It is a familiar story writ small. Man meets loan. Loan eats man.
A Touro law graduate who financed his education with a $69,000 loan in 1996 says he’ll owe more than $1.5 million by the time he retires in 23 years …
Koch tells News Channel 12 the debt burden harmed his former marriage and affected his mental outlook. “When I’m 69 years old, I will have carried student loan debt for 50 years,” Koch tells the reporter.
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Whenever a person’s interest payments exceed his available income trouble may arise. Question: why will the California, Greece, the EU or the Federal Government escape his fate? What does it mean to be “too big to fail”? Who bails out the lender of last resort?
Reading Walter Russell Mead suggests that the higher education bubble is part of the collapse of an even bigger bubble, what Mead calls the Blue Model. Basically the Blue Model’s uncompetitiveness destroyed the jobs which young people could aspire to. In it’s place it created the full-time job of school attendance which was not obviously related, and in fact consciously detached from the economy. It aimed to produce a species of graduate who almost stood above the need to work.
The decline of the blue social model is a subject I’ve been thinking about for the last thirty years. My first book, Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition was written in the mid 1980s from the standpoint of someone who still believed that the blue model was synonymous with progress and civilization. In that book, I looked at how globalization was dismantling the social compact not just in the United States but throughout the developed world, and argued that the decline of consensual social market capitalism wasn’t just a challenge to the American domestic system. It was a challenge to America’s global leadership — the model and ideal we proposed for life under social capitalism was falling apart. …
I can still remember the feeling I had back in the early eighties when I first began to see how low wage manufacturing in the developing world plus the globalization of finance were going to rip up the social fabric I identified with progress and stability. I see many people, some on the left, some in the center, going through that kind of moment today. My first reaction, and that of many people today, was to cling tighter to the blue model as I sensed its fragility and vulnerability. But over time I’ve come to see this breakdown and the transition to something new as the next stage in the story of social and human progress, rather that as some kind of horrible return to savagery …
As the educational system grew more complex and elaborate (without necessarily teaching some of the kids trapped in it very much) and as natural opportunities for appropriate work diminished, more and more young people spent the first twenty plus years of their lives with little or no serious exposure to the world of work … The separation of learning and work was originally seen as a way to promote learning: by allowing young people to concentrate full time on learning without the “distraction” of work, they could do a better job in school …
That so many American kids spend so many years in school without learning basic, elementary school-level reading and math skills — to say nothing of the other things that in theory 12 years of formal education should teach — is a devastating critique of the way we organize this part of our lives. The sheer amount of time wasted is staggering – to say nothing of the money, effort or lost potential. People often speak of the need to revive vocational and industrial education as a way of reaching students for whom the traditional academic classroom holds little appeal; more basically, education needs to be integrated with the priorities and purposes of life as these young people experience it.
Apart from collapse of the Blue Model, which pulled the jobs rug out from under the educational system was the emergence of education as a good unto itself. Being “education” became synonymous with becoming middle-class, although the linkage between them, namely employment, was neatly excised from the picture.
It was as if an entire generation had forgotten what things were for. The means became ends in themselves until finally the ends themselves were forgotten.
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Recently, 77.4 percent of Touro Law Center graduates passed the New York bar exam, about 11 percentage points lower than the state average. This metric placed Touro in last place out of 15 ABA accredited New York-area law schools. This ranking should concern prospective students.
Conclusion
The tame location, low ranking, high price and below-average employment prospects do not make a strong case for Touro Law. Regardless, the law school’s recent move puts it close to the halls of power, as it now shares a campus with a state and a federal courthouse. The opportunities associated with being so close to these courthouses are not yet clear, but may bode well for future graduates. The school’s proximity to New York City is also a plus but, on the whole, Touro Law seems to offer a lot of debt and not a lot of opportunity.
I wonder what his LSAT was.
As this fellow shows, the credential doesn’t get you over the bar.
He should look at becoming a paralegal with specialization: Chapter 7, 9, 11, 13 of the Bankruptcy Code.
( Chapter 9 should be a booming field, in particular. )
Paralegals have to be at least as well paying as latex rolling.
—-
As for branding…
Touro Law is too close to Tyro Law. Think of the nasty quips.
Who bails out the lender of last resort?
The printing press. Of course.
