How much does it cost to go to college?
I am not talking about the time and effort invested in cramming for AP and SAT tests. Nor am I talking about the diligence a students must demonstrate in sessions with a guidance counselor, visits to prospective campus, or the time dedicated to charitable causes to beef up one's college application.
I am talking about tuition. I am talking about money.
The cost of college has increased six times faster than inflation. It's crazy. Another economic bubble is about to burst in this country. College degrees are hyperprinted, where any student willing to slap down exorbitant tuition can walk into a post-secondary institution, sit through a series of empty lectures, get passing grades.
After four years, then what? There is an industry that caters to baccalaureates who have no clue what do with their lives, beyond discharging the immense debt they have been saddled with after years of "education."
Now, one specific case highlights the fraudulent plight afflicting many bright-eyed and hopeful college candidates.
At a local grocery store, I spoke with the young lady clerk who was scanning my purchases. She told me she went to a local charter school, top-notch, prominent in major nationwide publications. She boasted of earning 4.0 and scholarship to UCI.
Why was she working in a second-rate grocery store in the South Bay? She ran out of money. The tuition was too expense. Then, she told me she was thinking about enrolling in a technical school.
It strikes me as both fitting and foreboding that a young person, filled with brash self-confidence (even bordering on arrogance) would be cut down so quickly by the economy and other realities on the ground. What did she plan to do when she went to a UC? What was she going to study? How did she want to improve her lot in life?
Her predicament also underscores the subtle problems with charter schools. No matter how high they rate on standardized tests, no matter how well-respect the institution may be, no matter how jingoistic and self-promoting the students feel about their success, they have not really accomplished anything. What do they take with themselves when they graduate at the end of their senior year in high school? Tech savvy buildings, innovative curriculum, passionate educators, and a determined, small student body do not fashion young people for the real world, including the bleak limitations of a command-control economy which shackles students to choose among schools still arrested to kill-drill skills instead of educating young people from the inside out.
If nothing else, students deserve to develop the inner integrity that can face monumental challenges, even the grand disillusionment that follows the demise of the academic ideals of their instructors and charter schools.
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