The Crisis in Education

 

Many viewing the twin crises facing higher education, the escalating cost of tuition and the decreasing numbers of students, are predicting its demise.  How did we get here and what can we anticipate moving forward. The answers are complex, and in order to understand where we are going, what we need to do to survive this crisis, we must understand the roots of this calamity.

Our journey starts with the end of World War II as America founds itself with two interesting dilemmas.  On the one hand it was the only intact Western nation with an abundance of excess capital.  On the other, it had saw the beginning of the baby boom, the largest single rise in its population in centuries.  Added to this, it found itself competing with the Soviet Union for dominance, and the push to see who the winner would be.  The response to these were interesting.  We dumped a tremendous amount of money into education at all levels.  Our goal was to win the race into space, produce the future scientists, business and industry leaders, scientists and intellectuals needed to move us into this post-industrial universe. Our high schools cranked out an abundance of well-educated students, while our colleges saw the largest single mass of students (of all races, genders, and class groups) we had ever produced.   And guess what, we accomplished these.  In the process, as those baby boomers came into adult hood, the best educated and trained generation this country ever saw, guess what happened? Guess what these highly educated, motivated, and inspired youth attempted to accomplish? They orchestrated the most comprehensive set of social movements this nation had ever witnessed.

1) Social movements calling for racial, gender, LGBTQ+, Immigration, Native American equality and equity. 

2) Calls to end the war in Viet Nam, end poverty, and relax the laws on drugs.

3) A push to secure the future for our increasingly elderly population, provide for welfare reforms, and expand the coverage of health care.

But while these have been portrayed by media and historians as being separate movements, they were all coordinated and intersected.  Hence, leaders of all these movements worked collaboratively across them to produce a unified call for change.  The response from conservatives were universal and dramatic.  A long term anti-social movement came into being -the roots of MAGA were born.  Lets us consider this anti-social movement.

Back in 1970's and early 1980's the state and federal government provided 85% of the operating costs of Higher education, 65 % of the costs of public-school funding.  

With the Reagan election, and his call for getting tough on crime, military buildup, and social unrest - we began constructing the cradle to prison pipeline and the attendant militarization of the police, over policing of black, brown and Native communities, massive increase in prison construction, and considerable increase in military funding.  The outcomes:

1) We now have more people incarcerated than most countries in the world. We lead all the Western democracies. We spend more on prisons then we do on education.

2) Today, we only provide 5% of funding to higher education, and 30% of the funding for local schools.  The balance is being picked up by students and local communities.

3) The war on crime, poverty, drugs have all failed.

4) Our military expenditures have produced a large stockpile of weapons, but our biggest threat is from within not external.

5) And while the white student population is in decline, that of diverse students (Hispanics, Black and Immigrants) is on the rise. 

When the majority of our students at colleges were white, and the professorate were white -the future of education was bright indeed.  Now that diversity is becoming more and more realizable, the attacks on education, particularly higher education have never been so intense. The future of education, and higher education in particularly, is diversity.  And that is the major problem that ultra-conservatives have with education.  Alternatively, the people of America -as in we the people -brown, black, Native American, Asian, and White - must be educated, must be able to think critically, and self-complex problems.  Education is more than job development but tied to the liberation of the mind.  Therefore, they will continue their attacks. Democracy itself and our way of life will depend upon who wins this battle.