Willing to bet big money that each time he failed the Bar Exam he failed the Multi-State multiple choice portion. That is a flawed test. (1) Each question leaves out a crucial fact, if you assume the correct fact you get the answer right, if you assume a different un-presented fact you are lead to the wrong answer. (2) They claim to only test 7 (IIRC) subjects but there is always at least 2 questions on the test that are from a different section of law.
.
And Yes, I passed it the 1st time.
Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo
You’re living in your own Private Idaho
Living in your own Private Idaho
Underground like a wild potato.
Don’t go on the patio.
Beware of the pool,
Blue bottomless pool.
…
You’re out of control, the rivers that roll,
You fell into the water and down to Idaho.
Get out of that state,
Get out of that state you’re in.
You better beware.
You’re living in your own Private Idaho.
You’re living in your own Private Idaho.
Keep off the patio,
Keep off the path.
The lawn may be green
But you better not be seen
Walkin’ through the gate that leads you down,
Down to a pool fraught with danger
Is a pool full of strangers.
You’re living in your own Private Idaho,
Where do I go from here to a better state than this.
Well, don’t be blind to the big surprise
Swimming round and round like the deadly hand
Of a radium clock, at the bottom, of the pool.
I-I-I-daho
I-I-I-daho
Woah oh oh woah oh oh woah oh oh
Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah
Get out of that state
Get out of that state
You’re living in your own Private Idaho,
Livin in your own Private Idaho.
/B-52s
When I graduated from high school in 1982 my parents did not have the money to send me to college. I went to work at a leading yearbook publishing company and bought me a set of Britannica’s encyclopedias and the set of the Great Books. I think I made a wise decision. I’ve read all of the books (can’t say I’ve always understood especially the one pertaining to math) and continue to read my favorites over and over. Not to gross anyone out, but I keep the Plutarch book (my very favorite book, ever)in the rest room so that I can keep myself occupied.
BTW, I still work for the same yearbook company.
I think the only thing you can learn in school is the habit of learning. As practice, you should be unleashed on books, math problems, carpentry, etc to acquire the basic functional skills.
School should make you an autodidact drawn on by presented problems. Those problems should at some stage, come from life. How to build a house. How to measure a piece of land. How to map an area. Etc.
You then pull through whatever knowledge you need to solve the problem. What Mead seems to say is that we’ve forgotten the ultimate purpose of education; which is to teach people how to solve their problems.
Instead what you have is content; and the delivery of same. Since much of this content has value only within the context of academia the divorce from reality is complete.
I think the generalized formulation of the Blue Model problem is what happens when a set of institutions become self-referential? When rising in them is the value in itself.
Early in the Obama campaign he said, “we are the people we’ve been waiting for.” My first question is why? Haven’t you met yourselves before? But I misunderstood. The real interpretation of that statement should have been: “now we get to write the checks”. Ah yes, but you’ve forgotten to get the job.
And high school guidance counsellors STILL tell every kid that they HAVE
to have a college degree in order to function as an adult and get a “good”
job. I have acquaintances from the 70′s who vowed back then to be “lifetime
college kids” who continue, even now, to attend college. (Most of them either
live with Mom and Dad or on their parents’ life insurance proceeds). Parasites,
every one! Most of them are just a waste of the “life force”.
There are four levels of education.
Primary, for basic literacy numeracy and evaluation.
Secondary, that teaches the skills and values needed to be an employable citizen.
Tertiary, that prepares people for career tracks, vocational or middle management.
Graduate, that trains to professional standards in the academy, learned professions, or higher management.
How to get higher education paid for? The traditional methods worked best.
1. If you want the government to pay go talk to your friendly local Recruiter. Not only will you get access to money and impress employers but the kindly sergeant will even help you learn time management.
2. Ask Mom Dad or Uncle Scrooge to help. You will learn valuable lessons in humility as they review your expenses.
3. Go to a bank. Given your spotty credit record they should expect a co-signer, see #2.
4. Work and save. Learn the magic of compound interest from the positive side.
Any law policy or regulation that weakens the above needs to be changed, probably back to what worked. For example why are banks making loans, education or mortgage, to those with no credit and no co-signer?
