I want you to know that these concerns are not just my own; they are concerns of many faculty members and many students who are afraid to come forward. I expect you" — the Trustees? — "to take these concerns into deepest consideration and reevaluate your admissions policies especially regarding language proficiency of international students." It's also a sad fact that the author, even if a hoaxing undergrad, doesn't proofread well — I resisted the impulse to put "[sic]" after each error — and sadder that The Miami Student does little better than most current non-student publications in copyediting.
            Still, even if "Anonymous" isn't a member of the teaching faculty, concerned or otherwise, public comments with the on-line article and comments I've read elsewhere indicate that there are at least perceived problems with Miami University International students who lack "the conversational skills to follow along with lecture materials or to contribute to large or small group discussions." And there are at least some on campus who agree with Anonymous that "The majority of these students do not have the English reading and writing skills to read and comprehend in class exams, out of class reading assignments or out of class writing assignments" — and a number agree that "the level of disengagement the international students display during class is downright disrespectful …."
            Okay, the guest column by Anonymous was and remains intemperate, as were some comments against it.
            My own experience with International students at Miami U at Oxford was generally neutral to strongly positive. The only class I taught with a noticeable number of foreign students was a College Composition course scheduled for students who needed or wanted to take the first semester of a two-term course Second Semester. (Got that? It doesn't matter.) Anyway, the class was largely University athletes, so I got the national stereotypes fulfilled with Canadian hockey players and an Australian swimmer, all of whom — the hockey players and swimmer — blended in with The Great White Majority of MUO students. More interesting were the two students from Africa: both products of a British-style education and both of whom did very well in a course largely based in English "Sayings." English was their third or fourth language, but they just assumed that to understand a language and culture one had to learn the proverbs and truisms and clichés; so they knew more English sayings than the North American students did. (They also reminded me that Africa is a continent and not some monolithic culture: aside from sharing a "Public School" style education and traditional attitudes toward proverbs, the two students were definitely different. So I got to look on at similarities and differences; there may be an English-speaking North American culture more than Canadians like to think, and significantly more than there's some "African culture.")
            From afar geographically — California — and in time (I retired in 2006), I could be annoyingly unemotional about this issue with my former colleagues and suggest to faculty on a Miami University ListServ that they'd just been offered "a teachable moment." How did substantial numbers of mostly Chinese students wind up in Oxford, OH, and why might a fair number of them have trouble with the language of instruction? There are, after all, well-established procedures for guaranteeing that foreign students can get by when they arrive on an American campus, and respectable schools have support services to help them do better than just get by. Given the effort it takes to come to Ohio from China, and given the pretty high proportion of truth in the stereotype of the serious Chinese student, why might Miami at Oxford get even a few Chinese students with limited language skills and bad attitudes?
            There were, of course, questions of racism and xenophobia in the perception of such problems: as President Kennedy used to say, "Where there's smoke, sometimes there's a smoke machine" — but my younger colleagues were on the race/ethnicity issues immediately, and I didn't have to tell them about the "Yellow Peril!!!" periods of hysteria in US history. (I told them anyway; I dealt with the subject for a couple years.)
            And race isn't an abstract issue at Miami University, Oxford, OH: we have been and to a great extent remain notoriously nondiverse — as in mostly wealthy, Incandescent White — and parochial. Indeed, the bitter joke went that any African-American student smart enough to attend Miami at Oxford was smart enough not to. And Anonymous suspected that the Miami administration was bringing in "bodies of color" (my formulation) to help Miami's statistics and to do so without panicking the herd (also my formulation) or Ohio parents who'd just as soon have their offspring at a majority-White — way majority White — institution far away from most things urban, and emphatically WASP and WASC ("WASC" is from a colleague of mine who was also a priest; it's a useful term for a Catholic who is sufficiently assimilated to be socially and culturally indistinguishable from a WASP). One hypothesis to try out would be that if, but only if, there are unqualified International students on campus, might part of the explanation for their presence be the playing of bureaucratic numbers games?
            The main thing I could and did tell my necessarily younger former colleagues was that they should dig up some emeriti who'd stuck around south-west Ohio and ask for the story, "Grampses, how did Miami University at Oxford get the Ohio Board of Regents to approve a Miami University College of Engineering and Computing?" After all, if you put the pointy end of a pair of compasses in Oxford, OH, and draw a circle with a 300-mile radius, you will take in a number of quite fine engineering and computer-science programs, including some world-class operations (Purdue, OSU, the U of I, Case-Western, et al). There are excellent and obvious reasons MUO would want an engineering school — more attractive gender parity as well as more ethnic diversity, higher test scores, more serious students, prestige as a graduate institution, grants — but how could Miami convince the Regents that they could get engineering students to attend and generate enough money for teachers to teach them, and do research and get grants and awards and all?
