Chart of the day: A major shift in higher ed

From a Pew  Research Hispanic Center report, “Hispanic High School Graduates Pass Whites in Rate of College Enrollment,” which notes:

As recently as the class of 2000, only 49% of Hispanic high school graduates immediately enrolled in college the following fall. Since then general college-going has increased among all of the nation’s high school graduates, but it has risen the most—by 20 percentage points—among Hispanic high school graduates.

In the class of 2012 Hispanic high school graduates (69%) were more likely to be enrolled in college in October 2012 than either whites (67%) or blacks (63%). In 2012 Asian recent high school completers were the most likely of the major racial and ethnic groups to be enrolled in college in October (84%).

Headlines of the day: Economics and illnesses

We open with Europe with this from the Irish Times:

IMF trims global growth forecast and warns of bumpy recovery

Warns Europe not to relax efforts to tackle debt crisis

From Spiegel:

Capital Study: Chinese Investment in Europe Hits Record High

From El País:

IMF sees Spain’s jobless rate climbing to 27 percent this year

Closer to home, there’s this From ProPublica:

FDA Let Drugs Approved on Fraudulent Research Stay on the Market

And finally this from the Sacramento Bee:

Nevada buses hundreds of mentally ill patients to cities around country

Charts of the day: Indentured servitude soars

Graphic goodness from a special report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis:

 

Headlines of the day: Pinnipeds to curmudgeons

First, the headline, from the Los Angeles Times:

‘Unusual mortality event’ is declared for the California sea lion

The federal designation comes after sickly sea lion pups have been found stranded on beaches from Santa Barbara to San Diego at rates exponentially higher than in years past

And then there’s this dramatic new sea lion discovery, via UC Santa Cruz:

Finally, there’s this, from the European Journal of Social Psychology [H/T to Metafilter]:

Refusing to apologize can have psychological benefits (and we issue no mea culpa for this research finding)

Student debt & financialization of academia

Paul Jay of The Real News Network interviews economist Michael Hudson on the lethal collusion of politics, banks, and academia that has inflicted a blanket of debt servitude on generations of American students.

Hudson devotes special attention to New York University, which he describes as a real estate company that wins tax exemptions by offering classes.

A transcript of the interview is posted here.

Headlines of the day: Signs of the times

From UC Berkeley’s Daily Californian:

Berkeley Student Cooperative pushes for cuts to employee benefits

From Bloomberg:

Rising Student-Loan Delinquencies Hurt Young Homebuyers

And to close on a positive note, from Science 2.o:

Pessimists Live Longer And Healthier

Quote of the day: The deep politics of online ed

From Patrick Bigger and Victor E. Kappeler, writing in anthropologies:

The decline of the traditional campus in favor of online education has the added bonus of post-Fordist dispersion of dangerous populations and elimination of sites of struggle and resistance. It’s also cheaper. Furthermore, the reassignment of educational costs to students and families through rising tuition mirrors the neoliberal tactic of shifting the cost of workforce training from the private sector to the public, as in decades prior. This has the added bonus of propping up the financial industry that holds more than $150 billion in private student loan debt. This debt is different from almost any other form of debt, in that it cannot be discharged in bankruptcy proceedings. It does not require much imagination to speculate as to what private financiers might do with $150 in debt assets, or its potential effects on the broader economy.

Finally, we note that in addition to having hugely negative ramifications for students and society at large, faculty will not emerge unscathed. The shift towards adjuncts and other forms of contingent faculty labor is well documented, as is the move to abolish the tenure system. However, these are only precursors of academic labor restructuring which the ‘training-ization’ of education promises. On offer is a three-tiered labor system consisting of a ruling class of content creators who designate what constitutes appropriate learning content and outcomes and who make course modules that can be licensed to individual institutions. The institutions (or individual academic units) would designate a content coordinator to select the modules best suited to their training programs. Finally, the vast majority of faculty would be relegated to the inauspicious position of “content deliverer,” clarifying the message of the content creator, contextualizing the material in the overall training program, and assigning grades to students who are overpaying for such certificates with extortionist private loans.

The shift toward training through the growth of online education is detrimental for students, educators, and society alike. But if this is the case, then why pursue this disruptive path? As in most things political-economic, this is a question best answered by asking ‘who benefits?’ In this case, the answer is fairly transparent: financiers backing for-profit education, private student-loan originators, and venture capitalists supporting online education software developers. As usual, the economic rationality is cloaked in the normatively positive language of ‘democracy’, ‘access’, and ‘efficiency’. In other words, the shift toward training is an explicit class project engineered to more effectively transfer wealth toward to those who already control a lot of it. Consequently, our response must recognize this transition as such and respond in kind.

