An accurate analysis of America’s higher education is summed up by Victor Hansen Davis: “Employment rates for college graduates are dismal. Aggregate student debt is staggering. But university administrative salaries are soaring. The campus climate of tolerance has utterly disappeared. Only the hard sciences and graduate schools have salvaged American universities’ international reputations.”
Question: Why is higher education a wasteland? Answer: State legislators.
What on earth is the connection? How can state legislators be driving up the cost of higher education while lowering its quality?
State Legislators get elected, and stay in office, by doing favors.
One of the biggest favors they can do is get some otherwise unemployable person a “job” in a state university system. A useless “job” as a typical “Assistant Dean” can be filled by anyone who is able smile and nod and has what appears to be a college degree.
State legislators have contributors with many, many unemployed relatives. To get the funds to get, or stay, in office, some legislators have to find “jobs” for a few unemployed relatives of big contributors. In the past, they could be put to work in toll booth jobs. EasyPass has eliminated most of those jobs. Since the future “Assistant Dean” has a useless degree in some useless subject, they feel they are “too good: for a sign-holding job on a construction site.
But, they can be an “Assistant Dean”, especially in some useless department in some unnecessary state institution of “higher learning”.
Such make-work jobs are driving up the cost, and reducing the quality, of higher education. Those involved have to spend their time in higher education participating in endless frauds. Then, Judgment.
Then, who gets it worse, the person who received the money, benefits, and huge pension for the useless job? The Legislator who made people poorer to provide the state’s higher education system with the funds to do the hiring and forced that particular waste of money to be put on the payroll? The big contributor who tied his “campaign donation” to a job for “Poor Janey. She’s having a hard time and would like a job in the University down the road.”?
