The Objectivist
HAS THE UNITED STATES ACHIEVED GENDER EQUALITY?
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
3/29/06
Sadly, radical feminism is alive and well. On campuses, government offices, and courthouses, there are still endless discussions of glass ceilings and old boys’ networks. These parables are then used to justify preferential treatment in government hiring and contracts, litigation involving claims of sex discrimination, women’s studies departments in academia, and year-of-the-woman articles about politics. That this intellectual movement is still going strong despite the achievement of gender equality in the United States is testament to the power of intellectual inertia.
If we look at many of the usual indicators of well-being, U.S. women are doing better than men. They live four years longer and work fewer hours even when time spent on housework and childcare is factored in. Women are also significantly less likely to be injured in a variety of contexts. They are less likely to commit suicide, injured or killed at work, and victims of violent crimes. Women also have more educational success. They are more likely to graduate from high school, attend college (the ratio of women to men first-year students is 58:42 and young men drop out more readily than do young women), and earn master’s degrees. They get better grades and are less likely to be put in special education classes.
The radical-feminist claim that women haven’t achieved equality often focuses on the supposed wage gap. Here too the data doesn’t support their claim. As Warren Farrell in Why Men Earn More points out, women get paid less because of the choices they make. This appears to be the result of firms taking into account women’s propensity to take jobs requiring less time and being less likely to take jobs that that pay more. Women don’t work as much as men. Specifically, they work fewer hours, have fewer years of experience, have fewer years of uninterrupted experience, work fewer weeks during the year, are absent more often, and commute less far. They also don’t take jobs that pay more due to greater risk, worse shifts, unpleasant environments, greater hazards, higher stress, greater travel, and relocation. That this is not the result of discrimination can be seen in that when factors such as marriage and children are screened out, the wage gap, at least in some cases, disappears.
When the differences in men’s and women’s income does show up it reflects differences in work habits rather than discrimination. For example, what employer wouldn’t view woman applicants more skeptically given that working women are eight times as likely to spend four or more years out of the labor force than are men, nearly nine times more likely than a man to leave the workplace for six months or longer for family reasons, and lose about twice as much time from the workplace as men?
The differential assignment of work and of housework and childcare reflects women’s choices. That these choices were freely made can be seen in that they are made by many of society’s richest and brightest women. For example, graduates of Yale University and Harvard Business School make the same choices.
The evidence simply is not on the radical feminists’ side. They shouldn’t be taken seriously.
***
The Constructivist
THOSE DARN RADICAL FEMINISTS
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
3/29/06
Those darn radical feminists are at it again, marshalling their evil powers of gossip and rumor-mongering to make it seem as if the perfectly rational decisions to pay women less than men for the same work or keep them from positions of real authority are discriminatory. If women want to have babies, they had better get used to being paid less than men—it’s as simple as that. We all should follow The Objectivist’s sensible advice to tune out their nagging that this amounts to sexism. So what if his evidence is taken from a self-help book by a men’s movement guru angling for a spot on Oprah? With a guy like that on his side, even the most highly credentialed feminists must realize it’s high time to sit down and shut up.
I mean, come on, we have, what, like 81 women in the 109th U.S. Congress, right? There may be a dozen female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies by now. How many more do we need?
Sexism? Please! There’s even a woman playing a U.S. President on TV these days. How much more evidence of progress can you ask for? Wait a second—her show got renewed while one with a male President got cancelled? Ooh—reverse discrimination! The liberal media strikes again!
It’s high time for radical feminists to face up to the simple fact that we’re living in a golden age for American women and girls. Look at all the great opportunities for advancement they have in Wal-Mart and the service industry (see Liza Featherstone’s Selling Women Short and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed). Take a peek at how great the women working in America’s sweatshops have it (try Edna Bonacich and Richard Appelbaum’s Behind the Label). How about domestic service? Priceless (see Grace Chang’s Disposable Domestics and the 10th anniversary edition of Mary Romero’s Maid in the USA). Forget Barbietopia—middle-class American women today are living in a veritable gendertopia. As Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School Elizabeth Warren reports in a recent issue of Harvard Magazine, families with both parents working to support their children “have about $1,500 less for discretionary spending than their one-income counterparts of a generation ago” (see The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke for the full story).