The great-grandchildren of the generation that survived the Depression and WW-II, making “Good Old American Know-How” a watchword, now appear more feckless than aristocrats who would starve to death if there was no one to open the refrigerator door for them. We need to go over an index of where the Left gets its money from and where their donors/foot soldiers are employed and structure the law and the budgets to systematically defund them. We need to cast them off like a snake’s old skin.
Blue model reminds me of that once described here: “Pushing papers around in tall buildings.”
I would love to somehow extrapolate a fair system according to how we divide time each day- something like Maslow’s Hierarchy. Everyone has base animal functions that some people can barely maintain. (Why should a peasant ever cook for another?) Then there are psychological needs just slightly above that…. Noble and decadent life occurs at the top.
Rightists expect only the foundation guaranteed: namely, life and freedom. Leftists aim for the peak – an inverted pyramid that ultimately topples, leaving a new corner at the top, but overall spread out in rubble….
Now consider a system of plastic, interlocking blocks… Oh never mind.
Wretchard #7:
When they hand you your pilot’s license they often say, “Consider this license to learn.” If not, they say “Here’s some things you should work on on your own….,” which means the same thing.
When flying airplanes you either keep learning or something bad happens to you. Nonetheless, the Federal Government came up with the Biannual Flight Review, which requires you to go flying with an instructor periodically. And also to sit down and discuss the Federal Aviation Regulations, which is designed to impress on you how important the FAA is.
The FAA requirements are absurd because basically they are checking to make sure you have not killed yourself in a plane crash in the last couple of years. Training that gets tested as part of life does not need government reinforcement.
If they are concerned about us forgetting stuff and losing skills they should call us all in every couple of years to conjugate some verbs in Latin, diagram a few sentences, and work out some chemical formulas. Of course if they did that we would have to demonstrate what we have learned about firearms during the time when we forgot all of that other more important stuff.
Ah, I remember wood shop and metal shop in Middle School. Wish I coulda taken auto shop in High School but no could do with the college prep schedule. My physics teacher said we could figure out everything they were doing, and that is true to some extent. But nothing beats hands on experience.
Baobo @ 10 said:
About 2/3rds of those where I work are of pushing papers types but they push bits. Spend their days picking pepper out of fly sh-t and call it Mgmt or Quality. Also they spend most of their time with their gaze into the LED screen of a laptop. Useless gits, the lot.
“Paralegals have to be at least as well paying as latex rolling.”
blert@2 – You miss the point. He can’t make more money because if he does then he has to start paying the loan again. Since he cannot make enough to pay the loan or even pay it down and cannot free himself from the loan in bankruptcy he is literally locked into debt servitude wit the federal government as his master.
One of the purposes of having bankruptcy laws is to force a degree of responsibility onto the lender but with our federal student loans that doesn’t really happen. The school essentially originates the loan and pockets the tuition. The bank is guaranteed their principal and interest by the feds and the feds play the role of pimp – first all sweetness and light here to help you fulfill your bright future and the next threatening you with garnishments or imprisionment.
The government distorts to long term detriment of the consumer and market it gets involved in by substituting the coercive power of the state for the freely arrived at decisions of the players in the market. In the case of education it has created a real monster that is just now rising to the attention of the public.
STOP THE PRESSES!!!
BP, Plaintiffs Reach a Settlement http://tinyurl.com/89a4x3x
ARE YOU WATCHING POOTIE-POO? EVEN OBAMA IS NOT TOO BIG TO FAIL!
OKAY MY RUSSIANS FRIEND, LET’S COMPLETE THE SURPRISES BY EJECTING PUTIN SUNDAY MARCH 4, 2012!
BTW – This is also going to be a bottom-feeding, bloodsucking, ambulance chaser full unemployment act. What pitiful payment will the plaintiffs’ bar get for their 72 million documents?? Not enough to fund them “in the manner to which they have become accustomed”!
HA-HA-HA! http://tinyurl.com/6dachu8
Another memory. I could work during the summer and make enough to pay for a semester of college. Most of my friends had better jobs and they could pay for both semesters with a summer of work. At the time I was going to school someone came out with a study comparing the payoff of getting a degree versus going to work. As I recall, going to work instead of school was supposed to pay off more in the long run. However, from what I have observed, the degree paid off far better. That was then.
The problem our society has had is that the drug addicts of the Sixties never cured their addictive personalities, they just went into “journalism” and politics.