Healthcare crisis: UC plans a hidden fee hike?

And there’s a Berkeley protest rally coming. . .

From reclaim UC:

Despite the fact that UC administrators seem generally to have shifted their focus away from making students pay more for their education, and towards shoring up their support amongst members of the faculty and weakening the power of organized labor on campus through speedup, downsizing, and automation, recent moves by the administration around the UC Student Health Insurance Plan could result in what is effectively a new fee increase for graduate and undergraduate students.

Partly in response to a campaign by the Student-Worker’s Union (UAW 2865) for the elimination of caps on lifesaving care and for free preventative pre-natal care — reforms which would bring UC SHIP more in line with the regulations of the Affordable Care Act — management has initiated a push to raise SHIP fees for all students covered by the plan.  They are claiming that UC SHIP has been operating at an annual deficit of around $20 million, and that fee increases are therefore urgent and inevitable.  This despite the fact that the UC medical centers are earning over $900 million in annual profits – profits that could be used to help fund the insurance plan.  In a report recently delivered to the graduate assembly, outgoing President Yudof proposed student health insurance fee increases of up to 70% over the next three years — increases that would amount to approximately $1,500 per person.  While the administration would like to present their push for higher health insurance fees as a matter of the prudent management of a faltering program, when put in the context of recent antagonisms at the UCs, it appears much more as an attempt to find a politically tenable means of raising student fees while claiming not to be doing so.

It’s one of their backup plans.  We’ll know in a few months whether it works.

Charts of the day: The UC fish rots from the head

From the redoubtable Charles Schwartz, who has been carefully documenting for decades the history of University of California finances:

This shows the continuing outsized growth of the management cadre (defined as the employees classified in Senior Management Group and Management & Senior Professionals): their numbers grew by 252% over the 21 year period while total employee numbers grew by a mere 51%. (The total number of employees shown in this graph is scaled down so that one can compare the relative growth, over time, of each population.)

For another comparison, the latest total number in this management category (SMG + MSP) is 9,457 FTE (full time equivalent employees) while the number of Regular Teaching Faculty is 8,657 FTE.

A second chart from his campus-by-campus analysis [PDF] reveals that bureaucratic bloat has been soaring right here at UC Berkeley, though UC Santa Cruz runs a close second:

One wonders what students will think when they discover that their radically soaring tuition costs aren’t going to pay their teachers but a rapidly growing omnivorous caste of supernumeraries.

Quote of the day: Austerity and the university

Bob Samuels teaches writing at UCLA and UC Santa Barbara, and he’s also president of the University Council of the American Federation of Teachers, which represents libraries and faculty who aren’t members of the university systems academic senate.

Writing at his blog, Changing Universities, Samuels comments on the recent resignation [health reasons] of University of California president Mark Yudoff, who has overseen the steepest tuition hikes in the institution’s history:

As many are now judging President Yudof’s time as the head of the UC system, what we have to consider is that the biggest effect of austerity is the austerity of our own imagination and policies. In the Age of Austerity, we do not have leaders with a broad vision; what we have are managers who manage a crisis but cannot imagine any real significant changes.

Recently, I have had the opportunity to present my plan to make all public higher education free in America by simply using our current resources in a more effective manner. Although it would cost around $128 billion to fund the total cost of tuition and related expenses for every student currently in public higher ed (80% of all college students), I have shown that if you add up all of the financial aid, institutional aid, tax breaks, tax credits, and tax shelters, we are currently spending over $200 billion. In other words, the only thing stopping us from making all public higher education free is leadership.

When I have made this demonstration, the first response of many people is that while you might be right, this can never happen in America. The reason why people do not think it is doable is because they cannot imagine that any major change is possible.

Read the rest.

Headline of the day: Gee, who’d a’ thunk it?

