Reflections At The End of 2011

I will remember 2011 for, among other things, learning "I'm not the only one."  As someone who has taught, and worked in other capacities, in colleges for nearly two decades, I never heard anyone question his or her decision to attend graduate school or pursue an academic career.  Even the ones who were adjuncts for even longer than I've been one didn't express regrets--at least, not openly, anyway.

I've discovered that parts of the Internet are as Dick Gregory described comedy:  a venue in which people say out loud what they'd been saying under their breaths throughout their lives.  The difference is, Gregory marvelled that he got paid to do such a thing, and, to my knowledge, no one is getting paid to write a scamblog.

I'm sure that some of my colleagues who didn't express their doubts in the workplace would, outside the confines of academia, complain to friends, significant others and--for those who could afford it or had good health-care insurace--their therapists.  Some of the people to whom I lamented my decision to pursue "the life of the mind" never could or would believe what I told them.  That resulted in the end of a couple of friendships or at least one love relationship with people who believed that if I just kept on working hard and meeting the right people, I'd have that tenured position and time to finish my novel and publish my poems.

At least my parents and one sibling understand the situation, even if they still are shocked that the reality of being a college instructor is nothing like the tweedy upper-middle-class life portrayed in the popular media.  Thankfully, other people are becoming more aware of the fact that the vast majority of college instructors--including all who don't have tenure--are pawns in a system that's every bit as exploitative as that of a multinational corporation that sets up shop in an impoverished, corrupt dictatorship that has no laws to protect the environment or children or to allow women to be anything more than the chattel of men.

That so few non-tenured instructors raise even a peep about their lot may well lend credence to the notion that academia is a cult.  But, more to the point, it is a symptom an economy in which some of its most educated people are part of an indentured servant class that is no more secure than a Wal-Mart worker in any state south of the Potomac.

To those of you who've been reading and offering your support:  Thank you.  I also want to express gratitude to those of you from whom I've learned so much.  I won't mention any by name, lest I forget anyone, but I think you know who you are!  I hope you, and your loved ones, have a better year than the one that's about to pass.

Two Down

And then there was one...


The good news was that York didn't rehire me. However, today I found out that the technical school in which I've been working cancelled the courses I was scheduled to teach, starting next week.  The dean said enrollments were down and other classes were cancelled.  In situations like that, they have to give courses to full-timers first.


My best hope is that something changes between now and next week.  My next-best hope is that something will be available in the next term, which begins in early March.  (The school has six eight-week  terms every year.)  In the meantime, I'm crossing my fingers and hoping I don't lose my other job.  Of course, I'm looking for other work, but we all know what that's like in this economy.


If my parents weren't alive, I'd probably be selling everything I own and taking the next one-way flight to somewhere in Eastern Europe or South America.  I knew that this country is going to hell in a handbasket, but now that fall is taking me down, it seems.  Someone once said that a recession is when you lose your job, and a depression is when I lose mine.  I know what that person meant!


Anyway, I find it nothing if not ironic that, as this country is sinking into the morass that swallows all empires, my best hope might be to go to countries that were once considered "Third World" and teach the language of that dying empire.

What They're Graduating Into, Continued

I know this doesn't directly relate to schools.  Well, actually, it does, in that it's related to what recent graduates are up against.

The European Village is an open-air mall that opened in Palm Coast, Florida five years ago, just as the real estate market was near its historic peak.  It consists of stores and restaurants that surround a courtyard, and condominiums on top of those stores and restaurants.

All of these stores, on the north side of the Village, are vacant. 

This Christmas tree was painted on the window three years ago, when Barbara Jean's celebrated its third, and last, holiday season.  In spite of its good food and reasonable prices, it closed shortly afterward.  In fact, it seems that only two or three businesses have succeeded.  One of them is Mezza Luna, which is, in spite of its location (on the east side of the Village), one of the most popular restaurants in the area:

The condominiums above these restaurants were selling for a quarter of a million dollars each (for a two-bedroom) just a few months after the Village opened. Now they can be had for as little as $35,000.  The catch is, of course, the buyer has to pay in cash:  No financing is available.  The same holds true for most other for-sale properties in the area.