Man, keeping to the right-wing party line is so hard! (No, I’m not talking about keeping a straight face while you’re doing it—why do you ask?) It just so happens that every book I’ve cited in the previous paragraph was written by one or more feminists—not a politically correct move for an aspiring wingnut in the making and on the make to have made. It’s getting so darn hard to tell what’s “radical” or “feminist” these days!
The fact is, The Objectivist wouldn’t recognize a radical feminist if Alice Echols and Ellen Willis’s Daring to Be Bad or Denise Thompson’s Radical Feminism Today were to fall off his bookshelf and land on his...head. It’s liberal feminists who advance the position that few people under 40 disagree with today—that women should be judged as individuals, not profiled by gender, in the workplace. Why he goes out of his way to antagonize the very feminists who share his fundamental belief that individuals ought to be rewarded for their productivity and the value they generate for their organizations is beyond my understanding. Too often, however, such liberal feminists either assume a male norm or assert a female difference without exploring such issues as the construction of gender and sexuality, the interrelation of gender, race, and class formations, or the impact of transnational movements and forces—something radical feminists have been pointing out for decades. My point in emphasizing the intellectual diversity within feminism today is to suggest that the energy it has generated has helped power women’s studies, gender studies, sexuality studies, and men’s studies.
The Objectivist would clearly benefit from a course in one or more of these fields. I would love to see him review the textbook used in SUNY Fredonia’s newly-approved Women’s Studies major, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s An Introduction to Women’s Studies: Gender in a Transnational World. But to do that, he’d actually have to read something written by feminists. It’s difficult to tell from today’s column if he has.
30 March 2006
16 March 2006
Debating Intelligent Design in US Public Schools
The Objectivist
SHOULD PUBLIC SCHOOLS TEACH INTELLIGENT-DESIGN THEORY?
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
3/15/06
Intelligent design theory asserts that there is evidence that the presence of an intelligent designer best explains various features of the world, such as biological diversity. This theory competes against evolution, which involves the idea that the impersonal forces of nature produced biological diversity. Across the country, a number of school districts have proposed incorporating discussion of intelligent design theory into their biology classes. The way in which educators, scientists, and intellectuals have treated these claims shows that they don’t know how a free society works.
When an educational institution is taxpayer funded and places a heavy burden on parents who don’t want to send their children there, the institution should not, except under extraordinary circumstances, teach their children ideas that conflict with the parents’ fundamental religious beliefs. In teaching evolution alone, this is precisely what is done. Public schools are obviously taxpayer funded. The government puts a heavy burden on parents who don’t want to send their children there. Such parents must either pay for sending their children to a private school or teach their children at home. Both options are made more difficult by the fact that these parents are made to pay through the nose for the public schools even if they don’t use them.
Christianity and evolution conflict. Christianity asserts that God exists and is all-good. Hence, he couldn’t have made it so that human beings who do evil (for example, rape and murder) had to do these things. Christians instead hold that human beings are responsible for such acts. That is, to explain evil, Christians claim that human beings have free will, that is, their actions are not determined by things outside their control.
In contrast, the proponents of evolution must hold that human beings don’t have free will. The idea is that an individual’s mind is his brain and that what goes on in his mind is determined by things outside his control. Biologists hold that the mind is the brain because they hold that the mind is acted on by genetics and the environment and only physical things like the brain can be so affected. The proponents must then accept that a person’s thoughts and decisions are determined by things outside his control since they are just changes in the brain, where these changes are, roughly, dictated by genetics and the environment.
This fundamental conflict between Christianity and evolution and the impossibility of finding a suitable middle ground in the classroom is yet another reason to favor vouchers over the current educational system. The failure of educators and other parents to recognize the legitimate concern of Christians is yet another failure on this score, similar to their failure in introducing a leftist agenda with regard to homosexuality, sex education, and the environment. When added to the dismal performance of the public schools and their outrageous costs (roughly $14,000 per student per year in Dunkirk), the case against public schools strengthens considerably.
***
The Constructivist
WHERE SHOULD INTELLIGENT DESIGN BE TAUGHT?
