Where's Mario Savio when you need him?

Police arrested 52 students protesting a tuition hike Thursday at the University of California-Davis and held them in jail overnight without food. One was reportedly beaten by police, a source close to the incident tells Raw Story...The incident took place in the midst of widespread protests at several University of California campuses, in response to the Board of Regents' decision this week to hike tuition fees by 32 percent starting next academic year.

Yeah, I know...Mario who? Lanza? The Nintendo guy? Well, back in the early 60s, prior to Vietnam and Freedom Marchers, Berkeley had something called a Free Speech Movement and Mario was the best known of the leaders.  I read something by the then Chancellor of the University System years ago, and I wanted to bitchslap the guy even though he was dead. Mario appears to have cared a lot, and died 36 years after coming to prominence. Of heart failure.

Fast foward to today. California is tanking, as we all know; the universities are headed down the old clockwise rotating clusterbowl along with just about everything else. They decided to raise the cost of tuition by 36% -- really? I suspect costs have risen at least 36% over the last ten years or so, but according to the Wall Street Journal, the average loan load for students graduating is $23K, up 10 grand since 1996. Bear in mind, that includes ALL THE STUDENT DEBT for tuition, books, room and board and so on. Most students work, most borrow, most are twitching in fear that their parents will lose their jobs or have lost their jobs, and are all living with feelings of impending doom and dread. Well as they should; the journal goes all supply and demand a bit later, speculating that the availability of loans contributes to the costs, as students compete for seats. Charging outrageous prices for something is the best way of rationing it.

The new numbers highlight how debt has become commonplace in paying for higher education. Today, two-thirds of college students borrow to pay for college, and their average debt load is $23,186 by the time they graduate, according to an analysis of the government's National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, conducted by financial-aid expert Mark Kantrowitz. Only a dozen years earlier, according to the study, 58% of students borrowed to pay for college, and the average amount borrowed was $13,172.

On the other hand, Crusader AXE has in fact argued pretty strongly that an elementary knowledge of math is required for informed comment. While the imbalance between rich and poor is growing, most of the folks borrowing a lot of the money are not poor, but middle class. If you're really poor and smart enough, the money is there in the form of scholarships, need-based financial aid, and more heavily subsidized loans. If you're rich, shit...who cares. It's the "middle class" that's getting hit...instead of aspiring to go to UCAL Davis, a worker's daughter will be dreaming of going to Barstow Community College; the kid who could have gone to Harvey Mudd will be siting around at Davis. Supply, demand and cost...very cold calculus. Unless you bitchslap the sytem and make fundamental changes.

There have been discussions over the years about the difference between the student movement in the 60s in the US and in France. Well, as with quality of life in general, France's student movement did in fact result in changes. In the US, we elected Richard Nixon as a backlash; in France, Charles de Gaulle was forced to resign. There's something about a level of passion when something hits viscerally as opposed to intellectually. Pocketbooks and mortgaging the future for forever are pretty visceral. We'll see how this turns out, but my guess is that the bottom rung will suffer severely indeed.  Poorer students will be forced out, smaller schools may be shuttered. And, we'll import more folks with degrees from places like Mobai and Guangzhou. The middle class will become more of an afterthought and we'll see what happens next. Looks in a lot of ways though to this old Hegelian that the Universal Spirit is unfolding itself dialectically and headed for the next stage. Or, to use Marxist language, capitalism is revealing it's contradictions and we're headed for a clash between the American Dream or the American ideology and economic reality; a new omelet will be created, and eggs will be broken.

Took several months back in the early 60s for the cops to break out the teargas. This time, happened basically the same day. We'll see what's next...

Comments

[zencomix]

What happens next is they skip the tear gas and go straight to the tasers and sonic gun gastric disrupters.