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ALPERN AT LARGE - Inasmuch as there are two competing dual realities—jobs often require expensive university degrees, and taxpayers should not have to pay off the loans that others chose to accept—there is one overwhelming common truism:
COLLEGES ARE TOO DAMNED EXPENSIVE!
Are they efficient? No.
Are they cost-effective? No.
Do they link students/graduates to jobs? No (oh, but they’ll SAY they will!).
Do they try to improve any link from the university to the work setting? No.
Are they decreasing staff and professors to allow for the greater computer/internet access now available for remote learning? No.
Did they learn sufficiently lower tuitions during the COVID pandemic? No.
But…
Are college tuitions rising faster than inflation? Yes.
Have colleges become self-serving institutions that have outlived much of their usefulness of previous generations? Yes.
Are colleges ignoring the skills needed for students to thrive in the working world? Yes.
Have colleges become a growth industry that is saddling our youth and the rest of us with debt that has become impossible to overcome? Yes.
Finally, are employers more focused on university/college experience and GPA to discern who would make a great employee addition? No.
And also finally, do colleges give a damn about all of the above? No…of course not!
So are out-of-control college tuitions becoming a sort of “pump priming the economy”? Yes !
President Biden’s student loan forgiveness was properly overruled as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court—even Nancy Pelosi was quoted by Chief Justice Roberts in citing why the President could not single-handedly give a refund without Congress.
Furthermore, shall we forget those who paid their loans back, despite whatever hardships were involved?
Shall we forget those who chose to attend junior colleges, apprenticeships, or other alternative pathways to avoid debt?
And perhaps the biggest talking point of them all…shall we forget those who did NOT go to college because they could NOT afford them, and have them pay off the loans that others voluntarily assumed responsibility to pay back?
No, no, and no to those last three vital questions.
But student loans ARE saddling down our youth, and college tuitions ARE hurting us all without giving much back to our society in return.
You want student loan relief? Well, so do we all.
So let’s have the perpetrators of this problem be responsible for reducing the pain it’s caused.
A 10% across the board reduction of tuition, and/or a 10% or tuition refunds ought to do the trick.
Because one need not be a college graduate to realize this tuition/forgiveness issue will feed, and not extinguish, the flames of this fiery, contentious issue if we just pay back loans that we morally should not, and financially cannot, have encouraged in the first place.
(Kenneth S. Alpern, M.D, is a dermatologist who has served in clinics in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties, and is a proud husband and father. He was active for 20 years on the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC) as a Board Member focused on Planning and Transportation, and helped lead the grassroots efforts of the Expo Line as well as connecting LAX to MetroRail. His latest project is his fictional online book entitled The Unforgotten Tales of Middle-Earth, and can be reached at [email protected]. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Dr. Alpern.)
