Student-housing and meal plans at American universities: Another reason college students are taking out large student loans

College students take out more and more student loans to pay their tuition bills with each passing year because tuition has risen at twice the inflation rate for more than two decades. But tuition is only part of the cost of going to college.  

When you add in books, housing, and food, not to mention incidental costs like a cell phone, the cost of going to college for one year can be well over $30,000--even at a public university.

Let's look at Louisiana State University, located just down the street from me. LSU requires its first-year students to live on campus unless they qualify for an exemption. This means that most of the 6,400 students who enroll for the first time will live in a dorm.  First-year students must also purchase a meal plan.

According to LSU's own calculation, the typical first-year student needs to come up with 24 grand just to pay tuition, room, and board.  How many Louisiana families have $24,000 lying around to pay for their child's first year at college?

And students have other costs besides the money that goes directly to the university. LSU estimates the total annual cost for an in-state student is $33,590! How many Louisiana families have that kind of money sitting in the bank?

Of course, many families figure out ways to spend less than $30,000 a year for their children to attend college. Students with good high-school academic records and good ACT scores can qualify for a TOPS scholarship that covers most college-tuition costs in Louisiana. 

But even a first-year student who gets a "free ride" and pays no tuition must still come up with $12 thousand to pay for room and board.  And in most instances, at least part of that money will be borrowed.

Now stretch these costs over four, five, or six years. A typical student who graduates from LSU in four years will have spent $130,000 to finance their studies. But only about two-thirds of LSU students graduate in six years! A student who pays in-state tuition and spends six years living in an LSU dorm will rack up costs totally almost $200,000.

Obviously, that's far too much. And offering students free tuition at a public university (as Senator Bernie Sanders proposed) doesn't provide a total solution.

Of course, tuition must come down, but students need to spend less time hanging out on college campuses.  Spending six years to find oneself, financed with student loans, is a disastrous way to become an adult. And this is particularly true for students who spend six years in college to get a degree in art history, sociology, or gender studies.

How would you like to spend six years here?

Colleges of Education--Higher Education's Cash Cows--are Suffering from Malnutrition

Colleges of Education have been higher education's cash cows for more than half a century, but the cash cows have gotten sick.

 Fifty years ago, the education schools were packed with undergraduates--mostly young women--working on their bachelor's degrees in elementary education. Many of them wanted to spend their careers teaching children, and others chose to major in education because they knew it was easy. 

Graduate programs in education also attracted a lot of students. In most states, an educator was required to have a master's degree in educational administration to become certified as a school principal.  That requirement kept the educational administration programs well supplied with working-adult students. 

In the old days, school districts often gave teachers automatic raises if they obtained a master's degree. Many school districts would actually pay a teacher's tuition to get a graduate degree in curriculum studies or educational administration.  Most teachers said, "Why not?"  Free tuition and a pay raise were all the incentives they needed to enroll at a nearby public university.

Universities loved their education colleges because they usually carried large enrollments, and the universities didn't have to pay the education professors very much. Also, public universities often received additional revenues for their graduate programs, so all those enrolled in M.Ed. and Ed.D. programs generated extra income.

But in recent years, the cash cows have gotten sick. Enrollments in education colleges are drastically down at universities all over the United States. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, undergraduate degrees have plummeted over the past 50 years--from 176,000 in 1970-1971 to only about 83,000 in 2017-2018. Graduate-program enrollments have also dropped sharply.

What in the hell happened?  First of all, young people aren't going into the field of education. During the same 50-year period, when education degrees dropped by half, degrees in business more than tripled. In 2017-2018, more than four times as many people obtained business degrees than degrees in education.

Secondly, non-university certification programs proliferated at the expense of the education colleges.  Instead of sitting through a battery of boring college courses before getting a teaching certificate, people with college degrees found out they could immediately get a teaching job and work on their teaching credentials while drawing a salary. These programs were often operated by regional service centers and--in some states--even by the school districts themselves.

No wonder then that the University of South Florida demoted its college of education to a school within a larger college that included non-education programs.  Louisiana State University, where I first began teaching, took that step more than ten years ago.

