Is college still considered a "public good"?

Here's a piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education that recalls when that was a shared value in the US and questions whether that remains true today.

The author quotes Gary Rhoades, a University of Arizona professor and former president of the AAUP to the effect that "We have been systematically disinvesting in higher education, and that is precisely at the time when people who want higher education — lower-income kids, students of color, and immigrant kids — have increased."

Continues Chronicle writer Scott Carlson, "Meanwhile, for poor whites, the economic options have narrowed. Decades ago, manufacturing was a path to a decent livelihood, but those jobs disappeared, to be replaced by work that requires postsecondary training. This year white, non-college-educated voters registered their frustration in the presidential election. At a time when the cost of college drives a national conversation about its payoffs, policy decisions that have made college less accessible have hurt everyone, regardless of race."

Mr. Trump says he will bring back the manufacturing jobs of the past.  Perhaps he can at least to some extent.  But will these jobs be done by blue-collar workers or by robots?

In June 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported, "A new generation of robots is on the way—smarter, more mobile, more collaborative and more adaptable. They promise to bring major changes to the factory floor, as well as potentially to the global competitive landscape."

Last January another publication confirmed, "The trend for better, smarter robotics is spreading to new industries as well. The primary consumer and investor of robots in North America, the automotive industry, decreased robot ordering from 41 percent in 2005 to 21 percent in 2014. Yet, the food and consumer goods industry increased robot orders from 3 to 7 percent, and use of robotics in life sciences, pharmaceuticals, and biomedical jumped from 2 to 6 percent, asserts the Robotic Industries Association. These changes are only possible with more capable robotics."

What kind of economy is this leading us into?  Buy yourself a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano,
a 1950s Sci Fi classic that postulates an America in which a handful of highly educated elites run everything.   Meanwhile, most of the populations works on road crews, mainly to keep them busy.  Income distribution ensures a reasonable standard of living for all.  Was Vonnegut a prophet?  Perhaps so.

What the blue-collar folks who swept Trump into office may not get is that they just might be the vanguard of a growing underclass of permanently un- and under-employed that will only grow in the face of robotics and globalization.

Higher education can only do so much to keep this underclass as small as possible.  How much can be done will depend in large measure on how much government is prepared to invest in America's world-beating system of colleges and universities.  As Mr. Carlson and Dr. Rhoades point out, at the present time, the commonweal seems to have little taste for such an investment.

Public Service Loan Forgiveness: Does it have a future?

The program is poised to begin next fall, according to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

But nobody, not even the US Department of Education, knows what its prospects are.  Some say it defines "public service" too broadly and allows too much forgiveness.  The DOE thinks some 350,000 debtors could get a $6 billion windfall.

And then, of course, there is --- as with all else --- the Trump factor.  Will the Republican President and his Republican Congress condone the program or condemn it to the trash heap before it even gets underway?  Ain't nobody knows... probably not even the Donald at this point in time.

In the Sixties, National Defense loans were the student-borrower's drug of choice.  And the range of deferrals and forgivenesses was wide.  If you taught in the public schools you could get a chunk of forgiveness.  If you stayed in grad school or served in the military, the loans were deferred until you were in the civilian workforce.  (Or at least that's my recollection.)

One other thing that I can remember: in the Seventies, the interest rate on federal loan money was so low, one could borrow from Uncle Sam with the right hand, and reinvest the money in relatively safe but higher-returning financial vehicles with the left.

That fact points us back to critics' concerns that the program as written is way too vague and way too generous.

However, programs that entice young people into genuine public service could be win-win propositions: not only debt relief but also fulfilling life experiences for the new grads, and the addressing of needs that the profit motive has failed to address.

What the Trump presidency may mean for private higher education

Perhaps a whole lot:

For the for-profit sector, its evisceration by the Department of Education likely will abate.  Too late to save Corinthian Colleges and ITT, whose access to the the federal loan cornucopia being cut off killed them dead.

But Apollo Group will now prosper.  DOE has been sitting on its request to sell out to private investors, who have offered something like $8.00 a share.  If you can get Apollo stock for around $6, you should be all right if the sale dies anyway.  And you likely will make a tidy windfall if, as I expect, DOE will give the deal a nod next year.  

On the non-profit side, expect the current crusade against sexual assault to peter out.  The downward pressure of the accrediting agencies to get tougher is also likely to relax.  After all, Mr. Trump apparently enjoys sexually assaulting women himself, and Trump University hardly had any academic standards to speak of.