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
3/15/06
The intelligent design (ID) movement is in deep trouble today--and for good reason. In his landmark December 2005 decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, U.S. District Court Judge John Jones held that the Dover, PA, school board’s attempt to introduce ID in a science classroom violates both the U.S. and Pennsylvania Constitutions. But never fear, ID fans, the Objectivist, with his libertarian defense of ID, is here to show you the light. Before you begin thanking a certain Intelligent Designer formerly known as God for creating him, though, you’d better examine the design of his arguments.
When the Objectivist claims that “Christianity and evolution conflict,” he doesn’t just inspire jokes like “Who died and made you Pope?” (see Catholic Online 30 January 2006). He also repeats as fact the very “contrived dualism” between evolution and creationism that the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently rejected. But rather than trying to prove that ID is a legitimate scientific theory (a fallacy rightly exposed both by Judge Jones and contributors to The Panda’s Thumb, among many others), he is out to cast opponents of evolution as defenders of free will.
When the Objectivist claims that “the proponents of evolution must hold that human beings don’t have free will,” he doesn’t just inspire jokes like “Who died and made you God?” He also misrepresents the actual diversity of beliefs among biologists and tries to set up his discipline as the arbiter of evolution’s ultimate meaning. Don’t get me wrong: I fully support philosophies, histories, and cultural studies of science. But since the Objectivist does not work in these fields, such sweeping claims as his should be regarded with as much suspicion as NYU physics professor Alan Sokal’s infamous claim in Social Text that findings in physics validate Marxism (a claim he later exposed as a hoax).
I doubt the Objectivist’s column is a hoax. Instead, the “fundamental conflict” he fabricates between a libertarian Christianity and a determinist evolution is more likely a product of his desire to build a bridge between the libertarian and evangelical wings of the Republican Party. This is a bridge, however, that would take us all back to the dark ages.
The Objectivist’s core principle that public schools should not “teach children ideas that conflict with the[ir] parents’ fundamental religious beliefs” reveals his own lack of understanding of “how a free society works.” His call to let a thousand mullahs and inquisitors bloom--to subject all the teaching and learning in every public school in the nation to the dogmas of majorities in each school district--goes far beyond the parochial debate over ID’s lack of scientific standing (see Kim Stanley Robinson’s brilliant novel, The Years of Rice and Salt, for a much-needed alternative). His principle threatens not only to inflame sectarian conflicts within Christianity, but to balkanize American society along religious lines, as well. Should it become recognized as the law of the land, religious minorities, to preserve their own belief systems from majorities, would either have to abandon the public schools where they live, move to a school district where they could form a majority, or move where they could be sheltered by a majority that refuses to subject teaching and learning in public schools to theological litmus tests.
Judge Jones’s decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover points the way to the precise “suitable middle ground in the classroom” that the Objectivist rejects out of hand as an “impossibility.” While the decision makes it “unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom,” it points out that ID may “continue to be studied, debated, and discussed” (137). If proponents of ID, justification by design, or religious freedom really want to improve American public schools, perhaps it’s time for them to support bringing high school curricula closer to the disciplinary organization of higher education by replacing “Social Studies” with a more rigorous mix of history, anthropology, and philosophy. Within this framework, students and teachers could explore the belief systems of various world religions in comparative perspective rather than for purposes of indoctrination or conversion. ID-supporting parents who don’t wish their children to be exposed to such robust religious pluralism in American public schools shouldn’t expect the rest of us to finance their separatism.
SHOULD PUBLIC SCHOOLS TEACH INTELLIGENT-DESIGN THEORY?
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
3/15/06
Intelligent design theory asserts that there is evidence that the presence of an intelligent designer best explains various features of the world, such as biological diversity. This theory competes against evolution, which involves the idea that the impersonal forces of nature produced biological diversity. Across the country, a number of school districts have proposed incorporating discussion of intelligent design theory into their biology classes. The way in which educators, scientists, and intellectuals have treated these claims shows that they don’t know how a free society works.
