“Higher education” is becoming a double entendre. So high in
cost that parentage is now peonage.
The latest figures out last week indicate that four years of
college in a “public school” — state land-grant college or the
like — will run from $100,000 to $125,000 per pupil. A “private
school” — Harvard or Yale — will cost $200,000. None of this
takes into account how much private pre-college education may be
involved.
In other words, parents who educate four children in “private”
Ivy settings will spend at least $800,000 and will be approaching
50 when the task is done. Parents and children will be “finished”
at about the same time. With the market diving, al Qaeda rising,
and even President Bush suggesting it’s getting hot in here, isn’t
it time to take stock (the other kind)? What are the limits of
parental obligation, anyway? Four years of college has become a
warrant of childhood, dating back to the post-war years when the
G.I. Bill put thousands into college at taxpayer expense and
changed the landscape of the nation. But Mom and Dad paid only
indirectly for that and for the most part kept grinding away at
their self-financed retirement plan, knowing the other thing,
Social Security, wouldn’t amount to a fiddler’s dam. There were two
dire possibilities in those days: the poor house east of the
Mississippi and the poor farm west of it. Thousands of young people
“worked their way through school,” a phrase that died with
jitterbugging. Maybe some help from the folks, but only if they
were able.
No one has explained how a college education has become equated
with diapering as a solemn obligation of begetting. But it has.
Society is regaled with statistics demarking the income differences
between those with a college degree and those without. What parent
could possibly assign children to the lower rung? Besides, the
corporate door-keeper always asks, “Where have you gone?” not “What
do you know?” and “How badly do you want it?” The entree is all,
like the sauce in that other Frenchy phrase. Who cares what
character Mom and Dad instilled, how tight and tough the family
remained in rough times, and who bothers to point out that skills
are obtained by doing, even the work of physicians and lawyers.
Society is digging an even deeper oubliette: the debt owed the
grandchild. How many grandparents do you know who are fretting away
their remaining time trying to set up trusts for grandkids?
Obviously not entirely trusting those over-educated children to
take care of their own children.
Half a million. Eight hundred thousand. While the federal
government spends tens of billions on “education”? Education of
whom? It wasn’t until the mid-Sixties that the federal government
even dared venture into the field of funding education. Once the
civil right to an equal educational opportunity was secured, it was
a parent thing, a local matter. And it was better, because at that
level education did what its primary job has always been — it made
citizens.
