privatization of education:re to Cramer
Clayton Cramer
> > You assume that only the government, in its beneficience, would educate
> > a person coming from such a background. This is hardly the case. There
> > have ALWAYS been organizations offering scholarships based on need --
> > but most of them wanted evidence of educational potential (hence the
> > term, "scholarship"). This all changed in the 1970s, when for a while
> > the only issue that mattered was race.
> >
> >
> > Clayton E. Cramer ("You are damn right I'm upset.")
>
> This is total nonsense. In the first place, despite scholarships
> many, many people from lower middle class to poor backgrounds simply
> could not afford to go to college before the expansion of the student
> loan program and other aids for *all* to go to college.
You may recall the series PBS carried a couple of years ago with
Milton Friedman talking to a group of college students of varying
political opinions about economics. When one of the liberals
argued this same way, Friedman proceeded to explain how he worked
his way through school, as did many of his contemporaries who came
from lower class backgrounds. (Of course, taxes (not tax rates) were
much lower then.)
> Because of these programs the percentage of youth obtaining college
> degrees doubled.
Percentage of youth obtaining degrees doubled. Did the percentage
of POOR kids getting degrees double? A subsidy of middle class
kids.
> Nor was "race the only issue that mattered" in qualifying for such aid.
> The only issue that mattered for the student loan program (without
> which I could not have gone to college) was income level. The student
> loan program, Basic Educational Opportunity Grants and work-study
> assistance were all programs *totally* based upon income and had nothing
> to do with race. These programs made up the bulk of student aid
> when I went to college in the 70's.
The programs that Tim describes were, in fact, not racial in nature.
However, a great many scholarship programs run by various universities
did, in fact, seem to have racial quotas. There were kids from my
high school from *much* wealthier families, who managed to get scholar-
ships administered by UCLA. They were the RIGHT minorities. They didn't
have the GPA or SAT scores I did.
Our high school administered several scholarships which were OPENLY
for BLACKS ONLY, for HISPANICS ONLY, for people of ITALIAN DESCENT ONLY.
Maybe Tim's memory is short.
> There were other programs targetted towards increasing minority attendance
> in colleges but many of these were primarily concerned with recruiting
> minorities to attend college in the first place and using economically
> based programs such as student loans, BEOG's, Pell Grants, and work-study
> programs to insure that such recruited minorities could afford to go
> to college. Here are the actual figures of educational expenditures
> for post-secondary education in 1984:
>
> Educational opportunity grants: 3,561,209
> Work study : 561,322
> Direct student loans : 191,962
> Guaranteed student loans : 3,130,939
> Other student assistance : 32,969
> --------------------------------------------
> Total student assistance : 7,478,401
>
> Where is all the "race-based" student assistance Clayton claims exists?
> I see scarcely any. To my knowledge the only category which is
> not economically-based may be "other student assistance" - which
> represents less than 1% of all student financial aid.
>
1984 is not 1974. As my original posting observed, the mid-1970s
were a different time. It seems that the racial quota nonsense
has gone away, and universities are concerned about PEOPLE again,
instead of RACES.
Timothy Lee
> were a different time. It seems that the racial quota nonsense
> has gone away, and universities are concerned about PEOPLE again,
> instead of RACES.
They still are, but much more discretely, now that `quota' is a dirty word.