When an educational institution is taxpayer funded and places a heavy burden on parents who don’t want to send their children there, the institution should not, except under extraordinary circumstances, teach their children ideas that conflict with the parents’ fundamental religious beliefs. In teaching evolution alone, this is precisely what is done. Public schools are obviously taxpayer funded. The government puts a heavy burden on parents who don’t want to send their children there. Such parents must either pay for sending their children to a private school or teach their children at home. Both options are made more difficult by the fact that these parents are made to pay through the nose for the public schools even if they don’t use them.
Christianity and evolution conflict. Christianity asserts that God exists and is all-good. Hence, he couldn’t have made it so that human beings who do evil (for example, rape and murder) had to do these things. Christians instead hold that human beings are responsible for such acts. That is, to explain evil, Christians claim that human beings have free will, that is, their actions are not determined by things outside their control.
In contrast, the proponents of evolution must hold that human beings don’t have free will. The idea is that an individual’s mind is his brain and that what goes on in his mind is determined by things outside his control. Biologists hold that the mind is the brain because they hold that the mind is acted on by genetics and the environment and only physical things like the brain can be so affected. The proponents must then accept that a person’s thoughts and decisions are determined by things outside his control since they are just changes in the brain, where these changes are, roughly, dictated by genetics and the environment.
This fundamental conflict between Christianity and evolution and the impossibility of finding a suitable middle ground in the classroom is yet another reason to favor vouchers over the current educational system. The failure of educators and other parents to recognize the legitimate concern of Christians is yet another failure on this score, similar to their failure in introducing a leftist agenda with regard to homosexuality, sex education, and the environment. When added to the dismal performance of the public schools and their outrageous costs (roughly $14,000 per student per year in Dunkirk), the case against public schools strengthens considerably.
***
The Constructivist
WHERE SHOULD INTELLIGENT DESIGN BE TAUGHT?
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
3/15/06
The intelligent design (ID) movement is in deep trouble today--and for good reason. In his landmark December 2005 decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, U.S. District Court Judge John Jones held that the Dover, PA, school board’s attempt to introduce ID in a science classroom violates both the U.S. and Pennsylvania Constitutions. But never fear, ID fans, the Objectivist, with his libertarian defense of ID, is here to show you the light. Before you begin thanking a certain Intelligent Designer formerly known as God for creating him, though, you’d better examine the design of his arguments.
When the Objectivist claims that “Christianity and evolution conflict,” he doesn’t just inspire jokes like “Who died and made you Pope?” (see Catholic Online 30 January 2006). He also repeats as fact the very “contrived dualism” between evolution and creationism that the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently rejected. But rather than trying to prove that ID is a legitimate scientific theory (a fallacy rightly exposed both by Judge Jones and contributors to The Panda’s Thumb, among many others), he is out to cast opponents of evolution as defenders of free will.
When the Objectivist claims that “the proponents of evolution must hold that human beings don’t have free will,” he doesn’t just inspire jokes like “Who died and made you God?” He also misrepresents the actual diversity of beliefs among biologists and tries to set up his discipline as the arbiter of evolution’s ultimate meaning. Don’t get me wrong: I fully support philosophies, histories, and cultural studies of science. But since the Objectivist does not work in these fields, such sweeping claims as his should be regarded with as much suspicion as NYU physics professor Alan Sokal’s infamous claim in Social Text that findings in physics validate Marxism (a claim he later exposed as a hoax).
I doubt the Objectivist’s column is a hoax. Instead, the “fundamental conflict” he fabricates between a libertarian Christianity and a determinist evolution is more likely a product of his desire to build a bridge between the libertarian and evangelical wings of the Republican Party. This is a bridge, however, that would take us all back to the dark ages.
The Objectivist’s core principle that public schools should not “teach children ideas that conflict with the[ir] parents’ fundamental religious beliefs” reveals his own lack of understanding of “how a free society works.” His call to let a thousand mullahs and inquisitors bloom--to subject all the teaching and learning in every public school in the nation to the dogmas of majorities in each school district--goes far beyond the parochial debate over ID’s lack of scientific standing (see Kim Stanley Robinson’s brilliant novel, The Years of Rice and Salt, for a much-needed alternative). His principle threatens not only to inflame sectarian conflicts within Christianity, but to balkanize American society along religious lines, as well. Should it become recognized as the law of the land, religious minorities, to preserve their own belief systems from majorities, would either have to abandon the public schools where they live, move to a school district where they could form a majority, or move where they could be sheltered by a majority that refuses to subject teaching and learning in public schools to theological litmus tests.
