College Debt: When Student Loans Don’t Make Sense

There are many reasons to seek a college or university education: to become trained for a profession, to become intellectually well-rounded, to become a reflective voting citizen, to have an active social life on campus, to seek a spouse, and many other goals.

For none of these reasons is it wise to take on a massive amount of debt. Yet many students are doing precisely that in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

Education is often called an investment. Any investment is judged by the returns it yields, the “return on investment” (ROI).

The clear trend is that, over the last half-century, students have been making larger and larger investments, and much of those investments have been funded by larger and larger debt. Yet the growth rate for salaries is much lower than the growth rate for tuition, and for the loans needed to pay that tuition.

If education is conceptualized as professional training, then it fails to demonstrate a reasonable ROI. If the cost of earning a degree in a profession — engineering, law, medicine, etc. — has increased much more and much faster than the salaries of those professions, then it makes little sense to burden one’s self with debt to pay for such tuition.

It is even more illogical to assume debt if one is studying, not to be trained for a profession, but rather for any of the other reasons mentioned above.

Not only is accruing debt to pay for college unwise, it is also unnecessary: the price of university education is artificially high. A restructuring of America’s colleges and universities can maintain, or even increase, the quality of such education while reducing its price. The modern American university is marvelously inefficient in regard to its use of money, as Carol Roth writes:

However, in certain arenas, debt is being pushed and utilized in a way that is decoupled with achieving ROI. The biggest arena in which this is happening is college debt. In the US, college attendees, whether they had graduated or not, owed $1.6 trillion in college debt principal, aggregately, as of mid-2022.

Why haven’t the universities been reformed to offer better educations at lower prices? Because one powerful entity has a vested interest in keep the universities in their present condition: the government.

By maintaining the status quo in regard to the financing of college education, the government simultaneously achieves several objectives: First, because the government, and not private-sector lenders, does the majority of the lending, it thereby obtains a degree of control over those who are in debt. Second, because the universities rely on students paying large sums of borrowed money as tuition, the government has influence on postsecondary education.

In many cases, the size of an individual’s debt, and the degree on which universities rely on students obtaining large sums of borrowed money, justify the use of the phrase “debt trap” — alumni are held in effective servitude if they are still paying students loans several decades after graduation; colleges and universities understand that if student loan programs were to be reduced in size and scope, then they would be forced to become efficient at delivering quality education.

If these lending practices were used for home mortgages or car loans, the lenders would be prosecuted under the RICO statutes. But in this case, the lender is the federal government, as Carol Roth explains:

To put it bluntly, college and university degrees have become the biggest legal financial scam in the country, and the US government has morphed into the largest predatory lender in support of it.

To continue tricking students into taking out college loans, a barrage of propaganda is necessary to convince the public that a college education is the only path to personal or professional success. A side-effect of such propaganda is the neglect into which the non-collegiate skilled trades in the United States have fallen.

While the colleges indoctrinate America’s youth to believe that they must attend higher education at all costs, and especially at the higher costs which comfort the university’s administrators, the colleges themselves are being indoctrinated by the government to be or to do in such ways as will incline the government to maintain a given college’s status as eligible for student loans.

Each college or university — including the private ones, which are therefore less and less “private” — must comply with government protocols in order for its students to qualify for student loans.

If a college doesn’t comply, then its students will not be permitted to take out student loans, and the college won’t get the money. The students will move on to another college, one which complies with government ideas.

Neither the government nor the university has any motive to encourage students to reflect on whether the cost of the education is reasonable. Who will warn students away from taking on debts which will burden them for decades to come?

Carol Roth explains:

The profiteering college education structure is having a major impact on economic freedom and wealth creation for young individuals, as it does not enable a good financial return, or any return on investment in some cases, for too many of those buying education. Individuals aren’t contextualizing their choices about what they want to do and what they may need to do to fulfill their future objectives.

It is quite possible to restructure America’s colleges and universities so that students get educations which are as good, or better, than they are currently getting, but at a lower price — a price which would make massive college debt unnecessary. What is required is someone with the political will to encourage such restructuring.