Listen, but don’t argue with them, when they describe themselves as “news junkies”. And junkies who expect to get paid are whores. So to understand them think of them as “news whores” who will chase the hottest, juciest story they can find. An Obama impeachment? Nirvana!
Machias- I’m guessing his impeachment was planned long ago, and he is completely aware of it. 42 months, says one bible. That’s this summer.
#17.
Ah yes, One of my favorite reads was a grim book called “Tokyo Vice.” There is a section in which it is explained to the author how reporting the crime beat works. As I recall it went something like this, “It is a competitive business and we need to scoop the competition, to do that we need policemen to talk to us. To get them to talk to use we have to become their friends. You have to find out the names of their wives and kids, you have to go drinking with them, you have to send appropriate gifts when one of their kids has a birthday, basically we are Geisha’s to the police.”
blast
Tertiary, that prepares people for career tracks, vocational or middle management.
Not in my book, I’m afraid.
By the time you get to secondary, you already have in place the tool set for that, as so many brilliant careers have demonstrated.
For me, tertiary is where the simple assumptions that you learned in secondary are shown to be special cases of a bigger but more mystifying world. EG, Euclidean space is a subset of Minkowski space-time.
Abandon certainty all ye who exit tertiary.
And if you don’t, you have missed the point.
But of course, you must still believe.
ADE
Which is why I think that most tertiary students are wasting their time. And my money.
Even doctors, engineers, computer professionals. They already know (or should know) enough by the time they leave secondary level. For all those professionals, they just have to read the manual.
For the writers of the new manual, there is tertiary. And this is only to save time. They would have re-written the manual anyway – nothing was going to stop them (Gates, Jobs, Einstein).
As for the XXX-Studies graduates, they are wasting their time, but they knew that before they took out the loan, so why should I care? I’ve wasted my money on other things, but I’m not whinging.
ADE
The previous generation purposefully took out loans with the expectation of purposefully filing bankruptcy after they graduated. The “solution” was not to disencentivise that — the colleges were now now addicted to all those new dollars — so they took student loans out of bankruptcy allowances, postponing the inevitable with tales of good jobs and high wages and the socially “better” classes by getting a degree. As the feds grant more “loans” to parents, the cost goes up accordingly. The “system” has created the ultimate redistribution model, but of future income. Once student loans were not allowed in bankruptcies, the goose was cooked. If they left it alone, kids would have had to go to schools that were more affordable, especially under graduate, and save the loans for grad school.
I had 3 jobs going to college plus summer multiples. In grad school I had 3 jobs plus the GI bill. I graduated from college with $900 in my pocket and none (but without debt) from grad school. In High School we had wood, metal, and auto shop. My oldest got wood and “home econ” in 6th grade, but all shops closed down after that and my other two sons received none. They claim it was budgetary. Partly. Teachers wanted more in pay, pension and health care. But the real reason is the slow change of high school to the myth of being college prep. Run by college grads, who believe the world is made of college grads (many being surprised to find out less than 30% who go to college graduate, and only around 30% of our population has a college degree. Too many have the public school mentality reflecting the joke told by a candidate for VP some years ago as to why he was running for VP: no heavy lifting. Kids don’t want to do heavy work. When I tell kids I dug ditches, worked jack hammers, climbed 40 foot vertical dry dock ladders, cleaned out barns, etc., went door to door to get snow shoveling jobs, and delivered papers, they are shocked. Whenever I visit high labor intensive companies, with mostly south of the border laborers (what we laugingly call “documented illegals,” laughingly because we know that if they are deported the state’e economy collapses), I ask how many white or black students apply for summer jobs. So far, the answer remains consistent: none. Blue Model indeed
When we moved from an inner city school with no computer lab to a suburban school with a great lab, my kids were shocked to learn the kids were all great typists (bragged the principal). My oldest asked for a learn-to-type CD. Over the summer he learned it. When he showed up he found he was one of the few able to type. Nonetheless, as he was set up, the younger two wanted to be set up also. So the following year I set all three up with dedicated phone lines for their own dial ups (this was before cable and wireless), at 7, 10 and 12 (considered radical in 1993). I still work with young people. One of the things the now skilled young computer users have found out is how many older workers have been slow in learning how to ride the horse of the 21st century. Yes they now learn in the schools, but learning computers is still Blue Model if work is not attached. And regardless of red or blue state, most have gotten rid of shop, as what college grad is going to do wood/metal/auto/home eck “stuff?”