A Trump labor board will once again lower the bar on decertification of faculty unions.  The Obama board raised it by making  participation in financial decisions the sina qua non of the faculty-as-managers test ala the 1980 Yeshiva University case.  Since the financial arena is where faculty tend to have the least influence, this made withdrawal of recognition a whole lot tougher than it had been.  Additionally, a Scalia clone on the Supreme Court means Yeshiva will be reaffirmed if a case makes it to SCOTUS.

Lastly, it's unlikely that Mr. Obama's $12 billion promised investment in community colleges won't happen.  Whatever Trump, the consummate entrepreneur, does with higher education, it's likely to have a private flavor to it with opportunities for the likes of himself to cash in.

Getting our rivals to build our factories and create those promised jobs

Mr. Trump says he wants Mexico to pay for the Wall.  Good luck with that, Donald.

But it is possible to get our rivals to build factories.  For a couple of years now I have been following the progress of a plant built in Alabama by a Chinese company.

The realities of geography are at play here.  Whether it's Volkswagen or this Chinese outfit, products still need to be shipped across the vast oceans... or built on site where the market is.

And, if the company wishes to succeed, it also has to train the workers.  Sometimes it even has to deal with a labor union.

So, no, it isn't likely that the Mexicans are going to chip in for the Wall.  But the Chinese might prefer to build more plants in the US, especially if Trump follows through with his threats of tariffs.

By the way, if the President-elect thinks he can back pedal on bringing back the good jobs, let me warn him that people I'm hearing from in central-eastern Pennsylvania are true believers where this campaign promise is concerned.  He had better brace himself for the blow back is he can't show some serious progress on this front.

Trump made impossible promises.

And he is already backing away from them.  In his Sixty Minutes interview last night:

--- He said the border wall will only be a fence in some spots.

--- And his focus on illegal immigrants will be those with criminal records, a focus already in place in the Obama administration.

--- And the retreat from Obamacare will be gradual with no one losing health insurance immediately.

So much for repealing the Affordable Care Act on day one.

Trump will have a hard time matching with deeds the hopes he kindled in the hearts of his blue collar supporters, too.  No wonder number four on Michael Moore's Monday-morning (aka today) to-do list is this:

"4.  Everyone must stop saying they are stunned and shocked.  What you mean to say is that you were in a bubble and weren't paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair.  YEARS of being neglected by both parties, the anger and the need for revenge against the system only grew."

On Bill's Maher's weekend show, NYT reporter and best-selling author Thomas Friedman talked about the prospects for bringing back the manufacturing jobs that catapulted millions of blue collar workers and their families into the middle class.  He pointed out the obvious... that most of these jobs can never be brought back.

To understand why, let's go back to the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution was building steam.  A French version of Bill Maher, named Bastiat, proposed the following law in order to benefit the working man:

"Pass a law to this effect: 'No one shall henceforth be permitted to employ any beams or rafters but such as are produced and fashioned by blunt hatchets....' Whereas at present we give a hundred blows of the axe, we shall then give three hundred.  The work which we now do in an hour will then require three hours.  What a powerful encouragement will thus be given to labor!"

Bastiat's parody of protectionism goes hand in hand with Moore's (no, not Michael) law:

"Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years."

In other words, there is no holding back technology, not in our globalized world.  The Japanese were able to insulate themselves from modernity, until Admiral Perry forced them to open their doors to the West.  There are no new examples, except perhaps North Korea.  And who wants to emulate that regime? Hopefully not Mr. Trump.

And, so, even if he succeeds in creating a manufacturing Renaissance in the U.S., more jobs will go to robots than to people.  There's the rub.  And as Mr. Moore (yes, Michael) suggests, there is an opportunity here to rebuild the old Democrat coalition by luring those blue-collar Trumpsters back where they really belong.

My old man, a coal miner and bricklayer, used to say, "The Republicans are only out for themselves."  When the defectors discover this to be the case, the Democratic Party will have its chance.

Michael Moore's To-Do List

Morning After To-Do List:
1. Take over the Democratic Party and return it to the people. They have failed us miserably.

2. Fire all pundits, predictors, pollsters and anyone else in the media who had a narrative they wouldn't let go of and refused to listen to or acknowledge what was really going on. Those same bloviators will now tell us we must "heal the divide" and “come together.” They will pull more hooey like that out of their ass in the days to come. Turn them off.

3. Any Democratic member of Congress who didn’t wake up this morning ready to fight, resist and obstruct in the way Republicans did against President Obama every day for eight full years must step out of the way and let those of us who know the score lead the way in stopping the meanness and the madness that's about to begin.

