ObamaCare Reduces Employee Hours at Colleges

Sometimes Justice pays a visit to those who have most assiduously attempted to evade it.

Obama and his Collectivist Party have had extremely high support at our colleges and universities.  Recent college graduates, including many who cannot find jobs, voted for him overwhelmingly not just in the 2008 election, but in the 2012 election when any sane person would have known better.  The faculty and support staff of most colleges and universities have been even more fanatical supporters of the socialist president and the Democrat Socialist Party.  Most of them eagerly supported ObamaCare, the law no one read and most of which was subsequently written in reality by bureaucrats, who are still busy writing it.

The Justice is that most colleges are now under some financial pressure and finding it hard to allow their operational costs to exceed the inflation rate several times over for the first time in decades.  Many, in their mad quest to add more and more administrative personnel, had been scrimping on faculty for a long time.  In 1975, full time non-tenure track faculty and part-time adjunct teaching staff were 43% of the faculty at U.S. colleges.  In 2009, they had grown to 69% of the faculty.  Tenured and tenured track faculty have shrunk dramatically, which supposedly would mean that teaching skills have decreased as well.

It now turns out that ObamaCare is causing numerous colleges to reduce the hours of their long-growing adjunct professors to fewer than 30 hours a week so that they will not have to pay the penalty tax for not providing them with health insurance.  See the Wall St. Journal of 19-20 January 2013 for more on this.  They most certainly do not want to actually provide them with health insurance since the ObamaCare insurance requirements are causing the cost of health insurance premiums to skyrocket.  The worst of the cost increases are just about to land hard on employers everywhere.

Of course colleges are not just planning to reduce the hours of adjunct professors.  They plan to reduce the hours of many on their support and administrative staffs also.  Just as restaurant chains and retail chains are reducing the number of hours of their employees to less than 30 hours a week, so are many colleges planning to make such reductions.  In the ObamaCollectivistNation, fewer and fewer people will have full-time jobs.  It was really the same in the Soviet Union, where 12 people commonly stood around and watched as one or two people did some work.  Of course, there they pretended they all had part-time jobs, but they were paid in accordance with the work they did not do.

A Mr. Balla, an adjunct professor at Stark College in North Canton, Ohio, said after receiving a letter informing him of his reduced hours:

I think it goes against the spirit of the law.  In education, we're working for the public good, we are public employees at a public institution; we should be the first ones to uphold the law, to set the example.

 He says he will not be able to afford ObamaCare insurance on his own.  Poor special person!  Perhaps he should just suck it up and find a job in the private sector that he looks down his nose at and learns how hard it is to earn a living while carrying all the entitlees  and "public" employees on your back and obeying the flurry of unreadable and unintelligible regulations and the many irrational mandates of the local, state, and federal governments.  It really irks me that these people claim to be serving the "public" when they are so clearly serving themselves as privileged rulers over the brutes they think populate the private sector.  This guy claims his right to the Cadillac ObamaCare insurance provided by the taxpayer even as millions of private sector workers have their employment hours reduced because of his lovely ObamaCare tyranny.  He claims his special privilege as a worker for the public good even as tax revenues from the many with fewer hours worked in the private sector must go down.  But, our saintly educator must get his privileged health insurance despite any such inconvenient reality.  The Federal Reserve will surely just print the additional needed money and give it to the colleges.

The colleges have long failed to serve us well.  They are bastions opposed to the sovereign individual rights of each of us.  They have long favored collectivism and opposed the American Principle of limited government with powers so restricted that it could not violate individual rights.  Their man Obama just reiterated his allegiance to collectivism and his real opposition to our individual rights in his Second Inaugural Address.

What is more, they do not even do a decent job of preparing their students for work in the private sector.  They are turning out droves of young people too privileged to actually be willing to work hard.  Their student product is ignorant of civics and U.S. history, of economics, of business reality, of the climate, of fossil fuels and their use, of writing skills, of logic and the construction of rational thought, and of science.  Most fallaciously believe they are qualified to choose the values by which others shall be forced to live their lives and able to choose politicians who will micromanage our incompetent lives in the private sector.  They are so full of themselves and so very hollow in reality.  Just like our Mr. Balla.