Palm Coast is located about twenty-five miles northeast of Daytona Beach and twenty-five miles south of St. Augustine in Flagler County.  Flagler, and neighboring Volusia, have the highest unemployment rates of Florida's counties; last year, they had the highest unemployment rates of any counties in the nation. 

My parents live nearby.  Today I went bike-riding along the Atlantic, on Route A1A.  Properties that were for sale three years ago are still on the market. 

A PhD In...

The horrendous debts students incur in going to law, medical or most graduate schools--and almost any non-prestigious private college or university--are, along with the dismal prospects for employment, reason enough to dissuade people from going to those schools. If you're one of those people who thinks "you can't put a price" on education or gains self-esteem through titles, I'll try to explain another reason why incurring such debts--let alone encouraging someone else to incur them--is immoral.

I was just reading about PhD programs in Nursing.  Now, maybe I'm late in coming to this party, but I wasn't aware of them until just recently.  I guess I shouldn't be surprised, given some of the other programs that have developed under the current social, legal and economic climate.

York College, my former employer (It feels good to say that!), has bachelors' degree programs in a number of areas that come under the appelation of "health professions."  They include traditional programs like ones to train nurses, physicans' assistants, physical therapists and occupational therapists.   While most students attend them in the hope of working in one of those areas upon graduation, the college (and others) exert--and the students feel, from various sources-- pressure to pursue higher degrees in those areas.

Part of the explanation of this is simple:  Like any other college (which includes nearly all of them), York and its parent university (City University of New York), is part of what some of us are calling the Financial-Educational Complex.  The FEC wants students to stay in school for as long as possible because, for most students, more time in school translates into more and bigger loans.

However, there is another factor that exacerbates the situation I've described.  The health-care industry is increasingly dependent on nurses and others in the "health professions" I've mentioned to provide primary care. 

Part of the reason for that is the fact that the difficulty and expense of medical education, and the low wages paid to residents, discourage many students from pursuing such a path.  Still others are being, and will be, deterred by the bureaucracy of the health care and insurance systems, which won't become less onerous under Obamacare or any of the other "socialist" health insurance plans that are being proposed. 

The discouragement of would-be doctors has created shortages in some areas, which has exacerbated yet another problem:  Real, live, MDs are just more expensive than nurses and other kinds of health professionals.  Under just about any system of health care provision that's under any kind of serious consideration--and the system we now have--insurers are looking to cut costs and increase revenues.  One way to do that, of course, is to have other kinds of professionals provide "routine" care.  That's a good idea, in theory, until you realize that one can never really tell when a "routine" case will stop being routine and require greater analytical skills and expertise than those in "health professions" have.

People in those professions can market themselves as being "alternatives" to MDs, and increase their incomes, by--you guessed it--getting master's, or even PhDs, in their fields.  An MD is essentially a PhD in medicine, much as a law school degree is a PhD in law (a Doctorate of Jurisprudence).  And a PhD is a PhD, right?  That's what those pursuing the degrees--and the health care institutions who employ, and insurers who pay for, them will hope the public will perceive.

In the end, though, pursuing advanced degrees in Nursing or "health professions" will only help the health care industry to do what the higher education industry has done:  Increase its revenues via a combination of higher costs to the consumer and federally-guaranteed loans and other monies while cutting the costs of providing services (Think of all of those PhDs who are working as adjuncts.) and keeping up appearances through building glitzy facilities that, for the most part, serve as Potemkin Villages.

But, hey, aren't you reassured that you're being treated by a PhD?  And don't you feel good that you got one?  You just can't put a price on such things, can you?

