Education (was Re: marxism-digest V1 #1811)

[John Lacny <deathtocapitalism@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

--- Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> In the United States I would assume about 80% of the
> student body are working class.

        Dead-on.  Students in the US-- most of them, that
is-- are far from privileged brats.  I speak in
defense of most people I know, if not myself, since I
have a full scholarship.  But for most students it's
no picnic.

        I just got back from a preliminary meeting for this
year's United States Student Association (USSA)
lobbying on Capitol Hill.  It's a dire situation.
Things are getting much worse for students from the
working class.  It used to be that the Pell Grant
covered a huge part of your education; that's no
longer so.  Over the past decade loans have increased
by 108% while grants have only increased by 63%; 25
years ago, need-based aid covered 80% of all financial
aid, while now it covers less than 40%.  The type of
aid that is increasing is tax-based incentives-- which
is to say, loans to people who are already not in the
lowest tax brackets, which means that the
lowest-income students get shafted.

        Some of the tax incentive stuff is probably meant to
offset the effects of the incredibly restrictive
means-testing which applies to almost all social
programs in the US, financial aid most certainly not
excepted.  But the bottom line is, only very
low-income students can get grants, but those grants
are far from enough.  And the end result is that
people end up leaving school with a pile of debt--
after most of them have had to work jobs (not "a job,"
mind you, but several, simultaneous jobs) to get
through college in the first place.  Because most
students are from the working class.  Demanding
universal free higher education is the only thing
that's going to relieve the burden on them.  To attack
it as a petty-bourgeois perk, in the manner of the
kind of "ascetic socialism" we have all been
denouncing on this list, is a little galling to say
the least.

        John Lacny
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