The Green Shadow Cabinet’s Department of Education expresses our strong support for the students at Cooper Union who have been peacefully occupying their campus President‘s office since Wednesday, May 8, in protest of the college’s recent decision to end the policy of free education for all students. The new policy was announced by the Board of Trustees on Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013, ending a tradition of over 150 years of free higher education at this private college in New York City. The Cooper Union was founded by Peter Cooper (philanthropist, inventor, and visionary) on the principle that education should be “free as air and water”. We agree.
High quality education should be available for all people in the United States, starting with early childhood education and continuing through graduate school. It should be the role of our federal government to provide free high quality education for all. We appreciate U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) bill to reduce student loan interest rates to the same interest rates that banks pay to the federal reserve, which is 0.75 percent for a year. However, we must go further and state that education can and should be free for all who are interested and able to benefit from it. Student loans and student loan debt (which has now surpassed credit card debt in our country) can and should be a thing of the past. As many college graduates are suffering under massive student debt that threatens to foreclose on their future, the Congressional Budget Office recently announced that the federal government’s student loan program is set to turn about $51 billion in profit. It is a moral outrage that the U.S. Department of Education made more than Exxon Mobil, the world’s most profitable corporation, by profiting from the debt that our country’s young people – our children and grandchildren – as well as returning adult students, have been forced into by a broken system.
The Green Shadow Cabinet Department of Education affirms that high quality education is a human right and therefore should be provided by a caring and responsible federal government.
We call for tuition abolition and debt emancipation from all existing student debt, which sentences millions of current and former students to years of indentured servitude to the financial industry.
High quality education can assist people in developing their full potential and in making their maximum contributions to their families, communities, and society. We can fund free high quality education for all in the United States simply by increasing taxation of the highly profitable banks and other corporations, many of which pay unfairly low taxes because they benefit from tax loopholes that rob our country of valuable resources created by the people of this country. As a percentage of national income, corporate profits stood at 14.2 percent in the third quarter of 2012, the largest share at any time since 1950, while the portion of income that went to employees was 61.7 percent, near its lowest point since 1966. This is unacceptable and can and should be changed. The wealth of society can and should be used to offer free education on the path to creating the country we all deserve.
Statement of the Green Shadow Cabinet’s Department of Education, a section of the Democracy Branch:
- Kimberly King, Secretary of Education
- Roshan Bliss, Assistant Secretary of Education for Higher Education
- Jack Gerson, Assistant Secreraty of Education for K-12
- Todd Price, Assistant Secretary of Education for Education Technology
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!
In brightest day, in darkest night
No evil shall escape my sight.
Let those who laugh at my lack of height
Beware my banjo…Green Froggy’s light!
That’s a neat trick: socialize every sector of the economy, and when you can’t make the intellectual case that socialization is actually the right thing to do, you just whine that its opponents are hypocrites for not retreating to a cabin in the woods.
The subsidies involved in my higher education actually ran the other way. With my grades and test scores I could have gone to an elite college, but USM was so motivated to upgrade its student body that they asked me to accept a free ride: tuition, housing, and meals.
At Michigan, my tuition was paid for by my labor, which UM bought at over a 50% discount (compared to working in industry) in order to provide TAs for all the 13th-graders they pump through their overpriced auditorium classes.
Peter Thiel is right: higher education in America is suffering from an over-investment bubble, inflated by a flood of Other People’s Money. It’s also trapped in a Red Queen’s equilibrium in which consumers (i.e. students) wildly overpay in order to match the signaling benefits that other consumers are purchasing. Prof. Bryan Caplan’s forthcoming book (preview here) explains it all nicely.
The irony here is that leftists on this issue completely abandon one of their standard critiques of free markets: the wastefulness of status-motivated consumer arms races over http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positional_goods.
In America, the Education Fundamentalists are just as unthinking as the Democracy Fundamentalists. No matter what problems their religion causes, they have blind faith that the solution is to apply their religion more fervently. When was the last time you heard an education or democracy advocate talk about the problems of having too much of either? By contrast, the standard problems of having too much market freedom are diagnosed in every macroeconomics textbook — and yet market-freedom advocates are the ones who get accused of being dogmatic.
No, we don’t believe it should be limited to the 1%. There is some empirical evidence on how government education has compared with a free market in education in educating poor people in the US, and government education has done a far worse job. For example, see http://www.ruwart.com/Healing/chap10.html
No, of course not. Brian is perfectly free to advocate whatever he desires, but perhaps he should change his first slogan to read, “Libertarian: Former freeloaders who now believe higher education should be limited exclusively to the 1%.”
So what? Should that mean he can’t see the wisdom of doing things a different way?
I agree with Brian.
Mea culpa: I graduated from the government subsidized University of Alabama. And yes, I use government roads and government operated and/or subsidized transit. That doesn’t mean I should not be able to advocate changing the system.
I didn’t realize that Brian Holtz was a graduate of Hillsdale College, or possibly Grove City College in northwest Pennsylvania. I thought I read somewhere that he was a graduate of heavily federally-subsidized Southern Miss. and the University of Michigan.
This is among the stupidest things I have ever heard in my life. The Green Party is a bunch of wackos, and they don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell at any kind of meaningful electoral success in the United States.
Free education paid for by violence courtesy of the Green Party.
You all may be ‘green’ on the outside, but you are STILL ‘red’ on the inside.
If there anything close to a ‘state religion’ in this country, it is the “Church of Public Education”.
I don’t owe your children a college education.