The debate over teaching Darwinian biology in public schools has become the hottest battle in the culture war. The Darwinians cheered their victory on Feb. 14, when the Kansas Board of Education decided — in a 7-3 vote — to require the teaching of evolution in public schools across the state, thereby reversing a decision in August 1999 to remove evolution from the statewide guidelines for teaching and testing. But those Darwinians who think that in winning this battle they have won the war are mistaken.
What really happened in Kansas is that the opponents of Darwinism tested a new intellectual weapon. As they become more skilled in the use of that weapon, the tide in this protracted battle could shift in their favor. The new weapon is called “intelligent design theory,” or IDT.
Until recently, the critics of Darwinism have championed creationism — the idea that a literal reading of the early chapters of the Bible offers a more accurate account of human origins than Darwinian biology does. The Darwinians have easily defeated this position by dismissing it as a religious belief unsupported by material evidence and inappropriate in science teaching.
But now intelligent design theorists are claiming that scientific data show evidence in the living world for “irreducible complexity” or “specified complexity,” which can only be explained as the work of an intelligent designer. Whether this cosmic designer corresponds to the biblical God, they admit, is a metaphysical or theological question that defies empirical science. Nevertheless, they argue, the observable evidence for design is scientifically compelling.
Steve Abrams, a Kansas school board member who voted with the majority in 1999 and with the minority on Feb. 14, argued vigorously that teaching IDT as an alternative to Darwinism does not depend upon religious belief at all. After the Feb. 14 decision, Abrams insisted that intelligent design is based on “what is observable, measurable, testable, repeatable, falsifiable, good empirical science.” The Discovery Institute, which identifies itself as “an intelligent design think tank” in Seattle, issued a press release condemning the decision in Kansas. Its spokesman, Mark Edwards, declared, “What is heralded as the triumph of science is instead a victory for censorship and viewpoint discrimination. This is not what science, or America, is about; discussion of the dissenting scientific opinion on Darwinism should be allowed in science classrooms.”
The Discovery Institute is led by conservative Republicans who promote IDT as a strategy for defeating what they regard as the immoral materialism of modern science. They hope to influence the new Bush administration. Their ultimate objective is to win a case before the U.S. Supreme Court that would uphold the constitutionality of teaching IDT in public school biology classes.
The institute’s legal strategy is laid out in a recent Utah Law Review article by David DeWolf and Stephen Meyer, who are associated with the organization. Over the past 20 years, the Supreme Court has said that teaching “creation science” in the public schools is an unconstitutional establishment of religion. But the court has also ruled that teaching alternative scientific theories of origins that challenge Darwinian biology is constitutional. And the court has said that when public schools create public forums for the free discussion of ideas, they must not practice “viewpoint discrimination” by suppressing ideas that might have some connection to religion.
DeWolf and Meyer argue that unlike creation science, IDT rests on purely scientific evidence rather than biblical doctrine, and that therefore it represents a scientifically defensible alternative to Darwinism that can and should be taught in the public schools. And although some religious believers will see intelligent design as confirming their religion, DeWolf and Meyer explain, public schools that exclude the teaching of IDT because of this connection to religion are practicing the viewpoint discrimination prohibited by the Supreme Court.
The intelligent design movement was launched by Phillip Johnson with his 1991 book “Darwin on Trial.” Johnson is a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley with a degree from Harvard Law School, and the prestige of his academic background has lent him some credibility. In his book, Johnson metaphorically puts evolution on trial in order to persuade his audience that Darwinism is intellectually bankrupt.
Everyone who has heard Johnson speak publicly — including his opponents — acknowledges his rhetorical talents. But defenders of Darwinism have also turned Johnson’s strength into a weakness by suggesting that he argues more like a lawyer than a scientist; he relies, they say, on the verbal tricks of the courtroom to win debates in ways that would never be accepted in the scientific community. Moreover, Johnson makes no bones of the fact that his religious beliefs motivate his attack on Darwinism, throwing the scientific validity of his position into question.
Michael Behe, currently IDT’s leading proponent, brings greater intellectual respectability to the movement by means of his impeccable credentials. Behe is a real scientist, with a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania. He worked for four years at the National Institutes of Health studying DNA, then became a teacher at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., where he is now a full professor of biochemistry. Darwinians who debate Behe can’t dismiss him as a crackpot or as a smart but deceptive lawyer. And although Behe is a devout Catholic, he never resorts to theological arguments. Instead, he relies on meticulous reasoning, starting from the detailed biochemical processes that he knows so well, to infer that the observable complexity in living things can only be explained by the existence of an “intelligent designer.”
The argument for intelligent design has an appealing, common-sensical simplicity. Suppose a particular person, let’s say a woman, dies. Was her death just bad luck, an accident? Or was it the inevitable result of some natural cause, such as bone cancer? Or was she murdered? If we can’t plausibly explain the woman’s death as accidental or necessary, then we must consider the possibility that she was killed intentionally. Similarly, when we see some complex order in nature that can’t be explained as the consequence of chance or necessity, we might infer that it has been caused by an intelligent agent. And if we can’t reasonably believe the phenomenon to be the work of some naturally intelligent designer (a human being or an animal), then we might choose to see it as the result of a supernaturally intelligent designer.