Well, their support for ObamaCare is about to result in their shooting themselves in the foot.  At least unless the efforts of such college groups as the American Association of Community Colleges to get the IRS to write the rules to exclude colleges from ObamaCare's requirements works.  The Obama regime has a tremendous propensity for writing administrative rules that exclude their biggest supporters from the rule of law.  We have already seen them write massive exceptions for unions and for companies from Nancy Pelosi's district.

Speaking of unions, more and more of college adjunct professors are already in unions.  About 37% of part-time non-tenured faculty are in unions already.  The colleges are fearing that putting these people on fewer hours will cause even more of them to join unions.  It is very funny that unions and their Collectivist Party are nearly universally supported on college campuses,  until unions approach their lower paid faculty and threaten to make the colleges pay them more money.  Colleges are rather the ultimate joke when it comes to hypocrisy.  How ironic that the ObamaCare that they cannot afford will push more of their lower paid faculty into unions that will demand higher pay they cannot afford.  Yet the justice come home to roost upon these bastions of irrationality is really quite sweet.

Explanation for the Huge Surge in Part-Time Jobs in September

It has been pointed out that in years past, employment of 18 to 25 year olds has fallen drastically in September as students returned to college and gave up their summer jobs.  Not this September.  Also not last September.

I suspect three things are going on here.  One is that these last two summers, many fewer students were able to find jobs in the summer, so the student drop in employment in September was much less due to them returning to college.  Another effect is that with college expenses having increased much more than family incomes have for many years and the actual loss of real family incomes over the last few years, many more students may have very part-time work-aid assignments at their colleges as part of their student-aid package.  Finally, in the past, the BLS was inclined to ignore these very part-time college jobs and not count these students as employed while in college.  What if they are now very assiduously counting these work aid students as part-time employed in the household survey?  This would account for the strange increase in employment of 18 - 25 year olds these last two Septembers and for the huge increase in part-time jobs precisely in the month of September.

This is a very natural way for the Obama administration to make use of the students to help save his re-election chances.  The Democrats have been very assiduous in courting students by forcing their parent's health insurance to allow them to be kept on their parent's policies until they are 26, by ever more heavily subsidizing their student loans, and by carefully indoctrinating them in the beliefs of the Progressive Elitists in dominant control of virtually every college campus.  These students are in turn generally very enthusiastic supporters.  The Democrats are child molesters, though in this case molesters of their underdeveloped minds.  They give a great deal of thought of how to take advantage of them, so it is a natural thing that they thought of using their work-aid as a means to bolster the employment numbers just prior to the election.

Update, Afternoon of 10 October 2012:

That was an interesting idea, but on looking deeper into the BLS numbers in Table A-8 and Table A-9 in the September employment report, it does not hold water.  Instead, we find something very different and still disturbing.  First let us look at the change in employed by age from Table A-9 in September compared to August using the Not Seasonally Adjusted Numbers:

16-17 years, -130,000
18-19 years, -455,000
20-24 years, +101,000
25-34 years, +291,000
35-44 years, +249,000
45-54 years, +238,000
55 & older, +483,000

College students are mostly 18 - 21, so it is fairly clear that there is a net decrease in employment in those ages, so the work-study part-time work is not the explanation.  The explanation is found in Table A-8, where we find that the major change in employment was in government workers.  Government workers increased by 934,000!!!!!  The more complete story in the Not Seasonally Adjusted numbers is:

Government workers, +934,000
Self-employed workers, unincorporated, +90,000
Agriculture and related industries, -53,000
Private households, +15,000
Other Industries, -221,000

So much as one would expect given the general sorry state of the economy, industry is shedding employees in large numbers and some of the unemployed are setting up their own micro-businesses.  What on Earth is going on with this massive hiring of government workers though?