School Effectiveness: Time and How It’s Used

One factor in the success of any endeavor or institution is the utilization of time. This is true of schools. Teachers have time; students have time. How does the institution empower, or prevent, teachers and students from using time well?

A teacher’s time can be divided, roughly, into three categories. First, the work done to prepare for the time spent with students; second, the time spent with students; third, the work done as a result of time spent with students.

In the first category are tasks like lesson design, resource creation, curation of existing resources, assessment design, etc.

In the second category, the teacher facilitates learning activities as the students do them, presents content, moderates student presentations, etc.

In the third category, the teacher evaluates student work, analyzing that work to determine which content the students have mastered and which content the students should further practice, etc.

Schools become inefficient and ineffective when teachers are required to spend time on anything which is not one of these three categories. The main culprit in this regard is meetings. Teachers held as captive audiences in faculty meetings are being deprived of the opportunity to do work which would help students.

Other non-productive uses of teacher time include the generation of various reports for administrators and participation in evaluation processes which are so badly designed that the resulting evaluations are meaningless.

Sadly, time spent on administrative busy work, faculty meetings, and poorly-conceived evaluation processes is not only non-productive, but rather counter-productive.

The result is not only lost chances for improved education, but actual degradation of the quality of education.

This is true, too, of many “professional development” — or “inservice training” or “continuing education” — events for teachers. These events are often as ineptly conceptualized as other administrative activities.

To improve the quality of education, schools must examine how teachers are required to spend their finite and valuable time. Any use of time which isn’t preparing for contact with students, which isn’t actual contact time with students, or which isn’t used after the contact time with students to process what happened during that time — any such use of time is actively harming the quality of education by forcing teachers to waste a limited and precious resource.

The Educational System’s Romance with Numbers: Why All the Statistics and Percentages?

In the decades-long and endless debate about grading and assessing, the conversation inevitably cycles around to the observation that evaluation systems are increasingly numerical. Current teachers, students, and parents are surprised to learn that only a few decades ago, a teacher’s gradebook might have far fewer numbers in it.

A century or two ago, a teacher’s gradebook might even have no numbers whatsoever: merely rows of letter grades.

Conversely, teachers and parents from a few decades ago would be surprised to see the massive spreadsheets which are contemporary grading programs, with grades calculated to two decimal places and weighted averaging of different categories.

How did this obsession with numbers arise?

There are multiple reasons.

One reason is a desire to be, or to at least seem, more scientific and objective. But here the appearance is stronger than the reality: while endless spreadsheets might give the perception of neutral analysis, critics have noted for decades that a great deal of subjectivity can lurk behind the outwardly sterile numbers.

A second reason is that teachers in recent decades have increasingly been placed in the position of having to defend grades. While this has always been the case to some extent, it is perhaps now more so than in the past. Spreadsheets and averages provide supporting evidence for the teacher who’s been asked to defend a grade.

An entire industry of gradebook software now exists to package the basic software engine of a spreadsheet into a larger framework of education-related terminology. A large number of online or downloadable grading programs are, at their cores, simply variations on a spreadsheet.

A great deal of time and effort is spent to create complex and sometimes confusing systems of grades, largely to generate a defensible grade in case a parent militantly objects.

Perhaps a more efficient use of the system’s work and energy would be to give a modicum of unassailability to issued grades. If grades — even if they contain the inevitable bit of subjectivity — were understood to be the educated judgment of an experienced subject matter specialist, then parents and students might not feel so free to question them.

The concepts of measurement and evaluation are used throughout civilization. Customers in a grocery store do not routinely question whether the twelve-ounce package of cheese is actually twelve ounces. Homeowners being billed for using 850 kilowatt-hours in a month don’t habitually voice doubts about the accuracy of the electric company’s measurements.

Why, then, do people feel free to question the grades which a teacher issues, causing teachers to waste countless man-hours in the generation of spreadsheets in grading software, so that such numbers are ready in reserve to defend grades?

A Poor Substitute for Education

Here’s what Alvin Toffler did not write: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

That sentence is widely posted as coming from the pen of Alvin Toffler, but he did not create it.

While those words might rightly be seen as a bit of wisdom for those who must interface constantly-changing hardware and software, it is not good advice for navigating social and political situations. While this insight can help a person adjust to the latest version of an operating system or to the newest update of an app, it is a poor way to view the world in general.

