Saturday, December 12, 2020

"You can go to hell. I'm going to Texas." Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and Tesla are heeding Davy Crockett's advice

 Davy Crockett went to Texas after he lost his seat in Congress.  "You can go to hell," he told his political enemies. "I'm going to Texas."

That decision didn't work out so well for Davy. He was killed in the Alamo by Santa Anna's army. 

Despite Davy Crockett's bad luck, many Americans are heeding his advice and moving to Texas.  Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and Tesla are three corporate giants relocating to Texas from California, and thousands of individual Californians are making the same move. 

I think they are making the right decision. Many people have migrated to Texas since the day the Alamo fell, and most of them have prospered. I am one of those people. I went to Texas as a young man and graduated with honors from the University of Texas Law School in 1980. Forty years later, it is still my proudest professional achievement.

Even as a child growing up in Oklahoma, I knew that Texas was different from the rest of the United States. My family occasionally visited my Aunt Ann and Uncle Grady, who lived in Borger, Texas, in the bleak Texas panhandle. As we crossed the Texas border on old Route 66 in our 1958 Chevy, I would see that Lone Star flag snapping in the Texas breeze, and I knew things were better on the Texas side of the border.  

What does Texas have that the rest of America doesn't? I think it is a distinct heritage that Texans remember on at least a subliminal level--a legacy of courage, risk-taking, and supreme self-confidence.  

Texas, after all, is the only state to have once been an independent nation.  For ten years--from 1836 until 1846--Texas was on its own, and it organized its own defense against the marauding Comanches--the world's finest and most ruthless light cavalry. 

Ed Bruce perfectly expresses my sentiments about the Lone Star state:

When I die, I may not go to heaven.
'Cause I don't know if they let cowboys in
If they don't, just let me go to Texas
Texas is as close as I've been

I'm 74 years old now, one year closer to death than I was a year ago. I once comforted myself in the belief that my end would be marked by a Catholic funeral Mass. But that won't be happening.

So now my instructions are these. When I die, just let me go to Texas. I wish to be cremated and my ashes scattered over the upper Colorado River near the historic Regency Bridge in West Texas.

It will comfort me to know that my friends and family will assemble somewhere to eat Texas barbeque after my ashes are scattered. I hope they will commemorate my life by toasting me with cold bottles of Shiner Bock and perhaps listening to some of my favorite songs. 

Maybe the immortal Ernest Tubb will croak out the words of Waltz Across Texas. Perhaps someone will play a recording of the Texas Playboys playing Roly Poly, Big Ball's in Cowtown, and  San Antonio Rose

When my friends gather for my farewell party, I  hope they will listen to Johnny Rodriguez's rendition of We Believe in Happy EndingsIf so, that will certainly be good enough for me.



Shiner: "The beer your mother would want you to drink if she knew you were drinking."







Thursday, December 10, 2020

"My neighbor burns trash in a barrel out back": And why the hell not?

 It is the province of the elderly to lament the good old days when life was sweeter, and it is the province of the young to scoff at such nonsense.

Nevertheless, I recently heard a tune by a band called Southern Culture on the Skids titled "My neighbor burns trash in a barrel out back," and it made me think of my childhood in Anadarko, Oklahoma.  

Our family indeed burned trash in a barrel out back, but as far as I know, we never set anyone's house on fire. Of course, some things don't burn--empty cans of Demonte green beans, milk bottles, etc.  So my father took the noncombustible stuff to the town dump, which was located on the bank of the majestic Washita River.  Hell, everyone did that.

I remember going with my dad on a dump run when I was about four, and he allowed me to play in a gigantic pile of rusty tin cans. I slipped and fell and got a nasty cut on my wrist. Seventy years later, I still see the scar--a reminder of happy times!

When I was a kid, small-town Oklahomans believed in the constitutional right to own guns, but fortunately, most of us were too poor to buy one. We also held a strong belief in our dogs' common-law right to run freely about the neighborhood, pooping where they chose.