Behe, and William Dembski, director of the Michael Polanyi Center at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, were the leading speakers on behalf of a Discovery Institute-sponsored conference last year at Baylor. At least half of the speakers — including some Nobel Prize-winning scientists — argued against the theory, while Behe summarized the argument of his 1996 book, “Darwin’s Black Box,” insisting that Darwinian biology cannot explain those biomolecular mechanisms that are “irreducibly complex.” A system is irreducibly complex when it consists of many interacting parts that contribute to some function, such that the removal of any one part prevents the whole system from functioning.
The common mousetrap is Behe’s favorite example of an irreducibly complex mechanism. It requires at least five parts — a platform, a spring, a hammer, a catch and a holding bar — arranged in a specific way. If one part is missing, or if the arrangement is wrong, the mechanism won’t function as a mousetrap. We know that such a device did not arise by chance or by some natural necessity. Instead, it was designed by human intelligent agents with the intention of catching rodent pests. Behe suggested that many biological mechanisms show the same purposeful arrangement of parts found in human devices such as the mousetrap; this, he says, points to an intelligent designer outside of nature.
Dembski argued that we should infer intelligent design when we see what he calls “specified complexity.” We detect intelligent design in events that are highly improbable (thus complex) and that also correspond to some independently given pattern (thus specified). For example, we might see some Scrabble letters on a table in a sequence such as BDWSFCHJDMB, which would be improbable but not specified. Or we might see a sequence such as THE, which would be specified but not improbable. In neither case could we reasonably infer intelligent design. But we could rightly make a design inference if we saw METHINKSITISLIKEAWEASEL, because this is both improbable and specified; it looks as if some intelligent human being has arranged the letters.
If a detective decides that our deceased woman’s death was not accidental or from natural causes but, rather, the result of a murderer’s plot, he is inferring intelligent design from specified complexity. According to Dembski, we make similar inferences every day of our lives when we conclude that something has occurred because of someone’s purposeful plan.
You can see where Dembski is headed. The genetic information in DNA that governs all life is stored in a highly complex and highly specified sequence of chemicals called nucleotide bases. If God really did create Adam and Eve from the dust of the earth, that would be a miracle. But wouldn’t it be equally miraculous if God created the genetic code that controls the development of human beings as well as all other living beings?
Yet the theory of a miracle-working designer seems to lead to more questions than it answers. If evolution doesn’t occur, does the designer miraculously intervene to separately create every species of life and every irreducibly complex mechanism in the living world? If so, exactly when, where and how does that happen? Did the designer create the first human beings as fully formed adults, bellybuttons and all? And by what observable causal mechanisms does the designer execute these miraculous acts? How would one formulate falsifiable tests for such a theory? Proponents of IDT refuse to answer such questions, because it puts them at a rhetorical disadvantage. It’s far easier for them to take a purely negative position in which they criticize Darwinian theory without defending their own.
Jonathan Wells understands this strategy very well. Like Behe and Dembski, Wells is sponsored by the Discovery Institute to promote IDT as an alternative to Darwinian science. In his new book, “Icons of Evolution,” Wells shrewdly employs a purely negative approach — attacking weaknesses in Darwinian theory while refusing to defend intelligent design in any positive way. He encourages the reader to infer that since Darwinian evolution hasn’t been absolutely demonstrated, creation by an intelligent designer wins by default as the only reasonable alternative. However, the standards of proof Wells demands of Darwinian biology are so unreasonably high that he could never satisfy himself if he had to argue for intelligent design.
If we remember nothing else from our biology textbooks, many of us remember what Wells dubs the “icons of evolution,” the standard examples used to demonstrate Darwin’s theory. These include the peppered moths that became vulnerable to bird predators when they lost their camouflage as a result of air pollution that blackened tree trunks, the various species of finches in the Galápagos Islands that evolved for diverse ecological niches, the similarity between the embryos of radically different species and the pictures showing the gradual evolution of humans from apes. Wells argues that each of these standard textbook stories of evolution and many more are either distortions of the truth or complete lies.
Wells’ attack on the story of the peppered moths illustrates how his argument works. Beginning in the 19th century, it was widely noticed in England that the typical peppered moths — white with dark speckles — were becoming less common in areas where industrial air pollution had blackened trees, and darker forms of the moth were becoming more common. In the 1950s, Bernard Kettlewell performed experiments in which he released moths with different color patterns and observed the consequences of bird predation, which seemed to show that the darker varieties were less likely to be eaten in areas of industrial pollution, but more likely to be eaten in areas were the air was clear and the trees were covered with light-colored lichens. This became the clearest example of evolution in action, with natural selection favoring changes in the moths that would hide them from predation. Almost every biology textbook now has pictures of peppered moths on tree trunks to show how dark moths are harder to see against dark tree trunks.
The problem with such pictures, however, as Wells indicates, is that they are faked. Peppered moths do not normally rest on tree trunks. These moths fly at night and then hide under the upper branches of trees during the day. The textbook pictures come from scientists who have either placed live moths on tree trunks during the day when the moths become torpid or glued dead moths to tree trunks. Indeed, Kettlewell’s experiments are now criticized by researchers as too artificial. Wells accuses biology textbooks of omitting this controversy and thereby concealing the flimsiness of the evidence for Darwinian evolution from students.
Wells does score a good point here in showing how biology textbooks oversimplify — to the point of distortion — the evidence for evolution. But to show that the evidence is more complex and more controversial than the textbooks usually indicate is not to show that there is no good evidence at all. The same researchers who criticized Kettlewell’s study found that dark moths nevertheless do survive better in polluted, rather than unpolluted, woods, which suggests that they are somehow hidden from bird predators and thus favored by natural selection. One of those researchers concluded “that natural selection, the primary mechanism of evolution put forward by Charles Darwin, actually happens.” Wells doesn’t quote that.