When I taught at a community college when in grad school, I as shocked at how little they knew. I announced in the 3rd week that the next week I was giving a test: multiple choice, fill in the blanks, and half page essay questions. And, to help them out, I told them that I would give them questions in advance. Even better, I told them that I put all the answer down as well. I then announced that 1/3 would flunk, 1/3 would not do well. They protested saying they received As and Bs. And they did. The following week they took the test. And sure enough, 1/3 flunked, 1/3 did poorly, and 1/3 were middling with only a couple of high grades.
But before I passed out the results I explained how the system worked: no one would get less than a “C”. Period, that the community college inherited them. As pass through from the public schools, the school had no choice unless the school was to be emptied and teachers laid off and jobs lost. It was therefore incumbent on them to do what was necessary to catch up, that the school had catch up classes, etc. They tried to get me fired. When the dean asked me if I told them no one would get less than a “C” and I said yes, he said “then what’s their problem.” End of problem. And that was not the only time (it happened in 4 yr schools as well).
So #9 blast from the past, has it right: work out a multiple strategy:
1. If you want the government to pay go talk to your friendly local Recruiter. Not only will you get access to money and impress employers but the kindly sergeant will even help you learn time management.
2. Ask Mom Dad or Uncle Scrooge to help. You will learn valuable lessons in humility as they review your expenses.
3. Go to a bank. Given your spotty credit record they should expect a co-signer, see #2.
4. Work and save. Learn the magic of compound interest from the positive side.
And if there are limbs on the family tree, work it. A friend of mine got all of his relatives to contribute to his medical school costs in return for no above insurance or Medicare allotment charges.
As a former draftee from the Vietnam era, I have also encouraged to enlist. So far, they’ve all come back. And changed for the best, having learned the joy of routine, being an expert, and the discipline to achieve both. Obviously, apply for every ethnic/racial/regional/legacy/special interest, etc scholarships available for just being an ethnic/racial/regional/legacy/special interest candidate. There are CDs available now with all the different ones.
Finally, do the first two years at a community college and live at home, making arrangements with parents that the home is now an apartment complex, with no rules other than noise and over night understandings. They can get all of the “college experience” the last two at a four year college. In other words, they’ll get it, and they’ll still be able to live knowing as all graduates know, that they went to the best school to obtain a college education and experience. As I tell eager high school students wanting to know where they will get the best experience, I say, as with everyone else, the one you go to.
Any lawyer who can’t pay off a 69,000 dollar loan standing on his head deserves to be in debt til he’s 69.
A small point about this big subject — why does Mead call it the “Blue Model”? Everyone knows the anthem of the communists was the Red Flag. The flags of the Soviet Union and Red China were, well, red.
The fellow travellers in the US media in the last decade did not want to be so obvious as to use red for the color of the Democrats when they showed their electoral maps, so they reversed polarity and made the Democrats blue (probably while splitting their sides laughing at their ability to control the language for non-Democrats).
To our great disgrace, it worked. Blue is the new Red. But the “Blue” model is still Red.
#7 “I think the only thing you can learn in school is the habit of learning. As practice, you should be unleashed on books, math problems, carpentry, etc to acquire the basic functional skills.
School should make you an autodidact drawn on by presented problems. Those problems should at some stage, come from life. How to build a house. How to measure a piece of land. How to map an area. Etc.
You then pull through whatever knowledge you need to solve the problem. What Mead seems to say is that we’ve forgotten the ultimate purpose of education; which is to teach people how to solve their problems.”
Y, when I went to school (ended almost 40 yrs ago now) the idea was to teach students HOW to think. Now the emphasis appears to be on teaching them WHAT to think. When you listen to people these days, whether it be in person or in the media, there are so many I can honestly envision being inside a big paper bag and not being able to get out. There is no reasoning ability, no idea of how to go from point A to point B without directions (or even WITH) – if no one taught them how to do something they have no clue on how to approach it. There is no concept of ramifications or consequences to actions, no self-awareness – the housing bubble is a perfect example. So many people apparently just assumed that since the salesman wrote them a mortgage on the $750K house on their $50K a year salary, things were copacetic. No questioning of the numbers, no “am I sure I can make this work?”, no looking into the possible futures, no nothing. It’s pathetic.