Why have young people become less inclined to be teachers and school administrators?  Poor pay is one reason.  In Louisiana, teachers are severely underpaid, and the state doesn't participate in Social Security. Why would anyone invest their career in education knowing it will be damned difficult for them to retire comfortably?

Secondly, a public-school classroom is often not a nice place to be anymore--especially in the inner cities. Student discipline is a serious problem in some (but not all) schools.  Standardized testing has put teachers under stress to deliver good test scores. The bureaucratic maze of providing services to students with disabilities has made teaching a lot less satisfying for many educators.

My father was a cattle rancher, and when one of his cows got sick, he got out his spring-loaded "pill gun" and tossed a bovine-grade antibiotic pill down the ailing cow's throat.

But universities do not have an equivalent remedy for their sick cash cows.  For professors and students alike, the education business suffers from a malady for which there is no known cure.

Did you major in liberal arts? You may be the 21st-century equivalent of a blacksmith

 I grew up in a small western Oklahoma town where middle-class families worked at jobs that no longer exist. People owned their own gas stations in those days, and a man could make a modest living by selling gasoline (regular or ethyl), repairing cars, and fixing flats. 

I recall two appliance stores in the little town of Anadarko: Zerger's Appliances and Roberts' TV and Appliances.  Two families owned gift shops: Graham's and Lovell's.  

And there were 10 or 12 little grocery stores in my hometown. Everyone lived within walking distance of at least one. These were mostly run by widows who supplemented their modest Social Security checks by selling milk, bread, and canned goods in the front room of their homes. And soda pop. As a kid, I'm sure I bought at least one Grapette at every one of those little stores.

All these businesses are long gone--wiped out by Walmart and corporatism in general. 

Something similar is happening in the field of liberal arts. People who get college degrees in the humanities, liberal arts, or the social sciences will find it damned difficult to find a job. And people who went into debt to get a degree in comparative religions or sociology may have committed financial suicide on the day they selected their majors. 

People who get Ph.Ds in those fields are not likely to find jobs either--at least not teaching jobs at the university level. As the New York Times reported today, colleges across the country are slashing budgets in response to the coronavirus pandemic. And they are laying off faculty members--both tenured and untenured. Most of those laid-off faculty members teach in the liberal arts.

Not too long ago, tenured faculty members had rock-solid job security. Unless they committed a violent felony or said something unforgivable like "All Lives Matter," they could be assured of keeping their job until they tottered off to a comfortable retirement, made possible by a fat pension and lifetime health insurance.

But no more. Universities are enrolling fewer students, and those students are more likely to major in business than the humanities. Professor Whatshisname still teaches his seminar on the causes of the Crimean War (his dissertation topic), but nobody wants to borrow tuition money to listen to his lecture.

In his cautionary book about going to law school, Paul Campos warned against the snowflake syndrome.  You may think you are special.  You may think you will beat the odds and find a great job at a prestigious university, where you will teach fawning students all about the progressive era in American history. Or you will teach English while you write the great American novel.

But you won't. If you pursue a doctorate in liberal arts intending to become a professor, you are probably on a fool's errand. Like the blacksmith of yesteryear, no one will want to hire you. And if you borrowed money to pursue your foolish dream--you are a dead person walking--at least in terms of your financial wellbeing.

"We escaped Commie-fornia": Californians are leaving the Sunshine State in search of a better life

 Driving home from New Mexico a couple of weeks ago, I stopped for gas at the Love Truck Plaza in Tucumcari, New Mexico. A guy pulled up at the gas pump next to mine, driving a good-sized vehicle and pulling a large storage trailer.

As I walked behind his rig, I notice a sign on the back of the trailer: "We Did It!! We Escaped Commie-Fornia. We back the Blue!!"

I've got to meet this guy, I said to myself. So I chatted with him a bit while he was gassing up. He turned out to be a real nice guy with a big smile and a sunny disposition.  He said he and his wife were moving to Florida to be nearer their grandkids.

I didn't want to intrude on this man's privacy, so I broke off our conversation without asking him about his political views.  I don't think he was some right-wing zealot.  I read him as a guy with mild political views who just wants to move to a place where life is a little easier. 