            Was Miami going to import engineering students?
            When I visited the campus a while back, that, precisely, was the theory, although the rumors didn't include statistical breakdowns on the engineering program. As the University of California was accused of doing in a dust-up a while back (and probably to return with the Santa Anas), gossip had it that Miami was bringing in foreign students for the higher tuition and fees that non-Ohioan pay (figure over $40K per year, with housing).
            So Miami University may be actively and publically recruiting abroad — one colleague asserted it was — and (the colleague wrote) at least had the reputation where she was in China of not being overly fastidious about the quality of students: If you can afford to pay, MU wants you!
            But this figurative thread can be pulled on more.
            Why does a public university like Miami have to depend upon tuition and fees? As an undergrad at the University of Illinois, I paid what amounted to a service charge. The U of I is now a lot more expensive, and even the University of California system is now charging for classes. The State of Ohio was never generous is supporting higher education, and when I left Miami U the State was picking up maybe 5% of the tab.
            In part, that was A Good Thing: as David Eisenman et al. demonstrated back in the last third of the 20^th century, highly subsidized higher education transfers money from poorer people (who pay sales taxes) to richer people (who go to college more). And there were a number of substantial, responsible suggestions for how to correct that injustice and still have a good college education available for any American who wanted it and could hack it.
            Indeed, Governor John Gilligan of Ohio suggested a Pay As You Earn (PAYE) program, and no less than Yale University tried one out. In the form I like, the State (in some sense) fronts the money for college, and students pay back the entire costs of their education if they can afford to, and when they can afford to — and for as long as it takes to pay back the State. Given that the US Internal Revenue Service exists and is good at collecting money, this could be done as a "revenue neutral" program through the Federal Government. And a PAYE program could be open to older adults: eighteen to twenty-two is a good age for a lot of people to go to college, but not for all. (Hint: If they still call themselves "kids" and think their parents owe them a college education, there's a fair chance they're not ready for college. [Think about it: at least ideally free education for people's kids when they're kids — children — but asking parents to pay for the education of adults: Why?!])
            So why don't we have a large scale PAYE program and not the current mockery of one you've probably never heard of? Hint: There's a lot of money to be made by banks making student loans backed by the United States.
            Like many good scientific quests, there's a lot to be said for The Miami Student's doing some investigative journalism starting with asking if there are a significant number of linguistically or otherwise unqualified International students at Miami University at Oxford and, if so, how did they get admitted — and sometimes graduated.
            With luck, non-student journalists will get involved, and we can have a national discussion of why higher education has gotten so much more expensive.
            And if you are a journalist that will investigate, check out colleges becoming more like highly-bureaucratized big businesses: with rising numbers of administrators — highly-paid administrators — and competition for clients with luxury living: including semi-pro sports, fancy dorms, state-of-the-art recreational facilities, and, at Miami University at Oxford anyway, a tradition of tuition and fees high enough to keep out the riff-raff (today's costs certainly would've kept me out at any age).
            And while they're at it, journalists in and around the Oxford, OH, area might want to see if the Honorable if not always useful John Boehner finally did something for his district and pulled a string or two to bring home some bacon to Miami University as a commercial/educational operation and for the economy of south-west Ohio or maybe even a nice pork-roast of an engineering school, with students to help fill it — and maybe some other majors. The Boehner gambit I doubt: he seems to have been quite consistent in declining to earmark funds for projects in his district (more's the pity!). The other crassly economic and Public Relationshypotheses, though: those are worth investigating.

Zero Tuition: Who pays? Who profits? (1 Feb. 2015)

            It's not a name you'd know, but he's important for the current debate on zero or low tuitions at community colleges, and for reducing tuition and fees at four-year colleges and universities.
            As described in a memoir by the Director of the Bureau of the Budget of the State of Illinois in the Ogilvie administration in the late 1960s, "there was a fellow by the name of David Eisenman who had been at the university [of Illinois]. David worked the tuition issue very hard […,] and our thesis on tuition was that low tuitions are a massive subsidy to middle class and upper middle class families. If you really wanted to assure equal access to educational opportunity, what you should be doing is charging high tuitions and then [use] the Scholarship Commission as a vehicle for providing assistance above tuition and fees to low income families to get their kids in the university system." 
