Indentured students

The amount of student debt in the United States is greater than the amount of credit card debt, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Conventional wisdom says one should not borrow more money in loans than one expects to earn in a starting salary.

Thus, students in the humanities or arts, who typically make less than those in more lucrative career paths such as the sciences, might find it difficult to justify student loans from an investment perspective.

Tuition prices have increased since the 1980s far faster than inflation, and public funding for universities is slowly but significantly diminishing.

Universities are effectively being privatized.

This will require, then, that students look at their educations as investments. Already, this change affects our views of education. Students now exercise a sort of demand from the university. The average GPA of incoming freshman and the job-placement rate of graduates are now big bragging points for admission offices as a sort of assurance for investing students.

The markets now influence the demands of university students by determining what jobs will be in demand upon a student’s graduation.

Because we live in a prosperous and materialistic society with the end of oil looming ahead, there is great demand for cheap energy and conspicuous consumption, making technological and entrepreneurial development still very profitable.

The government recognizes this and is “investing” in science and math. This will serve to promote economic prosperity through the cultivation of innovation and international competition.

It will also advance our energy technologies so we can continue to meet the high demand for cheap energy in the future. In this way our public education systems are now being privatized for the sake of continued economic prosperity, and I object.

I object not as an English student who prefers a beautiful sentence to a functional equation but as a concerned citizen.

I am concerned that these changes, which have been happening in universities across our country for decades, are fueling our increasingly unsustainable economic model and undermining our democracy.

Without a continued and strong presence of the liberal arts in higher education, how will we face the challenges of our shrinking world?

We need social ingenuity now, not mere technological innovation.

The Occupy phenomenon has pointed to some of the most significant issues of the past 50 years, particularly those related to the corruption of the democratic process by the hand of private money and to the economic fascism of neoliberalism.

The privatization of universities fuels indentured servitude of students and graduates to the markets.

By the mechanism of increasingly expensive loans for college, the function of the university has become to provide skills compatible with job acquisition, not to generate concerned and capable citizens.  We need universities to promote deep questioning. We need people to ask, “Why the hell are we doing this?” not “Can we make this profitable?”

Democracy might not yet be lost. To defend it, we need public education to serve the public, not the wealthy.

­— poren@indiana.edu