Teachers are mostly government workers and they do massively become employed again in September after being off for the summer.  However, any seasonal adjustment should eliminate the annual effect of re-hiring teachers in September.  So, we can examine the seasonally adjusted number of government employees and should see this number wiped out to the degree that it is teachers.  It turns out that the seasonally adjusted number is only 106,000 lower!  Now this makes no sense, since there are clearly many times 106,000 teachers who go back to public school jobs in September.  Maybe if the adjustment was formulated over many years, the fact that more teachers may have found summer jobs in the past than could now might make for a smaller adjustment projected from the past onto the present.

The federal government has not been hiring massive numbers of new employees and the state and local governments are having trouble paying the employees they already have.  It would appear that there was no adequate seasonal adjustment for the annual return of government-employed teachers to public schools!  Whatever the case of the surge in the numbers of government workers, this is not an indication of any sort of recovery in the economy.  On the contrary, the numbers indicate a worsening of the economy with the loss of 221,000 more jobs in industry.  A gain of 934,000 government workers, even if actual, would not be indicative of an improving economy.

How could the BLS fail to make a seasonal adjustment on teachers that would not make their annual return to school look like a boom in hiring?  How convenient for Obama that in the last employment report prior to the election they did not make this annual correction?  All of those claims that the BLS is staffed with professional and incorruptible people are hard to support now.

The Soon-to-Burst Education Bubble

In early June, Glenn H. Reynolds, professor of law at the University of Tennessee and the Instapundit, wrote that the education bubble would burst soon.  He pointed out that Money magazine reported that "After adjusting for financial aid, the amount that families pay for college has skyrocketed 439 percent since 1982... Normal supply and demand can't begin to explain cost increases of this magnitude."

Reynolds notes that:

• Just as with the housing bubble, "cheap and readily available credit has let people borrow to finance education."
• The consumer ignorance of students and parents denies how tough it will be to repay the loans.  [ I'll attest to this, especially when the same government that makes the loans easy to get causes a massive recession that harms the parent's small business.]
• There is "a belief that, whatever the cost, a college education is a necessary ticket to future prosperity."
• Bubbles burst when ignorance and excessive optimism can no longer sustain them.
• Student loan demand is decreasing and students are more willing already to go to less expensive colleges.

Reynolds says that colleges can provide a student prosperity in three ways:

1. It may make them more economically productive by providing a skill of economic value in the marketplace.
2. It provides a credential employers want for which they will not be accused of discrimination as they would if they required IQ tests and the degree suggests an ability to follow instructions and to show up.
3. The degree may assist in forming a social network that may provide jobs and opportunities.

Reynolds adds that only the first path to student prosperity does much for society as a whole.  The others are only about who enjoys the distribution of wealth.  His own deadly evaluation of colleges is that they are better at providing for 2. and 3. than for 1.  He also says they offer the college experience, which is rich in the party experience!  He does not think the colleges will do a good job of reforming themselves.  He expects that after the bubble bursts, educations will more likely be obtained on-line as Anya Kamenetz has suggested in her book DIY U.

Michael Barone has picked up on this Reynolds prediction of the education bubble burst in the Sunday Washington Examiner of 5 September 2010 in an report entitled "Higher education bubble poised to burst."  He notes that the National Center for Education Statistics has found that most college graduates are insufficiently proficient in verbal and quantitative literacy.  Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks of the University of California found that the average time a college student studies now is 14 hours a week compared to 24 hours in 1961.

Frankly, I do not believe a student belongs in college if they are not studying 36 hours a week.  This number of 14 hours of study a week makes it very clear that the average college student has no business being in college, given the expense.  A college is a very expensive playground and people 18 through 21 years old have no business spending four years playing.  This is childish and irresponsible.

