Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Homeless People Borrowing Money to Attend College: Is That a Good Idea?

According to a recent news story, 58,000 homeless people are enrolled in college, a 75 percent increase from just three years ago (Ashtari, 2015). How, you might be asking, are homeless college students paying their tuition bills?

Most, if not all of these hapless college students are eligible to receive Pell Grants based on their economic circumstances and most are probably borrowing money from the federal student-loan program.  At the University of Massachusetts-Boston, a student support center provides free meals for homeless people and guidance on financial aid.

Is this a good idea? Kathleen O'Neill, who runs something called Single Stop USA at Bunker Hill Community College, thinks it's a great idea for homeless people to attend college. "These are people who get it," said Ms. O'Neill. "The way out of poverty is education and they are committed to doing whatever it is they need to do to get there"(as quoted in a Huffington Post article).

Obviously, having homeless students in college works out great for the colleges. They get more tuition-paying students, and the federal student-aid program foots the bill.

I would love to chat but I'm late for my social studies class.
But some colleges have been criticized for recruiting homeless people. A few years ago, Drake College of Business was spotlighted for recruiting homeless people and then paying them a stipend. For a time at least,  homeless students apparently received $350 biweekly stipends so long as they showed up for 80 percent of the classes and received "Cs" for their work.

Drake's president defended the practice of recruiting homeless students. "We do not believe that recruiting at [homeless] shelters is either illegal, unethical, or immoral so long as the recruitment of students from shelters is above board, which it has been," Drake's President Ziad Fadel said of its practice (as quoted in Golden & Hechinger, 2010). Nevertheless, Drake stopped recruiting homeless students.

If homeless people borrowed money to attend college, obtained the training they needed to get good jobs, and then paid off their student loans, this would be a Cinderella story. But my guess is that an awful lot of these 58,000 people will never pay off their student loans. And when they go into default they will be barred from participating further in the federal student aid program.

In my view, a university that feeds homeless people while it helps them fill out financial aid applications sounds a lot like the way religious homeless shelters used to operate. Sure, we'll feed you, but you have to listen to this sermon first. Here's a nice hot meal, but don't spell soup on your FAFSA form.

When I reflect on the fact that 58,000 homeless people are paying tuition with federal student aid money, President Obama's proposal to offer two years of free education at the nation's community colleges sounds like a good idea.

Wouldn't it be better if economically disadvantaged people could get two years of free secondary education or training rather than forcing them to take out student loans to pay their tuition bills--loans very few of them will ever pay back?

References

Shadee Ashtari. A Look Into the 'Double Lives' Of America's Homeless. Huffington Post, December 26, 2014 (updated January 7, 2015. Accessible at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/26/college-student-homeless-boston_n_6145980.html

Daniel Golden & Jon Hechinger. For-Profit N.J. College Halts Recruiting of Homeless. Bloomberg, May 5, 2010. Accessible at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-05-05/drake-for-profit-college-in-new-jersey-will-stop-recruitment-of-homeless










Sunday, February 8, 2015

No Statute of Limitations on Student Loan Debt: How Can That Be Justified?


Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. 
                                 Dante Alighieri 

Awhile back, Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a bill passed by the California legislature  that would have expanded the statute of limitations for bringing sexual abuse lawsuits against private schools, including schools operated by the Catholic Church. The law did not apply to sexual abuse claims against public school teachers.

Cartoon Credit: Carol Simpson

In vetoing the statute, Governor Brown invoked ancient principles of fairness that put time limitations on lawsuits. "Statutes of limitation reach back to Roman law and were specifically enshrined in the English common law by the Limitations Act of 1623," Governor Brown wrote in his veto message. "Ever since, and in every state, including California, various limits have been imposed on the time when lawsuits may still be initiated. Even though valid and profoundly important claims are at stake, all jurisdictions have seen fit to bar actions after a lapse of years."

Statutes of Limitations Invoke Ancient Principles of Fairness

Governor Brown correctly stated the law regarding statutes of limitations. It is not fair, as the courts sometimes put it, for aggrieved parties to “sleep on their rights” and then file a lawsuit long after a claim has grown stale, when memories and witnesses may have faded away and critical documents may have been lost. Thus, all states give claimants a specific time limit for filing a lawsuit. If the claimant fails to file within the time limit, the claimant irrevocably loses the right to seek a remedy in court.