Judge Jones’s decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover points the way to the precise “suitable middle ground in the classroom” that the Objectivist rejects out of hand as an “impossibility.” While the decision makes it “unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom,” it points out that ID may “continue to be studied, debated, and discussed” (137). If proponents of ID, justification by design, or religious freedom really want to improve American public schools, perhaps it’s time for them to support bringing high school curricula closer to the disciplinary organization of higher education by replacing “Social Studies” with a more rigorous mix of history, anthropology, and philosophy. Within this framework, students and teachers could explore the belief systems of various world religions in comparative perspective rather than for purposes of indoctrination or conversion. ID-supporting parents who don’t wish their children to be exposed to such robust religious pluralism in American public schools shouldn’t expect the rest of us to finance their separatism.
02 March 2006
Debating Privatization of US Public Higher Ed
The Objectivist
SHOULD SUNY BE PRIVATIZED?
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
3/1/06
Both fairness and efficiency warrant privatizing the SUNY system. Nationwide taxpayers pay through the nose for higher education. In 2004, states spent $5,721 per student at public universities. In total they spent $69 billion, thereby providing 64% of public universities’ revenue. Over the last ten years federal student aid, adjusted for inflation, more than doubled to $90 billion per year. In return, the public universities have raised tuition from 2000-01 to 2004-05 by 36% despite the fact that the consumer price index rose about 11%.
It is unfair to ask some taxpayers to pay for the education of other adults. The U.S. Commerce Department reports that college graduates make nearly $1 million dollars more over their working life than those with merely a high school degree. I’m guessing this underestimates the differences since it likely doesn’t take into account the fact that college graduates likely gain even more via higher-earning spouses. Persons with a professional degree make $3.2 million more than persons with only a high school degree. There is nothing fair about requiring taxpayers to give such valuable assets to other adults, the vast majority of whom could pay for it via loans. Since less than a third of the population 25-29 had bachelor’s degrees (2002 figure), having government colleges and universities involves a substantial transfer of money from people who don’t have the advantages of a college degree to persons who do or will. Worse yet, over half the families who attend the SUNY system are middle class or better. Why do they need educational welfare? Even if taxpayers should pay for other adults’ education, the transfer involved in state professional schools is simply obscene.
If the concern is to provide opportunities for the poor, this can be done more cheaply by giving the poor vouchers for college. This is how we give other benefits to them. For example, the poor receive subsidized food and medical care via payments to private supermarkets and physicians. It is hard to believe that anyone really thinks that taxpayers would be better off if we instead set up government supermarkets. Would you want the Department of Motor Vehicles to run Wegmans?
Nor is the government very efficient in terms of how it runs universities. For example, at SUNY Fredonia more than a third of the students don’t graduate in six years and it is not clear that this is worse than competitor state colleges. One reason for this is that many students who don’t have the skills or the work habits to graduate don’t bear the full costs of going to college, thereby wasting their time and taxpayer money. Similarly, the administrative bloat at many of these colleges and universities is truly impressive. For example, again at Fredonia, there is one president, four vice-presidents, six associate vice presidents, four deans, and one associate dean. It is hard to believe that a private institution would have so many high-level administrators.
***
The Constructivist
SUNY IS A GOOD INVESTMENT FOR NEW YORK
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
3/1/06
Those advocating privatization of public higher education have difficulty supporting their case. The supposed benefits of privatization—increased competition, expanded choice, lower costs, and higher quality—either already exist or are hard to find.
Take competition and choice: there are well over 3,000 U.S. colleges and universities of all kinds, all competing for students, faculty, financing, and reputation. Traditions of tenure, academic freedom, shared governance, and faculty responsibility for curricula have established the relative autonomy of these institutions from their funders—individual donors, corporations, or the state.