Darwin never claimed that his theory could be demonstrated with a precision and certainty that would leave no room for reasonable doubt; he believed that no theory of the origin of species could be demonstrated absolutely. He anticipated almost all of the objections to his theory and devoted over one-third of “The Origin of Species” to considering such “difficulties.” He admitted that some of the objections “are so serious that to this day I can hardly reflect on them without being in some degree staggered.” And yet he insisted that his theory would emerge as highly “probable” to anyone who considered the “facts and arguments” in its favor.
Most of our knowledge in science rests on probability rather than certainty. If the alternative to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is a theory of creation by a miracle-working designer, most of the empirical evidence is still on the side of Darwin. Certainly, no one knows how the existence of a supernatural designer could be rigorously verified by purely scientific means.
Wells is careful to refer to IDT only in passing because he wants to put all the burden of proof on the Darwinians, but he often implies that the only good alternative to Darwinism is “creation by design.” And he warns his readers that Darwinism promotes a materialistic view of the world that denies the reality of a spiritual realm. His main conclusion is that “biology students are being taught materialistic philosophy in the guise of empirical science.”
This fear of “materialistic philosophy” shows what’s really at stake here: At a deeper level, this is a moral, religious and political debate over the adequacy of science in explaining the meaning of human life. For the people at the Discovery Institute, that debate amounts to something like a holy war.
Bruce Chapman, the founder of the Discovery Institute and its president since 1990, is a conservative Republican who held various appointments in Ronald Reagan’s administration. He believes that America’s moral and religious heart is threatened by the corrosive materialism and atheism of modern scientific naturalism, and he promotes IDT to other conservative Republicans as the only way to win America’s culture war. Last May he even sponsored a meeting in Washington for members of Congress, who were given a three-hour briefing on IDT. Now he expects to have some influence in the new presidential administration.
At the briefing, Nancy Pearcey quoted the lyrics of a song by the Bloodhound Gang — “You and me, baby, ain’t nothin’ but mammals, so let’s do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel.” This, she warned, is what we can expect if the materialism of the Darwinians persuades us that we are merely mammals, rather than beings elevated above other animals and created in the image of God. She urged the congressmen in her audience to remember that the U.S. legal system is grounded in the belief in a creator as the ultimate source of moral law. Darwinism, by undermining that belief, is morally and legally dangerous.
American culture has long, if somewhat tensely, maintained a balance among common-sense morality, democratic politics, scientific naturalism and biblical religion, but this kind of rhetoric can make the schisms in American society seem unbridgeable. It’s also unwarranted.
Modern science isn’t necessarily incompatible with the moral, religious and political traditions of America. Darwin himself believed there was a natural moral sense rooted in the desires of the human animal, and he laid out this biological theory of morality in his 1871 book “The Descent of Man.” As intensely social animals, he argued, we need to cooperate with one another to succeed. Natural selection has favored those emotions — such as love, guilt and anger — that dispose us to cooperative relationships with relatives, friends and fellow group members. As intellectual animals, we generalize our social emotions into the rules of good conduct and then into moral principles. Our natural moral sense doesn’t require religious belief, but it shouldn’t surprise us that religious teachings tend to support those universal standards of conduct — honoring parents, not stealing, refraining from unjustified killing and so on — that sustain social life.
And while some theologians have dismissed Darwin’s theory as atheistic, there’s no necessary conflict between Darwinism and religion. Darwin often confessed that scientific research could not answer questions about the First Cause — the origins of life and the universe — and as a result left room for religious faith. Many thinkers have seen no contradiction between biblical theology and Darwinian evolution. God could have chosen to create everything in six days. Or he could have chosen to create a universe governed by natural laws in which life would evolve gradually over millions of years. God could also have chosen to allow a moral sense to evolve in human beings. Indeed, there is an old tradition in biblical theology that God implanted a natural moral sense into the animal world. Thomas Aquinas, for example, saw this in the instincts for self-preservation, sexual union, parental care and other social behaviors.
Instead of fighting a dishonest battle for a theory that has little empirical support, American conservatives should welcome the Darwinian idea of morality as rooted in our biology. The idea vindicates the belief held by America’s founding fathers that there is a fundamental harmony between scientific knowledge and religious faith. After all, when Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, he seemed to anticipate this very crisis when, in arguing for the existence of the United States, he appealed to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”
Last summer a young lawyer wrote to me about her struggles to find employment. Her story was all too familiar: After graduating with honors from a middling law school, she was unable to find a real legal job, and was reduced to taking a series of temporary, low-paying positions that did not allow her to even begin to pay off educational debts that, three years after graduation, had ballooned to nearly a quarter of a million dollars.
Rather than merely lamenting her situation, however, she explained to me she was more fortunate than many of her fellow recent graduates: “I know that I am better off than a lot of these younger lawyers. I get job interviews. I can afford the apartment I share with my friend. I have a great resume. I am an excellent researcher and writer. I rarely go to bed hungry anymore.”
That last sentence stayed with me. I have been researching what’s been happening to recent law school graduates, and it’s no exaggeration to describe the situation as a growing catastrophe. The statistics are shocking:
Approximately half of the 45,000 people who will graduate this year from ABA-accredited law schools will never find jobs as lawyers. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that over the next decade 21,000 new jobs for lawyers will become available each year, via growth and outflow from the profession.)
Most of those who do find jobs will be making between $30,000 and $60,000 per year.