I recall going to Technical school on the G. I. bill back in the early 80′s The requirement was to spend one month in what was called Consumer and career Mathematics. The reason was because the majority of students right out of High School could not do math, balance a budget, checkbook or even knew how to plan or start a budget. How to pay rent etc.
Kids were coming into Electronics classes and did not know how to do the math.
The teachers simply laid out the curriculum and expected the students to do the work and even grade themselves, coached to give yourself a B in order to keep the VA or what ever money coming in. At the end of the course you paid the school $5.00 for a diploma and then went out into the world were the world told you your course, study and what you learned were useless.
Being told by employers that everything you learned in school actually hurt your chances of work because the employers desired untrained people that the employers could train their way.
A WTF moment for me Fer Shure.
But he’s not a lawyer. He busted the bar exam three times.
pj @ 22: The previous generation purposefully took out loans with the expectation of purposefully filing bankruptcy after they graduated.
This is where I start feeling older than dirt. When I started school, a year at an elite university cost about $2,000, which was barely a tenth of an average middle-class (generally one-salary) household income. I got through school on a mix of a few partial scholarships, modestly paid part-time work, and loans froms school and state. The total loans were about 1/3 of my first year’s salary. And hey, I *had* a first-year salary, and adjusted for inflation it’s probably 3X what a new STEM graduate today gets. I kept driving my old car for five years, which was enough time to pay off these low-interest loans quite easily. The only federal education loans that were a bad bet, were those extended to fly-by-night trade schools, that existed only to promote lower-class students into taking out these “free money” loans for a third-rate educational product. Back in the day even an English major at a state school, taking out loans for a $1000 academic year mostly for books and rent, could likely pay them off over five years, working some average white-collar clerical desk job, which still existed circa 1980.
Actually, by 1980 my alma mater had almost tripled in cost (though some of that was inflation), and the mass white-collar jobs were under major attack from automation. By 1990 my alma mater had tripled AGAIN in real cost, the clerical jobs were gone, and the English majors were in trouble. By 2000 the H-1Bs had arrived and the STEM graduates were in trouble. By 2010 there was a worldwide glut of college graduates, the price of even the state schools is soaring because of government revenue shortfalls.
My cousin went back to medical school at age 40+ in the early 1990s and raved constantly that she was being crushed by loans and a declining compensation in the corporatized medical field (even worse, psychiatry which was being disintermediated by new drugs). So, I do see the problem of our Touro law graduate of 1996, in about the last twenty years the jaws of economics have started crushing college graduates as never before.
The numbers are not huge. Average US household incomes (which probably average nearly 2 salaries) average around 50k, but are over 60k in several states, data is pretty lumpy.
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/incpovhlth/2010/statemhi2_10.xls
But here’s the thing, this guy has a level of debt 4x what I faced, with much weaker employment prospects.
–
And then the question is, so what, is he living in his own private Greece? Let’s turn it around. Is Greece living in a world where the prevailing macroecomic system has collapsed? Did Walter Russell Mead see it coming 20 years ago? Is it a social problem of integrating work and learning?
I think it is a glut of productivity! Four billion people can easily produce enough goods and services for seven billion, but that leaves three billion unemployed, without the socially allocated incomes to consume the available goods. That is STRUCTURAL, not fiscal, not monetary. It may be that Bernankecare is the answer – you simply print money and hand it out to three billion people, the better to support the four billion still working. The goods are there.
Are you lucky or otherwise, if you are “selected” to live on the dole your whole life? That, perhaps, is the question. As automation progresses, the numbers may get more extreme, until say one billion working can produce all the goods and services needed by eight billion total. And then what?
(and note that the glut of qualified workers, tends to depress wages even for those who do have jobs)
Josh @ 28: “I think it is a glut of productivity! Four billion people can easily produce enough goods and services for seven billion”
Remember the basic rule of economics — human desires are infinite. One farmer produces enough food to feed 100 people. But those other 99 need not be deadweight excess. They are making the tools the farmer needs — the fertilizers, tractors, fossil fuels, baling wire, distribution & marketing systems. Adam Smith back in the 18th Century pointed out the importance of specialization to economic progress, and he was probably not the first.