Unfortunately for student loan debtors, these ancient principles of fairness do not apply to student loans. In 1991, Congress passed 20 U.S.C. § 1091a, a statute that abolished all limitation periods that might otherwise apply against specified lenders and governmental entities that seek to collect on student loans. As one scholar succinctly summarized the law, “[O]nce a student contracts for a student loan, the student cannot use a statute of limitations as a defense against collection on that loan by the entities listed in the statute—ever” (Roper, 2005, p. 37, emphasis supplied).

The Fabrizio case: Student-Loan Guarantor Attempts to Collect a 25-Year-Old Judgment

In 2010, this harsh federal law was applied in a case against Anthony Fabrizio, who borrowed about $9,000 in the early 1970s to help pay for his postsecondary education (New York State Higher Education Services Corporation v. Fabrizio, 2010). Apparently, Fabrizio did not pay back the money, and the lender obtained a default judgment against him in 1983 for $9,664.63. In 2008, twenty-five years after the debt had been reduced to judgment, the New York State Higher Education Services Corporation, which (through a predecessor agency) had guaranteed Fabrizio’s loan, told Fabrizio to begin paying off the debt or the agency would start garnishing his wages.

Fabrizio tried to persuade a New York court to enter an order declaring that his debt was deemed paid under a New York law stating that a money judgment is presumed to have been paid after 20 years from when the creditor was first entitled to enforce it.

Unhappily for Mr. Fabrizio, a New York appellate court ruled against him, finding that 20 U.S.C. 1091a, abolishing all statutes of limitation that might otherwise protect a defaulted student-loan debtor, overrode the New York statute of limitation.  Fabrizio can still be made to pay back the loan. Presumably, he is also liable for collection fees and more than 30 years of accumulated interest.

Defaulting Student Loan Debtors Have No Place to Hide

Today, there are millions of people who have defaulted on their student loans, and some of those loans are now quite old. Nevertheless, student-loan defaulters are never off the hook for their debt--no matter how old that debt might be.

As the Fabrizio case illustrates, statutes of limitation do not apply to student-loan debts that are guaranteed by the federal government, and a lender can pursue collection at any time, even if the lender took no action for a quarter of a century.

Moreover, unlike most other overburdened debtors, student-loan debtors cannot discharge student loans in bankruptcy unless they can show that failure to discharge their student loans will cause them “undue hardship”  (11. U.S.C. § 523(a)(8)(B)). As several scholars have observed, it is very difficult for student-loan debtors to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy--even in heart-rending circumstances (Pardo & Lacey, 2009, Fossey, 1997). 

In fact, student-loan debtors who fail to repay their loans can have their Social Security checks garnished, a practice that the Supreme Court approved in the 2005 decision of Lockhart v. United States.  People who took out student loans in their early twenties and never paid them back can see their Social Security income diminished by their failure to discharge their student-loan obligations (Cloud, 2006).

Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here

For millions of college students, the federal student loan program has become a nightmare. Over the years, Congress has passed harsh legislation that has stripped student-loan debtors of traditional legal protections like statutes of limitation and unfettered access to the bankruptcy courts.  As a result, for individuals who default on their student loans, even those who took out their loans in good faith, the famous passage from Dante seems chillingly appropriate: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”  
**********
Note: Parts of this essay were taken from an essay originally published in 2010 in Teachers College Record.  The citation for the original article is Richard Fossey & Robert C. Cloud, Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here: Defaulting Student Loan Debtors Have No Place to Hide. Teachers College Record, October 12, 2010 at http://www.tcrecord.org, ID Number: 16195.

References

Chae v. SLM Corporation, 593 F.3d 936 (9th Cir. 2010).

Cloud, R.C. (2006). Offsetting Social Security benefits to repay student loans: Pay us now or pay us later, Education Law Reporter, 208, 11-21.

Fossey, R. (1997).  "The certainty of hopelessness:" Are courts too harsh toward bankrupt student loan debtors?  Journal of Law and Education, 26, 29-48. 

