These are two words that have been sweeping the hippie/hipster nation recently, and perhaps even permeating the more conservative elements of our society who, despite not believing in global warming, can see the red-blooded American value and economic drive and the (sometimes) profitability of buying local. We know a bit about the environmental cost of importing food and other goods (planes use fuel, and are a rather expensive method of shipping); and the diversity and beneficial competitive environment that small local businesses promote. The hipster nation knows all about the fascism that is Wal Mart and any other corporate enterprise, even if they don't all necessarily know what fascism is.
But while I do think that the ideas of sustainability and homegrown enterprise are permeating the realms of business, energy, and humanitarian organizations, one place it has been notably lacking is education. My dad likes to rant about how the higher education system as it is now cannot be sustainable. Looking at the sky-rocketing, already-insane costs of higher education, it is hard to be optimistic.
The first thing I think of when I see costs of even out-of-state public universities (supposedly cheaper) steadily approaching 60,000 dollars a year is: where the fuck are they coming up with that number? That number doesn't even include room, board or transportation; so there is no way that 60,000 dollars is what you're paying for your standard fifteen credits and some computer, library, and writing center fees; it can't even be that much to include insurance and student health blankets. Thirty years ago the same fifteen credits of classes at Harvard that now costs 30,000 dollars was; believe it or not; some 400 dollars a semester. (This is what a Harvard alum who attended around thirty years ago told me). It is completely ridiculous to expect even the wealthiest among us to be paying the modern costs of an undergraduate liberal arts education.
I don't know what it is, though. I'm not an economist. And the breakdowns that colleges provide as to where their tuition goes seem legitimate; professor salaries aren't the best, anyway, and research funding is a must to garner a university the required accolades to attract the best and brightest. I've talked to some of my friends who are, like me, attending expensive out of state colleges and concerned about it (I have a literally constant internal battle as to whether or not it is worth it, and it's torture).
One of my friends was of the opinion that one of the only (or most effective) ways to cut the cost of higher education would be to make universities teaching-only insitutions, so that tuition would not go towards funding research and research-based salaries in addition to the (for most undergrads, at least) teaching-based education that is the bare necessity. I'm sure that this would do something in the way of reducing education costs and perhaps rendering education more sustainable, but it would also rob U.S. higher education of its dynamism, applicability, and comprehensive enrichment. For indeed the strongest unique quality of U.S. university faculty members is that their research allows them to teach in a flexible, tailored manner, applying their subject to modern problems and examples. Dynamic education that is at least to some extent re-formulated and reconfigured each new semester saves us from falling into archaic forms of education that do not challenge, inspire, or prepare students to be competent in the real world. Additionally, U.S. universities are unique in offering a variety of undergraduate research opportunities: and many of these undergrads become published, productive researchers even (or perhaps especially) in their youth; this is an asset we cannot afford to lose.
Another idea for cost-curbing that I have heard, and don't like (yeah, I'm an ol' stickler for the traditional) is that online courses that are beginning to be offered by companies like Coursera and Edx might begin to substitute at least those very basic introductory college classes (which deal with sometimes 600 students at a time anyway, so its hard to make the argument that the education experience will become 'less personal'). I think if there is some sort of certifiable way to earn credit for these classes (like at least a sit down final exam so they can make sure you're the person getting the credit and you know some of your shit), and if online classes are substituted ONLY for those classes that are already funneling kids through, plug-and-chug, (like Intro Psych or something) and there is some external human source to whom students might go to for help, then overall it might be a good idea. But I know that, at least in some ways, I am completely a product and a mindless robot of our educational system: and so much personal motivation, without even having a guy or gal to stand in a lecture hall and yell at me about deadlines or inspire me to read, would be hard for me to muster. Also there is something (see: a lot) to be said about human interaction and even perhaps the bare fact of REALITY (rather than virtuality) that is an integral facilitating component of learning.
So instead of vast online overhauls or cutting off research funding, I think that more government energy needs to be spent on public universities. One reason I didn't go to the University of Utah is because I know about professor attitudes to introductory lecture courses; my dad bitches about them all the time. I would have been neglected as one in a million, but more than that I would not have had to apply myself to get straight A's in a series of classes I was sampling (higher level courses are another story, certainly). It should not be the grade that motivates us to immerse ourselves in our classes; but unfortunately this is the mindset institutionalized education has trapped us in. I have to admit that although I love learning about anything and everything and I read voraciously, I probably wouldn't apply myself in college classes beyond what I needed to earn an A. And simply put, I have to work a lot harder for my A at UVA than I would in the same class at the University of Utah.
But another thing is true of higher education, or for that matter any level of education; and that is that a good student will be a good student regardless of the environment you place them in. So I would possibly have been as good a student at the U as I was at UVA, and perhaps even pursued more research opportunities if easier intro classes left me with some free time (or because these opportunities are far less competitive at the U than at UVA). But I do not think it is fair to relegate every good student to a perfunctory education at a state school that might be worse than the University of Utah, which is a good university after all.
There is not enough government focus on making education a sustainable resource. The best and brightest are deterred from enrolling at their local state schools by enticing offers from prestigious private and public schools out-of-state (hence: brain drain). The people who leave will probably never come back, at least not permanently. They will overcrowd a more metropolitan area with their intellect and skills, not to mention their bodily functions and carbon footprints, and conversely their small local roots will remain slow-developing. The local university, neglected by the best and brightest, is left with the same fate.
Brain drain is countered by a phenomenon known as 'wallet drain', where ones' parents must shell out exorbitant amounts of money so that their best-and-brightest kid can get the fuck out; because after all, the most generous full ride scholarship offers are from unheard of state schools. While they might be out of your own state, these state schools might be academically even less stimulating than the affordable local state school is, so it's not a logical option.
