November 9, 2014 -- Everyone knows that America's system of higher eduction is in serious trouble, with $1 trillion in student debt, tuition costs rising faster than the cost of health care and students getting into college without the educational foundation they need to succeed. It's even worse than that. This film gives you an overview of how bad things have gotten.

There is perhaps no better example of what's gone wrong with higher education than the story of the Cooper Union. When filming of this documentary began, the Cooper Union, in New York City, was one of the last institutions of higher education in the county to offer a free education to everyone. Not only was the education free, but for 150 years, it was also one of the best technical schools in the nation. By the time filming ended, about a year ago, the school began charging tuition. It was free no more.

Why is that? After all, the school has a very large endowment, including the land on which the Chrysler Building sits, and it gets generous contributions many of its famous alumni. And there's tradition. When Peter Cooper founded the school in 1859 his belief was that his school should provide an education “equal to the best technology schools established” and that it should be accessible to those who qualify, independent of their race, religion, sex, wealth or social status and that it should be “open and free to all.” That's a pretty clear direction. Why didn't the administration and trustees follow it?

The film makes the case that the Cooper Union followed a path set by many other schools, to expand facilities, build new buildings, attract more students, and pay for these new facilities with tuition fees. The school not only borrowed huge amounts of money to build new buildings, it used part of the loan money to invest in risky hedge funds, which collapsed during the last national financial crisis. Cooper Union students did not make these decisions, but they must bear the cost of them, and they are not happy. They carried out a lengthy occupation of the administration building when they found out what was going on.

Higher education is in a kind of death spiral. In order to attract more students, schools build more attractive student dorms, student activity buildings, provide better food services, recreation facilities, entertainment, and new sports complexes at great cost. Schools also lower academic admission standards to attract more paying students. Who can pay becomes more important than who can learn.

This race to the bottom in education is explored in the film, along with some alternatives, such as free classes offered over the internet, community colleges, and other experiments, such as the unique Deep Springs College in Death Valley, an all male school where students study, self-govern, self-direct their education and they also do farm work on a ranch, which is part of the campus. Students burdened with $100,000 in student loan debt are interviewed. A black student from a low income family who is attending Harvard for free is also interviewed for the film.

Some of these different alternatives are weighed in the film, such as the free college courses offered online. According to the film, the failure rate in these courses is high. The film makes the argument that face-to-face time is needed for many students.

So how did we get to this point? It wasn't always this way. In the 1970s and earlier, a college student could earn enough on a summer job to pay his own way through college. Many colleges offered education basically for free. The idea was that an educated populace is good for the country as a whole. It provides an educated work force, including the technical skills and scientific knowledge to advance the nation's industries. The entire NASA space program and all the commercial spinoff products produced by it was powered by people who attended college at little or no cost.

The California system of higher education, in particular, was the envy of the world. That all changed with the election of Ronald Reagan, who firmly believed that access to higher education was not a benefit to society and should not be paid for by society. Reagan believed that since higher education was a benefit to the individual, then the individual should pay for it.

Reagan carried this philosophy with him to the White House, along with “Supply Side Economics,” (also called “trickle down” economics) which argued that tax cuts on rich people would benefit society as a whole, and balance the federal budget at the same time. At the same time, government support for higher education decreased. The student loan industry, with its own merry band of lobbyists in Washington, got bigger and bigger. Lobbyists also got the bankruptcy laws changed, so that student loan debt now can be passed up and down through the generations. So much for the American dream of advancement.

It didn't work out that way, but that policy has remained with us, essentially intact, for over 30 years (except for a brief time during the Clinton administration when increased taxes on the rich helped pay down the national debt). In that time, the national debt, student debt and the cost of higher education has skyrocketed, as has income inequality. The rich have become fantastically richer, the poor have become poorer, and the nation's once mighty middle class keeps shrinking.

Government services, such as aid to education, defense, and road and bridge maintenance keep shrinking because of the need to make up for the billions of dollars cut from the taxes of the wealthiest people. Then there are the tax cuts and pork barrel grants to industries engineered by the ever-growing band of lobbyists in Washington. Social Security and Medicare are next on the chopping block to pay for those tax cuts. Combined state and local spending per college student also hit a 25-year low this year, due in part to federal support cutbacks and a weak economy. If the idea is to cut our way to prosperity, it isn't working.

Without access to higher education, the middle class can't survive. If the middle class continues to decline, the rest of our society will follow it down the tubes. The federal government's policies (and those of many states) to punish the middle class and the poor, while rewarding the rich with an ever-increasing portion of the pie, cannot be sustained.

This film makes a convincing argument that the higher education system is headed toward collapse. Financing the system largely with student debt is unsustainable. The answer, at least in part, implied by this film is that society needs to once again support higher education the way it used to 40 to 50 years ago. Well, I see I've gassed on for too long. There is a lot in the movie I have not touched on here and a lot I've written here that isn't in the movie, so see it for yourself. It's a good documentary film. It rates a B.

Click here for links to places to buy or rent this movie in digital formats, or to buy the soundtrack, posters, books, even used videos, games, electronics and lots of other stuff. I suggest you shop at least two of these places before buying anything. Prices seem to vary continuously. For more information on this film, click on this link to The Internet Movie Database. Type in the name of the movie in the search box and press enter. You will be able to find background information on the film, the actors, and links to much more information.

Copyright © 2014 Robert Roten. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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