It has been very difficult to get good numbers on the federal student loan program and how it has affected our national education needs. As tax payers, we need to know if the programs is "worth it" or not. Obama keeps talking about the federal student loan program like it is an investment, so why don't we get a report from him about the "profit" that we are "earning" as a result of the program. Well, I have dug out some of my own numbers that I will share with all of you.
I could only find good comparable data for the period from 1966 to 1993. I don't know why it is so hard to get better current data on something as important as this. Here are my numbers for Bachelor degrees issued by all colleges and universities in the USA. The first number is the total and the second is just those for engineering. I want to keep this simple.
(1) 1966 Total---------524,000 Engineering---------36,000 Percentage Engr----- 6.8%
(2) 1985 Total------1,000,000 Engineering---------78,000 Percentage Engr------7.8%
(3) 1993 Total------1,179,000 Engineering---------63,000 Percentage Engr------5.3%
What do you conclude from the numbers above? Here is my take. From 1966 to 1993, we increased the number of Bachelor degrees by 125% while at the same time only increasing the number of engineering degrees by only 75%. Notice that in 1985 we hit our high point in engineering degrees and have gone down from there. At a time when the world is getting more technical, fewer and fewer of our kids are earning engineering degrees. We are spending more money than ever on college degrees while it appears that we are buying (investing in) more and more worthless degrees. Do you think it is some kind of mystery why so many of our new college graduates can not find jobs? Do you think that we have wasted too much tax money supporting the student loan program and "investing" in worthless degrees?
PS---The kids who graduated with engineering degrees in 1985, graduated from 8th grade in about 1975. It was in about the 8th grade that most kids decided for or against getting a technical degree like engineering. What changed about our kids, their parents and the schools about 1975? There had to have been something or we would not have seen such a decline in engineering degrees while at the same time we had such an increase in worthless degrees. Do you think that it was the decline in the quality of our school teachers that started back in the 1960's and it took that long for the old good teachers to retire and have the schools taken over by the teachers who graduated in the 1960's? Do you think that it was because of unionization that started in the 1960's, or the shift toward more "feel good" type education? It had to be something that happened between about 1960's. Was it the "liberation" of women where the smart ones left teaching and went into other fields? If one of these or a combination of all these that caused the decline, how do we fix it? I don't think it is more pay for teachers or spending more on education. So what is it? How about better parents? We know that most of the good parents are having fewer kids and the worst parents are having more kids. Is that it?
I think that the facts are clear, but the more important problem is how this all happened? If we don't know why it happened, how do you think we can ever turn it around? The problem for the USA in the area of education is that it is a "long lead time" investment. That means that what you do today will not have an affect until many years into the future. Take pre school. The kid is 4 years old and any investment that we put into this kid will not start to pay back until they are at least 34 years old. It will take at least that amount of time before they pay back the investment and it is not until after that that we start getting real "profit" from our investment. My point is that we are looking at about a 30 year lead time on that investment. If you are going to become an engineer, you need to start early and if you get off the technical track, it is almost impossible to ever get back on. How many people do you know who did not take math seriously in high school who ever went onto get a degree in engineering? I don't know any.
The point of the above is to point out that we "have bought the farm" as far as the next 25 or 30 years are concerned. If we all got on the band wagon right now and started preparing our kids for the more difficult engineering degrees, we would not see any significant benefit for 25 or 30 years. What we have done in the past 25 or 30 years is to have dug ourselves into a deep hole that we will now have to dig ourselves out of. Pure and simple. Looking back, why didn't we put more strings on the student loan program and not allow our kids (and parents) to spend all of our tax money on worthless degrees? Were we all that stupid? I guess that I have to say that we were. The least that we could do now would be to stop being stupid and clean up the federal student loan program or eliminate in completely. Looking at history, we did better without the federal student loan program.
PS---I know that most school teachers think of themselves as being "smart". They do not realize that, as a group, they have been cut from poor cloth. The fact that they graduated from some kind of college gives them a phony confirmation that they are "smart". Most think that going to college makes one "smart". Further, they hang around with other teachers and have little intellectual contact with really "smart" people. How stimulating intellectually do you think the atmosphere is in an average 4th grade class room? They do not grow. All this combines to give teachers the impression that they should be paid as much as other professionals who graduated in the more difficult majors. We know why education worked in the past, but we don't know how we can ever get back there! This may be another example of the "Darwin Limitation" for which there is "no" solution.
PS---Obama's mother had her degree in Anthropology which is rated as one of the 5 most worthless degrees. Do you think that has shaped our President in any way?