4. Everyone must stop saying they are “stunned” and “shocked.” What you mean to say is that you were in a bubble and weren’t paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair. YEARS of being neglected by both parties, the anger and the need for revenge against the system only grew. Along came a TV star they liked whose plan was to destroy both parties and tell them all “You're fired!” Trump’s victory is no surprise. He was never a joke. Treating him as one only strengthened him. He is both a creature and a creation of the media and the media will never own that.

5. You must say this sentence to everyone you meet today: “HILLARY CLINTON WON THE POPULAR VOTE!” The MAJORITY of our fellow Americans preferred Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Period. Fact. If you woke up this morning thinking you live in an effed-up country, you don’t. The majority of your fellow Americans wanted Hillary, not Trump. The only reason he’s president is because of an arcane, insane 18th-century idea called the Electoral College. Until we change that, we’ll continue to have presidents we didn’t elect and didn’t want. You live in a country where a majority of its citizens have said they believe there’s climate change, they believe women should be paid the same as men, they want a debt-free college education, they don’t want us invading countries, they want a raise in the minimum wage and they want a single-payer true universal health care system. None of that has changed. We live in a country where the majority agree with the “liberal” position. We just lack the liberal leadership to make that happen (see: #1 above). Let's try to get this all done by noon today. -- Michael Moore 

Double underline this one:

What you mean to say is that you were in a bubble and weren’t paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair.

I don't know how we deal with this one.  But deal with it we MUST!

Entrepreneur Trump and the Challenge of the Blue-Collar Class

Yesterday, I referenced the great economist Joseph Schumpeter in characterizing Trump as the consummate entrepreneur.  Herewith, more from Schumpeter:

"We shall understand, therefore, that we do not observe in the entrepreneur's position the emergence of all those affective traits which are the glory of all kinds of social leadership.  Add to this the precariousness of the economic position both of the individual entrepreneur and of the group, and the fact that when his economic success raises him up socially he has no cultural tradition or attitude to fall back on, but moves about in society as an upstart, whose ways are readily laughed at, and we shall understand why this type has never been popular..."

A certain MrBlackChestnut posted a comment to yesterday's post in which he brilliantly analyzed the sources of Trump's success in the election and concluded with the prediction that Trump will be unable to deliver on his promises to the white blue-collar class.

Indeed, it will be darned difficult for Trump the Entrepreneur to make good on his vague but sweeping promises to the white blue-collar class that lifted him to power.  Just how hard is captured in an article published yesterday in the Chronicle of Higher Education under the headline "What a Michigan County's Switch to Trump Says About the Limits of Higher Education."

The article opens with the observation that "In July 2009, during the depths of the recession, President Obama traveled to Macomb County, Mich., to unveil a plan to invest $12 billion in the nation's community colleges."  It continued, "Mr. Obama called for preparation, in Michigan and elsewhere, for the 'new jobs of the 21st century.'"

"Time and again," promised Obama, "when we placed our bet for the future on education, we have prospered as a result...."

Meanwhile, that summer, automotive jobs in the state plummeted 30 percent.One observer, a Michigan State economics professor, is quoted to wit, "Michigan is where the middle class was invented."  Indeed, so it was with my Great Uncle Eddy, for whom the auto plants and the UAW where his tickets into a comfortable middle-class life.

I asked a colleague of mine yesterday if he knew of a solution.  He gave me the Obama panacea: training.  His comment: "In Chattanooga, Volkswagen built a plant and insisted that the workers it hired be properly trained."  Did he not hear himself?  "Volkswagen built a plant."  First the plant, then the training.  Training on faith that the jobs will follow seems naive, if not disingenuous.  Similarly, we have allowed college students to run up significant loan debts on the faith and hope that the good jobs will be out there waiting.  Instead, far too many of them have had to take from their less educated contemporaries the service jobs that are all that's available.

There is another aspect of jobs in heavy industry that almost never gets mentioned.  This is the pride and self-esteem that such blue-collar workers enjoyed.  My American Studies Ph.D. Dissertation bears a title that announces that it's primarily a study of ethnic groups across the centuries in my home county of Carbon in central-eastern Pennsylvania.  But the thread running through all the chapters is the coal industry.  The dissertation takes Carbon County's story up to 1954, when the anthracite mines and the railroads that serviced them began to fail fatally.