The American Council of Alumni and Trustees (ACTA) surveyed 714 colleges and came to the obvious conclusion that "by and large, higher education has abandoned a coherent content-rich general education curriculum."  Jay Leno on his many visits to college campuses has long made that very clear!!!  Well, ACTA notes that college students are not taught the basics of literature, history, math, or science.  Most colleges do not require economics, American history and government, or a foreign language.  You can examine the requirements of these colleges here.

It is being noted that college administrations are hugely bloated, just as governments are.  Meanwhile, their endowments have generally taken a beating with the recent collapse of the stock market and other investments.  State governments are cutting back on the tax monies passed on to colleges.  State-funded colleges have generally had to raise tuition and fee costs.  For-profit colleges are beginning to siphon students away with offers of economically valued training.  These are signs of the impending collapse.

Barone and Glenn Reynolds agree with me that college is not for many or even most of those going to college.  Barone notes that in 1910, about 2% of Americans graduated from college.  The number of graduates in 1910 was 39,755, which is fewer than are to be found on many single college campuses today.

He observes that:

Government's student loan subsidies have enabled institutions to grow faster over the last three decades than the economy on whose productivity they ultimately depend.  ...  The people running America's colleges and universities have long thought they were exempt from the laws of supply and demand and unaffected by the business cycle.  Turns out that's wrong.

Of course governments can do wonders to obscure the law of supply and demand, but in the end, even they cannot silence its demands. This seems to be a recurring theme in my own writings on many a subject here.  In the aftermath of the college education bubble bursting, one wonders if the remaining colleges might take economics more seriously and actually try to understand how the private sector produces the goods and services which support government and colleges.  In the long run, the colleges have done more to harm the business of America than to help it.  The colleges will one day find that they were actually poisoning themselves, albeit with a slow poison.

Poisonous snake bites .... itself

No place in America has support for Obama and his socialism been greater than on most college campuses.  In particular, support for ObamaCare ran strong on most college campuses.  It turns out that the Democrat policy wonks who wrote the badly written 2,700 page ObamaCare health care "reform" bill harbored among their many dislikes a hatred for student health care insurance offered by colleges.  There are a number of reasons for this:

• These plans were not controlled by government bureaucrats who must exercise their power lust.
• The plans offer upperclassmen and graduate students inexpensive insurance due to the generally good health of these young people.  But under ObamaCare the young must subsidize the older and the less healthy by paying much more for insurance than their good health should require them to pay.  College health plans remove too many of these subsidizers from the national pool.
• Children will have to be carried on their parent's health insurance plans until they are 26 as a penalty for those guilty of over-populating the world.  This means only a few Ph.D. candidate graduate students will be left for campus health insurance plans anyway.  Half of them are foreigners, so only half of a college's Ph.D. candidates will need health insurance plans.
• The doctors and nurses of college health plans will be desperately needed to treat Medicare patients as ObamaCare gets underway.  So, it is important to shut college health clinics down to provide more manpower to that program to delay some of its severe rationing of services.

 The American Council of Education and a dozen other higher education groups complained to the Obama administration that ObamaCare will put an end to inexpensive campus health insurance plans.  These plans cover between 4.5 and 5.5 million college students.  The ObamaCare bill is somewhat ambiguous about how campus insurance plans will be affected.  But, it appears that the plans will have to be converted into plans more suitable to the general population, at least as seen by the Obama administration.  This will make them much more expensive.  They may also have to be kept continually open to graduates of the universities as they age and become less healthy.  The many ambiguities of the ObamaCare bill has the consequence that insurance companies are uncertain on how to price their health insurance plans for this rapidly approaching academic year and future years.  The letter to the Obama administration asks that these college allies of Obama and socialized medicine be given a waiver to be excluded from ObamaCare.

I believe at least 60% of the citizens of this land would also like to apply for a waiver from ObamaCare now!!!!  That number will go up as health insurance skyrockets in cost under the physician shortages and the increased demand for services for every sniffle.  Socialism is so strongly advocated, admired, and indoctrinated in the students of our universities that it is very fitting that the snake has been found to have sunk its poisonous fangs deep into itself.  The health care costs of college students will go up more than the health care insurance costs others in America.