Garner, B. A. (Ed.). (9th ed. 2009). Black’s Law Dictionary. St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing Company.

Lockhart v. United States, 546 U.S. 142 (2005).

Joseph Mack (2006). Nullum Tempus: Governmental immunity to statutes of limitation, laches, and statutes of repose. Defense Counsel Journal, 73, 180-196.

New York Higher Education Services Corporation v. Fabrizio, 900 N.Y.S.2d (A.D. 3 Dept. 2010).

Raphael I. Pardo & Michelle R. Lacey (2009).  The real student-loan scandal: Undue hardship discharge litigation.  American Bankruptcy Law Journal, 83, 179-235.

Glen E. Roper (2005). Eternal student loan liability: Who can sue under 20 U.S.C. 1091a? Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law, 20, 35-78.


Saturday, February 7, 2015

President Obama proposes a free community college education but the Brookings Institution disapproves

Even a blind hog occasionally finds an acorn, and President Obama finally came up with a good idea for addressing the student-loan crisis--or at least the kernel of a good idea. In his State of the Union address, the President proposed offering a free community-college education to every American.

But the Brookings Institution apparently doesn't like that idea.  Stuart M. Butler authored a piece for Brookings on President Obama's plan and offered these criticisms.
Stuart M. Butler
Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution
First, Mr. Butler argued, "the plan is badly targeted." Providing free community-college education "would mean middle-income and even upper-income, students would get hefty subsidies, even though many do not need the help."

Of course this is true, but public K-12 education is also free to rich and poor alike; and I don't hear anyone complaining. And to suggest that rich kids would pass up elite institutions like Harvard to get a free education at a local community college is absurd.

Second, Mr. Butler argues that community college "is usually a dead end." Here, Mr. Butler stands on firmer ground. It is true that only a small percentage of community-college students obtain two-year degrees; and very few transfer into four-year colleges  and eventually get bachelor's degrees.

Mr. Butler suggests that the federal government should "help states and school districts provide a fuller range of opportunities at the high school and college levels, such as professional credentials, apprenticeships and high-school career academies." Yes, of course; but President Obama's plan doesn't preclude other avenues for providing post-secondary education. In fact, I understood the President's free community-college proposal to incorporate more than just traditional academic programs.

Finally, Mr. Butler offers his flimsiest objection to President Obama's plan--that it might cause high-performing high-school students to "settle" for a free community-college education rather than apply to more elite institutions. Right--like a high school kid with a realistic chance of getting into the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where Mr. Butler studied, would turn St. Andrews down to get free schooling at Alamo Community College in San Antonio.

So what does Mr. Butler suggest?  He wants bigger Pell Grants that could be used at any institution, presumably meaning the expensive elite colleges where the Brookings Institution's policy wonks went to school, as well as the for-profit colleges that are ripping off low-income young Americans.

And Mr. Butler also wants President Obama to give "more enthusiastic backing to new, low-cost competitors to traditional colleges and universities." Duh, Mr. Butler. Community colleges are low-cost competitors to traditional colleges and universities.

Mr. Butler finished his Brookings puff piece with a flourish. "President Obama would be much wiser," Mr. Butler concluded, "to use his political capital to spur competition and real cost reduction in higher education rather than subsidizing community college education."  Whatever that means.

In my view, President Obama articulated the germ of a good idea--two free years of postsecondary education at the nation's community colleges to anyone who is qualified to enroll.  Of course, the community colleges need to do a much better job of matriculating their students; and the transfer of students from two-year institutions to four-year institutions needs to be made surer and more smooth.

The president calculated that his plan to offer a free community-college education would only cost the federal government about $6 billion a year--about one fifth of what the federal student-aid program is currently pumping into the for-profit college industry. If the federal government would stop propping up the for-profits and support community colleges, the public would actually save money--a lot of money.

On the other hand, if President Obama wants to offer free community-college education as a new feature to our present rickety student-aid program, then his proposal is merely a diversion from the hard task of reform . Unfortunately, I think the president wants to add a $6 billion free community-college plan to an out-of-control federal student aid program that already costs more than $100 billion a year..