I interviewed a number of old miners, including my own father, who died of miner's asthma.  I realize that my sample was small and based on convenience.  However, I believe these old timers where representative of their group.  And what I heard uniformly were stories that expressed great pride and self-satisfaction from the hard and dangerous work they did.  I discovered a kind of awe of the mines and the underworld they had built and inhabited.   JRR Tolkien, who drew his characters from the world he witnessed around him, gave us the dwarfs, who mined the great mountains of Middle Earth and took enormous pride in their achievements.  Weren't they based on the English coal miners of Tolkien's day?  I believe they were.

Trump says his three priorities are health care, immigration and jobs.  I have no comments on healthcare at this time.  But jobs and immigration are inexorably interwoven.  The blue-collar workers who carried him over the top on Tuesday night have observed for decades a balance of trade that has plummeted them from the middle class: immigrants imported, industrial jobs exported.

Can this be reversed?  It won't be easy.  But opportunities exist.  I'll write about some of them in future posts.

Donald Trump: The Consummate Entrepreneur

Economist Joseph Schumpeter described the entrepreneur this way:

"An innovation implies an innovator--- someone who is responsible for combining the factors of production in new ways.  This is obviously not a 'normal' businessman, following established routines.  The person who introduces change into economic life is a representative of another class--- or more accurately, another group, because innovators do not necessarily come from any social class.   Schumpeter took an old word from the economic lexicon and used it to describe those revolutionists of production.  He called them entrepreneurs.  Entrepreneurs and their innovating activity were thus the source of profit in the capitalist system." --- Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers (sixth edition) at 296.

 Harvard's Clay Christiansen has added to this the notion of disruption.  In higher education, for example, disruption --- according to Christiansen --- has been caused primarily by the technology enabling online learning.  This has lowered the entry level cost of getting into the business of higher education dramatically.  No more the need for sprawling campuses, expensive tenured faculties and all the supporting infrastructure of the traditional college.

Perhaps significantly, Trump was among those entrepreneurs who recognized this... thus Trump University.  And, as Schumpeter also pointed out, once the entrepreneur has launched the new enterprise, he quickly loses interest... thus the lawsuits that have emerged against Trump University, not least because the plaintiffs didn't get any direct counsel from its founder as promised.

In the 2016 election the entrepreneurial Trump recognized an unserved market.  And he brought Christiansen's principles of disruption to bear on that market.  He realized that the new technologies, that have so disrupted traditional higher education, could also be used to disrupt the traditional political parties.  Thus, no need for him to kowtow to the GOP establishment.

What we have witnessed is the first successful application of disruption theory in a national election by a consummate entrepreneur.

This same entrepreneur lost interest in Trump University and it came to ruin.  Will he lose interest in his new role, once it falls into a routine?  Or perhaps there is no such thing as routine in the presidency of the United States and he will remain engaged for the next four years.

Frankly, I'm not sure which would be worse.

What should we do about the town v. gown gap?

That's what it's traditionally termed: Town v. Gown.  It's lampooned in "Animal House."  As the Delta's destroy the parade, and much of Main Street with it, we see the mayor strangling Dean Wormer.  It's what many "townies" have always wanted to do to us administrators and professors, as well as our students.

I attended college in the second half of the Sixties, something like five years after the time in which the iconic movie was made.  And I recall an evening when a group of "townies" showed up at our fraternity --- the animal house of Franklin & Marshall College.  The local lads picked the wrong frat house to threaten.  Most of my brothers were dedicated jocks and weight lifters.  When the leader of the town group confronted our half-dozen biggest brothers and said, "You college guys have it up here but we have it down here," pointing first to his head and then to his body... somebody doused him from a window with a bucket of water.  It dampened his ardor for a fist fight.

Personally, I felt sorry for him and his friends.

But back in those days, the townies could look for well-paid manufacturing jobs at plants like Hamilton Watch, which had enormous war contracts on top of its brisk watch and clock business.  I myself was a night watchman in a local tool-and-dye plant for a semester or two.  Hourly manufacturing jobs were tickets to high wages, good benefits, union security, and a pension.

The gap between town and gown yawned wider and wider as this election day approached.  Or maybe it just became more visible than ever before.  White voters without college degrees overwhelmingly support Trump.  They have abandoned the Democratic party.  White college grads are more split, but the majority favor Clinton.

Those without college degrees no longer can count on making a good living that leads eventually to a comfortable retirement.  And I have to agree with Trump that both parties... and both the political establishment and Wall Street... have abandoned them.  Their grievances are real.

Regardless of who wins today, we in higher education should be asking:

Do we owe anything to the "townies" that the information age has left behind in their rust-belt and rural pockets?