Kindle, A Public Enemy

Yes, our Progressive, Nanny State government declared Kindle a public enemy.  The Amazon reader was to be used in an experiment for some college courses as a replacement for larger, heavier, and more expensive textbooks.  Case Western Reserve University, Arizona State University, and Princeton University planned to use Kindle for a few classes last academic year, but the Justice Department threatened them with legal action.  Specifically, Thomas Perez, the head of the Civil Rights Division told them they were under investigation for violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

It turns out that the National Federation of the Blind and other activist groups have been critical of the Kindle, because its menu functions require sight.  Kindle will read books out loud, but a sighted person had to set that up.  But curiously when you ask how this affects a university course, the blind are not able to read standard textbooks either.  Go figure.  Now, it may be that many popular textbooks are on audio and a blind student can acquire the audio versions, but can't they do that anyway even if the textbook is on Kindle?  Besides, the Princeton program, for example, consisted of three courses and none of the 51 students involved were blind.

So, perhaps the National Federation of the Blind was just upset that sighted students will not have to lug around many heavy and large textbooks anymore!  This seems to be spiteful.  If the NFB wanted improvements to the Kindle to make it easier for blind people to use, the best route was to allow the Kindle a larger market.  With a larger market, Amazon can better afford to make improvements or special products for the blind.  Perhaps, the NFB, rather then trusting to the goodwill of Amazon, was preventing the use of the Kindle as a form of hostage-taking to force Amazon into making improvements in the Kindle for the benefit of the blind.  This extortion was probably what was really happening.

The Justice Department settled with the schools in early 2010 and the NFB settled with Arizona State University.  The schools agreed they would not use Kindle until all students could use them.  Amazon had previously told the NFB that it was working on text-to-speech technology for the next Kindle model menu and function keys and that is now available.  The entire affair has been a tempest in a teapot.

But, our ever intrepid Justice Department is working up a much bigger and meddlesome project.  Perez is trying to get the Internet declared a "public accommodation" under the Americans with Disabilities Act.  Apparently, every website will have to have text-to-speech accommodation.  What will this do to the costs of small company websites?  No doubt, many larger companies will embrace this as a means to help eliminate the competition potential of many smaller companies.

Perhaps this will also become a way to get rid of pesky bloggers such as myself.  This blog might be forced to be accommodating to the blind.  Then again, maybe it already is and I just do not know how blind people access it.  One day, I may have to know more about this.  The government has millions working for it and many, many of them are sort of hard at work trying to give each of us millions of mandates so we will be sure to have no spare time.  We are constantly being told:  "In your copious free time, you will do this and this and this and this and this and ............................................................................................................................"

Nationalizing the Student Body

In the same gargantuan bill that established ObamaCare, the federal government once again used the fascist socialist model of gaining control by effectively nationalizing college students.  They did this by putting all student loans under a government monopoly.  The theory is the time-honored one of:  "He who controls the money, controls everything."  Of course in the short-run, this just means that whereas a student could approach many private lenders, he can now approach only one lender, the federal government.  That lender will even allow him not to pay back the loan, if the student takes a government job after graduating.  This reveals the government's bias against the private sector, which is merely tasked with the need to be productive enough that the government can suck enough of private sector blood to continue on happily in its bloated growth.

Why did this nationalization of student loans wind up in the ObamaCare bill?  Of course, in part just because Obama can usually count on the young who have been indoctrinated in the socialist viewpoint throughout a public school education and then again in college and he believes in making his followers believe they have been rewarded.  He knew ObamaCare was unpopular and wanted to be sure it would be popular with his loyal base of young people.  But, perhaps it was also in the bill due to simple logic.  ObamaCare nationalizes the bodies of every American by making all Americans dependent upon the federal government for all of their medical care.  The government monopoly of student loans, in the face of extremely high college costs, nationalizes the student body of every college in America.  So, the common issue of the bill was the nationalization of bodies, both student bodies and everyone else's as well.