Instead, people are most successful in understanding the world when they seek and discover the unchanging principles which underlie and shape reality. However old human history might be — let’s say 10,000 years although the oldest known writing samples are only 5,500 years old — human nature hasn’t changed during that time. While people reshape technology and fashion at a dizzying pace, human nature remains reliably constant.

Likewise, the physical properties of the universe remain the same: the laws of physics and chemistry.

All which presents itself as new and different is usually a repackaging of something much older.

Education, to be truly useful, must give students skills and knowledge which will apply in the unanticipated and unpredictable circumstances of the future. Sometimes dismissed as ‘essentialism,’ an education which helps students to understand human nature, and therefore be able to understand all people, is a meaningful key in the midst of changing appearances but steady immutable underlying realities.

Human nature is a constant, a foundation under the diverse appearances of ethnicities, languages, nationalities, religions, and other demographic variables.

This is why the ancient utterances of Confucius and Aristotle largely agree with the common sense of today and tomorrow.

What did Alvin Toffler actually write? In his book Future Shock, he wrote: “Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.” In the context of changing computer systems and financial systems, Toffler is correct.

It is a misuse of his words to apply them to the essential structure of human society or to the timeless characteristics of human nature.

Charitable Reading: Why Recontextualization Is Worth the Effort

To explore texts from different eras, different places, different languages, or different cultures requires a sympathetic reading: assuming that what might at first appear nonsensical or bizarre has a reasonable interpretation, and assuming that the author was expressing, or attempting to express, a rational and plausible idea.

Recontextualization is work. It requires one to find analogues and parallels in one’s own era, own place, own language, or own culture.

The reader who devotes exertion to this task is rewarded.

Two texts which merit such exploration are books authored by Mortimer Smith. The first is titled And Madly Teach: A Layman Looks at Public School Education, published in 1949 by Henry Regnery Company as part of “The Humanist Library” series. The second is The Diminished Mind: A Study of Planned Mediocrity in Our Public Schools, which appeared in 1954 by the same publisher.

Smith’s prose is dated, and his examples are by now obscure bits of trivia in the history of education, but the generic principles which he puts forth endure. The insights gained from these books are valuable principles which continue to explain education in the United States.

Educational Administration: Subversive or Merely Incompetent?

People who do not regularly inhabit the workplaces of school administrators may be forgiven for imagining that they’ve been transported to the surface of Mars when they encounter the verbiage and decision-making processes of such administrators. Ordinary common sense and standard business practices count for little in the world of educational bureaucracy.

One such average human being who wound up as a visitor in the domain of educational administration was Mortimer Smith. He was surprised by what he found, and wrote a book to share his experiences with anyone else who wasn’t a full-time educational administration, i.e., with 99% of the human race.

Reviewing Smith’s book for the University of Chicago, Manning Pattillo writes:

As a member of a board of education in Connecticut, Mortimer Smith was given the responsibility of interviewing candidates for a public school superintendency. He reports that this experience was rather depressing because so few of the applicants seemed to have any real interest in education as such. Their concern, according to Smith, was almost entirely with the machinery of education, with the equipment and organization of schools, rather than with the purposes of education. And when the candidates did talk about educational philosophy, the author was impressed by the extraordinary uniformity of their ideas. Nearly all of them seemed to hold the same views and to express these views in precisely the same words. So Mortimer Smith began an investigation to discover what influences ces are operating on the public schools and why public educators are the kind of people they are. And Madly Teach: A Layman Looks at Public Education is the report of his finding.

In the book, Smith notes that one of several causes for the inept management of schools is found among the parents and voters themselves:

This, then, is an essay about education by a layman and an amateur, and it is not written in sackcloth and ashes; it is written in the conviction that laymen that is, parents and taxpayers ought to get over their lazy indifference to the public schools and study the theory and practice of public-school education; in short, to find out what it is we are paying for and to which we so glibly turn over our children.

Smith’s message would seem to be, then, that if educational offices are staffed with functionaries who have little interest in, or knowledge of, content and curriculum, then these offices are so occupied because of under-involvement on the part of voters and parents.

