June 2007 Archives

A student gave an oral report on financing of student debt. Turns out it’s an 85 billion dollar a year business.   Not exactly chump change.  She decided to look into the topic because she will be graduating in a matter of days with 45,000 dollars in debt on her back as she walks down the aisle. She had to finance her own education she said.  Her parents had managed to help her two older brothers but by the time it got to her and her younger sister, the larder was bare.  So she had to take out student loans, and she had run up credit card debt, and she had to start working.  Well, her attendance in my class has been irregular.

Mostly her report focused on hearings in New York on the collusion between college and universities across the country and the major lenders, like B of A, and Citibank.  Seems that when a student goes to get a loan at the school, he or she is given a list, created by the school, of preferred lenders.  Lenders the school prefers for whatever reason.  Turns out the reasons have to do with outright kickbacks, payoffs, as well as free vacations to some exotic spot for the whole damn financial aid office.  So for these perks, the lender gets put on the preferred list, that sometimes has only two or three lenders listed, and as it turns out 90% of the time students pick one of the lenders on the list given to them by their school.  They make the mistake in other words of trusting the people at the college of their choice.

This is fairly disgusting. 

I really don’t know where to direct my anger.  At the fact, companies and colleges have systematically set about fleecing students, or the fact that student have to take out such huge loans at all. 

I got my weekly copy of The Nation and came across an article by Alexander Cockburn arguing that global warming is a crock or more precisely that the human contribution to global warming, if there is global warning, is negligible.  He brings in “scientific evidence” having to do with diverse types of C02 emissions to chip at the empirical claims, and then goes more ideological with the claim that guys like Al Gore don’t really give a rat’s ass about anything but preserving their own power position, intimating perhaps that Gore is a lackey for the nuclear industry.  Additionally, who can trust those scientists anyway since they work for mega-corporations or mega-government operations and are mostly interested in getting money for their diverse mega-projects, and most profoundly there’s no better way to get the herd to do what you want unthinkingly than to scare the crap out of them.

Now I have believed in the possibility of global warming since about 1978; recent stuff coming from international commissions seemed finally more or less to confirm that the claim is not utterly alarmist speculation.  In fact, the confirmation to me seemed complete and the predictions dire.  Not that I care really.  I will be dead if and when the shit hits the fan.  The predictions of global warming are not going to change my actions one iota; I am not going to go out and buy a boat or move further inland.  Screw that.  I am too tired.

My concern is more emotional.  As a teacher, as somebody working with the generation that might be around should the end of the world as we know it occur, whether or not these predictions are accurate or inaccurate does have some affect on the way I feel about teaching enterprise.  If the end of the world is at hand and the current generation of students is the one that will have to deal with it, then I feel the USA is pretty screwed.  I don’t think the current generation is up to the job at all.  They will collapse and the US will go to hell in a hand basket.

But if things are not going to be as bad as all that, then I can take a deep breath, relax a bit and not get all tensed up when students seem to want to defend their right to buy an SUV if they want to and that anybody who says they don’t have that right is like “anti-freedom” or something.  Of course I felt we were screwed well before my worst fears were apparently confirmed.  My work with students who wanted to be doctors, for example, lead me to the conclusion that I never ever wanted one of them to operate upon me.  Their lack of attention to detail was certainly going to cause a  lot of old people to pass on a bit prematurely from having been dosed up with incorrect meds by a generation of medical people all apparently plagued by ADD.

But now with the predictions more dire than ever and finding myself still dealing with students who believe it is the right of businesses to do any damn thing they want, I get more tense.  And I need that like a hole in the head.