And who can blame him? I'm not making a political statement when I say that California appears to be rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell (to paraphrase Merle Haggard). The forest fires are out of control despite everything the Californians have done to manage their public lands.

I'm not saying these massive fires--4 million acres burned this year alone--are anyone's fault.  I agree with Governor Newsom that climate change is probably the biggest contributor to the state's forest fires.  Who's done more to combat climate change than the Californians?

Nevertheless, it must be terrifying to live in a neighborhood that could be engulfed at any time during the fire season by a holocaust fire.  That little fire extinguisher you bought at Home Depot won't do you much good when the big one comes roaring down the street at 20 miles an hour.

Then, there is the growing problem of homeless, which is out of control in San Francisco and a few other California cities.  I'm not blaming that on anyone either. I have thought a lot about the homeless crisis, and I've done some volunteer work at food banks.  

I don't know how to solve the homelessness problem--made almost intractable by the fact that so many homeless people suffer from mental illness. Nancy Pelosi doesn't want homeless people living in her neighborhood, and I can't really blame her.  The image of some bum peeing in her hot tub is too horrible to contemplate.

But something else is going down on the West Coast--beyond the forest fires and the homelessness. The California legislature appears to be dominated by lunatics who, unfortunately, are not homeless. The California university system is a mess and seems to have forgotten how to teach young people how to think and reason.  

Crime.  I read that Walgreen's closed its third store in San Francisco due to high levels of shoplifting. 

The state pension funds are underwater and will someday collapse.--when, nobody knows. Who is going to bail out the California pension funds--the taxpayers of Ohio?

I find it ironic that hundreds of thousands of Americans from the Midwest came to California as refugees during the Great Depression--the Okies and others who rolled down old Route 66 in beat-up cars and trucks.  And the Californians tried to keep them out.

Now, Californians are baling on the Sunshine State and are moving east to the Rocky Mountains states, Texas, and Florida. They can count their lucky stars that the people who live in these states are mostly decent and compassionate Americans who will greet them much more warmly than the Californians greeted my ancestors when they went west in the 1930s to escape the Dust Bowl.

A salute to the mountain chickadee: Late in life, I take up bird watching

 As a young person, I disdained bird watchers. I thought of them as nerdy people wearing khaki shorts, long black socks, and shapeless hats, skulking around the woods looking for some obscure friggin' bird.  Pathetic!

But two events changed my view. First, I met Jim Maple of Antlers, Oklahoma, and became reacquainted with Sarah, whom I had known in high school. Jim and Sarah were bird watchers and made occasional road trips to Louisiana to enjoy its diverse birdlife.

If Jim and Sarah, two people I admire and respect, are bird watchers, I reasoned, there must be something to it.

Second, my wife and I bought a home in Baton Rouge, located only two blocks from the LSU Lakes. As I walked or biked around the lakes, I saw an amazing number of beautiful Louisiana birds: great egrets, snowy egrets, great blue herons, kingfishers, white ibises, and white pelicans.

My family has a cabin in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico, located on Hondo Creek, at an elevation of 9,000 feet. Although I have visited the Sangre de Cristos since I was a child, I never looked around this high-altitude environment to notice the birds.

But I bought a New Mexico bird guide, and this fall, I observed the world around our family cabin. What did I see? First, I saw two American dippers, blue-grey birds that like to live around noisy, moving water.  Hondo Creek was the perfect place for them.

I saw mountain chickadees, which are as common as sparrows in the Sangre de Cristos' coniferous forests, but which I had never noticed. Modest little birds but beautiful.

Then I saw a Steller's Jay, which looks like a common bluejay but is larger and has an impressive feathered crest.  Of course, the name is a misnomer. These jays don't actually belong to Mr. Steller. He's just a guy who noticed one back in 1741.

I also saw grey jays. These large birds are sometimes called camp robbers because they will eat anything. I found some vile health-food mix in the cabin pantry--chia, flax, and hemp seeds--and sprinkled it on the footbridge across Hondo Creek.