How about lower costs and higher quality? Total annual student fees at Hamilton College and Princeton University, from which I graduated, top $41,000 at each school. Still, they covered only 22% of Princeton’s $920 million operating budget last year (of which 14% was devoted to student aid). Hamilton emphasizes in its mailings to alumni that student fees cover less than half of its annual operating costs and that the 60% of its students who receive financial aid average $26,000.
In higher education, quality costs. Wealthier students bear these costs upfront and most graduates offset these costs with a lifetime of donations. As a result, the best private colleges and universities have used their tax-exempt status to build astronomical endowments over the centuries they’ve existed. Investment income on Princeton’s $10.8 billion dollar endowment covered roughly one-third of its budget last year while gifts and sponsored research covered another third. Hamilton has to get by with a mere half-billion-dollar endowment.
With our $80 million operating budget and $16 million endowment, it’s going to take decades for SUNY Fredonia to even begin thinking about competing with such schools. Yet to continue to operate without state funds, the economies of scale that being part of SUNY brings, and the protections of a union contract, Fredonia would have to answer a series of tough questions: how high to raise tuition and class sizes? how many fewer students to admit? how many faculty and staff to fire? how many building projects to cancel? how many student services to abolish? We’d have to offer less for more just to stay in business. Is this what privatization advocates want?
Ultimately, though, this debate is less about motives than arguments. The case for privatization rests on the notion that state funding of higher education puts undue burdens on taxpayers even as it privileges college graduates. What’s left out of this equation is any understanding that higher education is a public good that provides a high rate of return on both individual and state investments.
The individual returns on higher education are fairly easy to track—and they lead directly to the public returns. The 2000 census and subsequent samplings provide strong evidence that college graduates earn an average of $1 million more over the course of their working lives than high school graduates (and double their annual family income). According to SUNY, 80% of its graduates stay in the state; hence, all New Yorkers benefit from the work they do, the jobs they create, the goods, services, and properties they buy, and the taxes they pay.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg. SUNY Chancellor John Ryan testified to the New York legislature in January that every dollar of direct state support for SUNY generates more than eight dollars for the state’s economy and that every $1 million in grant money brought in by a full-time faculty member creates 29 jobs. In addition to being among the largest employers in many counties, SUNY schools help attract new people, businesses, and investments to New York. When you also account for “intangible” returns on public higher education—contributions of an educated and engaged citizenry, expanded opportunities for upward mobility, and fostering the creativity necessary for the state and nation to prosper in a global economy—it’s clear that SUNY deserves more funding, not less. Yet according to the NYSUT Higher Education Data Project, New York commits only 2.2% of its general fund spending to SUNY. So until Fredonia’s endowment produces revenues significant enough to offset any further reductions in state investments, privatization is just a pipe dream.
SHOULD SUNY BE PRIVATIZED?
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
3/1/06
Both fairness and efficiency warrant privatizing the SUNY system. Nationwide taxpayers pay through the nose for higher education. In 2004, states spent $5,721 per student at public universities. In total they spent $69 billion, thereby providing 64% of public universities’ revenue. Over the last ten years federal student aid, adjusted for inflation, more than doubled to $90 billion per year. In return, the public universities have raised tuition from 2000-01 to 2004-05 by 36% despite the fact that the consumer price index rose about 11%.
It is unfair to ask some taxpayers to pay for the education of other adults. The U.S. Commerce Department reports that college graduates make nearly $1 million dollars more over their working life than those with merely a high school degree. I’m guessing this underestimates the differences since it likely doesn’t take into account the fact that college graduates likely gain even more via higher-earning spouses. Persons with a professional degree make $3.2 million more than persons with only a high school degree. There is nothing fair about requiring taxpayers to give such valuable assets to other adults, the vast majority of whom could pay for it via loans. Since less than a third of the population 25-29 had bachelor’s degrees (2002 figure), having government colleges and universities involves a substantial transfer of money from people who don’t have the advantages of a college degree to persons who do or will. Worse yet, over half the families who attend the SUNY system are middle class or better. Why do they need educational welfare? Even if taxpayers should pay for other adults’ education, the transfer involved in state professional schools is simply obscene.
