Students are trapped in the higher education ponzi. And are chained to their loans!

If students actually had to earn the money to pay for that world-class fitness center, the 2,000 different clubs, and the off-campus apartment with the pizza parties, there would be a lot less of those things.  And while I like both world class fitness centers, and apartments, they're not the sort of thing that should be funded with borrowed money.

That was Megan McArdle writing in the context of her arguments to "allow students to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy."

The university where I teach has built an ultra-modern fitness center, with rock-climbing walls.
Here is how a recent all-campus email described the facility:

The HWC is a 40,000 square foot facility, comprised of a two-court gymnasium with an elevated track, two racquetball courts, three multipurpose rooms, a 6,000 square foot cardiovascular and strength training area, a 40 foot high by 40 foot wide rock climbing wall, locker rooms,an equipment check-out area, lounge areas with wireless internet capabilities and the Aquatic Center (lap and therapy pool).

Seriously, we need such a facility so that our students' learning will be vastly improved?  Coming next: a cigar lounge with a well-equipped bar?

Of course, students have no choice but to pay a fee every term they are registered as students.  And, most of them do not use it either--their lives are way too busy, juggling work, family, and essays and tests.

Anyway, the same email also included this info on how much faculty and staff will have to pay if we wanted to use it:

Fall term membership cost is $78

$78 for three months works out to a monthly rate of $26.  Turns out that this is pretty much the market rate at privately run fitness centers that have swimming pools too.


It is clear then, isn't it, that we conveniently tap into the taxpayer money that is available through the students in order to build these fancy structures.  Students don't feel the pain now because they don't see it as their own out-of-pocket expenses when they are paying out of their loans.  Which is why my argument has always been that these taxpayer subsidies for higher education end up benefiting the higher education industry and not the students, who are the real intended beneficiaries.

McArdle writes:

I'm sure some people would be worse off if student loans were harder to get--but I'd guess that many more people would be better off if their government, and private creditors, and universities, had not enabled them to make some very, very expensive bad decisions.  The answer to this problem is not to further socialize the college-industrial complex; it's to demand that it justify its worth to its customers up front, for cash on the barrelhead.

Plus if we stopped the broad general subsidy for student loans, we could put that money into merit scholarships or scholarships for the neediest students, rather than yet another plan for the middle class to get rich by picking its own pockets.

Meanwhile, making student loans bankruptable would offer immediate relief to those who are trapped under crushing debt burdens from which they now can't escape.  It might not give a huge immediate boost to the economy.  But at least it would give some of those people some hope that they might one day get ahead.

How awful!

One class that I was scheduled to teach this term was originally scheduled in a classroom in this brand new facility that I refer to as the Taj Mahal.  I called up the office-in-charge and asked her whether my class could meet elsewhere--I didn't give her all these reasons though.

But, no other classroom was available for that time block.

It was a hybrid class, with only one meeting a week.  Turned out that most students had registered for the class thinking that it was a fully online class--the university had not made this clear in the listing of classes.

When we met, students preferred getting rid of the hybrid structure and the weekly meeting.  The administrators owned up the institutional mistake in the class schedule and ok'ed the deletion of the meeting.

So, guess what?  Now that fancy shmancy state-of-the art classroom is unused.  Increasingly more and more classrooms will be under-utilized as we go more and more online.  We seem to be the only industry making investments in brick and mortar facilities that won't be used for too long.

But, hey, it is after all taxpayer monies, right?