A nearby State University has advertised for a new President. One local businessman considered sending in this resume:
“I am applying for the position of President of this State University. My goal is this: to provide the finest possible education while burdening students and taxpayers with the lowest possible cost.
To that end, the first goal is to immediately discharge the horde of useless “deanlets”. This ravenous pack of assistant “administrators” has infiltrated this University much like termites moving into an house with no exterminators available. There are nearly as many “administrative assistants” as there are teachers. Each “administrator” costs taxpayers and students a hundred thousand a year, thereby contributing to the amount students must pay for tuition, thereby driving up their debt burden.
Secondly, I will stop the vast waste involved in putting up more useless buildings. The new student union costs almost as much as a year’s tuition for the entire student body and does nothing to drive up student costs and debt.
Third, students are required to waste countless hours on “required courses” that waste both time and money. Students are smart enough to decide what courses they need to take. The teachers of unnecessary, and even harmful, courses,are largely unemployable in the real world. They use “requirements” to provide themselves lush salaries, benefits, and pensions. The students are forced into debt to pay for these unnecessary costs. I will eliminate all “required” courses and let students be free to make their own decisions.
Fourth, I will discourage students from taking faddy, useless courses that provide no real skills or employment opportunities.
My goal is to provide a University education for less than $10,000. When required courses and increased availability of good courses eliminates scheduling problems, a far more meaningful degree can be granted more quickly for having completed a real course of study at a greatly lower costs. Students will not waste years of their lives, basically as slaves, working to pay off unnecessary personnel and construction costs.
I will always bear in mind a most unpleasant fact: Students who borrowed money in the 60s and 70s are now having their Social Security checks levied to repay their student loans.
Rather than focusing on having the University work as a “jobs program”, it is better to concentrate on providing the best possible education at lower cost. Computers allow us to have the finest professors of every subject available while simultaneously reducing expenditures. That translates into less debt for students and reduced burdens for taxpayers. Rather than building the University to a ridiculous size, paid for by forcing students to borrow money that cannot be discharged by bankruptcy, it is better to cut costs.
My salary? A mere 2% of the amount by which I reduce expenditures.
Political requirements? That the Governor of Pennsylvania recognize the vast waste, declare this University to be “an economic disaster zone” and provide the authority to override the many, many special interests whose demands are hurting students and impoverishing taxpayers.”
The reasons why I will not be hired as President of the local university are exactly why someone with real concerns about financial and educational realities, especially when they burden students with huge debt loads and often useless skills, should be put in a position to reduce the bloated cost of higher education and improve the quality of students’ lives.