If the concern is to provide opportunities for the poor, this can be done more cheaply by giving the poor vouchers for college. This is how we give other benefits to them. For example, the poor receive subsidized food and medical care via payments to private supermarkets and physicians. It is hard to believe that anyone really thinks that taxpayers would be better off if we instead set up government supermarkets. Would you want the Department of Motor Vehicles to run Wegmans?
Nor is the government very efficient in terms of how it runs universities. For example, at SUNY Fredonia more than a third of the students don’t graduate in six years and it is not clear that this is worse than competitor state colleges. One reason for this is that many students who don’t have the skills or the work habits to graduate don’t bear the full costs of going to college, thereby wasting their time and taxpayer money. Similarly, the administrative bloat at many of these colleges and universities is truly impressive. For example, again at Fredonia, there is one president, four vice-presidents, six associate vice presidents, four deans, and one associate dean. It is hard to believe that a private institution would have so many high-level administrators.
***
The Constructivist
SUNY IS A GOOD INVESTMENT FOR NEW YORK
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
3/1/06
Those advocating privatization of public higher education have difficulty supporting their case. The supposed benefits of privatization—increased competition, expanded choice, lower costs, and higher quality—either already exist or are hard to find.
Take competition and choice: there are well over 3,000 U.S. colleges and universities of all kinds, all competing for students, faculty, financing, and reputation. Traditions of tenure, academic freedom, shared governance, and faculty responsibility for curricula have established the relative autonomy of these institutions from their funders—individual donors, corporations, or the state.
How about lower costs and higher quality? Total annual student fees at Hamilton College and Princeton University, from which I graduated, top $41,000 at each school. Still, they covered only 22% of Princeton’s $920 million operating budget last year (of which 14% was devoted to student aid). Hamilton emphasizes in its mailings to alumni that student fees cover less than half of its annual operating costs and that the 60% of its students who receive financial aid average $26,000.
In higher education, quality costs. Wealthier students bear these costs upfront and most graduates offset these costs with a lifetime of donations. As a result, the best private colleges and universities have used their tax-exempt status to build astronomical endowments over the centuries they’ve existed. Investment income on Princeton’s $10.8 billion dollar endowment covered roughly one-third of its budget last year while gifts and sponsored research covered another third. Hamilton has to get by with a mere half-billion-dollar endowment.
With our $80 million operating budget and $16 million endowment, it’s going to take decades for SUNY Fredonia to even begin thinking about competing with such schools. Yet to continue to operate without state funds, the economies of scale that being part of SUNY brings, and the protections of a union contract, Fredonia would have to answer a series of tough questions: how high to raise tuition and class sizes? how many fewer students to admit? how many faculty and staff to fire? how many building projects to cancel? how many student services to abolish? We’d have to offer less for more just to stay in business. Is this what privatization advocates want?
Ultimately, though, this debate is less about motives than arguments. The case for privatization rests on the notion that state funding of higher education puts undue burdens on taxpayers even as it privileges college graduates. What’s left out of this equation is any understanding that higher education is a public good that provides a high rate of return on both individual and state investments.
The individual returns on higher education are fairly easy to track—and they lead directly to the public returns. The 2000 census and subsequent samplings provide strong evidence that college graduates earn an average of $1 million more over the course of their working lives than high school graduates (and double their annual family income). According to SUNY, 80% of its graduates stay in the state; hence, all New Yorkers benefit from the work they do, the jobs they create, the goods, services, and properties they buy, and the taxes they pay.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg. SUNY Chancellor John Ryan testified to the New York legislature in January that every dollar of direct state support for SUNY generates more than eight dollars for the state’s economy and that every $1 million in grant money brought in by a full-time faculty member creates 29 jobs. In addition to being among the largest employers in many counties, SUNY schools help attract new people, businesses, and investments to New York. When you also account for “intangible” returns on public higher education—contributions of an educated and engaged citizenry, expanded opportunities for upward mobility, and fostering the creativity necessary for the state and nation to prosper in a global economy—it’s clear that SUNY deserves more funding, not less. Yet according to the NYSUT Higher Education Data Project, New York commits only 2.2% of its general fund spending to SUNY. So until Fredonia’s endowment produces revenues significant enough to offset any further reductions in state investments, privatization is just a pipe dream.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