From a University of Indiana press release:

New Study Reveals Sex to be Pleasurable With or Without Use of a Condom or Lubricant

Quote of the day: Science, pros, prose, and cons

UC Santa Barbara anthropologist John Tooby, Co-director of Center for Evolutionary Psychology, writing for Edge.org in response to the question, 2013 : WHAT *SHOULD* WE BE WORRIED ABOUT? [emphasis added]:

[C]ooperative scientific problem-solving is the most beautifully effective system for the production of reliable knowledge that the world has ever seen. But the monsters that haunt our collective intellectual enterprises typically turn us instead into idiots. Consider the cascade of collective cognitive pathologies produced in our intellectual coalitions by ingroup tribalism, self-interest, prestige-seeking, and moral one-upsmanship: It seems intuitive to expect that being smarter would lead people to have more accurate models of reality. On this view, intellectual elites therefore ought to have better beliefs, and should guide their societies with superior knowledge. Indeed, the enterprise of science is—as an ideal—specifically devoted to improving the accuracy of beliefs. We can pinpoint where this analysis goes awry, however, when we consider the multiple functions of holding beliefs. We take for granted that the function of a belief is to be coordinated with reality, so that when actions are based on that belief, they succeed. The more often beliefs are tested against reality, the more often accurate beliefs displace inaccurate ones (e.g., through feedback from experiments, engineering tests, markets, natural selection). However, there is a second kind of function to holding a belief that affects whether people consciously or unconsciously come to embrace it—the social payoffs from being coordinated or discoordinated with others’ beliefs (Socrates’ execution for “failing to acknowledge the gods the city acknowledges”). The mind is designed to balance these two functions: coordinating with reality, and coordinating with others. The larger the payoffs to social coordination, and the less commonly beliefs are tested against reality, then the more social demands will determine belief—that is, network fixation of belief will predominate. Physics and chip design will have a high degree of coordination with reality, while the social sciences and climatology will have less.

Because intellectuals are densely networked in self-selecting groups whose members’ prestige is linked (for example, in disciplines, departments, theoretical schools, universities, foundations, media, political/moral movements, and other guilds), we incubate endless, self-serving elite superstitions, with baleful effects: Biofuel initiatives starve millions of the planet’s poorest. Economies around the world still apply epically costly Keynesian remedies despite the decisive falsification of Keynesian theory by the post-war boom (government spending was cut by 2/3, 10 million veterans dumped into the labor force, while Samuelson predicted “the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced”). I personally have been astonished over the last four decades by the fierce resistance of the social sciences to abandoning the blank slate model in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is false. As Feynman pithily put it, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

Chart of the day II: Paying more and getting less

From My Budget 360, comparing inflation of college costs and deflation of earnings growth:

Quote of the day: Til [student] debt do us part

The one apocalypse that’s coming off on schedule, destroying the hopes of a generation.

From Chris Maisano, writing in Jacobin Magazine:

In June 2010, total outstanding student loan debt became larger than total outstanding credit card debt for the first time in the country’s history, and in the spring of 2012 this figure surpassed the astonishing figure of $1 trillion. This explosion in student loan indebtedness has been the logical result of the dramatic inflation in the cost of higher education (particularly public higher education) in recent decades. Economists estimate that the cost of tuition and fees has more than doubled since 2000, easily surpassing the rate of inflation in energy, housing, and even health care costs.

The driving force behind this explosion in higher education costs is the long-term disinvestment in public colleges and universities at the state level. While public higher education institutions have absorbed the majority of new undergraduate enrollments since 1990, the proportion of state spending on higher education has dramatically declined. According to a recent study by Demos, between 1990 and 2010, real funding per public full-time enrolled student declined by over 26%. This shortfall has not been filled by other sources of public funding, but rather by a marked increase of students’ out-of-pocket costs. Over the same period, tuition and fees at four-year public colleges and universities rose by 112.5% while the price of public two-year colleges increased by 71%. Because household incomes have stagnated over the previous two decades, students and their families have been compelled to turn to student loans to cover these costs. According to the Department of Education, 45% of 1992-1993 graduates borrowed money from federal or private sources; today, at least two-thirds of graduates enter the workforce with educational debt.

Even though college-educated workers tend, on average, to earn higher incomes than their less-educated counterparts, young college-educated workers have not escaped the pressures of wage stagnation. In the last decade, the average annual earnings of workers ages 25 to 34 with Bachelors degrees fell by 15%. New graduates, meanwhile, saw their as the average debt load increase by 24%. What makes this dramatic expansion of student loan indebtedness particularly troubling is the fact that unlike most other forms of personal debt, student loans cannot be discharged through the standard bankruptcy process. In the event of default on a private or federal student loan, borrowers face a range of invasive measures: wage garnishment, the interception of tax refunds or lottery winnings, and the withholding of future Social Security payments.

Headline of the day: Coffee, tea, or Ivy League?

From Zero Hedge:

It Is Five Time More Difficult To Get An Attendant Job At Delta Airlines Than Enter Harvard

Screwing two generations for fun and profit

The ongoing 21st Century Great Crash, despite all the claims to the contrary, is showing no signs of improvement.