People currently in law school are going to graduate with an average of $150,000 of educational debt. This debt will have an average interest rate of 7.5 percent, meaning the typical graduate will be accruing nearly $1,000 per month in interest upon graduation. Unlike almost every other form of debt, these loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.
In short, one out of every two law graduates will not have a legal career, and most of the rest will never make enough money to pay back their educational loans. This means they will either have to rely on other sources of income (spouses, extended family) to service their debts, or they will have to go into the federal government’s new Income-Based Repayment program. This program will keep people in debt servitude for 25 (soon to be reduced to 20) years, during which time the balance on their loans will grow, making it almost impossible for them to qualify for mortgages and many other forms of consumer debt. Finally, the debt – which for many law graduates will have grown to more than $1 million – will be discharged, meaning, of course, that taxpayers will be left to pick up the tab.
All this adds up to a completely unsustainable system – one in which the cost of acquiring a law degree no longer bears any rational relationship to the benefits the typical graduate can expect to receive from it. In this regard, the economic disaster that legal education has become is merely a particularly stark example of the increasingly absurd financial structure of higher education in America.
How did we get into this mess? The basic problem – one that goes far beyond the growing crisis inside America’s law schools – is a product of two related myths. The first is that educational debt is almost axiomatically “good debt” – that is, the sort of debt that will generate a positive return on investment. The second is that the market for higher education is rational and efficient.
For generations now, Americans have been told that it always makes sense to invest in higher education for themselves and their children. This belief was so strong that it had three unfortunate consequences: It convinced politicians and taxpayers that there was no good reason to subsidize public higher education (if people were going to enjoy such a good return on an investment why should the government subsidize it?). It encouraged colleges and universities to adopt a business mentality, which increasingly led these institutions to make revenue maximization their top goal. And it led the purchasers of higher education not to ask hard questions about whether what they were buying was worth the price they were being asked to pay for it.
It is true it is more realistic to expect prospective law students to try to determine the real net present value of attending law school than to expect high school students to make the same calculation regarding a college degree. Still, in the case of law schools the ceaseless message that more higher education is always worth the cost has combined with the misleading reporting practices regarding employment and salary outcomes to produce a classic case of severe market failure: Most law students now pay far more for their degrees than those degrees are worth.
The result has been several consecutive decades of rising costs in real dollar terms. Law schools provide a particularly stark example of these trends: A generation ago, as measured in 2012 dollars, annual tuition at Harvard Law School was $12,500 per year. Resident tuition at my alma mater, Michigan Law School, was $4,400 per year, again in current 2012 dollars. Today the respective figures are $51,000 and $48,000.
Despite the rhetoric of self-interested and/or clueless academics, higher education is not “priceless.” At some point, the cost will come to outweigh the benefit. That point has already been reached for countless university graduates in general, and law school graduates in particular. As prospective students and their families become aware of this fact, our debt-fueled higher education bubble, like so many other financial bubbles before it, will pop.
“The only security of all is in a free press.” Thomas Jefferson wrote these words to the Marquis de Lafayette at the age of 80. The reason Jefferson lauded a free press was that he wished, in tense political times, for the U.S. to function as a deliberative democracy, in which an increasingly better-educated citizenry monitored the policy decisions of its elected representatives and judged whether or not they deserved to remain in office.
A better-educated citizenry. That was Jefferson’s mantra, and it should be ours, too. Republicans in Congress have claimed Jefferson as their man, time and again quoting him as a champion of small government. One of their favorites lines is, “If it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution,” it would be “taking from the Federal Government the power of borrowing.” The Jefferson they do not pay attention to is the one whose lifelong dream was a well-funded public education system — the Jefferson who spent his post-presidential retirement years creating a beautiful public university in Charlottesville, Virginia. Jefferson asked no less a figure than U.S. Attorney General William Wirt, notably the son of a Maryland tavern-keeper, to be its president. He understand that personal growth and national strength were best served by lifting up ordinary folks.
This week, the Senate debated student loan rates, which are now at a comfortable 3.4 percent and are set to double on July 1, if nothing is done. In his most recent college tour, President Obama focused on the endangered interest rate, fully aware that Republicans would have to support the Democratic initiative, if only to avoid embarrassment. Their sleight of hand was in proposing to come up with the $6 billion by removing money from preventive healthcare programs. That, then, is how the House Republican majority voted a week earlier to pass a one-year extension of the 3.4 percent rate. Democrats had urged cutting subsidies to oil and gas companies instead of raiding health care funds. When that wouldn’t fly, the alternative became an increase in the Social Security payroll taxes of the already wealthy. The White House vowed a veto after the House measure passed. It’s now the Senate’s turn. Congress will have to reach some sort of compromise, because neither party wishes to be seen as anti-student in an election year.
So, what about educational opportunity in America? Is it, or is it not, a priority? We all recognize that there is wasteful spending in the budget, but Republicans in Congress routinely recommend slashing funds for education, as though the fiscal crisis can be solved by cutting social programs first. (This past week, claiming that the Democratic plan was counterproductive, Senator Mitch McConnell, R-KY, relied on the fiction that government should not be “raising taxes on the very businesses we’re counting on to hire these young people.” He apparently views college graduates as dependents on government rather than future job creators.) Nothing could be more self-defeating, or hurtful to more people. Literacy programs? National writing projects? High school graduation initiatives?