            What State legislatures did, of course — mostly for reasons other than class equity and fiscal fairness — was reduce subsidies to public higher education, eventually drastically, with only small increases in scholarships and grants.
            And so the cost of public higher education was shifted significantly to students and their families, even while the those costs increased and then continued to increase.
            In part, that's fair, especially with four-year institutions: most Americans pay taxes, frequently "regressive taxes" like the sales tax, or often-oppressive ones like property tax; only some people go on to higher education, and the ones who go to the big, prestigious public research universities tend to be well-to-do, and even community college students aren't often the wretched of the Earth.
            In larger part, the high-tuition/high-fees system is unfair and unwise: it's depriving young people chances their elders had for inexpensive higher education — those who received The G.I. Bill, "War babies" and Boomers like me who paid only token tuition — because it's depriving the American Republic of a large body of well-educated citizens, and because it's depriving the American economy of educated people who can help America survive and thrive in what will be increasingly sharp global economic competition.
            The non-solution so far has been mostly student loans, which has been great for bankers but not even good for most others. The banks get nice capitalist profit on the loans, while the risks get socialized: your tax dollars in action guaranteeing (for the banks) at least part of the loans.
            It didn't and doesn't have to be that way.
            Here is another name you probably don't know but should: the Honorable John J. Gilligan, Governor of the State of Ohio 1971-75 and sufficiently an advocate of an alternative that it was sometimes called "the Gilligan Plan." It was more commonly known as "Pay As You Earn," or PAYE, and the idea has been around — and implemented on a very small scale — for nearly half a century.
            The version of PAYE I have pushed is one in which the Federal government advances to any qualified resident enough money to actually afford a college or university education: which can be a substantial sum for married people with families, "nontraditional students" such as we had with veterans under the G.I. bill.
            This sounds expensive, and the original outlay would be very large; PAYE would, however, save money and could turn a modest profit.
            PAYE advances are loans that must be repaid, and repayment can be through a surtax on one's Federal income taxes at a rate set by actuaries so that the basic program breaks even, with former students paying back their loans if they can afford to and as they can afford to, and with a time limit on how long they must pay.
            If you graduate and go on to make a lot of money, you pay back the loan with interest; if you don't make a lot of money — or hardly any at all — then you pay back what you can.
            But you do pay back: A well-funded IRS has shown itself to be very, very effective at getting the sovereign capital "P" People money we're owed. And it makes far more business sense to collect money from people who have been out working for a while and have money than to start dunning immediately recent graduates who are broke.
            The rates can be set so that students can pay full freight for the cost of their educations, but between market forces and government arm-twisting, students should have to pay no more than that. Capital expenses, research, public service (including providing cheap semi-pro sport), top-heavy administrations, and other frills — those can be subsidized by the States and, with luck, in some areas subsidized a good deal less.
            As a former college teacher, the major advantage I see to the plan is that it would attract more full-fledged adults to college campuses and help concentrate the minds of younger students. For sure, it will limit the weirdness of the American State's offering more or less adequate, more or less free education to people's children when those children are children, and then asking parents of legal adults to pay for further educating for their adult offspring, helping to reduce our current over-load of "adult children."
            (My slogan as a teacher: College Is for Grownups, not what a couple of my students called, in two very fine essays, "College: Half-Way House to Adulthood," and "College: The Four-Year Vacation.)
            As a very-long-term US resident, I like the idea of reducing subsidies to the well-to-do while helping "to assure equal access to educational opportunity."
            As a taxpayer, I also like the possibility of driving down college costs if colleges have to compete for students who themselves have to pay for their educations, and at the same time having all taxpayers who are paying attention highly conscious that we are putting up money, at least for a while, to support those colleges and universities.
            Many banks will lose a sweet source of income, but right about now a lot of Americans might well say, "Screw the banks"; the money the banks are not lending to students they might put toward carefully-vetted local mortgages and loans to small businesses: that social-responsibilty stuff they may recall from old movies like It's a Wonderful Life.
            So my vote is for "No" to zero tuition, but an emphatic "Yes" to investing in education, but investing with high probability of high return on the investment, starting, crassly, with getting back the money.