College Is Wildly Exploitative: Why Aren’t Students Raising Hell?

[Ptarmigan]

College Is Wildly Exploitative: Why Aren’t Students Raising Hell?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026913680

Colleges are sadly indoctrination factories. Their tuition are rising faster than inflation.

marmar (67,219 posts)

College Is Wildly Exploitative: Why Aren’t Students Raising Hell?

By David Masciotra, the author of Mellencamp: American Troubadour (University Press of Kentucky). He has also written for Salon, the Atlantic and the Los Angeles Review of Books.


Higher education wears the cloak of liberalism, but in policy and practice, it can be a corrupt and cutthroat system of power and exploitation. It benefits immensely from right-wing McCarthy wannabes, who in an effort to restrict academic freedom and silence political dissent, depict universities as left-wing indoctrination centers.

But the reality is that while college administrators might affix “down with the man” stickers on their office doors, many prop up a system that is severely unfair to American students and professors, a shocking number of whom struggle to make ends meet. Even the most elementary level of political science instructs that politics is about power. Power, in America, is about money: who has it? Who does not have it? Who is accumulating it? Who is losing it? Where is it going?

Four hundred faculty members at New York University, one of the nation’s most expensive schools, recently released a report on how their own place of employment, legally a nonprofit institution, has become a predatory business, hardly any different in ethical practice or economic procedure than a sleazy storefront payday loan operator. Its title succinctly summarizes the new intellectual discipline deans and regents have learned to master: “The Art of The Gouge.”

The result of their investigation reads as if Charles Dickens and Franz Kafka collaborated on notes for a novel. Administrators not only continue to raise tuition at staggering rates, but they burden their students with inexplicable fees, high cost burdens and expensive requirements like mandatory study abroad programs. When students question the basis of their charges, much of them hidden during the enrollment and registration phases, they find themselves lost in a tornadic swirl of forms, automated answering services and other bureaucratic debris. ............(more)

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/06/college-is-wildly-exploitative-why-arent-students-raising-hell.html

SheilaT (18,055 posts)
3. Lots of reasons.

I think the chief one is that most college students are simply too young and too inexperienced in the world to understand what's going on.

The parents also just don't get it. More than once I've had conversations with parents of kids getting ready to go off to college and they simply don't understand how expensive it's going to be to borrow all that money, and how almost all of the seemingly generous financial aid package is loans, or how the aid will drop precipitously after freshman year.

Mandatory study abroad programs? I'll confess I hadn't run across that one before.

In the end, people need to read EVERYTHING, especially the fine print. Don't be afraid to ask hard questions. Get your kid to understand it's not the end of the world if she doesn't get to Expensive Glamorous College a Long Way From Home to major in some field where there are no jobs, but instead goes to the local community college and maybe even takes a two year certificate program that leads to employment.

A while back someone here on DU was telling me that the only time most people would have to study various academic things (art history, anthropology, 17th century French literature, and such) was when young and first going to college and that (in the eyes of this member) it was simply not possible to ever get back to those things later. My opinion was and is quite different. Get a practical degree of some sort (which could also be traditional B.A. and then a Masters), get decent work, and if you still want to study early Roman lesbians, go for it.

Many years ago someone pointed out to me that one of the best things about this country was that you were never totally shut out of higher education. You can always go back to school and get more learning or another degree.

Too many people go to college with all the government loans and non-government loans.

Warpy (83,153 posts)
4. They're terrified of the amount of debt they're racking up

and that keeps them silent on the plight of their (adjunct) professors.

They get louder once they're out.

When the highest paid person in your state is a college football coach, SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG WITH THIS WHOLE PICTURE.

Football coaches get paid mostly from endorsements, marketing, and media.

Who Pays the College Coach
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122853304793584959

[Big Dog]

Warpy (83,153 posts)
4. They're terrified of the amount of debt they're racking up

and that keeps them silent on the plight of their (adjunct) professors.

They get louder once they're out.

When the highest paid person in your state is a college football coach, SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG WITH THIS WHOLE PICTURE.

Everything Warpy knows about success in life can be summed up in one word: Earwigs.