They can talk all they want about Jeffersonian small government, but Thomas Jefferson stood for opportunity for young people, not a further consolidation of power among big business combinations. For millions of low- and middle-income students with admirable ambitions, a college education is the American dream. President Obama’s revelation that he and the first lady were only able to pay off their student loans eight years ago – they were in their forties – cannot but resonate with younger voters. On the campaign trail, Michelle Obama says that her husband was “the son of a single mother who struggled to put her son through school.” It’s a good narrative when you’re running against a candidate who was pretty much slotted for Harvard at birth.
Jefferson made himself quite clear. His definition of republicanism projected greater civic involvement and an expansion of the electorate, opening minds rather than opening the wallets of the privileged few to preserve their political sinecures. The Jefferson quote about a free press comes from a letter of November 4, 1823, addressed to his old friend Lafayette, the last surviving general to have commanded Continental Army troops in the American Revolution. Jefferson invoked his small government philosophy in the line that directly preceded his call for a free press: “A rigid economy of the public contributions, and absolute interdiction of all useless expences, will go far towards keeping the government honest and unoppressive.” And then, he assured, “the only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. We are, for example, in agitation even in our peaceful country. For in peace as well as war the mind must be kept in motion.”
And how is the mind to be kept in motion? In a letter he addressed to a state legislator seven years before, as he proceeded with his design of the University of Virginia, Jefferson proposed that legislatures vote “a perpetual tax” to maintain a system of schools and a university “where might be taught, in its highest degree, every branch of science useful in our time and country.” Because, as he most eloquently put it, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Yes, small-government champion Thomas Jefferson did not wish to tax citizens – except when the money was being used for public education.
Those of our time who would sacrifice opportunity for the young and shortchange students of all ages ought to heed the thought Jefferson expressed next. Taken out of context, or left to stand alone, it is a rallying cry for those who fear federal encroachment: “There is no safe deposit [for liberty] but with the people themselves,” he proclaimed. But the rest of his comment expresses the best Jefferson we know, the education champion. Liberty is never safe, he said, unless people possessed knowledge to make informed political choices; for, “where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.”
Conservatives will certainly not appreciate one theory Jefferson put forward in the letter to Lafayette. He claimed that partisan ideologies were fixed in nature. Those of his day whom he labeled “Tory” or “aristocrat,” who wished to restrain the democratic rabble and keep the wealthy in charge, were, for Jefferson, “sickly, weakly, timid men” whose nerves could not withstand social change. Those who subscribed to his own, relatively liberal and open-minded belief in the educability of all (white) men were, he wrote, a “healthy, strong and bold” political interest.
Jefferson’s first priority was the intellectual elevation of those who were to succeed the founding generation — those who would sustain the values of the Revolution. He opposed all profligate spending, but he championed education spending. And he embraced the free press as the republic’s clearinghouse of ideas and the instrument through which political and ethical progress was insured.
College students in California received another dreary report card on Wednesday. Unless the state boosts its funding support for the public university system, warned school administrators, another 6 percent tuition hike could be on the way as soon as next year.
The officials may have been indulging in some good old-fashioned political grandstanding, hoping to whip up support for a November vote on a tax hike endorsed by Gov. Jerry Brown. But in a state where tuition fees have already doubled in just five years, another 6 percent hike is hardly unthinkable. And as a symbol of rising costs in higher education nationwide, California’s example is more than apt. Since 2001, tuition fees at four-year public colleges in the United States have risen at an annual average of 5.6 percent.
For three decades the cost of attending college anywhere — public, private nonprofit, or for-profit, Ivy League school or community college — has risen significantly faster than the rate of inflation. But the sharp acceleration over the last 10 years — and particularly since the onset of the Great Recession — has stoked a new wave of widespread anxiety over an impending “crisis” in higher education. The unrelenting cost hikes also explain why government aid for college students has become such a hot topic in this presidential campaign year. Even as the government continues to print money and throw it into the breach, the hole just seems to gets bigger. Total student debt is now over $1 trillion and rising.
In fact, for some critics, access to “easy government money” is the real problem, not the solution. No less an authority than House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, explaining why he wants to cut Pell Grants and reduce the availability of government-backed student loans, claims “there is evidence that subsidized lending contributes to tuition inflation.” Just last month, Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi told the Associated Press that government loans and subsidies don’t work because “universities and colleges just raise their tuition. It doesn’t improve affordability and it doesn’t make it easier to go to college.’’
For some of these critics, the solution to higher tuition costs is to take government out of the education equation altogether; to allow the market to provide “innovative,” cost-effective alternatives to old-school brick-and-mortar-style higher education. Online learning, for example, could theoretically provide students with a cheap end-around to the existing establishment. There’s an intuitive attraction to this approach that crosses party lines. We’ve already seen the Internet wreak havoc on the music business and publishing industry by fundamentally changing the economics of content delivery. Why can’t it do the same for education?
Maybe it can, and will, in the long run. But before signaling a full-scale retreat of government from the higher education fray, it’s important to look a little more closely at the simplistic claim that “easy government money” is fueling higher costs. While there are certainly some sectors of higher education in which there is a clear relationship between student loans and higher tuitions, for the great majority of college students the problem isn’t that the government is giving them too much money. Quite the opposite: It’s the collapse of direct government support for higher education that is the main driver of higher tuition costs.
“The reality is that student debt is not rising because the government is putting more money into higher education,” says Kevin Carey, policy director at Education Sector, a Washington-based nonpartisan think tank. “It’s rising because the government is putting less money into higher education.”