Most dogs exercised this right responsibly, but there were a few renegades. My childhood friends will remember Captain, a vicious collie that became a legend in southwestern Oklahoma. Although he looked exactly like the kindly Lassie we saw on television, he was, in fact, a terrorist. He was the anti-Lassie.

Captain struck a primal fear into the hearts of every child in Anadarko. This ruthless sociopath was known to visit Sunset Elementary School for the sole purpose of biting small children during recess.  I'm not making that up. Captain knew when the kids let out for morning playtime, and he traveled eight blocks from his abode on Colorado Street to maim schoolkids.

As a paperboy, Captain would occasionally ambush me on my paper route, but I developed a tactic for dealing with him.

 I carried a few extra newspapers in my canvas newspaper bag, which I rolled up tightly with rubber bands.  When Captain loped out of a ligustrum hedge to bite me, I would tuck my legs up high on my bike and pelt the son of a bitch with old copies of the Anadarko Daily News.

After a couple of encounters, Captain left me alone.

The town fathers (and mothers) were powerless to stop Captain from biting the citizenry. But finally, some high-school kids from the nearby town of Fort Cobb dispensed vigilante justice. They caught the dog, tied him to a chain, and dragged him behind a car through the streets of Anadarko until he died.

 It was sort of an Oklahoma version of The Magnificent Seven. The townsfolk were deeply grateful.

My family was poor when I was a child. I know that now because I remember the food we ate. We made grilled cheese sandwiches out of Velveeta, not cheddar, and we often ate Spam for dinner--scored of course so that it looked a bit like a grilled steak. And we put margarine on our baked potatoes, not butter. 

Then, there were those lunchmeat sandwiches, which we dressed with Miraclewhip instead of mayonnaise because Miraclewhip was cheaper.  Baloney, Oliveloaf, Liverwurst, cold hot dogs pressed between two slices of Wonderbread. If I had a dollar for every lunchmeat sandwich I ate as a kid, I could retire to the Caymans.

When I was about five, I remember coming home from our neighborhood grocery store, which an elderly woman operated in the front room of her house. Maybe I went there to buy a pack of Kool-Aid, which only cost a nickel.

While I was in the store, an older kid told me I was poor, and I went home crying.

But my mother told me that was nonsense. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. We lived on the east side of town, it was true, but at least our renthouse was west of the railroad tracks.  The kids who lived on the east side of the tracks--the kids who lived near the stockyards or the peanut mill--now those kids were poor. 

Gradually, imperceptibly in my child's eyes, my mother and father clawed their way into the middle class--where, we believed, we had always belonged. After I went away to college, my parents' status elevated to an even higher level. My parents repudiated their blood-oath loyalty to Chevrolet and began driving Buicks.  They built a house with two full bathrooms--two!

Do I miss my childhood days in Anadarko? Decidedly, I do not. 

But I have a growing respect for all the families who scratched out a living in small towns like Anadarko back in the 1960s. Some were middle class, but most of them were poor--at least by present-day standards. These families shared one bathroom, and dad bought retread tires to keep the family car on the road. Kids picked up soda bottles on the side of the road to claim the 2-cent deposit.

To live like that now would seriously depress me. But, curiously, when I was a child, the way my family lived was enough.

Anadarko: dogs could roam where they pleased, and nobody was poor!







Wednesday, December 9, 2020

A good news/bad news joke: American universities awarded 55,000 doctoral degrees in 2019

 First, the good news. American universities cranked out 55,000 doctoral degrees last year, slightly more than the year before. 

Now the bad news. American universities cranked out 55,000 doctoral degrees last year, slightly more than the year before.

Our nation's tired universities are investing some of their dwindling resources into ginning out more graduate degrees. Why? Because the population of undergraduate students is shrinking and graduate programs command higher tuition rates.  For example, Baylor University has about 400 doctoral students in its Ph.D. program in curriculum studies, and it hopes to enroll more.