And if you agree with me that we do, what should we be thinking about doing, when we wake up on November 9th?

Tomorrow's Election, the Threat of Fascism, and the Great Disruption

Fifteen years ago, only a few months prior to 9/11, I argued in an article in Change Magazine http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ635340  that with the precipitous decline of organized labor and the shift from genuine news reporting on TV to info-tainment, it fell to higher education to champion "Truth, Justice and the American Way."

A decade and a half, and a War on Terror, later... the Internet has changed the paradigm yet again.  The World Wide Web has eliminated the filters through which the liars and the crazies had to pass in their efforts to get their lies and their mad ravings through to the ignorant and the gullible.  Now they come to the American people directly and unedited.

Professor Clay Christiansen has made a fat living as the prophet of disruption theory.  He has pronounced on-line learning to be the technology that will disrupt higher education as we know it.  And, while many forces are at work undermining higher education as we have known it since WWII, the Internet is indeed the most disruptive force.

This has been clear to me for some time.  What was not clear to me until this election is how disruptive of democratic discourse the Internet is.  We foolishly thought it was a facilitator of free speech: every man, woman and child her/his own free press.  Instead, in the cacophony of fools and ignorami and charlatans and nuts, a demi-god --- in Lenin's words, a "useful fool" --- has been able to rise and reduce political campaign rhetoric to vulgar, insulting, offensive and insensitive gibberish.  And he has been able to reach the gates of the White House in the process.

If those of us disinclined toward fascism vote in large enough numbers tomorrow, we may drive the barbarians from the White House gates... this time.  But the fascist urge is flowing in the blood of tens of millions of our fellow Americans.  Their blood will grow hotter, not cooler, in defeat.  We --- and I mean especially we in higher education --- must gird ourselves to counter that challenge to our liberties and our Democracy.

But first we have to win.  Get out there and vote!

Is the REAL Problem Solvable?

In the end it's always about economics.

Hitler came to power by persuading the Germans that an international Jewish-banker conspiracy had robbed them of victory and prosperity.

NPR ran an interesting segment on Brexit and Trump this morning as I drove to work.  Many of the proponents of Brexit and Trump's supporters are people in pockets of England and the US that suffer from endemic depression.  The NPR piece focused on southwestern Pennsylvania and southeastern England.   In the former, the demise of steel and the decline of coal are the culprits.  In the latter, the demise of the tourist industry and an influx of immigrants are the villains.

NPR also did a piece on the Philippines, where hundreds of thousands have been arrested as small-time drug dealers.  So, it seems, a tenth of the country is selling drugs and the other 90 percent are high.  Why?  Poverty... no jobs... no opportunities.

So what's up?  Seems to me it's fundamental... simple... and intractable.

Too many people... too few jobs.

And as the world population continues to grow, scientists and engineers are working furiously to create more and better robots.  This contributes mightily to the widening gap between rich and poor.

The southern hemisphere pushes  relentlessly up against the northern hemisphere.  Is unrestricted immigration the answer?  No... it will only spread the southern hemisphere's troubles to the north, while failing to solve them in the south.   I saw this happen in my birthplace of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, which became briefly famous in legal circles in the 1990s when it passed an ordinance to limit immigration, which became a cause celeb in the federal courts for a time.

There may be no solutions to humanity's fundamental problems.  Or the solutions may be so draconian as to be unpalatable to people with any humanity in them.

One thing for sure:  neither Brexit nor Trump is the solution.

Horseshoe Nails, Pupperoni, and the End of Civilization: a Fantasy (I hope)

“For the want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For the want of a shoe the horse was lost,
For the want of a horse the rider was lost,
For the want of a rider the battle was lost,
For the want of a battle the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe-nail.”

--- Benjamin Franklin

So a friend of mine has a dog.  And she had a pizza box with a couple of slices left over.  She put the box on top of her gas stove.  The dog began jumping and smacking at the pizza box with its paws.  In the process the dog turned on the stove.  Goodbye kitchen.

A possible scenario:

Because Weiner was a pervert...

and because his wife worked for the Clinton campaign...

and because Weiner's laptop revealed more Clinton emails...

and because the director of the FBI chose to write a cryptic letter to Congress about them...

the failing Trump campaign was revitalized...

and an infantile madman became President of the United States...

and in his first term in office pushed the nuclear button...

and human civilization ended in the second decade of the 21st century.

The moral of each of these stories:  it sometimes doesn't take much to create a disaster.