I myself would never eat this crap, but the grey jays (and the chipmunks) loved it. 

Now that I have discovered birdwatching, I recommend it to you for two reasons:

First, watching birds makes us more observant. It is an activity that requires silence and a certain amount of stealth. It is hard to identify birds if you are listening to Don Lemon opine on the sins of our President.  Be silent, look around, and you will be surprised by what you will see.

Second, seeing birds opens a world of great beauty that is all around us. What can be more beautiful than a great egret standing stolidly in a Louisana marsh or a red and speckled woodpecker hammering away at a dead tree to get his breakfast? Or a group of white ibises with their soda-straw beaks?

As far as humans are concerned, most birds are useless. We eat chickens, geese, ducks, and quail, but we have no practical use for ravens, sparrows, hummingbirds, or wood storks.  But they must be on earth for some purpose.

Perhaps birds fly around us as a reminder that God made the world and created the birds for our pleasure. But then, of course, He also created black mamba snakes and crocodiles, for which humans have no need whatsoever. 

Maybe God made the birds in recompense for crocodiles and all the other evils that lurk in the world.  Perhaps St. Maximilian Kolbe, dying in a Nazi starvation bunker at Auschwitz, heard the chirp of a cardinal and was comforted.

A Steller's Jay

Chong v. Northeastern University: No tuition refund to students whose classes were switched to remote learning due to COVID-19

American universities were dealt a severe blow last spring when the coronavirus pandemic hit. Almost all of them were forced to switch from face-to-face instruction to an online format in midsemester. 

Students at several universities filed lawsuits demanding a refund of tuition and fees. They argued that the quality of online teaching was inferior to classroom instruction, and they wanted their money back.

A few days ago, Judge D. J. Stearns, a federal district judge in Massachusetts, issued a decision in one of these cases: Chong v. Northeastern University. Plaintiffs had filed a class-action lawsuit against Northeastern to get a refund of tuition and fees, but Judge Stearns sided with Northeastern University.  In his view, Northeastern had not breached its contract with students by shifting to an online teaching format, although he allowed the plaintiffs to proceed with their claim for a refund of the campus recreation fee.

I think Judge Stearns made the right decision, and I predict other judges will rule in favor of universities when they decide similar cases.  After all, it is not the universities' fault that the nation was virtually shut down by COVID-19 last spring. The colleges pursued their only reasonable option--which was to convert all instruction to a distance-learning format.

I am sure that complaining students are often right when they say that online instruction is inferior to face-to-face teaching. Nevertheless, new technologies like Zoom have improved the quality of video-conferencing.  I have taught via Zoom over the past several months, and I don't think my students' learning experience was hurt because I was not in the same room with them.

As I said, I think American colleges will win students' lawsuits demanding tuition refunds because their instruction was shifted to an online format. But that does not mean the colleges will skate through the coronavirus crisis unscathed.

Thane Gallo, one of the named plaintiffs in the suit against Northeastern, paid a tuition bill of $26,210 for the 2020 spring semester. Manny Chong, a graduate student in  Northeastern's counseling psychology program, was charged $23,400 to enroll in spring classes. That's a lot of money to take online courses.

All across America, universities will find that the coronavirus awoke students and their parents to the fact that the cost of attending an American college is too damned high. Undergraduate tuition at Northeastern is $52,000 a year, and students must pay additional money for room and board, textbooks, and assorted fees. 

That simply is not reasonable--especially when students are taking classes from their home computers.  In the months to come, colleges and universities may discover another symptom of COVID-19 not yet officially identified: sticker shock.

Snap out of it!

Leary v. Great Lakes Educational Loan Services: Bankruptcy judge slaps student-loan servicer with a $378,000 contempt sanction

 A few weeks ago, Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glen slapped a huge contempt penalty on Great Lakes Educational Loan Servicers--$378,629.62! Why? Because Great Lakes repeatedly refused to comply with Judge Glen's directives in a student-loan bankruptcy case.  

Leary v. Great Lakes Educational Loan Servicers: The facts

In 2015, Sheldon Leary filed an adversary action in a New York bankruptcy court, seeking to discharge over $350,000 in student-loan debt. He amassed this debt to pay for his three children's college education (p. 1). 