But do we need more Ph. D.s? Probably not. And why is that? Because many people will not get the salaries that they will need to justify the cost of their doctoral studies.

Maren Wood, who was interviewed by Inside Higher Ed, is a Ph.D. career advisor and founder of Beyond the Professoriate. She is troubled by the fact that doctorate recipients in fields with the highest median cumulative debt have the lowest median expected salaries. Less than half the recipients of doctoral degrees in education graduate without debt.

Traditionally, people with Ph.D.s could find jobs in academia, but that market is drying up--particularly in the soft disciplines--education, humanities, and social sciences.  Colleges across the country are slashing positions in the liberal arts due to declining interest in those fields.  

Ms. Woods advises doctoral graduates to consider private-sector careers outside the academic sector. But is that realistic?  The University of Texas offers a Ph.D. in African and African Diaspora Studies. But what does that qualify a graduate to do other than get a job teaching African and African Diaspora Studies?

Woods' advice is similar to the reassurances that law-school students sometimes receive as they face the prospect of a crumbling job market.  A law degree is a versatile degree, people say soothingly. I once gave this advice myself.

But Paul Campos, a law professor, poured cold water on this argument in Don't Go To Law School (Unless)

Far from being "versatile," a law degree can turn into a toxic asset for law school graduates who, by choice or necessity, look for work outside the legal profession. If you go to law school and end up not practicing law, there's a real risk that you'll find your law degree is actually worse than worthless, and that you would have been better off not getting it even if you could have gotten your degree for free.

Some law firms have an aversion to hiring J.D. graduates as paralegals, even though those individuals are exceptionally qualified for a paralegal's job. Why pay an attorney who could not get a job in his or her chosen field and take the risk that the lawyer will resent working in a legal support role?

And think about it. If you are applying for a job in the business sector, will your Ph.D. in medieval history help you or hurt you? 

Speaking for myself, I believe my doctorate from Harvard actually had a negative impact in some settings. Some people associate Harvard with a certain snootiness or arrogance.  Who wants to hire a snob when there is a congenial person with a Ph.D. from a respected state university?

Occasionally, I blurted out that my doctorate from Harvard is damned near worthless and that I wish I had never gone there. But that confession hardly helped my employment prospects. Basically, that admission just confirms in an employer's mind what I have long known to be true: I was smart enough to get into Harvard but not smart enough to avoid the damned place.

So, take the advice of an overeducated curmudgeon.  If you don't have a firm idea about what you will do with a Ph.D., don't get one.  And for God's sake, don't take out student loans to obtain a doctorate in gender studies.

On the other hand, if you are already a doctoral student in a field with dismal job prospects, don't delay your completion date to avoid a bad job market. I agree entirely with what Ms. Wood said about that strategy. "[R]un, don't walk, out of academia."






Three professors propose a complicated plan to protect private student-loan debtors: But isn't there a simple solution?

 Leaves of Grass,  director Tim Blake Nelson's cinematic paean to Oklahoma culture, tells a story about  Bill and Brady Kincaid, twin brothers who grew up in Little Dixie (southeastern Oklahoma). Edward Norton brilliantly plays both parts. 

Bill Kincaid escapes his redneck upbringing, improves his diction, and becomes a philosophy professor at Brown University. Brady, his twin brother, remains in Oklahoma, where he retains his Oklahoma accent and grows hydroponic marijuana.

When Professor Bill reluctantly returns to his roots, Brady, the stay-at-home brother, tells Bill that he reads all of Bill's scholarly publications.  Brady observes that Bill and his colleagues never write about a topic; instead, they write about what other scholars have written.  Professor Bill admits this is true.

"Well," Brady says with a perfect Oklahoma twang, "Why don't I write a book for all y'all, and I'll title it What's the F-cking Point?