Catharsis: Exorcising The Abuse

Today I arrived at my parents' house, where I'm going to spend Christmas and a couple of days afterward.  Although it's not Prague or Paris, it's still far away, spatially and spiritaually, from York College or anything else having to do with the work I do for a living.  That, and the fact that I'm with Mom and Dad (who aren't getting any younger) is enough for me right now.

Last night, I had a long cathartic cry before getting my hair cut and having lunch with a friend.  I didn't miss being at York, any more than I miss being the victim in any other kind of abusive relationship.  Rather, as the tears streamed and I sobbed, I had a senstation--I'm sure it was as physical as it was psychological--of a river of acid surging out of me.  I'm hoping that some medical issues I've had might lessen, if not disappear.

Poet Philip Larkin wrote, "They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad."  Perhaps all parents mess up their kids in some way or another.  But, as I've grown older, I realize that it's not a reason for anybody to be angry at his or her parents, as long as they didn't intentionally abuse him or her. If the parents did anything right, their kids should at least be able to make some choices about their behavior, and how they will deal with the parents' legacy, whatever it may be.

On the other hand, I've come to realize that the institutions of education are predicated, to varying degrees, on socially and legally sanctioned abusive relationships between administrators and teachers/professors/staff members, and students.  I will discuss that more in future posts.

On My Way Out

Today was my last day at York College.  My experience of today mirrored, in many ways, what is happening in America:  I, an honest person who worked hard and didn't make a lot of money, was treated as a criminal by folks who have been ripping off the institution, and those who have aided and abetted them.


Now, I'm sure that what I experienced isn't so different from what other people experience as they leave jobs, whether voluntarily or not.  However, the office manager in the department in which I'd been working said she never knew of any adjunct who was made to jump through hoops as I was.


I was given a form that listed eight different departments.  I had to get a signature from each one had to indicate that I did not have any of its equipment or property in my possession, and that I did not owe any money.  Some of those departments are the ones one would expect:  the library, educational technology and buildings and grounds.  (The latter department issues keys.)   However, there were at least departments with whom I'd never had contact in the nearly seven years I spent at York.


The thing is, when I received my letter saying that I wasn't re-appointed, I was not told that I had to do what I was doing today.  In fact, nobody told me I had to do it until I went to the human resources office to take care of another matter.   It was well past four-thirty in the afternoon; all of the offices I had to visit would soon be closed if they weren't already.  


For the record, after I received my letter of non-reappointment, I checked all of the written material regarding employment and termination policies and found no reference to what I was told I had to do today.  I know of professors--including one who had tenure for about thirty years and was the former chair of the department in which I taught--who were denied their last paychecks because they actually or allegedly had keys or other college property.


In one of the departments I never heard of until today, someone with some pretentious title said the person who could sign wasn't in and wouldn't be until after the New Year.   I was just about to start screaming when someone else told me to go to the Office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs, a.k.a. the Provost.  Since I wasn't in the mood for another runaround, I told the clerk in that office that I couldn't come back tomorrow because I was moving out of the country.  "That's a shame," she said. 


"No,that's not the real shame."


"You're right:  They didn't re-hire you."


In any event, she got the signature I needed and I managed to get back to the human resources office just as the woman in charge was about to leave.  


Now, if I wanted to be charitable, I could believe that I had to make a mad eleventh-hour sprint through the college's bureaucracy that no other adjunct has ever had to make because I was a full-timer, albeit on a temporary appointment.  However, I found out that most other full-timers haven't had to do what I was forced to do today.  And I know that the former department chair whose last check was held for ransom was not popular with the college's administration. Nor, for that matter, was I.  I don't know the particulars of that other prof's story, but I'd bet that she criticized people and things that needed it.  I have heard, from reliable sources, that she also spoke up when she experienced mistreatment from superiors.  Not to aggrandize myself, but if what I've heard is true, then her story and mine have at least two common denominators.  