The first great goal of socialists in America was to nationalize education.  The major American socialists of the 1800s and early 1900s worked very hard to have the government take over education in America.  Then, they worked very hard to enlarge school districts so that very few of the student's parents were on the school boards or would know the people personally who were on them.  The socialists wanted the controlling school boards to be distant from the parents, because the parents were not a good influence on their children, since most parents were not socialists.  The purpose of the schools was to engineer the students into socialists.  It was to design their behavior, direct their emotions, and to fully indoctrinate the students in socialism.  As the government-run schools escaped the effective control of the parents, this plan could be implemented more and more fully.  One of the most important further requirements was that the professional commitment to teaching children to think for themselves on the part of true educators had to be broken.  This was done with the unionization of teachers, which had the added advantage that union leaderships were full of socialists.

The need to put as many scientists as possible into the war effort in WWII, started the heavy funding of research for scientists at universities and colleges which continues to this day.  Along the way, other academics drooled with envy at the funding the scientists were getting.  The government realized that it had gained advantages by winning over the allegiance of many scientists to the idea of a growing federal government by controlling their funding for research.  The government had long exceeded its powers as granted by the Constitution, so it would be a disaster if the learned academics in colleges and universities were to start calling the government on this usurpation of power.  So, it became very clear that it would be wise for the government to provide taxpayer money to researchers in disciplines such as economics, history, sociology, psychology, and other fields to get them on board with an ever-growing government.  This would happen because these academics would want more and more money and a government would have to be growing and taking more and more in taxes to give it to them.  Besides, those researchers who did not praise big government, could be cut off from research funding.  Academics, not normally known for their bravery, could be mostly counted upon to toe the line.  They have done so.

Am I being unfair in saying that academics are not normally brave?  I do not think so.  First, the current crop of academics has among its older members the Baby Boomers.  This is my generation.  I know something about them.  They protested the Vietnam War when they were in college.  Now, there were valid reasons for protesting the use of the draft in the Vietnam War, but they rarely did so for the right reasons.  Most college students were really, really frightened at the prospect of going to Vietnam.  So much so, that they jumped right on board with the flimsy and false arguments of the organized socialists who were the organizers of almost all of the college protests of the day.  Unusually large numbers of this generation hated private enterprise as part of the so-called military-industrial complex.  These fearful people also felt an aversion to the risks of the free enterprise system.  This in turn, drew them into the belief that there was something wrong with the profit motive, so they could claim that they were averse to Capitalism for moral reasons, rather than fear.  Soon, they were largely inclined to sneer at anything to do with the private sector and sing their own praise as being more nobly engaged in the education of young people and to sing the praises of government leaders as well, provided they were not in the Defense Department.  This group, due to its size and the rapid growth of colleges in that era, soon was able to determine which other faculty were hired and then which would be granted tenure.  Almost every department on almost every campus was soon full of liberals and only the socialist viewpoint was ever to be heard.  This proved to be of immense value to the growth of governments in America.

Further evidence of cowardice is the insistence of college faculties in silencing any real dissention on campuses.  Brave academics would welcome debate, but today's academics try to shut it down and when challenged to debate, they most generally refuse to do so.  They have even developed extensive speech codes to limit debate by anointing politically correct speech.  A very blatant example of their cowardice was the very widespread acceptance on almost every American campus of the government-accepted theory of catastrophic man-made global warming.  This has long been a hypothesis of at least dubious standing and for several years now has been clearly wrong.  Any good scientist reviewing the evidence, whether a climate scientist by profession or not, can clearly see that its central theory that CO2 emissions by man have caused a uniquely large increase in temperature in the late 20th Century with catastrophic circumstances is wrong.  Where have the many academic scientists been who should have vociferously put this failed hypothesis to rest?  There has been hardly a peep from almost any college, but for the very occasional professor emeritus, who the socialist controlled universities had less power to intimidate.