I thought about this line from Leaves of Grass after perusing a scholarly article written by Professors Prentis Cox, Judith Fox, and Stacey Tutt.  The three wrote about a serious public policy problem: private student-loan borrowers' lack of consumer protection from fraud and abuse.

Cox, Fox, and Tutt are right.  Students have taken out about $150 billion in private student loans, and these loans do not have the consumer protections afforded to federal-loan borrowers.

 Besides, most private lenders require students to get a co-signer on their loans---usually mom or dad. Students and their parents who run into financial trouble can't discharge these loans in bankruptcy unless they can show "undue hardship"--a standard that is almost impossible to meet.

These scholars examined this problem in great detail; their law review article is 59 pages long, comprises 27,000 words, and is buttressed by 323 footnotes.  What do they recommend?

The authors propose the passage of two model statutes by all 50 state legislatures that would correct the evils they identified.  The first statute is titled the Private Student Borrowers Protection Act, and the second law is labeled the Private Student Loan Mediation Act.

I have a couple of questions about the Cox, Fox, and Tutt proposal:

First, what are the chances that even one state legislature will pass either of these laws? I would say zero.

Second, how many people will even read the professors' turgid, footnote-studded article?  And by reading, I don't mean skimming over the introduction and conclusion as I did.  How many people will read the whole damn thing--all 59 pages, all 27,000 words, all 323 footnotes?  I would say about two dozen.

I don't mean to denigrate academic endeavors. Some scholarly topics are complicated; I understand that. But--let's not overthink things. 

Private student loans are onerous and predatory for two reasons: 1) the banks require co-signers for these loans, and 2) the student borrower and the co-signer are virtually barred from bankruptcy relief--even if they are insolvent.

I have a proposal for addressing these problems, and it is only nine words long: Delete the "undue hardship" language from the Bankruptcy Code.

Virtually everyone agrees that the federal student loan program and the private student-loan industry have created a shit show for people who just want to get a college degree.  Federal and private student loans have saddled millions of Americans with massive student-loan debt they can't repay. Politicians, professors, and public-policy wonks all have solutions, but most of these solutions protect the status quo. 

Everyone wants to fix the student-loan program, but most reformers don't want to stem the flow of federal and private-loan money into college coffers. Like drug addicts, the universities must get their regular infusions of borrowed cash--even if they ruin their students' lives.

But if Congress would just strike the undue hardship language from the Bankruptcy Code, then student loans would be treated like any other consumer debt.  That single change would allow distressed student debtors to get relief from onerous loans in the bankruptcy courts.  

But nobody wants to do the obvious and straightforward thing. Most reformers just want to add elaborate, bureaucratic trappings to a con game that keeps the student-loan scam alive for a few more years.  

But isn't it time for Americans to ask the question Brady Kincaid asked his philosopher brother: "What's the f-cking point?

Redneck Brady, to his twin brother, Professor Bill: "What's the f-cking point?"

References

Prentiss Cox, Judith Fox, & Stacy Tutt. Forgotten Borrowers: Protecting Private Student Loan Borrowers Through State Law.  11 University of California-Irvine Law Review 43 (2020).

Tuesday, December 8, 2020

Going to college doesn't guarantee a middle-class lifestyle

 When I was a kid, my family would mark the holiday season by driving to Oklahoma City to do our Christmas shopping.

We always made three stops. We would drop by the Sears store, which was a treat for me because it had escalators, and popcorn was always popping on the first floor. Popcorn and escalators! I was in heaven.

Our family would also visit Brown's Department Store, one of those old-fashioned multi-story affairs in the heart of downtown Oklahoma City.  Brown's had elevators--not escalators, and each floor was devoted to one or two retail sectors--menswear, womenswear, appliances, etc.

We usually had lunch at Beverly's restaurant on 23rd Street--one of a family-owned chain of eateries specializing in "Chicken in the Rough," which meant fried chicken in a basket of french fries, accompanied by delicious rolls that I could slather with butter and honey.