Plus, I just happen to be a member of a minority group that routinely experiences discrimination, and that York has a continuing history of discrimination against the group in question.  Now, I'm not saying it's the reason I was made to jump through hoops.  But I can't deny the coincidence.


Oh well.  I'm not going to cry over any of it.  I plan on being out of the academic world in two years anyway.

In This Corner: Grade And Credential Inflation

This is my penultimate day at York College.  My class had a final exam.  I have finished grading and my other work in my other classes; I hope to finish tomorrow.

On my way to one of the few bathrooms in the college that doesn't pose a health hazard to its users, I passed through the Social Science wing.  In one corner, I saw a display for the Psychology Department.  In it was, among other things, a guide to help Psych majors get into graduate school. 

In addition to telling students which courses they should take, it advised them to network, aim for A's in their Psych courses and keep their GPAs up. 

I was not quite sure of what to think of it.  On one hand, the profs who made that guide are telling the students the facts:  One does need a very high GPA, along with A's in most courses in the major--not to mention stellar recommendations and references--to get into any Psych graduate program worthy of the name.  And, if one wishes to be a practicing psychologist or to do research, a PhD is a "must."

So, those profs' forthrightness about what students need to do is tainted by their push to get students into graduate school.   Then again, I'm not sure of what, exactly, a new graduate does with a Bachelor's in Psychology these days. Also, to be fair, I doubt those profs are any more guilty of egging their students on to graduate school in a glutted field than profs in other disciplines like English are.

I guess what upsets me is that the guide emphasized getting A's and a high GPA, and networking, but made no mention of what students could or should learn in their courses.  Worse still, I saw no similar guide for what other paths students could pursue after earning a Bachelor's in Psychology, and what they should do if they want to tread those paths. 

In answer to the inevitable question:  I don't know how else I would guide those students.  And I don't know what I would do to counter tenured profs who are stoking grade and credential inflation in order to keep grad school enrollments up.

Holidays You're Not Supposed to Celebrate With Families You're Not Supposed To Have

It's almost the end of the semester.  A couple more days, and I'll be finished with grading and all of the paperwork I have to do--I hope.  I tell people that this time is, for college instructors, as tax season is for accountants.

As always, I have mixed feelings about this time of year.  It always seems to be about what you're looking forward to, or what you're supposed to look forward to, at any rate.  The holidays are supposed to be fun, or at least relaxing. Believe it or not, I actually enjoy the holidays more now than I did when I was a kid.  It's not that I had so many disappointments on Christmas Day.  Actually, I didn't want that much, at least compared to other kids.  That's what Mom tells me, anyway. And I want even less stuff now.  I just want to spend the time with her and Dad:  I've already had them in my life for longer than most people have their parents, so I strongly sense that they have only but so many years left.  Plus, now that they are living in a different part of the country from the rest of the family, the holiday gatherings aren't as big as they were when we all lived within an hours' drive or train ride.  I prefer these new smaller gatherings because, truthfully, there aren't many other relatives I'm dying to see.

I rarely talk with colleagues about my relationship with my parents.  If they mention their parents, it's usually with groans and sighs.  And I'm talking about people whose fathers wrote the checks for their tuitions.  Not that it makes, by itself, for good parenting.  But sometimes I get the feeling that a requisite for being a humanities professor is to have a fucked-up relationship with your family, or to make it seem fucked up.  Yes, most parents make mistakes--God knows, my parents did, as they were very young when I was born, and I was their first child!--but they did what parents are supposed to do, didn't abuse me and have been supportive of me (and have offered support that I've turned down, for my own reasons).   

But, it seems, the higher you go in education, the more you're supposed to hate--and take from--your family.  And you're supposed to look down on those who celebrate the holidays.  As much as I dislike the commercialism of the holidays, and as non-religious as I am, I see no reason to denigrate those who celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, the Winter Solistice or any other fete at this time of year--with or without families.