Our problems stem in large part from mis-direction of the labor force not required for direct production & distribution. Government has employed many of those people as bureaucrats whose job is (in effect) to prevent production. Government has licensed others to prey on the productive. (We call them lawyers).
The challenge is to stop that misdirection of human productive capacity. That mis-investment begins with the “educational system” which is the topic of Wretchard’s post. And the answer seems to be — reduce the scope of government, and let a thousand flowers bloom.
Buck O #25- yeah, yeah, and yes.
I was lucky enough to drop out of high school at 15. Probably saved a lot of brain cells. Mom taught me to read early on, and filled my bookshelf with American and World History (not the victim versions) and Sci Fi, Asimov to van Vogt . Dad taught me to work hard and carefully assess problems. The street taught me to watch my six.
With those tools I was able to succeed.
We are entering a time of great flux- In Forstchen’s “One second After”, he describes a a young, well dressed woman with a specialty in HR or some other “soft” skill attempting to gain admission to the sealed off town where folks are trying to survive after a devastating EMP strike. All her college and paper skills are worthless to them. They needed mechanic’s, farmers, riflemen.
We still have those sorts of people, but a hell of a lot of them are old.(except the riflemen-thanks, guys!) Most of the young seem to be skilled in everything except making the products we need to survive.
One last OT ramble- The storm on the horizon is going to turn a lot of the cocktail party left into hard core property rights advocates- just watch and see how happy they are when the starving poor are raiding their arugula patch.
K @ 29: Remember the basic rule of economics — human desires are infinite.
I do not disagree, and of course maybe four billion people on Earth right now are living on $10/day or less, so even quite finite demands are still not being met. I oversimplify horribly. And yet, I think there is still a point to this glut in productivity. The markets, for better or worse, are balanced at this point of productivity. I could use a yacht and eleven crew and a better grade of wine, and what stands between me and that achievement? Well, probably not a lack of college degrees by me or the yacht builders or the crew, anyway. But if I hike down to Bevmo and take a look around, maybe my industry will address the last, anyway.
Josh @ 28 – I think you can relate to this http://tinyurl.com/6q3brtq
The “need” for a college education is largely as a source of draft deferments for liberal arts majors metastastized into the Marble Edifices of Division 1 football stadiums! Bread and circuses my friends, bread and circuses!
To attend law school or medical school is a huge gamble. Imagine 12 years of preparation and 100k plus in debt. Then you sit before a panel of examiners from the surgery board, or something, who will present you with cases and questions until you cannot answer anymore. They will determine in a somewhat subjective way, the future before you.
If everyone passed it would not be an exam. In the case of a surgeon you should be running at peak and the job is one of a serious nature. You ought to realize the gravity of what lies before you.
You are competing against your peers at that point. They are formidable and everyone knows what is at stake.
Some individuals can rally and come up with plan B. Some do not.
Our favorite Georgetown law student seems to have taken much time and energy away from her studies. If she is going to law school to be a more effective advocate for whatever she believes in than it would seem a good idea to put study first and everything else after. Maybe she is one of those who is so awesome she can get a high pass without all the sacrifice. I know a few of those people. I was one who had to put in the hours and avoid distractions when I was learning. I worked as an undergrad. Got a student job in a research lab with flexible hours and little money. Every dollar helped and it was interesting work.
Student health insurance was a joke then. Contaception was the least of my worries and I was not at all celibate. Married for most of it. I needed dental care, eyes, prescription…none of that was covered. Sold things or borrowed to pay hospital bills a few times.
She could have been an advocate for student health. Instead she focused on a minor issue that will only increase costs for her fellow students.
Anyone incurring debt to go to Touro Law School is an idiot.
This guy is in a jam. He could head for N. Alberta to make good money in the oil sands or do the same in Australian mining. Then he could make continuing payments now to stop his debt going higher. After a few years he might have enough saved to pay off the whole thing. I can’t see why he is staying in a hopeless situation in New York. Surely a bit of salt in his food in Canada or Australia (I understand that New Yorkers are afraid to eat salt or it’s illegal to eat salt, or something) is a better choice than the one he has made? There must be some information that I am missing. Maybe he’s never seen land that isn’t paved over and he thinks he might fall through the exposed dirt right up to his armpits?