 Mr. Leary represented himself and properly served Great Lakes, his student-loan servicer. He didn't know, however, that he needed to sue the U.S. Department of Education as well. Great Lakes passed Mr. Leary's complaint on to DOE, but neither DOE nor Great Lakes answered Mr. Leary's lawsuit. In fact, Great Lakes forwarded fifteen pleadings to DOE, but neither DOE nor Great Lakes made an appearance in Judge Martin's court for quite some time (p. 3).

In 2016, Mr. Leary obtained a default judgment against Great Lakes for failing to respond to his lawsuit, and Judge Glen discharged Leary's student-loan debt.  DOE ignored this judgment and sent Mr. Leary two letters threatening to garnish his wages (p. 5).

More than four years after filing his lawsuit, Leary moved to reopen his adversary proceeding and asked Judge Glen to find Great Lakes in contempt. Great Lakes still did not respond, and on April 29, 2020, Judge Glen held the loan servicer in contempt and assessed sanctions against it for $123,000.

Great Lakes did not pay this assessment, and Judge Glen held a second contempt hearing last August. At this hearing, Great Lakes made several arguments to avoid sanctions. First, it argued that it could not be held in contempt because it had not acted in bad faith. Judge Glen rejected this defense. Whether or not Great Lakes had acted in bad faith, the judge reasoned, it had ignored "clear and unambiguous" court orders and had not diligently tried to comply with them (p. 9). 

Great Lakes also argued that it transferred its loan processing job to another collection agent after Mr. Leary's lawsuit was filed, thus relieving itself of the obligation to respond to court pleadings. But that fact, the judge ruled, did not relieve Great Lakes from its duty to comply with court orders in Mr. Leary's lawsuit (p. 5).

Finally, Great Lakes argued that sanctions were not warranted because Mr. Leary had not been hurt by its five years of noncompliance with court orders.

But Judge Glen didn't buy that argument either. In fact, he pointed out, Great Lakes' inaction had significantly injured Mr. Leary by causing him to suffer "aggravation, pain and suffering, negative credit ratings, loss of sleep, worry and marital strain" (footnote 11).

Judge Glen:  Great Lakes was "grossly negligent"

In short, Judge Glen ruled, Great Lakes' inaction had been "grossly negligent" and "really much worse" (p. 1). As for Great Lakes' claim that its legal department was unaware that it was a named party in Mr. Leary's lawsuit, the judge found this argument "unbelievable[e]" (p. 11).

The judge ordered Great Lakes to pay most of its sanction to DOE, in an amount sufficient to pay off Mr. Leary's student-loan obligations. Thus, in the end, Leary got the relief he sought in 2015.  

Judge Glen did not find it necessary to hold DOE in contempt, but he did not find the agency blameless. As he noted in a footnote:

It should not be lost on anyone . . . that DOE's inaction with respect to Mr. Leary--especially when DOE had knowledge at multiple steps along the way that Great Lakes was ignoring its obligations to Mr. Leary as a named defendant in the adversary proceeding--is disappointing to say the least.

Another example of DOE arrogance and heartlessness

Judge Glen's decision fingered Great Lakes as the bad guy in the Leary case, but he found DOE's conduct to be "highly questionable" (footnote 4). As the judge pointed out, Great Lakes "sat by, regularly monitoring Mr. Leary's bankruptcy docket until his case was closed and Great Lakes could return his student loans to normal servicing status" (p. 10).

Obviously, DOE's lawyers knew what Great Lakes was doing and made no objection. It is hard to escape the conclusion that DOE allowed Great Lakes to flout Judge Glen's orders and thereby circumvent Mr. Leary's bankruptcy action.

 Great Lakes' behavior and DOE's complicity are despicable. All this shameful conduct must have been approved at the top levels of Betsy DeVos's administration. I say again, Secretary DeVos should be impeached.

References

Leary v. Great Lakes Educational Loan Services, Case No. 15-11583, Adv. Proc. No. 15-01295, 2020 WL 5357812 (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 8, 2020).