Is Education Reserved for the Elite?
Posted: Monday, May 16, 2011
by TeamAfro
AfroDaddy.com
Education in America has traditionally been a vehicle for upward mobility. “Go to college and get a good job” my mother used to say. She was not alone as most parents urge their children to get a degree and enter the workforce with as much preparation as possible. I am a college graduate with both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree and I will be the first to encourage my children to go to college. I am also aware however that the path to a degree is not the same as when I went to school. What cost me $10,000 will cost my son $40,000. I had the courage to work and take on student loan debt because I knew that when I graduated I was almost assured a job in my profession. Today’s young applicant has no such guarantee and also cannot simply get a part-time job to afford college because the cost is much too high. If his or her parents are “middle class” scholarship opportunities are severely limited. Many of the middle class options for affording college are disappearing, which lead me to the question of the day – Is education reserved for the elite in America?The wish for help from the government has fallen on deaf ears for years now. If the power structure is not creating a system of education for the elite only, they certainly are doing a good imitation. All the burden of increased tuition has been passed on to the students and their families. If your parents are rich, they pay for your education. If your parents are middle class or poor, you have to borrow the money. The student loan racket is lining the pockets of new private insurers. The traditional government student loan is the new vehicle to effectively guarantee an income stream to the government for 15 years per child. Student loans can never be erased (even through bankruptcy) so the government and the new private lenders have a built-in, money-making machine. I can almost excuse private insurers as we know all they care about is profit, but the government has no excuse for burdening our youth to such an extent.
If this country truly values education for all then lawmakers are going to have to make some changes. We cannot continue on this path where we overfund defense and provide tax breaks to corporations while cutting school funding. My sad suspicion is that like many other policies in this country, the rich who control the government don’t want education for all. I suspect that they want to reserve education for the rich as we all know that education is the great gateway to becoming rich. Close off the gateway and the power can remain at the top (where the rich thinks it belongs).
Note: If anybody wants to see the ghastly cost of education today. Follow this link to UC Berkeley's (my alma mater) cost http://grad.berkeley.edu/admissions/cost_fees.shtml
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)I enjoyed your article. I read that 25 years ago 1% of Americans took 12% of the income and controlled a third of the wealth. Now the top 1% takes nearly 25% of the country's income and controls 40% of the wealth!When wealth and power are concentrated in such a small group, the power is used to keep the wealth where it is - and investment in infrastructure and education for the many dries up. Because the wealthy don't need it. It always ends in trouble, though. You can't dismiss 99% of a population's needs. The Arab world is showing us that.
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