The Affirmative Action Education Bubble Behind the Campus Protests
The Left creates misery and then profits from it.
Forget the housing bubble, the education bubble is about to burst.
Student loan debt is at $1.2 trillion. College enrollment increased under Obama, but graduation rates fell. Barely half the students who enrolled in 2009 graduated. His plans for expanding enrollment rates worked, but the plans for expanding graduation rates didn’t.
And some of the biggest casualties were black students.
81% of black graduates had taken out loans and 39% of black borrowers drop out of college. This money helped keep colleges that were deeply in debt afloat. But it didn’t do much for graduation rates.
Black student loan rates had increased by 20 percent since the ’90s. But black male graduation rates had hardly increased at all.
Only a third of black male college students graduate. Among black women, it’s 44%. And the college graduation gap between white and black students has continued to increase under Obama.
71% of black high school graduates have enrolled in college compared to only 67% of white high school graduates. But that just means more black students washing out while burdened with student loan debt.
And, like most students these days, they’re having a lot of trouble paying it off.
Black students are going into debt for a college degree that they never receive. Taxpayers keep bailing out the student loan industry and the higher education industry while more black students are encouraged to repeat the same disastrous cycle of debt, dropout and insolvency.
The education bubble is following the familiar pattern of the housing bubble as lowering standards and the influx of government money created unsustainable minority debt. Black homeowners were encouraged to take out loans they couldn’t repay and now black students are told to take out loans for an education they are unprepared for. The bubble grows and when it pops, it takes people’s dreams with them.
The affirmative action disaster benefits a handful of institutions while costing taxpayers trillions.
Community organizers and teachers’ unions had destroyed local education in black communities by fighting against standards for either teachers or students. And they are still fighting any insurgent attempts at standards-based education from charter schools or religious schools.
Their enemy is the test because any evaluation of their failures exposes the truth about their agenda.
The problem of meeting national standards was solved through promotion. Students who couldn’t read or do simple sums still graduated with a diploma. 1 in 5 high school graduates can’t read. Only 16 % of black high school seniors were even assessed as proficient readers. That’s bound to be a problem when 71% of black high school graduates go on to college where proficient reading skills are a prerequisite.
Unprepared high school students were promoted on to college. Affirmative action made it easier for black students to get in, but once they were enrolled they still had to be able to handle the work.
80 percent of high school graduates arrived without basic reading, writing or math skills at the City University of New York. This year it’s down to 78 percent. Even more prestigious colleges have been dumbing down the reading materials assigned to freshmen. But eventually a limit is reached.
The campus race protests are one sign that the end is near.
As David P. Goldman points out, we can’t really talk about what’s going on. Black students don’t feel uncomfortable on campus because of Halloween costumes or a phantom swastika, but because they find themselves unable to compete. Their high school education failed to prepare them for college. Most students panic when they come up against materials they aren’t ready for, but black students have been particularly badly prepared and are burning through money they don’t have trying to cope with it.
The combination of activists and interests that made this mess can’t talk about what’s going on. Instead they blame campuses for being too “white” and not welcoming enough to minorities. And yet Asian and Indian students and even foreign students succeed there despite being “different” from the majority.
The demands by the various “Students of Color” groups are part careerism, creating more quotas for black students, tenured positions and degrees for identity politics where the only wrong answer is “whiteness,” but also part of a fundamental effort to transform educational standards so that they are oriented toward grievance-based racial advocacy rather than knowledge-based learning.
No amount of black psychologists, black student lounges or black housing can address the college graduation gap. Insecure black activists are blaming white students for their own lack of skills. Their insecurity is understandable, but their racism is ugly and hateful. They are victims, but not of the white faculty or white students, but of the liberal embrace of affirmative action as the answer to equality.
Instead of working harder, the “Students of Color” groups have decided to destroy education to secure careers for themselves. Instead of trying to be Ben Carson, they have decided to become Al Sharpton.
Administrators are happy to give them diversity deans and identity politics courses (while raising tuition rates.) They will even resign when told to, because diversity means more government subsidies. As long as the educational industry is subsidized up to its eyeballs, it can keep running up even more debt.
So the Crybullies of Color demand educational safe spaces in which to nurture their grievances. These grievance graduates will then be entitled to get jobs teaching or overseeing the mandatory identity politics curriculums which they are demanding for all students as core requirements.
But 71% of black high school graduates won’t all be able to get degrees in yelling about white privilege. There isn’t enough diversity training in the world to employ all of them. Embedding identity politics into every school and every course will help lower standards for some black students, but then they will have to get actual jobs and in some of those jobs, performance will actually matter.
Anthropology, American Studies and a hundred other similar academic fields can be the joke that they have become. But when you design a building or perform surgery, there’s no way to disguise failure.
When every academic standard fails, as it has, there’s always the hard standard of reality.
The left waged war against educational standards in high school. Now it’s going to war against educational standards at colleges. Tests are racist. Expectations are a microaggression.
But that just passes the affirmative action buck until it can’t be passed any more.
The education bubble is getting bigger while earning power continues to decline. More money is “invested” into the left’s schemes with no way to pay it back. Every failure has to be bailed out. Every bailout does to the national debt what the left’s policies have done to student debt ratios.
The left specializes in manufacturing grievance and entitlement by setting people up to fail and profiting from the carnage. It has set up millions of black students to fail and is now using activists to wage war to eliminate the last vestiges of free speech, academic freedom and academic standards from campuses.
Create misery and use it to radicalize is an old tactic. The left has created the campus misery, now it seeks to profit from the destruction. Once again the agitators win and the black community loses, being exploited, without recognizing its own exploitation, and losing its last educational pathway that might have given its children a better future.