Once the universities were well-controlled by these socialist faculty members, they could put pressure on the student bodies to become socialists in many ways.  First, the faculty only presented the socialist viewpoint at most colleges.  Second, it is much easier to agree with a teacher and regurgitate his line of thinking on exams and in assignments than it is to take off on your own as a student and present an opposing viewpoint.  Third, opposing viewpoints were and are usually graded more harshly.  Fourth, the egalitarianism of socialism resulted in huge inflation of grades so there was little in grades that could be used to distinguish students and this same grade inflation made it more risky not to agree and to be penalized with a lower grade.  Fifth, scholarships and awards are made to students who are good socialists and the criteria are blatantly socialist.  These awards are more important because there is no differentiation in grades.

Affirmative action provided the socialists and government still more power by forcing universities to take under-qualified students, who then were beholdened to government.  But, this still did not make the remainder of the student body sufficiently beholdened.  Meanwhile, the costs of colleges, fed by huge sums of federal research money and the huge increase in faculty salaries and benefits that came with that, kept rising very rapidly.  The colleges could not get these faculty members to teach classes without paying them enough to lure them away from their research efforts a few moments of each week.  Universities had generally become cost plus operations with little need to operate efficiently.  Besides, very many were run by governments and had all the customary efficiency of a government agency such as the DMV.  But, this put a huge strain on students and/or their families to pay the costs.  So, government-guaranteed loans from private banks came into being.  The next logical step in gaining complete control of the students was for the government to create the student loan monopoly, which it just did.

Now, almost every college student will be beholdened to government.  If any college graduate ever argues against socialism, the socialist opponent will yell "Hypocrite, did you not benefit from socialism by taking a student loan to graduate from college?"  What is more, the ready availability of student loans will reduce what little pressure there has been on the colleges to hold down expenses, so tuition and fees for students will continue to go up much faster than costs in the private sector.  This means that the government-run colleges and those private schools so beholdened to the government will become a larger and larger part of the drain on the hated private sector.  The fact that graduates will be able to have their student loans forgiven if they take a government job, will ensure that many graduates will clamber for more government jobs.  Why not?  The pay is twice that in the private sector, the benefits are out-of-this-world, and your huge student loan debts will be forgiven.  Who would go into the private sector under these conditions?  So, the college-educated elite who are supposed to direct the growth of socialism and the corresponding growth of government will be pushed all the more monolithically toward socialism and bigger and bigger government.

Do not kid yourself.  This is an absolutely insidious plan.  It fits perfectly well on the plane with the use of the health care insurance mandate to nationalize our bodies and make us dependent upon government for the very continuance of our lives, at least once we ever have a life-threatening disease or a cause of great pain.  The socialists' fascination with the control of education will be complete when they start using this monopoly on student loans as reason to assure that students are getting a good education with the money the government is committing.  Yes, the government will in time evaluate the colleges and universities the students are choosing and will deny those it does not like money by not loaning money to the students who would go there.  This will be the end of dissenting colleges and universities.  Then, the government will also exercise choice in which students to allow to have student loans.  Those who are not socialists and who view government with great distrust, will be weeded out.  This is a very powerful tool for a socialist federal government to develop as time goes on.  It will too.  It is inevitable.

Unless we kill this voracious monster and recreate the limited government of our Constitution whose purpose was to make the sole job of the federal government the protection of the equal, sovereign, and unalienable rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  We must keep socialism from killing our very individuality and our individual rights.  We must start by repealing this particularly insidious ObamaCare and Student Loan Monopoly Bill.  And then, we must start dismantling the federal, state, and local government controls on the education of young Americans.  We have to eliminate their indoctrination as socialists, or this fight for our individual rights will have to be desperately fought with each generation and will eventually be lost.