References

Stuart M. Butler. Obama's SOTU Free College Plan is Bad for Poor Americans. Brookings Institution, January 20, 2015. Accessible at: http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2015/01/20-obama-free-community-college-bad-idea-sotu-butler

Susan Dynarski and Daniel Kreisman. Loans for Equal Opportunity: Making Borrowing Work for Today's Students. Hamilton Project, Brookings Institution, October 2013. Accessible at: http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2013/10/21%20student%20loans%20dynarski/thp_dynarskidiscpaper_final.pdf


  


Monday, January 26, 2015

More evidence that the New York Times is totally clueless about the Student-Loan Crisis

Today's New York Times contained a full-page advertisement  (on page A22) with this message: "What our reporters are reading can be just as insightful as what they're writing." The advertisement contains a large color photo of Times writer David Carr wearing those round, horn-rimmed spectacles that people wear in Woody Allen movies--spectacles that convey sensitivity and deep intelligence.

Of course, the Times ad is true: What Times reporters read can be insightful. The problem is that the Times reporters are not reading enough and they are reading the wrong things.

And here's a case in point.  On the front page of today's Times is an article about the economic downturn Alaska is experiencing as a result of the recent drop in oil prices.  The article's author, Kirk Johnson, reports that "historians and economists say" that Alaska's economic crisis is unprecedented "in modern times."

That is simply not accurate. I lived in Alaska in the mid-1980s when oil prices turned down. Alaska's economy went into a tail spin, with a huge number of property foreclosures and several bank failures. I recall standing on a street corner in downtown Anchorage and viewing three financial institutions with plastic sheeting spread across their names because they had collapsed and been closed by federal financial regulators.

So what is happening in Alaska right is not unprecedented in modern times; and if "historians and commentators" told Times reporter Johnson that, they are certainly incompetent.

But that Times inaccuracy is a small matter.  More important is a pollyannaish article in last Sunday's Times about the student debt crisis. Times reporter Kevin Carey wrote favorably and uncritically about federal legislation that allows students to extend their student-loan payments out over 25 years. Apparently, Carey took a positive perspective on this development  because long-term repayment programs will reduce student-loan borrowers' monthly payments to a more manageable level.

 Carey ended his article by remarking that the federal government will probably replace the states as  the "primary financier" of American higher education. "Given how much unnecessary financial hardship has been imposed on students," Carey wrote, "this is a welcome trend." And Carey ends on this wholly unwarranted optimistic note: "The sense of pervasive student loan anxiety that characterizes much of the contemporary higher education conversation could become a relic of an older time."

What baloney! Essentially Carey has portrayed the federal push to get college student-loan borrowers  to sign up for long-term repayment plans as an entirely wholesome development.  And that simply is not correct.

First of all, the prospect of former students taking 20 to 25 years to pay off their student loans should be unsettling to everyone in the American higher education community, no matter how reasonable borrowers' monthly payments are. Surely when Congress adopted the first student-loan legislation back in the 1960s, its members never dreamed that 25-year repayment plans might someday become the norm.

In essence, as I have said before, long-term income-based repayment plans are turning Americans into sharecroppers, paying a portion of their earnings to the government for the majority of their working lives for the privilege of attending college. Who could be happy about such a prospect?

Second, as currently structured, long-term repayment plans operate as a perverse incentive for colleges to keep raising their tuition. Why should colleges try to keep their costs down when students can simply borrow more money to pay for tuition hikes and then pay it back in modest monthly payments over 25 years?

Third, long-term repayment plans remove incentives on students to minimize their borrowing. What difference does it make to students whether they borrow $30,000 to attend college (the current average) or $50,000 when the amount of their monthly loan payments will be based on their income and not the amount they borrowed?

Why has the Obama administration's push for long-term repayment plans been received so favorably around the country? I will tell you why. The only voices that are heard concerning the student-loan crisis are the voices of the insiders: colleges and universities, intellectually bankrupt think tanks like the Brookings Institution,and higher education's shamelessly self-interested constituency organizations like the College Board and the American Council on Education.