The first step in grappling with the rise in the cost of higher education requires understanding where students go to school. There are three main categories — public schools (which include both four-year public universities and two-year community colleges), private nonprofits (the Ivys, most liberal arts colleges, etc.), and the for-profits (Kaplan, University of Phoenix, Corinthian Colleges, aka “career schools”). Here’s the key statistic: Fully 70 percent of the 19 million undergraduates and 3 million graduate students enrolled in post-secondary education in 2010 attended schools considered to be in the public sector — by which it is meant that some portion of their funding comes directly from government.
The problem: The word “public” doesn’t mean as much as it used to. Direct state support for public colleges has cratered over the past 10 years, and really fell off the cliff after the financial crisis. Yes, tuitions have risen, but not by as much as state and local appropriations for higher education have fallen. Just between 2008 and 2009, for example, average tuition revenue at public research institutions increased by $369 per student, but the loss in state and local appropriations per student was $751. Similarly, at public community colleges, tuition revenue rose by $113 per student, while appropriations fell by $488. Since the recession of 2001, tuition hikes, as exorbitant as they have been, still haven’t kept pace with the fall in government support.
The bottom line: For the large majority of college students, rising tuitions have nothing to do with the availability of student loans or Pell Grants. What’s happening, instead, is that the burden of paying for college that was previously provided directly by government has now been shifted onto the backs of students, in the form of crippling debt.
The picture becomes a bit more complicated when one considers private nonprofits, which don’t get government support, but where tuitions have also been rising, if at a slower pace than at public schools. There’s an argument to be made that one explanation for why college costs have consistently risen faster than inflation over many decades has to do with the built-in resistance that the education sector has to the kind of productivity increases that result in lower prices in other industries. You can’t outsource teachers to China like you can iPhones or blue jeans. You need talent to operate a full-service college, and there’s a lot of competition for the talent, and so prices keep going up. While there are some problems with this argument — such as, do schools really need to have as many administrative personnel as teaching personnel? — the private nonprofit sector is where this argument seems to hold mostly true. Generally speaking, the private nonprofits are more or less immune to the same market forces that result in economies of scale elsewhere. This is particularly true for elite schools, where astoundingly high tuition gets tremendous public attention. So what? If you’re turning away 75 to 80 percent of your applicants, what possible reason do you have for lowering tuition? Quite the opposite: Keep hiking it! The kids will continue to apply!
Of course, deserved or not, our culture places a lot of value on a degree from an elite institution, which further maintains their ability to charge as much as the market will bear. The same is not true for the rapidly growing for-profit sector, which has burgeoned in size over the last 15 years despite not delivering much that anyone values.
One out of every 10 American college students now attends a for-profit school. And there is absolutely no question that those schools’ entire business model is built on the availability of student loans. Eighty to 90 percent of for-profit revenue comes from government aid — and it would probably hit 100 percent if not for a government regulation capping the total percentage of revenue allowed to come from government aid at 90 percent.
“It’s very, very clear,” says Carey. “The for-profits set their prices to whatever the maximum federal loan limit is. They charge as much money as students can borrow. ”
As has been amply documented, the for-profit sector also does a horrible job of actually educating students. For-profit students are more likely to drop out and much more likely to default on the debt they accumulated while failing to get a degree.
The dependence of the for-profit sector on government money poses a bit of a conundrum for Republicans who decry “easy government money,” because ideologically, Republicans are big fans of the for-profit sector, and fight hard to keep it free of government regulation and oversight. Yet it is precisely here that the system is most screwed up. When profit is the goal, and government looks the other way, students are the losers.
One informative, market-based method for comparing public, private and for-profit schools, suggests Lauren Asher, the president of the Institute for College Access and Success, is to look at the “net price” charged by institutions. Posted tuition rates don’t actually give a very clear picture of what a college actually costs to the person writing the check. The “net price” subtracts whatever grants are provided to the student directly by the school or government from total tuition (but does not include student loans).
The most recent data is eye-opening. The net price of attending one year at a four-year public school in 2009-2010 was $10,175. At a private nonprofit: $16,672. And at a for-profit school? A whopping $23,771. In fact, says Asher, the data indicates that in the last couple of years, the net price of attending public schools has held even and in some cases declined slightly, despite tuition hikes. Asher says that even as state appropriations plummet, schools are finding ways to cut costs and plow whatever cash they have available back into aid for low-income students. The data seems clear: If you’re looking for a bargain, your best bet is still state-supported education.
So what does all this mean in the big picture? In a perfect world, the easy answer would simply be to restore direct government support for higher education. There are still clear economic rewards to getting a post-secondary school degree, making government support of education a good investment for future economic growth and prosperity.
Unfortunately, in the realpolitik of today’s revenue-constrained, tax-averse governments, that simply isn’t politically feasible. Way back in 1978, California pioneered the future that we all currently live in when voters passed Proposition 13 and severely restricted the ability of the state to raise taxes. As a nation, we’ve voted with our taxpayer wallets: We are no longer willing to fund massive direct investments in our future.
Carey holds out hope for alternative providers of education that leverage the Internet’s huge advantages to provide instruction at low cost. Although some of the for-profits, most famously the University of Phoenix, have already been conducting classes online for years, they aren’t doing so with the goal of lowering costs for students, but rather to maximize their own profits. They’re essentially exploiting the Internet to deliver product as cheaply as possible on their own bottom line, but charging top-line prices to consumers that force massive borrowing.