The only savior will be a return to private education with professional educators, rather than blue collar unionists. These teachers must be committed to teaching Americans about our Founding Fathers and the American Revolution and why they fought for the American principle that each individual has an equal, sovereign, and unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  They must teach about the real purpose of our Constitution.  They must be knowledgeable about how Capitalism allows every individual to exercise his individuality and how it has allowed an incredible richness of life for almost every American.  They must also be able to tell the sad story of the many failures of socialism, whether of communism or fascism, or any combination of the two.  Then, and only then, might we be able to concentrate on living our own lives without undue concern that the monster of tyrannical government will squash us once again.

Sustainability on Campus

In a publication called Academic Sourcebook, the lead article of the June 2008 issue is entitled "Sustainability on Campus" by Skip Derra of Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. It describes a program in sustainability at Arizona State University. He begins with "One convert at a time is a noble goal for any altruistic endeavor, especially sustainability, which has long laid low in the grassroots of society." Convert, noble goal, altruistic endeavor, grassroots of society are words and phrases ringing of religious zeal and selfless, underdog struggle for the sake of society at the expense of self, following paths well pioneered by many religions and all forms of socialism.

ASU's president Michael Crow has made sustainability a university-wide priority. He also was much involved in creating the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment. This is a man with a deep commitment to the politically correct worldview. So, ASU has the first freestanding, degree-granting School of Sustainability in the United States. Jonathan Fink, director of the Global Institute of Sustainability and ASU's sustainability officer says that "We work with government agencies to make sure the problems we are working on are the ones that actually will have an impact." Yes, this is a good strategy to be close to the sources of government funding and stroking the egos of the bureaucrats in them. It is also an admission that the universities are not able to discern the important problems and must turn to government, which has a long track record of not being able to prioritize problems of any sort or of providing practical solutions to those it tackles. This is the blind leading the blind, big time.

So, ASU is providing free bus passes to all faculty, staff, and students in the name of sustainability. Sounds like a nice perk. They are renting cars on a Flexcar program to encourage alternative methods of commuting. I have no idea how that saves energy, though possibly it does reduce the need for parking lots, providing the Flexcars are used enough. They have a program requiring the purchase of recycled products, though many recycled products cost more energy to produce than the original manufacture did and others offer reduced product specifications, such as recycled paper products. They have a commitment to solar energy and have a goal to provide 15% of their 4 to 7 MW of power from solar energy. I am not sure whether the 4 to 7 MW range means that they are unsure of their energy usage, unsure how much energy they will be using when they achieve their 15% goal, or this is an annual rate projected from their winter usage versus their summer usage. They are also growing some of their food on campus, planting citrus, date, and nut trees. They are also growing herbs. A picture shows a narrow strip of garden plowed next to a building. It is hard to imagine that the farming of this narrow strip will reach the efficiency of a farmer managing his agro-business. But, it may educate students to recognize a few of the plants whose fruits they eat, at least.

They do talk about the need to conserve water on the desert campus. Certainly if people are going to insist on living in human inhospitable areas such as the Arizona deserts in large numbers, they have some real sustainability problems. Learning ways to economically conserve energy is also a good thing. Finding ways to recycle products that actually make sense economically, such as recycling aluminum cans, makes good sense. But, sense on university campuses is in short supply. These programs of study would make more sense if they were coupled with close interactions with businesses other than those seeking subsidies from the government for sustainability programs.

There is a sidebar describing programs in sustainability at Stanford University, at Rochester Institute of Technology, at Portland State University, and at Berea College in Kentucky. Rochester Institute of Technology is the university at which my youngest daughter Katie is entering her senior year in a biotechnology degree program. The Galisano Institute for Sustainability there focuses on research and education in sustainable design, pollution prevention, remanufacturing, and alternative energy development. Such a program may have merit, if it is carried out as a matter of rational investigation and education, rather than as the all too popular religious and socialist crusade.