And no; I am not talking about bridge. Another game: higher education.
Elizabeth Warren, a tenured celebrity professor who jumped into politics, and Barack Obama, an untenured law school instructor, who made it big in politics, know exactly why student loan debt is so high and why their measures do nothing to address its real causes.
Harvard Law paid Warren $350,000 to teach a single course. When Scott Brown brought it up during a debate about student loans, she protested. "I want to talk about the issues. Senator Brown wants to launch attacks."
At the modern university, the tenured celebrity professor who doesn't teach and gets paid is the 1 percent and the adjunct that teaches, but is unlikely to ever get tenure or a decent paycheck, is the 99 percent. But just as national inequality did not happen because a few CEOs receive huge salaries, student loan debt didn't spin out of control because of a few celebrity Socialist 1 percent professors.
The problem is always in the middle. In both the national economy and the campus, the biggest driver of inequality is bureaucracy.
The average ratio is two administrators to one full-time faculty member. In the 1960s it used to be two faculty members to one administrator. The runaway increase in administration has only increased in recent years and it will only continue to increase.
The devaluation of college diplomas is already leading some employers to unnecessarily demand graduate degrees. Eventually we will be stuck in a European system in which everyone has an armful of degrees and no one has a job.
The only way to reduce the trillion dollar mountain of student loan debt is by reforming higher education. Anything else is another cynical gambit by millionaire leftists who use inequality as a political weapon while denying the equality of merit that made higher education into the great equalizer to those who needed it the most.
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