Forum Post: Education bubble: liberal professors feeding at the public trough and gouging students
Posted 11 years ago on May 16, 2012, 10:53 a.m. EST by Pequod
(17)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Lets be truthful. 90% or more of college professors are extreme liberals. However in exactly the same way as public employees, professors have milked the public cow to the breaking point. Medical care has risen over the last 20 years about 250%, college expenses at 450%!
Only a complete fool would go to college and get a soft liberal arts degree faced with the knowledge that profs are the greediest of pigs, taking your borrowed money knowing your degree has little value, and you are left with no way to pay it back.
JP Morgan lost $2 billion of rich peoples money. Your college professors are closer to Al Capone, and now saps, er, students have $1 trillion in loans, cough, cough, sputter, sputter.
Berkeley has over a 100 profs making $200k or more!! http://www.collegiatetimes.com/databases/salaries/university-of-california-berkeley
And you think the Tea Party is wrong to try and control spending. Too funny.
Funny, compared to their counterparts in private industry (with comparable education), college professors earn less. Indeed, we can't even say that being a professor is a slacker job, because to be a college professor, you really had to be a top performing student when you were in college (or otherwise very accomplished).
So this is just more of the same, trying to divide the 99%, pit one group against the other, etc. Moreover, it's not that the tea party is wrong to say that we can't keep borrowing money at these rates forever, it's their proposed solution that we disagree with (they support austerity versus measures that reduce wealth disparity).
We used to have a phrase for societies where wealth becomes exceedingly concentrated, "banana republic" ....
So you are OK with a 450% fee increase? Drilling for oil is probably geometrically more difficult than being a professor, but you go nuts when gas goes up by 50c.
What measures would reduce our debt? Your answer is taxes but you wont be honest and admit taxes would have to rise dramatically on EVERYONE inorder to restore a more balanced budget.
I mean, I haven't done or looked at rigorous studies that seek to explain the inflation in college tuition, but if typical market dynamics are any indicator, then I'd suspect it's a supply and demand problem. The simple fact that population grows implies there will be consistently more demand for higher education over time. Has our college system kept pace with this increasing demand? I would think at a minimum you'd want a rigorous answer to this question before you knee jerked to some of the assumptions you're making.
Intuitively, I would guess it is a supply shortage, and therefore we should increase the supply (in this context, expand the number of seats in our universities). The most straightforward way to accomplish this (from a public policy perspective) is to expand our state university and community college systems.
all of a sudden supply and demand are ok in the area of liberal professors income, but not ok in gasoline prices?
Nice flip flop to suit your bizarre perception. At least be honest.
Where have "I" said (or for that matter implied) that supply and demand is not a factor with gasoline prices? To say otherwise would be somewhat ridiculous. Maybe there's some degree of collusion in the oil industry (I'm not really sure, but the industry is dominated by a handful of extremely large corporations, which would suggest collusion could be a factor).
Anyway, my opinion of gasoline (if you'd like to hear it) is .... we strive to drive it into obsolescence (because CO2 emissions will eventually burn up our planet, and seriously alter the ecosystem that human beings evolved in).
By 'strive,' do mean consciously or unconsciously? I would guess the former.
I likely have you confused with some of the conspiracy loons who are like vermin on the left.
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you say you are honest, I KNOW I am honest.
Here is your chance, can we close the budget gap by raising taxes on the top 5 % alone?
nope, the bottom must be funded for business to happen
That seems like a no-brainer to me. How come so many people in charge don't get that?
Or maybe they do?
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I don't take troll bait ......
Your sswer, de facto ten, is no we cant. So proves you are a liar.
Oh I get it .... this must be the "absurdity" strategy :)
Then how can penciling out the math be untruthful? its MATH!
Sorry, I'm still not taking the troll bait (you'll have to eat it yourself).
Come on now... being a professor of the sociology of addictions is valuable work, especially when you get a salary plus government grants to carry out research whose methodology could be easily critiqued by a 5 year old child with down syndrome.
Why did you forget to mention how much the Presidents and executives running the for-profit colleges and public colleges make?
For ex: Gregory Cappelli, the co-CEO of the Apollo Group, parent company of the University of Phoenix raked in $25 million in total compensation for the year 2011.
Or how about the 1 million plus salaries that most of the Presidents of public colleges make?
And let's not forget about how much money the college head coaches of basketball and football teams make... I believe Rick Pitino of the University of Louisville was paid around $7 million last year.
These types of yearly incomes kind of pales in comparison of the professors... dontcha think?
I mean, if you are so concerned about spending... wouldn't it be honest to include everybody's salary at the colleges?
I should have included the Admin team, you are correct.
I dont care about coaches salaries. Usually big name coaches generate more revenue than anyone.
Thanks for being honest. And the next step towards a more honest approach is to take a look at the systemic issues, instead of blaming the individual actors.
everyone feeds off the public through
income based repayment.. only 20 bucks a month at 20k a year
http://studentaid.ed.gov/PORTALSWebApp/students/english/IBRCalc.jsp
What's a soft liberal degree?
English, literature, history, sociology, philosophy, urban studies, any ethnic study,
Hard major: mining engineering, math, physics, materials science, solid state dynamics, physical chem, petroleum engineering.
Ah, I see. And what did you major in, dear Pequod?
They can't comprehend that people in OWS have degrees in Computer Programming, or business degrees, or what-have-you. They are using this line to attack to try and show that the 1% is "smarter" than everyone else, when we know that isn't true at all.
Business is a soft degree. Computer programming is a soft degree.
This has nothing to do with the 1%.
I know. It's a bullshit thread.