TheMillerCircle.org

I have always very strongly believed that America should provide a free college education to those who qualify and attend and every person of college age should be encouraged and supported to do so. I look, as everyone else should, towards the University of California (UC) system of higher education that Clark Kerr put together after WW II (but greatly accelerated and refined by our reraction to Sputnik), when Federal Investments in building up universities began. The California system, with three different tiers of college levels (research universities, state system and community system), with free tuition, played a big role in helping California build up its sophisticated university system into the greatest public higher education system in the World. And, it stimulated the growth of the middle class and promoted their stability through the educational process and its accessibility. An educated work force coupled to outstanding research universities was a big factor in producing Silicon Valley and the more recent surge in biotech companies in the San Diego area. California, more than any other state showed that higher education could be the source of a great growth industry.

Unfortunately, our best national model for higher education began to deteriorate under……guess who? Yes, when Ronald Reagan became governor of California he adopted a hostile attitude towards Kerr who was perceived to be too lenient towards students at Berkeley during the “Free Speech Movement” of the 1960s. The FBI collaborated with Reagan and a conservative UC Regent Edwin Pauley to produce false documents which painted Kerr as a “subversive” and led to his dismissal as the University of California President in 1967, a position he had occupied from 1958, after being the Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley. Reagan’s hostility towards the higher education model that Kerr had put in place was coupled with the introduction of tution in the UC system for the first time. Once he became President, Reagan, like all his Republican friends to follow, would choose to emphatically promote the growth of the military, while reducing subsidies to higher education and further reducing access to universiites for young Americans. Today the level of debt that an undergraduate can generate during four years of college is staggering and inhibits the college option for many of our students. For far too many of our college graduates, the kind of jobs available to them place doubts on the value of a college degree, particularly one so laden with debt.

Lyndon Johnson wanted to make Kerr his Secretary of Health Education and Welfare, but a background check from the FBI, in which they used the same documents that they themselves had falsified, led to his removal from the candidate list. Thus, one of the great educational geniuses of the 20th century was expunged by the right-wing political machinery of America, which helped to pave the way for Reaganism, our free market economy and the huge, on-going disinvestment in the middle class of America.
When Bill Clinton was elected President, he moved to make the Federal Government a bigger player in the student loan program to reduce loan costs to students and he put a plan in play to do so in 1994. He and the Democrats thought that their plan would eventually make the Federal Government the main source of funds for student loans and reduce the costs to the student and the government. But banks and other lending institutions revolted and tried to find ways to minimize the Federal Government as the principal player for student loans and the Bush administration has encouraged a move favoring less direct government involvement and more participation from private lendings sources. According to the NYT article “President Bush’s budget reports that in 2006 for every $100 lent by private lenders, the cost to the government of subsidies, defaults and other items was $13.81, while the same amount lent through the direct loan program cost the government $3.85. The battle for dominance in the loan market has escalated as tuitions have soared and students have borrowed more.” Our national and state policies have pushed higher education beyond what many people can afford. Bright people who could have better lives with more education are increasingly unable to afford college, especially those from the lower rungs of the economic strata. In the meantime, Bush has helped to create another government feeding trough for private student loans, where the government subsidizes banks to make profitable loans because the government protects them against student defaults. Today, the Federal government’s direct student loan program covers less that 1/4 of the total student loans. But, the magnitude of the student loan program has dramatically increased from $30 billion a decade ago to $85 billion for 2005-06. As a country, we seem no longer interested in what the magnitude of this debt for students is, but only whether the students will pay it back on time. Meanwhile commercial banks do rather well with this program and that is why they fight hard to keep the program in their sandbox.