The Fosseys were a frugal family, and my parents drove a Chevrolet as an emblem of our sober lifestyle.  If we ordered Chicken-in-the-Rough, my brother and I would split the plate. We each got one piece of chicken and a handful of fries.

I associate all those places with my family's dogged aspiration to be part of the middle-class. But Brown's Department Store is gone now, Sears is gone, and Beverly's is gone.  And perhaps that is appropriate because the American middle class is fading away, just like the department stores and family-owned restaurants.

Jason Del Rey, writing for Vox, wrote that department stores and the middle class are dying together.  According to one prediction, more than half of all mall-based department stores will close by the end of next year. 

And the middle class is shrinking as well.

"Since the Great Depression began in late 2007," De Rey observed, "the vast majority of income growth in the US has gone to high-income households, squeezing middle-class households and altering the way they spend money." In a 2018 study, the Deloitte consulting firm reported that "the middle 40 percent of the country saw its income shrink in the previous decade, while $8 out f every $10 in income growth nationwide went to high-income households" (as reported by Del Rey).

If you considered yourself to be a middle-class person ten years ago, it is a good bet that you don't think of yourself as middle-class today. Our income doesn't go as far as it once did, and we no longer expect our incomes and lifestyles to improve.

Not only is the middle class seeing a decline in income, but it also sees a decline in its status.  Middle-class people once lived in the Heartland. Now they live in flyover country. Middle-class people once took pride in their patriotism.  Now the media elite label that patriotic instinct is as white nationalism.

And if America's middle class is dying--and it is--our nation's colleges and universities have their fingerprints on the dagger that stabbed it in the heart.  Millions of American young people are taking out student loans in the naive hope that a college degree will improve their economic status, but they are being scammed.  

The biggest rubes are the ones who get degrees in the soft majors--liberal arts, humanities, social sciences, ethnic studies, etc. After spending a lifetime in academic settings, I see now that degrees in these fields were always dubious. But at least history majors were forced to write essays and familiarize themselves with some of Western civilization's significant events.

Now, most students get As, and the professors are too lazy to read term papers. The broad themes of our American heritage have been repackaged into ethnic studies taught by card-carrying members of the cancel culture.  

Tragically, young people are taking out student loans to pay for this gibberish. When they graduate, they are saddled with unpayable debt, and they can't get a job that pays a middle-class wage. 

So if you are one of those people who went deep into debt for a degree in Inequality Studies and find yourself working at McDonald's, this is my advice. When your former professor shows up and orders a Big Mac--the one who taught you nothing useful--spit in his burger.






Monday, December 7, 2020

Is massive student-loan forgiveness off the table? The insiders prefer long-term, income-based repayment plans and that's what student debtors are likely to get

Remember the heady days of the 2020 presidential primaries? Democratic nominees proposed massive student-loan forgiveness, and some promised a free college education. 

This is what Vice President Joe Biden promised last April:

The concept I’m announcing today will align my student debt relief proposal with my forward-looking college tuition proposal. Under this plan, I propose to forgive all undergraduate tuition-related federal student debt from two- and four-year public colleges and universities for debt-holders earning up to $125,000. . . . The federal government would pay the monthly payment in lieu of the borrower until the forgivable portion of the loan was paid off. This benefit would also apply to individuals holding federal student loans for tuition from private HBCUs and MSIs.

But the election is over, and the political insiders have had time to reflect on massive loan forgiveness. As the Washington Post editorialized just a few days ago,

[W]wholesale debt relief is actually the antithesis of progressive policy. Most benefits would flow to upper-income households, which, despite the undeniable burden of debt for lower-income families, actually owes a disproportionate share of the total [student-loan] dollars. 

 The Post disapproves of the relief plan put forward by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Charles Schumer.  They want Biden to forgive student-loan debt up to $50,000 per borrower.  Biden himself has trimmed back his April proposal and now only wants Congress to forgive $10,000 in student debt.

