Education: May 2004 Archives

This might be interesting to Catholic Light readers, especially since the previous discussion of universities veered off into a discussion about Catholic primary schools:

Jeff Jacoby, a Boston Globe columnist, reports that the Southern Baptists may consider a resolution at their convention "urging the denomination's 16 million members to take their children out of public schools and either home school them or send them to parochial schools."

If this becomes a trend, it's a huge shift for Protestant churches. It used to be that "secular" schools taught an essentially Protestant worldview, complete with Bible readings in many school districts. Therefore, Protestants -- including "good guys" like the Southern Baptists -- have been reluctant to give up on public schools.

This is an entirely good thing. We need more fellow citizens to stand up for the principle that it is parents who raise children with the assistance of the schools, not the other way around. Evangelicals are roughly a third of the electorate, as are Catholics. If we join forces, maybe we can enact the best school reform of all, which is getting the state out of directly running schools altogether.

Peter Wood, a professor at Boston University, weighs in on Senator Kerry's proposal to make college more affordable. I'm posting this because of the comments on my post about the "giant sucking sound" coming from universities siphoning people's money from their wallets. He confirms my thesis that higher education is expensive because of government intervention:

Why is college so expensive? Why does federal aid never really succeed in making college more affordable? These shouldn't be deep mysteries. For over a decade I participated in university meetings aimed at determining my university's annual tuition increases. The only real question was, "How much can we get away with?" And the only real worry was that, if we overreached, we might move to the dreaded top of the list for largest increases. Most years, it fell to me to draft a letter to parents from the Chairman of the Board explaining that the tuition increase reflected this or that combination of new construction projects and programs.

I recall visiting George Mason when Steve Schultz was going there in the early '90s, when Virginia balanced its budget by modest reductions in spending. The university president decided that if the state was going to reduce its subsidy, he would endanger the safety of his students. He didn't quite phrase it like that, but he did order the facilities department to start turning off random street lights for several hours a night, as a "cost-cutting" measure. He could have fired a useless administrators and that would have saved as much money, but instead he wanted to make sure young women would walk around in dark areas so they might be more easily assaulted.

Wood includes an ominous possible explanation for high prices:

But maybe we have just decided that high prices for a college education are a good way to organize our society. Those prices are high enough to discourage large families and to provide a strong incentive for both parents to work.

...which means the price of a college education is another manifestation, not of capitalism run amok, but of the Culture of Death.

Thanks to the happy 7 people who visited this blog and then took the Pepsi survey. My team got an A on the project, in large part because RC helped me with some statistics concepts on Friday evening. Sorry for making you miss "Murder She Wrote" reruns on TNT, RC. :)