Rick Santorum is stretching his criticism of President Obama’s
advocacy of universal college attendance into a broader attack on
college itself. Santorum has three college degrees, which provides
a good indication of how seriously one should take his assault on
what he is labeling as Obama’s elitism. As with so many of
Santorum’s statements, this criticism contains a grain of
perception smothered in reactionary dogma.
“President Obama has said he wants everybody in America to
go to college. What a snob,” Santorum said last weekend. “There are
good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day, and
put their skills to test, who aren’t taught by some liberal college
professor (who) tries to indoctrinate them. I understand why he
wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I
want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their
image, not his.”
This is not new. For months, Santorum has been making the
point that encouraging all Americans to earn a college degree
reveals Obama to be hopelessly elitist. Blue-collar work done with
skill and pride is as honorable as any pursuit that requires first
enduring courses on 20th century feminist poets or the fundamentals
of marketing, he’s been saying. Alas, instead of sticking with that
point, he shifted the debate to the corrupting effect of college
itself.
On ABC’s This Week, Santorum noted that a large
percentage of students who enter college professing a religious
faith lose it by the time they graduate, and he complained of
political correctness on campus.
All of that is true, but beside the point. The president
is vulnerable on this subject, but Santorum’s barbs fail to sting
because, as usual, they narrow rather than broaden his appeal.
Santorum’s criticism is not of the president, but of college. In
his telling, college is no place Americans should send their
children. It is a place where radical leftists turn the budding
youth of capitalist America into unthinking socialist
drones.
The contrast Santorum presents is this: Obama wants your
kids to go to college so his radical professor buddies can
indoctrinate them. The American voters should pick Santorum instead
because he wants the country to have enough high-school-level jobs
so you never have to send your kids to one of those socialist
re-education camps in the first place.
In a nation in which almost everyone aspires to upward
mobility, how is this a winning political argument?
Sure, colleges are hothouses of liberalism. They have been
for generations. And yet Americans of all political persuasions
continue to send their children there en masse.
“Enrollment in degree-granting postsecondary
institutions increased by 9 percent between 1989 and 1999,” reports
the National Center for Education Statistics. “Between 1999 and
2009, enrollment increased 38 percent, from 14.8 million to 20.4
million.”
Santorum’s message to these millions of Americans and
their families is: Suckers. You fell into Obama’s indoctrination
trap!
Instead of attacking college, Santorum should be attacking
Obama. The president’s college promotion scheme is vulnerable to
two criticisms that seem to have largely escaped Santorum’s notice
because they don’t fit his '80s and '90s-era conservative talking
points on the subject of higher education.
The first is the cost. If millions more Americans go to
college, who is going to pay for it? Obama’s answer is, of course,
the taxpayer. He wants to turn higher education into yet another
federal entitlement. Can’t afford college? Don’t worry; Washington
will subsidize it. This mentality is the reason why Obama projects
a $25 trillion federal debt in 10 years.
College confers advantages for many graduates, Santorum
should say, but this is crazy. If America’s families cannot afford
college, the answer is not to further socialize the cost. That does
not make college cheaper. It only encourages colleges to keep
raising tuition and fees because the beneficiaries will pay a
shrinking portion of the bill directly. Obama proposes for college
the same system that has helped make medical care so expensive — a
major shift to third-party payments.
The second is the naked political cronyism. Obama’s
college scheme is a double vote-buying plan. With one initiative he
buys the votes of middle class families who want to pay less for
higher education AND everyone who draws a paycheck from an American
college or university. This is the auto bailouts and the stimulus
bill all over again. It is a transfer of taxpayer cash to a crucial
Democratic Party voting bloc — college and university faculty and
staff.
The president is running the country into previously
unimagined depths of indebtedness with blatantly obvious
vote-buying schemes. His college initiative is the latest in a long
line of examples. It clearly fits the pattern and helps confirm
what so many Americans already believe or are coming around to
believe about this president — that he is a financial incompetent
who has nothing to offer but the channeling of taxpayer money to
political constituencies he personally favors.
Yet, instead of taking this opportunity to further expose
Obama as a charlatan, Santorum denigrates college.
