What do you get when a columnist who reveres Bernie Sanders writes about higher education? A book that’s long on emotion and sad stories, but extremely short on insight into our serious problems.
I recently read such a book, After the Ivory Tower Falls, by Will Bunch, and write about it in today’s Martin Center article.
The sad stories are about the unfortunate young Americans who have gone far into debt for their college credentials and now find that those credentials won’t help them land high-paying jobs. Bunch takes us back to the Occupy Wall Street days and the red-hot rhetoric about the unfair wealth of the One Percent and the misery of the rest of us.
So, what should we do? Bunch wants higher ed to be a governmental entitlement, paid for with higher taxes on the One Percenters. He’s blind to any of the repercussions of that policy.
He’s also blind to any non-leftist policy ideas, such as making colleges take responsibility in the event that the students they purport to have educated fail to repay their loans. Bunch briefly mentions that, but then breezily dismisses it as just right-wing politics. To Bunch, everything conservative is infected with greed and villainy.
Oddly, though, he relates a bit of his family history that runs counter to his animosity toward the free market. Many years ago, his grandmother ran a for-profit college in Peoria, Ill., that provided good value for students who were paying their own way. Higher education worked pretty well in those days — before the advent of federal financing.
Read the whole thing.