This is not a story about Harvard.
It could be. The national average family income is just under 45,000 dollars. You could earn twice that, so twice what the average FAMILY pulls in, and still not be able to send one of your (on average) 2.5 kids to college, for two years, with a whole year’s salary.
And yes, it’s sort of a problem that you didn’t go to Harvard. All of the Supreme Court Justices are Harvard or Yale grads. Most of the high-powered wall street folks went to somewhere like Penn’s Wharton school of business. It closes a lot of the doors to the most powerful places. That’s a real issue, that’s why you’re in this situation, because no one who’s you is there to make sure you’re doing okay.
Let’s be honest though:
One, if your problem is that you didn’t go to Harvard, don’t go near an Occupy protest, they’ll eat you. It’s not that big a deal.
Two, those doors were closed to you anyway. You know what kind of money you need to make to be in one of the top legislative bodies in this country? You don’t have it. Joe Biden, famously our nation’s poorest senator, makes over 200k.
And three?
It turns out the list of the 100 most expensive colleges ends significantly BEFORE tuition and fees, for one year, come to less than that 45,000, less than the annual average salary of a family of four.
Now, you don’t need to go to one of the top hundred most expensive colleges any more than you need to go to Harvard, nor does the price tag guarantee the education, there are cheaper options that are just as good, better, etc. But this isn’t a story about Harvard or the top one hundred most expensive schools. This is a story about power.
Because why would the price of college go down if a hundred colleges can find enough people who can pay that much money to get that education, even though it’s pretty clear that nearly everyone can’t?
The only reason that it WOULD go down is that it should go down. A college education does matter in general, in terms of finding a job, and where you went to college often matters a depressing amount. But you make much more money leaving prices as they are, and you aren’t missing butts to put in seats.
The question is, then, why would the price of anything go down?
I can’t speak for Occupy protestors everywhere—one of the great annoyances for the Right is that no one can—but that’s what gets me. College is just one limb of the phenomenon.
The thing is, when you have a society with huge income disparity it would actually be insane for these schools not to charge these prices, since there are plenty of people who are still rich enough. These are hard times for the middle and lower class, not the highest. The point of corporations–and corporations run private universities–is to make money. Clearly the price of Harvard is not above the market value for the degree, it’s just above what basically anyone can pay. That’s income inequality for you.
The fundamental fact of capitalism is that it’s about competition. That’s not in itself a bad thing. For years it drove innovation, improved productivity, ushered in thousands of inventions. But this is new, this is global capitalism. Thanks to the internet, the accessibility of world markets and all kinds of other things, EVERYBODY on Earth is competing with just about everybody else.
Is that good? It’s good for some people. The top of the pile has never been hire, and if you get there it’s never been better. On the other hand, there’s an obvious problem.
The reason companies don’t have to make things more cheaply is exactly the same as the reason these colleges don’t need to charge less. You make as much money selling five things for twenty bucks each as you do selling twenty things for five bucks each, so long as you find five people willing to pay twenty bucks.
Because this is not a depression but a recession, because those who managed to keep their wealth intact beyond the crash are not hurting at all, the ability of some people to pay that twenty bucks has not changed. So long as the thing is desirable there is no good reason ANYWHERE to worry about making something accessible when the profit margin can be met either way. When the math works out equivalently, there will be some select corporations who, out of the goodness of their hearts, are willing to keep their products accessible. More often, however, you can make MORE money selling a few things to very rich people than lots of things to everybody else.
It’s not a problem that people are rich. It’s not even a problem that so many people are rich while so many people are poor. The problem is that enough people are rich that it drives the whole economy to be something that is only affordable to rich people, so even people earning at a level which would have been considered more than fine ten years are getting priced out of the kinds of things that used to be thought of as hallmarks of a fairly normal American life, and college is one of those.
There are, as you all know, plenty of people in this country who think the middle and lower classes don’t get taxed enough, for fairness’s sake. If I could convince these people of one thing, it would be this: Consider percentages. If you, like the average family (not person, family) in this country make 40,000 dollars a year, then a 20 percent tax would be 8,000 dollars. If someone taxed you 10 percent on a million dollars that would be 100,000 bucks.
There is one obvious tragedy to that conceptual idea– that feeding a family on 32k is really hard and feeding a family on 900k is not. But the less obvious tragedy is that 8,000 dollars doesn’t do crap in the government’s coffers. Which means you’re hurting a family, for the sake of something called “fairness,” to the point of struggling to meet ends meet– for a sum that will make no dent on any government program.
And even if there are a hundred families paying , that’s a hundred families trying to make on 32k, and you’re still only netting 800,000 dollars, or 100,000 dollars less than our hypothetical millionaire still PERSONALLY takes home each year, if he were taxed HALF as much.
And if you want to talk about fairness of the tax burden, please realize what that kind of scale of power means, because every corridor of American power runs on the same model. If one hundred average families poured in 20% of their annual salary to a political campaign, they also wouldn’t make the dent of a single millionaire’s single-year salary by 200,000 bucks, let alone what could be easily offered by billionaires like the Koch brothers.
If one hundred average families donated twenty-percent of their salaries donated twenty percent of their salaries to a cause, a coalition, a public information campaign, they wouldn’t make the dent of a single millionaire’s single-year salary.
In reality, the highest tax bracket is 35%. Again, we’re taking just a lonely millionaire, not a multi-millionaire and not a billionaire, but—and I’m aware that income tax isn’t the only tax that gets paid—that would be 350 k which, while a huge chunk of change, still leaves your millionaire with nearly SEVENTEEN times the annual income of an average family and all the corresponding political power that comes with it.
If that kind of power—the power to get your voice heard over literally a hundred other people, and so shape policy—doesn’t make it up to you for the unfairness of a tax burden which still leaves you with more than enough to buy a new house every year, or pay a whole four years of Harvard with a single check from a single year of income, I don’t know what to tell you.
What’s scary is not that the system is broken, but that the system isn’t actually broken at all. The system is a perfectly sustainable system, raking in record profits for those on the right side of things. It can go on forever without change and leave the vast majority of Americans out of the loop. The buying power of a small percentage of people is so much that businesses not only run perfectly well catering only to what they can afford, but have to, to compete with each other.
This is why America needs regulation, and price controls–because without them America’s march towards a true noble class has no reason not to continue, because there’s really no downside to it to the people involved. A CEO of any company might personally deplore that fact, but if he or she doesn’t maximize their profits by exploiting it, they’ll just be replaced by someone who will, and that’s as true for pay-to-play as it is for the environmental health of the world, for the production of sustainable technologies, for America’s ability to respond to real problems when they are counter to profit motive.
And this is why America needs fundamental change—because nothing else will make America something in which the majority of its citizens have any say at all.