How Has the AAPS Fared during the Pandemic?

There have been three (so far) academic years in which learning has been compromised by pandemic-related measures: 2019/2020, 2020/2021, and 2021/2022. The amount of loss is difficult to quantify or measure.

In the Ann Arbor Public Schools, elements of loss include lost instructional time, lost exposure to physical bound books, lost opportunities for administration of accurate assessments, etc. These could be at least approximately quantified.

Intangible factors are as real, but less easy to measure: the loss of in-person and face-to-face instruction, for example.

Among the biggest losses are three which are related to the German program in the AAPS. Ann Arbor has long been known for its German classes, starting in sixth or seventh grade, and allowing students to achieve at high levels until the end of twelfth grade.

Successful work in a German class distinguishes a high school transcript when it is read by a university admissions officer. Spanish is ubiquitous and French is relatively common, but a high school graduate who’s done significant amounts of work in German stands out.

German has suffered the same learning losses as History, Mathematics, and other disciplines. The AAPS German program, however, has long had several academic opportunities above and beyond standard classroom learning activities; these special opportunities, sadly, were also especially vulnerable to the COVID-related measures.

The German-American Partnership Program (GAPP) has been operating in various forms since the late 1960s in Ann Arbor. The program consists roughly of this: during the first half of the calendar year, a delegation of high school students from Tübingen, accompanied by one or more of their teachers, is hosted in Ann Arbor by AAPS families. Tübigen is Ann Arbor's sister city. The visiting students from Germany attend AAPS high school classes, and get to know daily life in the area by living with their host families.

The second part of the program takes place between academic years, in the middle of the calendar year, when delegations of AAPS high school students, accompanied by their teachers, visit Tübingen, usually for three weeks. The students from Ann Arbor stay with families in Tübingen and attend classes in their schools.

This program has successfully enabled AAPS students to engage in large amounts of learning, starting with but going far beyond the German language. The experiences of culture, economics, diplomacy, international relations, and communication are immense.

After decades of enriching the lives of AAPS students, the GAPP was shut down. In 2020, the German delegation didn’t come to Ann Arbor, and students from Ann Arbor didn’t go to Tübingen. The same is true for 2021, and will be for 2022.

The earliest possible hope for a GAPP exchange would be 2023. The reader is already aware of the uncertainty surrounding any long-range planning, so a 2023 event is desired but far from definite.

The loss of at least three consecutive GAPP events constitutes a major loss, not only to the students of the AAPS, but also to the entire community, as the enriching effects of this program touched families and local businesses.

The omission of GAPP events is not, however, the only loss inflicted by pandemic-related actions.

In the spring of each year, often in March or April, the University of Michigan invites those high school students who are enrolled in German classes to attend the university’s annual German Day. Middle school students are also invited, and AAPS middle school students have participated with distinction in this event over the decades. This long-standing event allows high school students to meet and interact with the university’s professors, grad students, and undergrad students. The day is spent on the U of M’s campus, giving the high school students not only a chance to explore the German language in deeper and different ways, but also to get a feel for campus activity. Again, the learning includes but goes beyond the German language: the participants in German Day explore some life skills which they’ll need after high school.

Sadly, the U of M’s German Day was not held in person in 2021, and is scheduled likewise not to occur in 2022: Again, two years of significant loss for students. What will 2023 bring?

A third major learning loss occurred with the cancellation of the annual field trip to Chicago. Students in both middle school and high school spend a day in Chicago, starting with the city’s annual Christkindlmarkt sponsored by Chicago's mayor and city council. The day also includes the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Loyola Museum of Art. Interdisciplinary learning is combined with a chance to walk through the monumental architecture of Chicago.

The annual AAPS field trip to Chicago, for all middle school and high school students who are enrolled in a German class, was cancelled in 2020 and 2021. There is some hope for 2022, but again, it is far from certain.

Such, then, are the losses of intangible and non-traditional educational experiences: learning outside the classroom. The learning loss of measurable content and curriculum is clear. There are skills which students don’t have, and facts which they don’t know: fluent manipulation of a quadratic equation, or the ability to explain the significance of the Battle of Hastings.

Also significant, but less easy to measure, are the other losses, like the three identified above.