[98ZJUSMC]

Higher education wears the cloak of liberalism, but in policy and practice, it can be a corrupt and cutthroat system of power and exploitation. It benefits immensely from right-wing McCarthy wannabes,  Huh? who in an effort to restrict academic freedom Who is?    and silence political dissent,  depict universities as left-wing indoctrination centers.

Yes, El Guapo.

[Big Dog]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiRGRvE_Wqg[/youtube]

[JohnnyReb]

Everything Warpy knows about success in life can be summed up in one word: Earwigs.

Is that anything like the "ear worms" in my corn?

[Big Dog]

Is that anything like the "ear worms" in my corn?

Didn't Warpy get fired from a job  because she talked out of school about earwigs?

[franksolich]

Didn't Warpy get fired from a job  because she talked out of school about earwigs?

Nope, that was the bitter old Vermontese cali primitive.

Warpy, she with the face like Hindenberg's, is the defrocked nurse who lives down over in New Mexico, near the "four corners."  Warpy hates everything and anything that moves.  And that doesn't move, too.

[Big Dog]

Nope, that was the bitter old Vermontese cali primitive.

Warpy, she with the face like Hindenberg's, is the defrocked nurse who lives down over in New Mexico, near the "four corners."  Warpy hates everything and anything that moves.  And that doesn't move, too.

Thanks for the correction.

So everything Warpy knows about success can be summed up in one phrase: "prescription drug abuse".

[Mary Ann]

Might be worthwhile to link to Cali's Wallduding episode.

Ah, good times.

[Delmar]

Higher education wears the cloak of liberalism, but in policy and practice, it can be a corrupt and cutthroat system of power and exploitation.

Not just higher education, the whole leftist democrat power structure wears the cloak of liberalism while in policy and practice exists as a corrupt and cutthroat system of power and exploitation. 

That's why the Valerie Jarretts of the democrat party are living like royalty and you lurking primitives are living in squalor.

[franksolich]

Might be worthwhile to link to Cali's Wallduding episode.

Ah, good times.

Now, tell me.  I did a search, and came up blank.

Our distinguished colleague notADUmmie was the one who originally posted the thread, not having the slightest idea it was going to turn out the way it did.  So that's the name I entered in that field.

And then "cali" for a search word.

Nada.

"cali" of course is a problem, because one gets "California" and all that other stuff, but naming the original poster should've taken me right to the thread, I think.  But it didn't.

[Carl]

Colleges drank up the free money and wiped their asses with it as a stripper would.
It is what always happens when there is no accountability.

[ChuckJ]

Now, tell me.  I did a search, and came up blank.

Our distinguished colleague notADUmmie was the one who originally posted the thread, not having the slightest idea it was going to turn out the way it did.  So that's the name I entered in that field.

And then "cali" for a search word.

Nada.

"cali" of course is a problem, because one gets "California" and all that other stuff, but naming the original poster should've taken me right to the thread, I think.  But it didn't.

Here you go--- http://conservativecave.com/index.php?topic=62285.0

I just searched "earwigs".

[98ZJUSMC]

Many years ago someone pointed out to me that one of the best things about this country was that you were never totally shut out of higher education. You can always go back to school and get more learning or another degree.

Heh...... try that in your beloved Europe when the all-knowing board doesn't approve it and all they did approve was a trade school in plumbing.

[Chris_]

marmar (67,219 posts)

College Is Wildly Exploitative

It's another self-inflicted problem created by yet more government.  The list is as endless as the number of faceless bureaucracies hidden in the federal government.

[RayRaytheSBS]

It's another self-inflicted problem created by yet more government.  The list is as endless as the number of faceless bureaucracies hidden in the federal government.

Just like our healthcare now. Bring on the death panels, obamacare is here to stay.

[obumazombie]

Here you go--- http://conservativecave.com/index.php?topic=62285.0

I just searched "earwigs".

I just read the thread you linked to.
An all time classic.
I don't think I was a member of the forum at the time of the thread.
But if I was, shame on me for not seeing it.

As for this thread, so as not to derail it so much, every college I have ever been to starts raising hell right around Greek Week.