Banks continue to get away with fiscal murder, with criminal charges rarer than foie gras at a tailgate party. Restoring Eisenhower-era tax rates for the rich is a pipe dream as the wealthy continue to accumulate ever-larger portions of the fruits of the labor of the masses and the natural riches of the planet.

For those of us who don’t belong to the One Percent, things look decidedly grimmer.

Consider the plight of two separate groups, retired grandparents and their grandchildren, Boomers and members of Generation Y.

Back when esnl was a tot [and we were born on the very first surge of what became the Baby Boom], folks were worked for many companies usually had a retirement plan of some sort, a pension to supplement their employees’ Social Security income.

Through the years, that would change, with the worker contributing an ever larger portion of their income.

Also changing was the nature of retirement plans as federal laws opened the floodgates for ever-riskier investments.

Instead of resting their confidence in fund managers, workers became active investors in 401K plans, in which stocks purchased by the worker or her broker became the norm.

One good friend, a reporter with a wreath of numinous laurels to his credit, lost most of his money in the Dot Com Crash of the last century’s closing decade, forcing him to work well into his “Golden Years.” Other friends saw their retirement funds vanish through Employee Stock Ownership Plans gutted in leveraged buyouts of their employers.

They, like esnl, are forced to rely increasingly on Social Security.

Once upon a time, a Republican President had this to say:

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

But now there are those who hope, if not to abolish Social Security, then at least to inflict crippling blows — presumably with the intent of forcing Americans to turn the last of their cash over to those same rapacious banksters who caused the latest crash.

One way of forcing Americans to hand over more money to the private sectors is by a devious process that the Obama administration seems set to swallow.

From Laura Gottesdiener for AlterNet:

This “dark art” works by switching the inflation adjustment calculation from one that increases the benefit payments to keep up with the increasing costs of basic necessities such as food (this one is called Consumer Price Index-Urban, or CPI-U) to another calculation, one that assumes that if prices skyrocket people will make substitution in their spending (called Chained CPI). Switching to the chained CPI calculation would dramatically decrease the Social Security benefits as seniors age; as one study shows, it will cut the benefits of a 95-year-old by 9.2 percent, decreasing their annual benefit by $1,611.

The problem with this decrease — and with calculating Social security using chained CPI in general — is that seniors often can’t and don’t make spending substitutes. Moreover, these cuts get worse as people age, so changing to Chained CPI is essentially taking money away from the oldest women in country — and it will affect not only future Social security recipients, but those currently using its benefits. The public overwhelming opposes changing the inflation calculation; according to one poll, 60 percent of Americans think the switch is “unacceptable.”

But a good number of liberal opinion writers are accepting the concession anyway, following Paul Krugman’s lead and using squeamish and defeatist language — classic Krugman: “as of last night I was marginally positive, right now marginally negative” — that tacitly lends their approval to this plan (it wouldn’t if the vociferously opposed it and called it a sellout).

Read the rest.

So what does it mean?

Consider first this chart from Bold Progressives:

So what substitutions will be involved?

From canned cat food to dry dog food as the favored dinner entre? From small apartment to a cardboard box under a bridge?

Chained CPI strikes us more as chaining our oldest citizens to ever-harsher forms of misery.

Generation Y as the Dead End Kids

But what about their grandchildren, members of Generation Y?

Consider this dire prognosis relayed by Elliot Blair Smith of Bloomberg:

Generation Y professionals entering the workforce are finding careers that once were gateways to high pay and upwardly mobile lives turning into detours and dead ends. Average incomes for individuals ages 25 to 34 have fallen 8 percent, double the adult population’s total drop, since the recession began in December 2007. Their unemployment rate remains stuck one-half to 1 percentage point above the national figure.

Three and a half years after the worst recession since the Great Depression, the earnings and employment gap between those in the under-35 population and their parents and grandparents threatens to unravel the American dream of each generation doing better than the last. The nation’s younger workers have benefited least from an economic recovery that has been the most uneven in recent history.’

“This generation will be permanently depressed and will be on a lower path of income for probably all of their life — and at least the next 10 years,” says Rutgers professor Cliff Zukin, a senior research fellow at the university’s John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development. Professionals who start out in jobs other than their first choice tend to stay on the alternative path, earning less than they would have otherwise while becoming less likely to start over again later in preferred fields, Zukin says.

Read the rest.

Not mentioned is another burden imposed by the rapacious politics of greed that came to dominate the country starting about the same time Ronald Reagan took the oath of office in Washington: Student debt.