The people who are being injured by the federal student loan program have no voice; they are suffering in silence while working at low-income service jobs and fending of the federal government's hired loan collection agencies--which are making tons of money chasing down student-loan defaulters.

The Brookings Institution, in one of its typically vapid policy papers, argued for having people's student-loan payments taken out of their pay checks so that they would simply become another income deduction, like health insurance and Social Security.

And friends, that day will some day come. And when that happens, it will be apparent to everyone that the federal student loan program, which was intended to help worthy young Americans get a college education regardless of their income status, has become a massive fraud perpetuated on the American people by the higher education industry and the federal government.

If we continue in the direction we are going--and we are actually accelerating our headlong drive toward catastrophe--American higher education will be destroyed. But our policy makers, our legislators, and our college and university presidents don't care. By the time this time bomb explodes--and explode it will--all the people who engineered this disaster will be retired, writing their memoirs and drinking bourbon beside the golf courses of their gated entry retirement communities. The fact that these empty-headed bozos destroyed our nation's once premier system of colleges and universities will bother them not at all.

References

Kevin Carey. Helping to Lift the Burden of Student Debt. New York Times, Sunday Business Section p. 1.

Kirk Johnson. As Oil Falls, Alaska's New Chief Faces a Novel Goa: Frugality. New York Times, January 26, p. 1.




Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Who turned on the gas at Auschwitz? Reflections on student-loan debtors in bankruptcy

Gas Chamber Door at Auschwitz--Looking Out
My father spent most of World War II as a a prisoner of war in Japanese concentration camps.

He was captured in the Philippines when the entire American army surrendered to Japanese forces in April 1942, and he survived the Bataan Death March. He remained a prisoner until August 1945, after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Two thirds of the men who were captured with my father did not survive the War. Some were summarily executed during the Bataan Death March or later, some died of starvation or disease, and a number committed suicide. The experiences of the American prisoners of war in the Pacific are never compared to the Holocaust, but perhaps they should be.

In any event, my father's concentration camp experiences (which he often talked about when I was a child) have caused me to ponder again and again this question: How can people lose their humanity to the extent that they can kill defenseless people without remorse and even without thinking about it seriously? Who turned on the gas at Auschwitz day after day as all those Jews were gassed to death? And did those people go home to their families when their work days ended to eat a nice meal and perhaps listen to the radio?

Recently, I returned to this question  after reading several of the published bankruptcy decisions involving student-loan debtors.  In the Myhre case, for example, how could attorneys for the U.S. Department of Education oppose the discharge of student loans owed by a paraplegic man who was working full time and whose expenses exceeded his income?

And in the Stevenson case, how could lawyers for Educational Credit Management Corporation argue that a woman in her fifties who had a history of homelessness and was living on less than $1000 per month, be placed on a 25-year income-based repayment plan to pay off her student loans?

And in the Roth case, how could attorneys for the same company--headed at the time by a man who made more than $1 million dollars a year), stand before a bankruptcy judge and maintain that a woman in her sixties, who had chronic health problems and was living entirely off Social Security income of less than $800 a month, should not have her student loans discharged in bankruptcy?

I listened recently to the audio of a bankruptcy proceeding in California involving a man with more than a quarter million dollars of student-loan debt.  The man brought an adversary proceeding seeking to discharge his loans in bankruptcy.  His suit was opposed by two parties: the U.S. Department of Education and a private loan company.

Judging by their voices, the U.S Department of Education and the private company were both represented by young women.  Both argued that the man--in his 50s and making less than $2,000 a month, should not have his student-loan debts discharged.

I imagine both women graduated from good law schools, are kind to animals, and have progressive views on the political issues of the day--global warming, for example.

So how could these smart and presumably sensitive young women be working for a governmental entity and a private company engaged in the reprehensible business of stopping distressed student-loan debtors from bankruptcy relief?

I don't mean to compare these two young lawyers to the people who operated the Nazi death camps, but the insensitivity to the unjust suffering of others is somewhat similar. Millions of Americans are burdened by student-loan debt that is totally unmanageable and will never be paid off; and yet our government employs lawyers to prevent them from obtaining bankruptcy relief.