There’s a clear role for government to play here, says Carey, both in restricting the abuses rampaging through the for-profit sector and in realigning incentives that constrict student and educational facility flexibility. For example, he notes, you can’t get a student loan to take a single calculus course from whichever professor might specialize in delivering the best online calculus course in the world. There’s no current way to get government aid for mixing and matching credits from different educational providers that can ultimately be assembled into a full degree.
Carey points to new, free online education initiatives from MIT, Harvard and Stanford that promise to revolutionize the education business by offering high quality at extraordinary low costs. These elite institutions pose no threat to their own operating model — there will always be plenty of students seeking the validation of a brick-and-mortar degree from Harvard, but they carry massive potential to destroy, or at least severely constrain, the for-profit model of education. We may one day look back at the current era and wonder how in the world the for-profit schools ever got away with charging such huge fees. And of course you won’t need a student loan to pay for a free online circuit engineering course put together by MIT.
How close that future might be is anyone’s guess. For now, you can’t get a transferable college credit from the MIT/Harvard initiative — exactly the kind of problem government needs to help solve. But for now, as Republicans and Democrats continue to squabble over how to pay for low interest rates on student loans or how much money to put into the Pell Grant program, we should remember that the real story here isn’t how much students are borrowing, but how little government is doing to help.
[UPDATE BELOW]
It was always bound to go there, but few likely expected it would be so blatant. I’m talking about the ongoing campaign against organized labor; for decades deeply rooted in American political culture, the crusade has been periodically amplified in popular culture as well, from 1954′s “On the Waterfront” all the way to the Sopranos’ depiction of mob-controlled unions (and sometimes pop culture and political culture have even fused). So it was only a matter of time before vilifying rank-and-file union members would be commodified into a consumer brand by a company looking for an edge in the high-end retail market.
That’s where Kenneth Cole now comes in. The clothing designer has just launched a new crusade to tie his expensive clothing and shoes line to the elite’s movement du jour: the fight to demonize public schoolteachers and their unions. In a billboard and Web-based campaign, Cole’s foundation portrays the national debate over education as one that supposedly pits “Teachers’ Rights vs. Students’ Rights.”
“Should underperforming teachers be protected?” asks the foundation’s website.
When asked about the campaign, one of Cole’s spokeswomen insisted the company isn’t trying to insult teachers or unions, saying, “It’s something in the news and being debated, and we wanted to provide a forum where people could discuss it as well.” But with the company using the same loaded language as the conservative political activists trying to undermine public education and teachers’ unions, the corporate P.R.-speak is, to say the least, unconvincing.
No, Cole’s campaign is thinly veiled ideological propaganda, and it comes with myriad problems, not the least of which is the simple fact that almost nobody believes “underperforming teachers” should be protected. That includes the nation’s biggest teachers’ unions, which have been outspoken in backing “accountability” reforms for teacher tenure. So right off the bat, Cole is constructing a straw man, one that has served over the years to pretend that public employee unions in general and teachers’ unions specifically are about nothing more than making sure bad employees get to keep their jobs.
Of course, there is a legitimate debate among state lawmakers and school boards about how to determine what an “underperforming teacher” is. Should a teacher be considered subpar if her students perform poorly on standardized tests? Should any teacher-to-teacher peer review be included in performance evaluations? And should any factors other than tests and grades — say, student poverty levels — be considered when using student achievement to judge a particular teacher?
As evidenced by the language of his new campaign, Cole, like the anti-union activists in the larger corporate-sponsored education “reform” movement, doesn’t want those questions asked, much less answered, for pondering them raises the very queries about power and wealth that Cole’s fellow 1 percenters don’t want to discuss.
For instance, actually taking an honest look at America’s education system brings up queries about why other less economically stratified nations have unionized teachers and far better academic results than here in America. It also forces us to ask why it just so happens that wealthy unionized districts in America do so well — but poorer districts have such problems. All of that consequently compels us to consider issues like poverty and funding disparities between rich and poor districts — issues that inherently threaten the status quo, and thus the interests of the super-wealthy. And so under the veneer of the term “reform” and with the backing of seemingly altruistic philanthropy via foundations like Cole’s, the super-wealthy work to avoid substance and instead define the education policy discourse on reductionist slogans like “underperforming teachers.”
Perhaps the biggest problem with Cole’s campaign, though, is how it forwards the “us-versus-them” notion that teachers’ rights to due process in the workplace are automatically at odds with their students’ interests. This so fundamentally misunderstands how education works that it perfectly underscores why a clothing corporation doesn’t have much credibility on education issues.
Think about it: We need our best teachers to work in the public schools that educate the most at-risk populations. Why? Because with decades of social science research proving that achievement is driven mostly by out-of-classroom factors (poverty, family dysfunction, etc.), those are the schools that need the most skilled pedagogues to overcome comparatively difficult odds for success. But why would a good teacher opt to work in such a school without basic protections — protections designed to make sure the at-risk population’s achievement-suppressing disadvantages aren’t used as a rationale to fire her? She probably wouldn’t.
In this way, “Teachers’ Rights vs. Students’ Rights” is the mirror opposite of how things actually work. Without extending teachers’ rights to, say, be evaluated fairly or to challenge a termination, it would be difficult — if not impossible — for public schools to recruit the best teachers to the specific at-risk schools that need them the most.
Most likely, these inconvenient truths are of little concern to someone like Kenneth Cole. According to Gotham Schools, he sends his kids to private school, making him part of the larger trend of elites who are trying to foist radical policies onto public schools, knowing their own kin won’t be hurt by those policies.