When esnl moved to California in 1967, the University of California charged $50 a semester in fees. Now they’re at $13,000, with students now paying more for their UC education that the state does — a direct violation of the state’s educational master plan.

And those costs don’t include room, board, books, and a host of other expenses.

The same picture is being repeated across the country, and students load up on student loans [again, from those same banksters who already screwed up their futures] to make up the difference, leaving Generation Y grads facing not only a bleaker vocational outlook but unprecedented levels of debt, a lethal double whammy.

But the rich are getting richer. . .

Headline of the day: We are shocked. Shocked.

From The Atlantic:

Research Says: Studying Economics Turns You Into a Liar

Chart of the day: The Hubbert Curve still rules

From Tad Patzek, chair of the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Austin, and gathered from this post at his always enlightening blog, Lifeitself:

The caption:

Historic production of crude oil in the U.S. is resolved into several Hubbert curves.  The tallest one is the original Hubbert curve published in 1956.  The smaller curves starting from 1960 were generated by producing shallow, deep and ultra-deep Gulf of Mexico, Alaska (mostly Prudhoe Bay), and then everything else that was not in the original curve: large waterflood projects, thermal and carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery (EOR) projects, horizontal wells, hydrofractured wells, etc.  The broad curve peaking in 2002 was introduced in late 2002, and the model represented fairly well the U.S. crude oil production until 2010.  The last small green curve on the right was introduced last month to describe the Bakken and Eagle Ford shales, as well as the increased production of crude oil from the Permian Basin near Midland, TX.  The right-most black curve depicts a hypothetical production of 7 billion barrels of oil from the Arctic Natural Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska.  So the last point on the blue step-line represents 5.7 MMbopd produced in the U.S. in 2011. This rate is predicted by EIA to grow to over 6 MMbopd in 2012.

And now for a word from our sponsor [not]

We’re voting yes on California’s Proposition 37, a ballot initiative that requires labeling foods containing the fruits of genetic modification.

Living in Berkeley, when “bioengineering” reigns supreme at the little college up the street, we’re rather bemused at the millions corporations are spending to defeat the measure, using the classic forms of deception previously employed to convince folks that smoking was equivalent to breathing pure mountain air.

You’d think corporateers would be delighted to have the efforts labeled and acknowledged. But no. They want to conceal their “contributions” to our dietary intake.

So here are two of the many excellent video spots produced by Vote Yes on Prop 37 featuring some very familiar faces:

Trust Us: Vote Yes on Prop 37

Grocery Costs: Vote Yes on Prop 37

Please join us in voting yes. Let’s give the corporateers their due acknowledgment.

And, no, we have no sponsors other than our own peculiar sense of obligation.

Quote of the day: Self-mythologizing scientists

From Philip Ball, a British science writer with a doctorate in physics, writing in Aeon:

[S]cience has never given up on the Whiggish view of history that historians have long since abandoned: a triumphant voyage out of the dark ages of ignorance and superstition into the light of reason. In this view, all we really care about in historical scientists is which of their ideas survived, not how they thought and why. All the stuff that was of its time — Kepler’s cosmic harmonies, Newton’s alchemy and eschatology, Faraday’s religiosity — must then become a curious aberration: ‘Isn’t it strange that such great minds held such weird ideas?’ It isn’t strange at all if you truly care about history.

It’s surely the attraction of this heroic vision that explains why scientists play fast and loose with history. Of course, history almost inevitably gets simplified in the popular retelling, and Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out that all trades and institutions invent their own myths. Yet scientists do seem to have an unusual susceptibility for bowdlerised narrative, pantheons and idols. And these almost always serve the didactic purpose of presenting science as a noble, brave and objective quest for truth in the face of ideology and superstition, whether that is Galileo versus the pope or Einstein versus the Nazis. In these stories, great scientists shake off the shackles, while dogma and prejudice capitulate to unreason.

As an illustration of how illiberal political systems inhibit science, Paul Nurse recently claimed that Hitler’s regime denounced relativity as ‘Jewish science’. In fact, the Nazis ended up ignoring the few careerist and racist physicists who supported the nonsense of ‘Aryan physics’ because they rightly recognised that Einstein’s colleagues had the more useful theories. A determination to present science as a calling that is ‘above’ politics and ideology goes hand in hand with the simplistic view of the fictitious ‘scientific method’ that many scientists hold, in which they simply test their theories to destruction against the unrelenting candour of experiment. Needless to say, that’s rarely how it really works.

Read the rest.