I think massive student-loan relief is off the table. Instead, I think the Department of Education--acting with or without Congressional action--is more likely to offer more generous income-based repayment plans.

In fact, that is exactly what the Washington Post is endorsing. Citing a study by Sylvain  Catherine and Constantine Yanellis, the Post says the feds should "mak[e] sure that everyone who qualifies enrolls in an existing plan that links repayment to a borrower's income."

But tinkering with income-based repayment plans (IBRPs) will not solve the student-loan crisis. 

Nine million people are in them now, and virtually none of them are paying down the principal on their loans.  College borrowers who stick it out will eventually get their student loans forgiven, but the canceled debt is considered taxable income by the Internal Revenue Service.

Making IBRPs more generous, which the new administration might do, is just a student-loan forgiveness program in disguise.  It would do nothing to change the status quo, allowing students to borrow too much money to attend college and the universities to charge tuition that is far too high.

As Steve Rhode argued in a recent essay, the solution to the student-loan crisis is to ease restrictions on bankruptcy relief for distressed college-loan borrowers.  All that needs to be done is to remove the "undue hardship" language from the Bankruptcy Code and allow student-loan debtors who are truly insolvent to discharge their loans in bankruptcy.

But perhaps that solution is too simple for the crafty minds of our politicians and our college leaders.  Instead of giving student borrowers a fresh start in bankruptcy,  they will likely concoct another complicated and labyrinthine IBRP.







Saturday, December 5, 2020

Parent Plus Loans at Historically Black Colleges: Should Parents Jeopardize Their Financial Future so their Children Can Go to an HBCU?

Andrea Fuller and Josh Mitchell of the Wall Street Journal have done some excellent reporting over the years on the student-loan crisis. Fuller and Miller recently published a WSJ article about poor and middle-class parents who take on substantial debt to help pay their children's college expenses. Most of these parents signed up for Parent Plus loans offered by the U.S. Department of Education.

You might think that parents whose children are enrolled at elite private colleges would be the ones with the biggest Parent Plus loans, but you would be wrong. According to Fuller and Mitchell,

The schools with the largest parent debt burdens aren't world-famous Ivy League schools . . . Rather, they include art schools, historically Black colleges and small private colleges where parents are borrowing nearly six-figure amounts to fulfill their children's college dreams . . . .

According to the article, the college where parents borrowed the most money for their children's schooling was Spelman College in Georgia, a historically Black institution.  Among parents who took out federal loans for their kids, the average amount was $112,127.  Among low-income families, the average amount was more than $83,000.

Keep in mind that the money parents borrow through the Parent Plus program is in addition to the student loans that their children took out themselves. 

Fuller and Mitchell's article contains a handy feature that allows readers to type in the name of an American college and learn the average amount of parent debt at that institution. I ran the numbers for some prominent HBCUs, and parent debt at several of these institutions is quite high.

Median By School

All Recipients

Low-Income Recipients

Spelman College, GA

$112,127

$83,894

Morehouse College, GA

$79,000

$48,862

Howard University, DC

$66,728

$52,145

Hampton University, VA

$73,244

$47,974

Clark Atlanta University, GA

$66,359

$40,095

Johnson C. Smith University

$28,586

$20,166

These numbers are disturbing. Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that the Wall Street Journal's school-reporting mechanism had no figures at all for several HBCUs.  For example, the feature reported no data for Jarvis Christian College in northeastern Texas; Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas; and Miles College in Alabama. All three colleges are HBCUs.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, 20 percent of African American parents who took out  Parent Plus loans in 2003-2004 defaulted on those loans by 2015. In other words, Black parents who take out Parent Plus loans to help their kids pay for college are running a one-in-five chance of being financially ruined.

All progressive-minded people support the historically Black colleges and universities and believe they should be adequately funded. But we should also think about the students who attend HBCUs and their parents as well. 

Perhaps the best thing we could do to protect African American parents from risking their own financial security would be to eliminate the Parent Plus loan program altogether.