It is true, and commendable, that not-top-tier local state schools are perhaps the only places you will be able to get a full ride or half-ride scholarship based on merit and not merely need. These scholarships prevent some brain drain but not enough, because (let's face it) who is even going to college in the first place these days (think majority, not minority): the kids from families with money. Rags to riches stories are certainly possible, but still not the norm, if ever they will be. So out of those kids who score high enough on their PSATs and get scholarships to the University of Utah, perhaps a third of them, maybe even less, will attend the U. Let's face it: they are doing so well in part because their parents attended college and gave a shit about their own kids' educations; and that probably means that they come from at least a middle-class background, which means they can (almost) afford going out of state.
I think that the government needs to take a far more personal and active role in improving the caliber of state schools over all, to promote affordability and sustainability, and prevent brain drain. State schools left to their own devices are lacking in resources; they can only provide a few scholarships based on some arbitrary marker like the PSAT (presumably because it saves them the time of actually having to look through applicants' coursework and essays), and they lose bright students quickly. But in the long run, I think that even the kids with money rearing to get out of their hometowns will not be able to afford out of state schools: so the quality of state universities is an issue that needs to be addressed promptly. If you consider students who live in California, Virginia, Michigan, or North Carolina (or anywhere else with a top-tier public university or two), they have it easy. The best and brightest students in Virginia by and large go to UVA, a top-tier public university. The same goes for UNC Chapell Hill and the University of Michigan Ann-Arbor. And indeed if you lived in any of these states and were accepted to any of these schools for the reasonable cost of in-state tuition, it would be hard to justify going elsewhere unless you had a more comprehensive scholarship.
I have a few sketchy ideas as to how our government could approach the issue of attracting more top-tier students to state schools, thereby increasing their caliber. One is perhaps not so sketchy: the government should fund more (and more generous) merit-based scholarships to in-state schools. Another idea I have is that state schools that are already top-tier, like UC Berkeley, might begin drawing from a wider pool of states and offer in-state tuition to those best-and-brightest students from out of state. The idea is that these students, once affordably educated, are more likely to stay in/return (if not to their state itself) then at least the general area, thereby enriching and improving this area (sustainability!). I have no idea how you would pull this off; I don't know enough about federal funding.
The other would be to convert the entirety of the United States to a giant socialist hippie commune in which we tax the fuck out of the wealthiest and use the fuck out of the money to 1) increase research funding (draws the best and brightest professors, increases the caliber of state school, attracts top in-state students) 2) subsidize administrative costs to eliminate any bullshit paths for our tuition 3) provide education as a basic right, because isn't that the goal of the public school system anyway, one that it is increasingly failing to fulfill?
One thing I don't understand is the paradigm of private schools versus public schools: in high school, there seems to be a disparity in cost without the disparity in education. I mean to say that while preparatory schools get kids into Ivy League schools like bosses, they don't seem to offer any rigor or spawn kids of otherworldly intelligence, in comparison to public high schools. And actually, I guess it's only coming to light for me now; but who is to say, or to prove, that my education at the University of Virginia (basically a private-public school) or, the fabled example, Harvaaard, is going to leave me any more knowledgeable, intelligent, or capable of critical thinking (you apply whatever you consider the ultimate goal of college, it beats me sometimes) than the same education at the University of Utah. It all comes down to the student: a good student will suck the marrow out of their experience at either institution and come out on top. Better students than me (oh, there are so many) are at the U capitalizing on opportunities I don't even HAVE at UVA, or that aren't available at Harvard: so tell me, why is it worth it? (It's not. It's all name. We are paying fifty-thousand dollars a year to graduate from a school with a name. On this scale, I chose the wrong place to go; Berkeley is better-known).
I suppose the reason that the public-school-private-school model works better in high school is that a High School diploma doesn't matter any more. While maybe 70 years ago graduating from Rowland Hall or Waterford might make me one of the few high school students to go on to college, nowadays even a good amount of public high school students advance to get a college education. So theoretically if the majority of Americans begin attending graduate school, their undergraduate institution and its nature as private or public will not matter one bit. But that won't solve the problem. Brain drain will start later, but it will still occur. Tuition costs for undergraduate institutions may become more reasonable and public universities might rise in caliber, all promoting sustainable education, but it won't matter any more because maybe the problem will shift to graduate education instead: maybe there will be a shortage of government funding to pay so many grad students, and graduate education won't be sustainable.
Another reason that public high schools are frequented even by college-bound students is programs like AP and IB, which provide them all of (and perhaps more than) the intellectual challenge of a private college preparatory school. AP and IB programs (especially in high schools who can subsidize the costs of the tests for low-income students) are a blessing, and among the only reasons that higher education can be accessible to low-income students (which will help promote sustainability and prevent brain drain, hopefully). Maybe we need to mimic AP and IB expand and improve Honors College programs in public universities, as well as provide more student-research programs like ACCESS at the University of Utah. And more fundamentally, AP and IB need to be championed and extended to every public high school in the United States.
So whatever the ultimate solution, I think we need to start talking and thinking about how we can make higher education more local, accessible, and sustainable: education is our most precious resource. Perhaps what remains as the largest marker of the United States' 98 percent- 2 percent paradigm is vast brain drain and private university costs: while the poorest among the 98 percent cannot even muster a public school education, the richest 2 percent are attending prep schools and Ivy League universities. Perhaps one way to curb the skyrocketing costs of education would be to observe models from other countries around the world (a lot of them have higher education either free or heavily subsidized, but they are largely socialist heathens anyway). But there is so much political and economic tension surrounding education funding that it often gets waysided, receiving the same fate as healthcare and most other things you might consider basic human rights, in the blatant partisanship and brainwashing that is our political system. So the bottom line is, I'm not exactly sure where the reform needs to start, but it does need to start.
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