College Tuition Increases Part Of Neoconservative Agenda

(Can Oklahoma meet the sustainability challenge it will face in coming years? Read DocHoc's commentary this week in Oklahoma City's finest alternative publication, the Oklahoma Gazette.)

The failed neoconservative movement has left horrible legacies for future generations, from a rising federal budget deficit to a loss of American prestige and security throughout the world to a health care system that fails to provide adequate medical care for millions and millions of Americans.

Thanks to the Republican Party and Imperial President George Bush, Americans work more for less and have diminished opportunities in life. We have lost basic respect among our traditional allies, and we are engaged in a prolonged military occupation that has divided the country and cost billions of dollars.

The richest people in our culture have seen their incomes and political power rise in record, mind-boggling proportions, but the rest of us remain without a voice, too busy and, for some, too scared to speak out against the social injustice that frames the neoconservative philosophy.

But the neoconservative assault on higher education is perhaps the most wretched legacy. This assault reveals itself most clearly in the astronomical increase of college tuition in recent years, especially in states like Oklahoma, which has been cutting the taxes of the ultra-rich and making it more difficult for middle-class students to go to college. It is the most wretched legacy because it both denies people a chance of obtaining their dreams and it marginalizes—through the stigma of debt—a sizeable portion of college graduates.

According to Americans United for Change, “Tuition is rising. At four-year public colleges and universities, tuition skyrocketed by 40 percent between 2001 and 2006. The typical student leaves college today with $17,500 in debt.”

This has been the neoconservative formula for disaster: State legislatures cut taxes for rich people under the neoconservative rubric. As a result, universities receive less or stagnant funding. Universities must then raise tuition. Middle-class students then delay college, work multiple jobs as they attend school or borrow money from a broken and, some argue, corrupt system that rewards predatory loan companies.

I published an article about this issue on a more local level recently in the Oklahoma Gazette.

This post, though, is about the larger ramifications of the assault on higher education. How can any rational person not think that the neoconservative philosophy is to make it more difficult to go to college and to marginalize many of those people who do go to college by saddling them with a debt so massive they can never truly get ahead financially in life?

Yet all the surveys and election results show the neoconservative agenda has lost support. Michael Lind, writing in Salon.com, argues the country is poised to enter a neo-Rooseveltian era. Lind writes, “The public wants the middle-class welfare state to be rounded out by a few major additions -- chiefly, healthcare and childcare -- and the public also wants the government to grow the economy by investing in public works and favoring companies that locate their production facilities inside the U.S. There, in a sentence, is a program for a neo-Rooseveltian party that could effect an epochal realignment in American politics.” Make no mistake about it. This new era will most certainly privilege education at all levels.

The issue of basic accessibility to higher education has become so apparent that even Washington has gotten involved. Congress recently passed a bill that would make tuition increases more transparent. Watch for more legislation making college more accessible on both the federal and state level.

Over the last several years, Oklahoma universities have been raising tuition almost annually. The average tuition increase this year was nearly 10 percent. Those students who started college in the last few years have been getting hit hard with rising tuition and now increased living costs. How do they make it? Sure, the students of wealthy, dedicated parents have no problem going to college, but what about the majority of students?

Oklahoma has one of the lowest per capita income rates in the nation, but you will never hear the neoconservatives here talk about that issue when they are cutting taxes for rich people.

What happens to a culture that refuses to invest in education and, instead, shifts more and more wealth to a miniscule number of people who then use their money to consolidate their tyrannical political power? It is time for a major correction in this country. Will Oklahoma correct its error as well?