And, let us remind ourselves that the U.S. Department of Education, the agency that sought to deny bankruptcy relief to a paraplegic student-loan debtor in the Myhre case, answers to a president who won the Noble Peace Prize.

How long can the injustice and suffering spawned by the federal student loan program go on? A long time I fear. Slavery existed in this country for well over 200 years.

But ultimately, this trillion-dollar house of cards we call the federal student loan program will come tumbling down; and when it collapses it will take American higher education with it and perhaps the American economy.

That is something for American college presidents to think about as they fly around in their private jets and drink premium liquor with wealthy alumni.  University foundation board members should think about it as well before they execute multi-million dollar contracts with celebrity football coaches.

And mom and pop should think about it too before they encourage little Suzie and little Johnny to take out loans to go to an over-priced, pretentious East-Coast college.  Because when little Suzie and little Johnny take out those loans, they will live with them until they are payed off  in full or until little Suzie and Little Johnie are dead.

And if they try to discharge their loans in bankruptcy, a bright young lawyer who graduated from an elite law school--someone very much like the person who turned on the gas at Auschwitz--will be in federal bankruptcy court to keep that from happening.






Wednesday, December 3, 2014

It is madness to borrow money for six years to get a four-year college degree

Complete College America, a nonprofit public advocacy group located in Indianapolis, issued a report recently entitled Four-Year Myth. The report starkly documents what everyone in higher education already knows: The vast majority of college students do not complete their four-year degrees in four years.

Here are some of the report's key findings:
  • Only 5 percent of students in two-year associate degree programs graduate on time.
  • Only 19 percent of students in four-year programs at non-flagship universities obtain their degrees within four years.
  • At flagship institutions, where the nation's top students attend college, only 36 percent of the students complete their four-year degrees on time.
Moreover, the report points out, a lot of students accumulated significantly more credit hours than they need to graduate.  On average, students at non-flagship institutions have 133 credits on their transcripts although most need only about 120 credit hours to graduate.

The report acknowledges that there are many good reasons why many students cannot graduate on time.  Nevertheless, as the report succinctly stated, "[S]omething is clearly wrong when the overwhelming majority of public colleges graduate less than 50 percent of their full-time students in four years."

The report lists several reasons for the low on-time graduation rates at most public colleges and universities:
  • Lighter course loads.  Many students don't take enough credits while in school to graduate on time.  A full course load at most colleges is 15 credit hours per semester, but only 50 percent of the students at four-year institutions take a full course load.  Only 29 percent of students in two-year programs take full course loads.
  • Remediation courses.  According to the report, 1.7 million students take remediation courses each year but only 1 out of 10 remedial students graduate.
  • Uninformed choices.  Too many students make poor choices when enrolling for classes, which causes them to take courses that won't move them toward on-time graduation.  Part of this problem can be attributed to an inadequate number of counselors at many universities.
/As Four-Year Myth points out, students who take six years to obtain a four-year degree often have significantly more student-loan debt than students who graduate on time.  At the University of Texas, for example, students who graduate on time accumulate on average about $19,000 in debt. Students who take six years to graduate are burdened (on average) with $32,000 in student loans.

Four-Year Myth is a very useful report, but in my mind, it did not place enough emphasis on the role that student loans play in the downward slide of on-time graduation rates.  I believe a lot of unmotivated students are taking just enough credit hours to qualify for student loans without realizing that they are accumulating a lot of unnecessary debt by taking a more leisurely path toward graduation. When a mandatory course is unavailable to them in a given semester, some of them will enroll in an unnecessary course solely to meet the minimum number of hours they need to qualify for student loans.

The report makes several good suggestions for improving on-time graduation rates, which I will not repeat here. But I would like to add an additional suggestion: The federal student loan program should only be available to a student for a maximum of four years of full time study.  Thus, students in four-year programs who take six years to graduate or students who take longer than four years to graduate because they changed colleges or changed majors should be required to pay the cost for delayed graduation out of their own pockets if those costs exceed the cost of being enrolled full time for four years.

Call it tough love if you like. But the federal government is doing America's young people no favor by allowing them to borrow money semester after semester while they wander around colleges and universities for five, six, or seven years when they are enrolled in four-year degree programs.