Eyes On The Prizes: Why?

Last night, a student I'll call Dina was discussing her research paper with me.  She was about to make some revisions; I told her that it had the potential to become one of the best papers I'd seen.  I mentioned a publication called The York Scholar, which publishes research papers written by York College students.  She was aware of it but, she said, she didn't care to submit it.  I was about to press the issue, but she short-circuited it:  By the expression in her eyes, I knew that she knew I was just parroting "the party line," if you will.


At the same time, however, I could see that she didn't want to upset me.  In fact, she hadn't.  Actually, I was rather glad she was choosing not to go through the process of submitting the application along with a statement about the paper, in addition to the paper in whatever format the editors wanted this year.  


Truth be told, even getting published and winning a prize for the best research paper would have done nothing for her academic, professional or personal life.  She is working for a city agency for more than a decade; the degree she hopes to complete next semester should lead her to a promotion, she says.  Her supervisor promised her as much.  


She had been considering law school, but nixed the idea when she realized that she would have to quit her job and would have to incur massive debt.  "Why should I do that for a job that won't pay that much more than what I'll be making after my promotion?", she wondered.  When she considered law school, she thought about becoming a child advocate. "I have no interest in doing corporate or finance law," she explained.  


She may, however, go for a Master's in Public Administration.  That would actually allow her even further promotion in her agency, or to do related work in other venues.  


Whatever she does, getting published in The York Scholar, or even winning any prize, will not mean anything to her, her employers or any graduate program to which she might apply.  Truth be told, it wouldn't matter almost anywhere outside the academic world.  Even within the academic world, publication in The York Scholar could do little more than augment, ever so slightly, an already solid application to graduate school.  


Actually, most honors and prizes won in school mean nothing outside the halls of academe.  Even after gaining admission to the next level of schooling, those "prizes" and "honors" have little meaning.  Quite honestly, I see the pursuit of those things as being no different from exploits in a school's or university's athletic arena.  That you played on the soccer or lacrosse, or even football or basketball team, might "tip" your application if it's already competitive.  (I'm not talking now about star players in Big Twelve schools or their brethren; I'm talking about the vast majority of student-athletes.)  Whenever I see a student chasing some sort of prize or title--or, worse, when I see a CV that includes those things--I think of those ex-jocks who get together with other ex-jocks and talk about the big play one of them made in some game they played long ago.  When you're working a dead-end job and paying off loans, the fact that you scored a touchdown on Thanksgiving Day--or got some prize named after some professor or benefactor--isn't going to change your situation. I can't begin to tell you how many adjunct instructors I've met who won some prize or award for their "original" research or their "excellence" in something or another.  Trust me, I've won a couple myself.  And look where they got me.

The Education-Healthcare-Insurance-Financial Complex?

Today C.Cryn Johannsen gave us another timely and insightful post on her blog, "All Education Matters."


In it, she alludes to the fact that illness or injury can have particularly disastrous consequences for student loan debtors. With their incomes lost or reduced, student debtors may be unable to make payments on their loans.  This, in turn can cause them to default on said loans.  That in itself is enough to ruin a credit score.  But, as student debtors' loans aren't being paid, their other bills are probably piling up.  That can further depress a credit score, and wreck whatever chance the ill student debtor has of getting a decent job should he or she lose the job he or she had before the illness or injury.


However, most of those other debts--including medical costs and credit card balances--are dischargable in bankruptcy, while student loans aren't.  That means, of course, that even if all of the other debts are cleared away and the student debtor gets back on his or her feet, there is still that student loan, which has been collecting interest in the meantime.


In response to Cryn's post, I left a comment that asked whether, in essence, most members of Congress have been silent on the issue of student loans for the same reasons they have opposed health-care and insurance-industry reforms.  It seems to me that the folks who enrich themselves from the current state of student loans are the same ones, or are connected to the ones, who profit from the current state of the health care and insurance industries.  And they all have powerful lobbyists on Capitol Hill.  

