The American Spectator

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(Page 4 of 12)

Talk about a drunken sailor. Higher education is completely out of control and is much worse than Wolfram suggests. Yes, he talks about government spending on higher education, but what about the private donations? How much money is donated to these institutions each year? This figure is even greater than the student loan program. Yet, tuitions continue to rise.

The simple fact is that colleges and universities have no interest in making education affordable. They are organizational dinosaurs. In their budgeting process, they set tuition rates according to student loan ceilings and the amount of endowments they collect. Also, colleges and universities are overbuilt. Show me an institution that is not constructing a new building, and I will show you some beachfront property in Arizona. If you step onto any college campus at 3 p.m. in the afternoon, you will find more than half the buildings empty. Yet, the administration will cry that they do not have enough classroom space.

Higher education is a bloated bureaucracy with overpaid administrators and professors who want big salaries but only want to teach between the hours of 9 a.m. and noon.

I noticed that Wolfram is from Hillsdale. When was the last time Hillsdale lowered its charges? In fact, Hillsdale charges over $20K a year. It is just as bloated as the rest of the bunch. I am sure that you will find more administrators at Hillsdale than teachers. Hillsdale does not live off government loans but conservative donors who finance the fat salaries of its administrators and its insatiable demand for new buildings.

We do not need a program that would invest in students by having them pay part of their salaries for upteen years! Under that model, tuition would continue to rise. What we need is competition in education. We need new colleges that are efficient. We need colleges that teach all day and into the evening. Hey, we are living in the information technology age! Yet colleges continue to produce more paperwork, hire more administrators, and build more buildings. As for the students, they get less education but are charged more every year.

Next to government, colleges and universities are the most inefficient and expensive institutions in this country. I agree that they are "subsidized stupidity," but we need a new vision of education and not a new method of financing these cows.

p>Here in Arizona, we are creating a new college that will not indebt the students for the next ten years. We are building a college that will become a new model for higher education. br> -- Dr. Matthew Holland /p>

What Big Education needs to control its out-of-control costs is a dose of Hillarycare. What Hillary tried to do to medical care we should do for education. And who could complain? Not the students (or their parents) who would watch their bills drop dramatically. Certainly not the overwhelmingly socialist/Marxist professoriate.

Democrats could hardly stand in the way of this new expansion of the Leviathan State. And Republicans? Well, given current attitudes on campuses around the country, things could hardly be worse.

And, once you think about it, a little dose of socialism at the "kickee" end might do wonders for academic attitudes. This is true because most academics are actually closet fascists. They imagine that with the advent of socialism the elite (them) will finally gain their well deserved recognition. In other words, the will be on top and order the peasants around (in the peasants' best interests, of course). In other words, they will be the "kickers," and the rest of us will be the "kickees." Nothing, certainly no rational argument based on mere experience, logic and history, could be calculated to more rapidly disabuse the professsoriate of their socialist fantasies faster than the experience of socialism -- as "kickee" human lab rat.

p>Hillarycare For Education! br> --

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