And we should pay special attention to one of the report's most shocking findings: Only 5 percent of students enrolled in two-year associate degree programs graduate on time.  Our community colleges, which purport to serve disadvantaged students, have fallen down on the job if they cant' get their on-time graduation rates above five percent.

References

Four-Year Myth. Complete College America, 2014. Accessible at: file:///C:/Users/wrf7707/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/9UM6POWU/4-Year-Myth.pdf

Tamar Lewin. Most Don't Earn Degree in Four Years, Study Finds.New York Times, December 2, 2014, p. A14. 










Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Friends don't let friends go to college in Boston

The New York Times ran a front-page story recently about what it called Edgar Allan Poe's "love-hate relationship with the city of Boston."  Actually, based on what the Times article reported, it doesn't appear that Poe had any love for Boston at all.

Edgar Allan Poe
Bostonians have no soul
According to the Times, "Poe sneered at the city's luminaries," whom he referred to as "Frogpondians"because to Poe's ears, the "moralistic works" of Boston's literary elites sounded "like the croaking of so many frogs."  Poe concluded, rightly I believe, that Bostonians "have no soul," although he conceded that they were "well bred--as very dull persons very generally are."

I gather that Poe's main beef with Boston was that many of its literary figures were "didactic."  In other words, Boston's literati tended to be preachy and self righteous.

Poe is not the only literary figure to disparage Boston. In Mr. Blue, Myles Connolly's deeply Catholic novella about a modern-day St. Francis, the book' narrator makes this observation: "The site of the gold dome of the statehouse above the white trees of [Boston] Common almost made me forget what an incoherent, clique-ridden, unproductive settlement Boston is."

Of course, Poe and Connolly's criticisms are dated. Maybe the city has changed from the way it was when Poe and Connolly were alive.  I don't think so. Just a  year ago, Joe Keohane  summarized the popular view of the city in just a few sentences:
For as long as there’s been a Boston, people have hated Boston. The reasons have been impressively consistent across the past two centuries. Bostonians are smug, puritanical, inhospitable, racist and/or pinko, and hopelessly blinkered and insular, and they go about all this in a manner that makes it next to impossible to tell if they’re suffering from the world’s worst inferiority complex or the world’s most gigantic superiority complex (in reality, probably both at once).
And Keohane quotes Drew Magary, who sums up the city of Boston even more succinctly: “People from Boston labor under the mistaken belief that being a relentlessly cynical asshole makes you tough. Endearing, even. They believe their deliberate misery makes them harder and deeper than you.  It’s all BULLSHIT…. "

I agree with all these criticisms of  Boston; and having lived for a few years in the Boston area, I can tell you that they're all true.  And every flaw in Boston's culture is magnified ten times in the city's colleges and universities, which are more common than liquor stores. Indeed, the academic class that infests Boston's higher education institutions makes up the most insufferable segment of Boston's provincial, condescending and arrogant culture.

All across the United States, people foolishly believe that institutions like Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, and a  dozen or so other elite New England universities provide the best quality post-secondary education that money can buy; and hundreds of thousands of young people apply to these institutions every year. They are even willing to borrow large sums of money to finance their studies.

But the elite colleges are empty, hollow, and vain institutions, lacking in all values except the postmodern notion that life is to be lived in the pursuit of fame, wealth, and self-gratification. People should be running as fast as they can from these places instead of clamoring to be admitted.

And Boston, crammed to the gunwales with snooty colleges and universities, is the epicenter of all this. Elitist, self-righteous and preachy, the Boston academic scene represent all that is wrong with American higher education.

And in case you think I am nothing more than an anti-intellectual curmudgeon, I invite you to do a Google search for the words "hate Boston"  (in quotes). You will get more than 31,000 hits.

References

Connolly, Myles (1928). Mr.Blue. Chicago: Loyola Press, 1928.

Seelye, Katharine Q. Edgar Allan Poes' Feud With Boston? Nevermore. New York Times, October 5, 2014, p. 1.

Keohane, Joe. The Burn is Back. Boston Magazine, October 31, 2013.  Accessibel at http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2013/10/31/red-sox-win-boston-back-being-loathed/