My PhD: The Holy Grail

Some of you might hate me for this:  I am going to do a PhD after all.


What possessed me to make such a decision?  Well, I was listening to a favorite "song" from my junior high-school years: Hocus Pocus, by a Dutch band called Focus. It's still one of my favorite recordings: It has the best guitar work on this side of Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, and nobody has ever made better use of yodeling!


Well, just for the heck of it, I decided to see whether "Song Meanings" listed it.  You know what they say about being careful of what you wish for.  Believe it or not, the site actually has "lyrics" for the "song."


Better yet, the comments that followed confirmed something I'd always suspected:  this "song" is even more artistically, culturally, empirically, epistemologically, etymologically, ontologically, scholastically, scientifically and spiritually significant than the Mona Lisa, the Divine Comedy, Hamlet, the Origin of the Species, the "Republic," any dictionary, any philosophical treatise, the Theory of Relativity or the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Sir Thomas More, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Reinhold Niebuhr, Spinoza or Rashi.   


Now, being the modest and truthful person that I am, I will not claim full credit for this insight.  All the more reason to turn it into a dissertation.  And my first citation will go to the person who posted this comment by one "ravenravenraven" on the "Song Meanings" website:


Contrary to popular belief, Hocus Pocus is not simply jibberish, but the greatest clue humanity has towards the discovery of the Holy Grail.

As I'm sure you know, the holy grail is a sacred symbol that has been disputed and sought after for centuries. There have been arguments that the grail represents the Christian God's son, Jesus' blood line. Nobel Prize winners Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman disproved this theory in 1987. Focus gives us important clues of the grail's true meaning within it's famous, and seemingly innocent song "Hocus Pocus."

Its first line "Yodeadodoyodeadodoyodeadodoyodeadodo" is obviously an allusion to the great "Ard-Rí" (high king) of Ireland. Ard-Rís, not allowed any imperfections, were avid believers in the myth of the Holy grail, and sought after it to ensure their state of perfection, believing that if they found the grail, they would become a being of true perfection, like Jesus. They divided Ireland in to 5 provinces, to perform a grid-like search for the Grail. This is interesting to note because it has been rumored that Jesus had 5 fingers. The lyrics "Yodeadodoyodeadodoyodeadodoyodeadodo" roughly translates to "Jesus turned the grail into a portkey, it is hidden in the Irish Country side." This is the first important Clue Thijs van Leer slyly slips into "Hocus Pocus".

I know you are thinking "So what? What makes that a reliable source of information?" In July 1999, Anthropologist Edward Tylor discovered a locked door in the back of his closet of his Beverly Hills home. The door was made of Hawthorne, and upon the door in gold letters were the words "What's da password?" Focus, upon hearing of this mysterious door, traveled to Beverly Hills to help. Drummer Pierre van der Linden walked right up to the door and whispered "humpelilly-luptodoro". This proves Focus is in fact a band of wise wizards.

The final clue is in plain sight, and one of the most convincing pieces of evidence of the location of the holy grail. The term "Bom" is used within the song 26 times. 26 is the number of words that the word "grail" can be rearranged into. This leads us to the conclusion that The holy grail is most definitely in Ireland.


Thank you, ravenravenraven.  You made my career! ;-)

Picking Up

On his blog, "JD Painterguy" has mentioned that the poems, sketches and mini-plays he writes on his blog represent his first attempts to write in twenty years.  


And he was an English major in college!


I thought about that recently, when I spent a Saturday with a friend of mine who happens to be a math professor.  He recently started drawing after being away from it for nearly four decades.   When he picked up his pencils and brushes, his wife was motivated to do the same.  I do not want to speculate on how good their future work might be, but their drawings interested me enough that I want to see what they do next.


For years, he said, he never told anyone that he drew and painted when he was younger, and he told himself that he "put it aside" to concentrate on his advanced studies in mathematics.  "It's what I wished were true," he told me.  


