elektrokardiogrammatology

Though Enrolling More Poor Students, 2-Year Colleges Get Less of Federal Pie

By DAVID LEONHARDT

WASHINGTON — Community colleges have received a declining share of government spending on higher education over the last decade even as their student bodies have become poorer and more heavily African-American and Latino, according to a report to be released Thursday.

“Many community colleges end up receiving minimal federal support,” saidRichard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, which is publishing the report. “The kids with the greatest needs receive the fewest resources.”

The report argues that colleges have become increasingly separate and unequal, evoking the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, which barred racial segregation in elementary and secondary schools. Higher education today, the report says, is stratified between four-year colleges with high graduation rates that serve largely affluent students and community colleges with often dismal graduation rates that serve mostly low-income students.

In 2009, community colleges spent $9,300 per student on educational resources, virtually unchanged from 1999 once inflation was taken into account. Public research universities spent $16,700, up 11 percent from 1999, and private research universities spent $41,000, an increase of 31 percent.

Community colleges often receive substantially less money per student than elementary or high schools, saidSara Goldrick-Rab, a University of Wisconsin professor who served on the 22-member committee that wrote the report.

The other members included the chancellor of Syracuse University, the president of the New York Public Library and three community college presidents.

Community colleges, which enroll about 44 percent of the nation’s college students, will play a major role in determining how quickly educational attainment rises in the United States, experts say. While the United States once led the world in educational attainment by a wide margin, ithas fallen behindsome other rich countries over the past generation.

President Obama has called for the country to regain its lead by 2020, and community colleges would probably have to improve significantly for that goal to be met.

Although 81 percent of new students at community colleges say they want to transfer to a four-year college and earn a bachelor’s degree, only 12 percent do so within six years, according to the report. Most entering students also fail to receive a two-year degree, although some community colleges have compiled an impressive record of graduating low-income students.

Community colleges began in the early 20th century, known then as junior colleges, and expanded rapidly in the 1960s. They became not only steppingstones to four-year colleges but also places that trained students for specific jobs, like nurses, paralegals or engineering technicians.

The largest, each with tens of thousands of students, include Miami Dade College; Northern Virginia Community College; City College of San Francisco; Lone Star College, in Houston; and Kingsborough Community College, in Brooklyn.

The report describes a network of federal and state educational policies that has failed to keep pace with the increasing enrollment of lower-income students in higher education. The largest federal financial aid program — Pell grants, which go to lower-income students to offset tuition — does relatively little to help community colleges because their tuition tends to be low.

“In the 20th century, going to college was not necessary for getting a job in the middle class,” saidEduardo J. Padrón, the president of Miami Dade College and a co-chairman of the 22-member committee. “But in today’s job market, if you don’t have a postsecondary credential, you can’t get a job that lets you achieve the American dream. It keeps you in a cycle of poverty.”

Community colleges and four-year colleges have both suffered in recent years from state budget cuts, saidSandy Baum, a senior fellow at the George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development. But four-year colleges have made up some of the shortfall through tuition increases, while community colleges have not increased tuition as rapidly.

The financing gap, Ms. Goldrick-Rab said, “is contributing to really appalling completion rates.”

The report recommended a series of policy changes, including more transparency about who benefits from federal education spending; more outcome-based financing, to reward colleges that do the best job with challenging students; and programs to make community colleges economically diverse. Community colleges could create more honors programs, including classes for high school students, and four-year colleges could set aside more slots for community college transfers, the authors said.

Other research has found that poor students tend to fare worse, all else equal, when enrolled in a school made up mostly of poor students. Yet over the last generation, higher education appears to have become more stratified.

In 2006, 28 percent of community college students came from the bottom quartile of the socioeconomic distribution, up from 21 percent in 1982. Only 16 percent of community college students came from the top quartile in 2006, down from 24 percent in 1982.

By comparison, only about 5 percent of students at the 200 most selective four-year colleges came from the bottom quartile in 2006, according to Anthony P. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, of theCenter on Education and the Workforce, at Georgetown University.

“The Economic Crisis: A Marxian Interpretation”

Marxian theory focuses on contradiction. Thus, it centers attention on the nexus connecting, on the one hand, workers squeezed by the end of rising real wages, and, on the other, capitalists raking in the resulting explosion of surplus value. That nexus was debt. The financial industry in the United States invented and proliferated the requisite mechanisms. They enabled capitalists with rising surpluses to lend a good portion of them to workers. The latter borrowed chiefly because they had no other way to realize the American dream once real wages stopped rising, and secondarily because countless reassurances were made that borrowing was safe, appropriate, and itself very American. The workers’ demand for credit was an effect of rising exploitation in the United States over the last thirty years. Bankers were flush with the deposits of expanded surplus value from that rising exploitation. Competition among them drove all to seek newer, more profitable outlets for loans. Whereas in earlier centuries bankers had lent to needy feudal lords and kings, now they lent to workers whose real wages stopped rising and to a government that cut taxes. To charge that borrowing workers were stupid or irresponsible, or that bank and other lenders were particularly devious or greedy, substitutes moral denunciations for social analysis. Our Marxian approach aims instead to understand how and why the economic, political, and cultural (including various moral failings as well) conditions of capitalism generated the contradictory post-1970s development that culminated in its second global collapse in seventy-five years.

