Neoliberalism Pushed up Cost of Attending University in USA
In the previous part of this series, I wrote about how housing polices of countries in the anglosphere have been optimized to benefit those who have lots of money rather than satisfying the housing needs of the median person in those places. That is why housing prices and costs have gone up much faster than the "official" rate of inflation during past 40 years. This is also why developed countries outside the Anglosphere have a far wider range of good choices for housing and why those within Anglosphere have an unusually high number of homeless people. Now let us talk about the cost of “higher” education under neoliberalism aka late capitalism where, once again, we see a very similar trend- and for broadly similar reasons.
So, have you ever wondered how the cost of university education has risen so much in certain "developed" countries during the past four decades? Some of you might not believe it, but there was a time when attending public universities in this country cost very little. Boomers, such as MikeCA, could attend well-regarded public universities for the equivalent of less than five thousand dollars per year in today's money, while doing so right now would cost at least 20-40 thousand per year. Which leads us to an even bigger question- namely, why hasn't the cost of attending university in other developed countries (outside the anglosphere) become similarly expensive during the past four decades? What explains this peculiar difference?
While I encourage you to confirm it (with Google, Bing, Brave etc), the yearly fees for attending public universities in developed countries ranging from Italy, France and Germany to Japan, South Korea and China are between 1-5 k USD- when adjusted for purchasing power. They are even lower in many central and east European countries. In other words, university fees in the rest of world retain the same relation to income as was the case in USA between 1945 and mid-1970s. And let us face it, the quality of undergrad education at a decent public university in one developed country is pretty much identical to that in another. The student who spends 20-60 k per year to attend an undergraduate program at Harvard, Columbia, Berkley or a large state university in USA is not learning anything different from his or her equivalent attending a similar university in France, Germany, Japan or in any other developed country. So why is the American student paying so much more money for the same product?
Here is a short list of the main reasons:
1] The first reason for the much higher fees at universities in USA (and anglosphere countries in general) comes down to the changing composition of people employed by universities in those countries. Forty years ago, the number of people employed in teaching and research at these universities was always larger than the rest combined. In those days, administration-types were typically outnumbered 2:1 to 4:1 by faculty. Today, almost every single university in this country employs anywhere between 2 to 4 times more administrative-types than faculty. To make matters worse, these parasites typically get paid almost as well or better than faculty. So how do these universities try to control costs? Well.. by not hiring for faculty positions and replacing them with temporary sessional "instructors" who are often paid wages below the poverty line.
Universities in this country are now run as employment schemes for administration parasites. Providing higher education is, at best, a secondary goal. While universities in non-anglosphere European countries have also seen some administrator bloat, it is noticeably smaller. Moreover, the differences in pay-scales between them and faculty combined with the generally higher degree of government funding for universities in those countries have kept things far more reasonable in those countries. But how is the administrator bloat seen in Anglosphere universities related to late capitalism? Well.. one of the distinguishing features of late capitalism aka neoliberalism is its very strong emphasis on performative bullshit rather than actual results. There is a reason why liberals in this country think Obama was a great president, when at best he was a greedy mediocrity. This is also why corporations in Anglosphere are always talking about "empowering women", "elevating black voices", "celebrating trans" etc rather than paying their productive employees a decent wage.
Administrator bloat is related to the optics of pretending to do something rather than doing anything useful. It is about creating the illusion of work through scheduling endless meetings, conferences, seminars and buzzword filled reports by people with borderline parodic job titles. It is also about the bizarre obsession of neoliberalism with "metrics" and other minutiae that are totally irrelevant in real life. But why does this administrator bloat keep growing? Let me ask you a simple question- how many of you would refuse an office job which paid well, had a nice pension plan etc even if it required you to perform totally useless "work" and maintain ideological conformity at the workplace. Furthermore, administrator-types hire more underlings to enhance their status even if it means destroying the original institutional mission.
2] The second reason why the cost of attending universities in this country has gone up a lot in past forty years is also linked to late capitalism aka neoliberalism. See.. under neoliberalism, the main function of government changes from maintaining an equilibrium between capital and labor to facilitating the “legal” looting of everybody else for enriching a few rich people. Part of this involves the government cutting taxes for the rich while simultaneously funneling more public money towards them. One of the main reason why government support for universities has declined over the past 40 years in certain countries has to do with reduced taxation of large corporations and the rich. Guess how universities in those countries make up for that funding shortfall..
But there is more. As part of their acceptance of the dangerous cult of neoliberalism, governments in the Anglosphere have also privatized many facilities and services which once helped these universities make some extra money. These range from meal plans for students in residence, management of residences, maintenance and renting of sport facilities etc. So, not only have neoliberal governments in the Anglosphere reduced their contribution to budget of universities but they have also crippled their ability to make some extra money from services they used to provide in the past.
But wait.. there is more. Another feature of neoliberalism is the desire to extract 'value' from things which should never be treated that way and look for alternative sources of money to fuel growth once they have depleted their environment. This is where all those overseas students, especially from some Asian countries, come into the picture. It is no secret that universities in the Anglosphere aggressively recruit students from well-off families in many Asian countries to fuel the latest stage of their pyramid scheme. And why not.. those students pay far more in fees, as well as live in the more expensive new residences. This increased "diversity" of the student body, therefore, is not about combating racism. Instead, it is about collecting lots of money from Asian students wanting to get credentialed from a university in the Anglosphere.
In the next part, I will write more about how neoliberalism is behind the explosion of cost for attending universities in this country.
What do you think? Comments?