The real reason he stopped, he said, was that "art school ruined me."  Until he said that, I didn't know that he'd gone to art school.  "Almost nobody else knows that about me," he explained.  Through his years of studying and teaching math, he had little reason to talk about his old artwork with anyone. More to the point, he said, was that mentioning it to anyone, especially his colleagues, would have "cast" him "in a different light" and "opened up some wounds."


His art-school teachers had very set, rigid ideas as to how pieces should be drawn or painted, and his work didn't fit into them.  What I saw of his work shows, I believe, competence and perhaps vision of some kind.  It certainly reflects attention to detail and mastery of some techniques.   The latter may have been one of the benefits of whatever training he had--and, I believe, is the best most education in the arts can do.  However, I still get the sense he is emerging from a "cocoon" or "shell" he constructed, perhaps as a defense.


Why would he have been defending himself?  Well, from my own experiences, I would guess that it wasn't against criticism, but against egoistic hostility.  Graduate programs in the creative and performing arts are full of it:  Those programs pit students against each other, and against their instructors.  There are so many people competing for a limited pie, and so many of the ways in which people are chosen for publication, hiring and tenure seem arbitrary and have as much to do with fads of the moment as with actual creative ability.  The more that success is based on factors beyond people's control, the worse they are likely to treat each other.


All of this has the effect of turning those creative enterprises-- for which students had passion when they began studying them--into dull, lifeless excercises. No wonder people stop practicing their arts after studying them!

On Debtors' And Veterans' Suicides

Every time I think about them, I find a closer relationship between the phenomenon of students taking out large loans to get degrees that have been losing their value in this economy and the phenomenon of young people signing up for the military during times of wars that aren't being fought on our soil.


The most obvious relationship between the two phenomena is that they're concurrent.  But more to the point, they're both results and symptoms of the state of this country's economy, and of the ways the missions and values of some of this country's most respected institutions have been perverted.


The Armed Forces of this country are ostensibly for the defense of this country.  As I understand it, that is how they were envisioned when they were founded in the early days of this county:  The idea of fighting foreign wars was abhorrent to the "Founding Fathers." 


The idea of a university as an economic engine that helps to drive the financial-political complex would have been equally abhorrent to the founders and early administrators of this country's colleges and universities.  Yet that is exactly what they--particularly in programs like law--have become.  


While pre-World War II universites were undoubtedly elitist, at least in a socio-economic sense, they at least served a purpose of helping to develop the next generation of leaders, thinkers and creators.  Although their role in society and the economy was much smaller than it is now, at least that role was relatively clearly defined, or at least adhered to with some kind of consistency.  


Most important, they didn't present themselves as something they're not:  namely, a passage to a middle-class job. While it's certainly true that most college graduates, then, got good jobs after getting their degrees, the colleges, for the most part, didn't present themselves as ways to one of those jobs. And students didn't have to mortgage the rest of their lives to pay for one of those degrees.  


So many of our recently-returned soldiers, sailors and airmen (and -women) are paying, and will continue to pay, for the time they've spent overseas, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Some have been physically maimed, but many more have been psychologically and spiritually scarred in all sorts of ways.  Given that they were sent to fight in some country that they'd probably never heard of, and couldn't locate on a map, before they were sent there, it's amazing that more of them don't come back more damaged than they are. 


Marriages and other relations break under the strain of long deployments.  So does much else in the fabric of families and communities.  This leads to prolonged depression and, in some cases, suicide.  


The unconscionably high rate of veterans killing themselves has no parallel at any other time in American history.  Nor does the number of hopelessly endebted graduates.  Both of them have their roots in the hijacking of institutions by those whose only interest is the profit they can make from them.  That is how invasions become "defense" and taking out loans for useless degrees becomes an "investment."   As always, the ones who profit are not the ones who pay.