But, you ask, wouldn’t a clothing mogul with no kids in public school be averse to a divisive crusade against teachers, if only to circumvent a controversy? Even if he is a political activist, wouldn’t he refrain from such a campaign for fear of losing customers?
These are fair questions, and they highlight how Cole’s campaign may say something hugely important — and troubling — about the long-term future of education politics in America.
Recall that Cole is in a zeitgeist industry that is all about lashing branded chic to the popular fad of the moment. That means his move probably reflects what he believes to be an ascendant cause célèbre — one that he thinks he isn’t joining in spite of his company, but in support of its profit-making objectives. Put another way, he probably believes he will gain customers if he ties his company to anti-teacher, anti-union themes.
Sure, that gamble could be wrong — and I hope it is. I hope America sees just how wrongheaded and ideologically extreme the crusade against public schools, teachers and unions is.
But as a successful mogul, Cole’s clearly got skill as a cultural seer; and if someone like him sees mass profit potential in not-so-subtly bashing teachers and unions, it’s a scary sign that such unhinged anti-teacher sentiment could be going more mainstream than ever.
Update: After a mass outcry from teachers, Kenneth Cole announced on Twitter Monday that it is removing the billboard. In its statement, the company said “We misrepresented the issue – one too complex for a billboard – and are taking it down.” It has also taken down the campaign on the accompanying website.
The multiple incarnations of the GI Bill are widely considered some of the most effective pieces of social welfare legislation ever passed by the U.S. Congress. Since World War II, millions of veterans have been able to attend college and graduate school via direct tuition assistance from the federal government. The education received by the initial wave of World War II veterans is believed to have played a key role in the massive economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s.
So how, then, did we get to where we are today, with GI bill education-related financial aid embroiled in the for-profit college mess?
The answer hinges on a classic case of unintended consequences. But first, cue President Obama.
On Friday, Obama continued his efforts to keep education front and center during his reelection campaign. This time around, the focus was on the military: specifically, the abusive, bordering-on-fraudulent practices employed by for-profit “diploma mill” colleges to boost military enrollment.
From the Associated Press:
The Obama administration wants to trademark the term “GI Bill” in an effort to shield veterans and military families being swindled or misled by schools that target their federal education benefits.
President Barack Obama is signing a wide-ranging order on Friday that partially addresses growing complaints about fraudulent marketing and recruiting practices aimed at military families eligible for federal education loans under the GI Bill.
And therein lies an interesting story. As Salon reported last week, the for-profit college industry generates the vast majority of its revenue from federal student loans. Indeed, if it weren’t for a law passed in 1998 requiring that at least 10 percent of a for-profit college’s revenues come from sources other than federal loans — the so-called 90/10 rule — the percentage might go all the way up to 100. And that’s exactly what makes military students so attractive to the for-profit sector. Military educational benefits do not fall under the same category as federal loans under the 90/10 rule.
As Holly Petraeus, the assistant director for service member affairs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and wife of retired general David Petraeus, explained in a New York Times Op-Ed last September ,the law creates a huge incentive for for-profits to enroll military veterans:
For every service member or veteran (or spouse or child, in the case of the post-9/11 G.I. Bill) enrolled at a for-profit college and paying with military education funds, that college can enroll nine others who are using nothing but Title IV money.
This gives for-profit colleges an incentive to see service members as nothing more than dollar signs in uniform, and to use aggressive marketing to draw them in and take out private loans, which students often need because the federal grants are insufficient to cover the full cost of tuition and related expenses.
One of the most egregious reports of questionable marketing involved a college recruiter who visited a Marine barracks at Camp Lejeune, N.C. As the PBS program “Frontline” reported, the recruiter signed up Marines with serious brain injuries. The fact that some of them couldn’t remember what courses they were taking was immaterial, as long as they signed on the dotted line.
Abuses such as these explain why the Obama administration has been attempting to increase oversight and accountability in the for-profit college sector, against Republican opposition every step of the way. But they also raise a larger question.
Right now, Republicans and Democrats are squabbling about how to pay for an extension of low interest rates on student loans. As I write these words, House Republicans have barely passed a bill, 215-195, that will pay for the extension by taking money from Obamacare. The White House has threatened to veto the GOP maneuver. It’s a classic political squabble, with both sides reluctant to raise interest rates on student loans during an election year, but each determined to squeeze as much political advantage as possible out of the bickering.
But the real problem with student loans goes much deeper. When the government subsidizes the private sector, which is what is happening when federal student loan money flows straight to for-profit colleges, it not only creates incentives for fraud, but also encourages the for-profit schools to keep raising their tuition prices.
Under the terms of the current incarnation of the GI Bill, veterans who attend an in-state public school get their full tuition paid free and clear. Wouldn’t it be smarter to take a leaf out of that book on a much more systemic scale? America’s system of public universities is still one of the wonders of the world, even as state funding support has steadily declined. Think how much better it could be with meaningful federal support, and a GI bill that covered all Americans, and not just the military.
Of course, to pull something like that off, we’d have to raise taxes and mobilize real bipartisan consensus. So that’s not happening anytime soon. We’ll have to content ourselves with picking at the margins — trademarking the name “GI Bill” for example, or fighting life-or-death struggles over interest rate adjustments.
(Credit: Vince Clements via Shutterstock) 
Thomas Jefferson (Credit: White House Historical Association) 
(Credit: hxdbzxy via Shutterstock/Salon/Benjamin Wheelock) 
President Obama (Credit: AP) 