Key to the debt nexus between workers and capitalists was debt securitization. Because the only collateral workers could ever offer were their homes, mortgages soared after the 1970s and with them securities comprised of/backed by bundles of mortgages. Across the country, banks and bank agents (‘‘mortgage brokers’’) pushed mortgages and quickly resold them to the bundlers/securitizers who then resold them to ‘‘investors’’ (including those with the mushrooming surplus value/based incomes). Because mortgage originators earned their fees and immediately resold mortgages, they had every incentive not to ascertain whether the borrowing families could reasonably afford such mortgages. Given the intense competition in the financial industry, corruption inevitably bloomed. It eventually sparked the larger financial crisis when default rates on the least affordable (‘‘subprime’’) mortgages undermined the values of securities into which such mortgages had been bundled. Of course, once the subprime mortgage securities market collapsed, the crisis spread to the rest of the mortgage-backed securities market and the credit markets more broadly and, from there, to all the other interconnected markets. Since capitalist markets interconnect different parts of the economy, transmitting change in one part to all others, they, too, contributed to the system’s current crisis.

Capitalists could and did exult after the 1970s as the system accumulated income and wealth for them on an unprecedented scale. They had, although without acknowledging the fact, substituted rising loans to their workers in place of the rising real wages their workers had enjoyed for the previous century. This was little short of a capitalist fantasy come true. They preferred to believe instead that the efficiency-driven mechanisms of private enterprise and free markets accounted for their good fortune, ‘‘benefited everyone,’’ and thereby proved private, unregulated capitalism’s superiority to any conceivable alternative system. While the good times for capitalists rolled, the worlds of politics, media, and academia affirmed such beliefs only too eagerly. The ideas that the end of rising real wages was the hard reality that dissolved the magic, and that the capitalists’ gains were the workers’ losses, were unacceptable and therefore generally ignored. Only when the resulting mass worker exhaustion, stress, and debt collapsed the system did that ‘‘other side’’ of capitalist euphoria-that contradiction that Marxian analysis had earlier found and elaborated-begin to become more generally visible.

Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick.

“May I rant about how fucking racist Barack and Michelle Obama’s commencement speeches were?”

“By almost every standard of measurement imaginable, Black people are held at the bottom of American society.  In homelessness, unemployment, poverty, access to education, access to food, access to healthcare, and on.

To refer to this reality is not making ‘excuses’ for Black people, as Barack Obama would have it.  And to suggest so is nothing less than outright racism.  By deflecting responsibility for racial inequality from the state and this society on to individuals, it is Obama who is making excuses for the racist system of oppression he oversees.

By employing such rhetorical tactics, Obama is paving the path for the further racial discrimination.  The criminalization of Black people, for instance, or the dismantling of public assistance programs relied upon by many poor Black people, is repeatedly justified by the kind of racial stereotypes referenced by Barack and Michelle Obama in their speeches.  Consider the NYPD’s outrageous stop-and-frisk program which has subjected 685,724 people in 2011 to random frisking, almost all of them Black or Latino.  The program is continuously defended by Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelley by deploying these kind of stereotypes.

The myth of the ‘welfare queen’ was used to clear the way for virtually every form of social assistance, and really, for the stripping down of any kind of public program.  By emphasizing personal, rather than social responsibility, the state itself became less of an administrative body, and more of a collective disciplinarian.  Rather than electing politicians who decided how and when to use publicresources, people began electing nagging parental units to tell us how awful we’ve gotten.

Indeed, Obama’s re-election campaign used these same arguments when he attacked Mitt Romney for supposedly creating programs that helped poor people get cars during his time as governor of Massachusetts.  As one author for Jacobin commented, it was as if Obama was channeling Reagan’s ghost.

It is for this reason precisely that so many of us on the Left argued against the pervasive “lesser evilism” of the election season.  Obama’s racist commentary offer a perfect example of how the “lesser evil” often serves as the “more effective evil.”  Coming from a liberal Black president, he’s less likely to be criticized when he does or says racist things–even though the outcome is the same, and the politics continues to shift toward the right. By harping on racist stereotypes, the President is providing a justification for even more economic, political, and social discrimination.

This is precisely why anti-racists and those on the Left cannot rely upon the lesser evil to defend against the (and there is no disputing this) far more bigoted, rabid, and vicious racists on the right.  The argument is not at all that both Democrats and Republicans are exactly the same on matters of race.  The argument by those who reject “lesser evilism” is that both feed into each other–one beats the path for the other, and emboldens the other to go even further.”

elanormcinerney:

Elizabeth Hardwick | Seduction and Betrayal

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sentimientos políticos en las calles, paredes y árboles de Bolivia, parte dos

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thepleasureofthesierramadre:

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