Ethics and Schooling - Cause and Effect

With all the corporate and governmental irresponsibility going around storing money in a mattress is looking like a better alternative all the time. As many commentators are now in retrospect saying, no one has been effective in stopping greed. It's likely they never will. Government regulators both Executive and Congressional have been asleep at the switch, or actively involved in taking payoffs while shamelessly promoting bad economic practices thinly coated by a veneer of multiculturalistic feel good puffery. Corporate leaders have cravenly tended well to their own golden parachutes while being ignorant of their corporate and industry goals and objectives. Private audit firms have been in disarray for years. Business ethics once again rivals Congressional ethics for the title of gold-plated oxymoron. As in all artificial economic booms no one thought the housing bubble would burst. No one saw anything wrong with housing prices going up exponentially.

The irony is that while Washington has seemingly contradicted itself by selectively bailing out some companies while leaving others to twist in the wind the American public has contradicted itself as well. Americans have increasingly been willing to go deeply in debt without concern for consequences relying somehow on faith that their home equity will eventually save them. They have this notion that the equity in their home will immunize them from economic hardship. Not only that, this equity will allow them to both live well in retirement and put all their children, no matter how many they have, through college.

Americans rightly hold government and corporations responsible for doing their jobs efficiently, effectively, and ethically. They do not however hold educational institutions to the same standards. While the cost of a college education routinely goes up each year at rate much higher than inflation they shrug their shoulders and accept it. "Well", they say, "you have to have a college degree to make anything of yourself today". So the cost of a college degree is given a big pass while it is equated to the air we breathe as a necessity in life. This might be so if the product furnished was of good quality sold at a reasonable price. You know, like when you buy a pair of shoes.

Based on their track record the American public is obviously better informed about buying shoes than about buying a college degree. Not that this is totally the fault of the consumer as colleges and universities don't come equipped with price sticker information or a list of ingredients. In most cases the only "product" of any immediate value produced by colleges is technical research, which is most often supported appropriately enough by sources other than college tuition. After all, as the saying goes necessity is the mother of invention. If something is seen as necessary then it is funded. It is funded by private or public investors. These investors look for a good potential return on their investment. To do otherwise would be madness. So why would outwardly sane people go heavily in debt to offer thousands of dollars for a college degree from a "quality" university without seeking a potential return? Why would they ignore the fact that many universities sit on obscene amounts of cumulative endowment funds yet will not directly offer discounts on the total cost of education to students based on their ability to complete coursework in an exceptional manner? We generally expect pay for performance at our workplace so why not from our colleges and universities?

Both Presidential candidates talk of reform and at least one of them calls education the civil rights issue of this century. Yet no one talks about the yearly extortion of the American public exacted by a cartel, not of nations that don't like us very much, but by out of touch domestic educational institutions that view tuition, books, residency and other costs and the burden they place on educational consumers only in the abstract. No one seriously proposes "reform" for an intolerable system concerned more with contemplating the lint in the collective navels of its classroom-phobic professors. So year after year these institutions of "higher learning" continue hectoring students with discredited social and political theory rather than imparting traditional classic knowledge to young men and women about to enter the very real and competitive world of adults.

It seems therefore no coincidence that the abject failure of colleges and universities to do their job effectively has contributed mightily to our present ethical crisis. At most colleges and universities Western Civilization is systematically belittled, moral ethos is condemned as being jingoistic and is replaced with moral relativity, and collectivism is substituted for individual initiative and responsibility. It is no wonder that at least some of this toxic intellectual waste is carried by students for most if not all their remaining lives.

Americans look at corporate executives and politicians with some disgust, a disgust we do not apply to administrators at institutions for higher learning. For all their craven practices however we cannot forget they are people who were once like us. While they may have let power, influence, and money affect them we have the same pressures and temptations to deal with in our own lives. We also have to remember that these people were directly or indirectly put in power by us as shareholders, consumers, and voters. It would serve us well to think about that every time we purchase a product or service, review the offerings of a college or university, exercise a proxy, or vote in a local, state, or Federal election. We may not solve all the problems of the world but at least we can say we tried.