Update (11/27): I am told the sign is a fake. I suspected as much. Fake or not it makes an important point. The point being that (i) the Left has done much to destroy the universities, and (ii) government programs, e.g., federally insured loan programs, have done much to cause an education bubble. The cost of education nowadays is shockingly out of proportion to the value of what the student receives. This shows what happens when government interferes with the market. (This is not to say that I am opposed to all government regulation as so many liberals think. They think that if you are a conservative you must be a laissez-faire capitalist. That's just plain stupid, but par for the course for the typical liberal who is apparently unequipped to make a simple distinction between conservative and libertarian.)
Compare the education sector with the electronics sector. I paid a paltry $800 over a year ago for my current Hewlett-Packard computer with huge flat-screen montor . It's an amazing piece of equipment and unbelievably cheap given what I am getting. ( I paid around $2000 in less-inflated dollars in 1985 for an Apple II-c which was a piece of junk compared to this machine. No hard drive, a mere 128 kilobytes of RAM.) Why so cheap? Because of competition and market discipline.
It is not that big-government liberals intend to make things worse; the worsening is an unintended consequence of their foolish and ill-thought-out policies, policies that fail to take into consideration the realities of human nature. One such reality is that if you make it easy for people to borrow monstrous sums of money, they will follow the path of least resistance and do so. Another such reality is that the educational institutions will raise their tuitions and fees to absorb as much as they can of this easy money without any concern for what they are doing to the students' long-term financial health or to the country's.
In I Too am a Debt-Peon, Justin Smith reports that his first year in the graduate program at Columbia cost him $45,000 which he financed using federally-insured loans. $45 K! I don't know which is harder to believe, that any institution could get away with charging such an outrageous amount for a year's worth of courses in a subject which, noble and magnificent as it is, notoriously bakes no bread, or that anyone could be so stupid as to go $45 K into debt in pursuit of a degree in a subject which, magnificent and noble as it is, notoriously bakes no bread. Luckily for him, Smith managed to get funding for the rest of his graduate study, and even luckier, got a job.
But now he complains about having to pay back the debt that he freely and foolishly assumed, and says that he will do what he can to avoid repaying it, thereby stiffing the taxpayers that financed his foolish adventure.
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