RE: Walter Russell Mead’s “Blue Model”
The writer deals in big-ticket big-picture subjects and deserves a rebuttal but I am too tired/lazy/uneducated/ginned up to provide one. Suffice it to say thus:
Any “model” that presumes to describe the 200 plus year evolution of this country must be purple. I will make one point to that end, but there are (many) others. The economic dialectic has not been fully teased apart from the political dialectic which is related to but not identical with the ideological dialectic. IOW, cross-currents. Mead emphasizes the blue role in stimulating economic consumption which destroyed the family farm and the warm and loving relationships that sustained said enterprises. I recall the so-called Robber Barons having something to do with the industrialization that impacted the family farm, not to mention the self-imposed impacts that led to the Dust Bowl migration and abject poverty, neither of which were much conducive to sustaining stable relationships within the family unit. As I said, purple.
Since the modern version of insightful analysis seems to demand superficial stereotypes that feed political agendas, here’s another example: Test your Bubba Quotient
From Charles Murray’s latest book, Coming Apart in which he redefines Demand Destruction, in terms of Bubba.
Mead, Murray, Limbaugh? They’re selling stuff. As best they can.
(Disclosure: I had no idea who Jimmie Johnson was, but I stayed at a Howard Johnson’s once.)
35 stevesmith “Maybe he’s never seen land that isn’t paved over and he thinks he might fall through the exposed dirt right up to his armpits?”
An excellent phrase, thank you.
My late sister was very smart about this. Her husband earned well but had a habit of bucking his bosses and mouthing off and getting canned from his high-placed PR jobs. She got a job working at a fine Southern university (top 20 nationally) doing PR for their engineering department, and gently encouraged her daughter to go there, TUITION-FREE, rather than go “away” for school. My niece did so, after my sister assured her she could live on campus if she wanted (she ended up splitting her time between campus and the home apartment).
My sister also very prudently bought life insurance; when she died of cancer at age 57, she left her son and daughter $50,000 each. My niece, ever the ant, invested hers; my nephew blew through his in his charmingly improvident way. My nephew decided he wasn’t getting much out of college after going for a year or so, so he bailed and got a job. Just got married last fall, and is a manager at a sporting goods store. He’s very smart, but can’t stand to sit still: like Breitbart, ADD and not a great student. But likes being a store manager and dealing with people, on his feet and moving.
One other niece, my brother’s daughter, quit after a year at the University of Georgia. Just didn’t like it, and moved to Ashville to be with a charming but ultimately faithless boyfriend. She works as a waitress, and seems to have no long-range plans.
I do note that their generation doesn’t seem to see college as the Social Necessity it was to my crowd in the 1970s. Dropping out without a degree doesn’t seem to strike them as stigmatizing.
I recall talking to a few cops who thought that by enlisting as MPs they would improve their chances of being hired by civilian police departments–most were surprised to find out that this was not the case. The Army trains MPs one way, the local police train their cops another way and really don’t want to have to “untrain” someone….
Discharged 1958, married with a pregnant wife, a high school drop out. Got meaningless jobs. Got into college as an adult who can benefit. Seven years and five children later graduated with a BA Econ. Started at the bottom in a title company progressed up in the field of industrial real estate. Retired as CEO.
Never had any help, worked in a sandwich plant, door factory, drug warehouse. We never had insurance for the birth of our five children. Worked hard, lived below our means (our whole life) and saved. March 1st we celebrated our 54th anniversary.
I believe that we as a nation got off track when Federal government got involved in education in the 60′s. When we allowed our society to become coarse in our language and when we began to remove the links between work and income with food stamps, public housing, medical care unemployment aid.
The Amish have never joined the blue model experiment. In fact, it seems in many ways our Govt. is making war on them trying to pull them in.
I’m not certain about they deal with education, I’m sure they do mostly home-schooling or setup schools on their own. I do know the children join their parents in their work at a young age and they have been granted exceptions to a lot of child labor laws, but one thing I’ve been hearing is this administration (surprise) is bent on changing that, especially for those engaged in furniture craftsmamship! Of course, they justify as it being for the children’s safety.
From R. A. Heinlein, speaking as Lazarus Long:
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
–Lazarus Long Quote info”
Mostly correct. Didn’t say how to learn any of these. Results may vary. / erc