California Bashing

I haven’t taken a swipe at the third world nation known as California for a while. So here goes.

It pains me to read that the state’s college system is contemplating raising undergraduate fees by as much as 32%. Even with this increase the in-state tuition bill will only hit $10,000 which is not outrageous in this day and age of egregious education expenses.

The harm this will do to the state’s businesses I can only imagine. The flow of college graduates from what was once one of the world’s top college systems will surely be severely reduced. The cost is staggering: there are currently over 1,500 academic jobs unfilled due top lack of money. Classes are being cut. Professors laid off. Building plans and research eliminated. The system may never recover.

Importantly the people hit most hard will be the kids from poor households, many of whom are finding the current low level of tuition hard to pay. So at some point in the future California, because it cannot get its head around a sane property tax system, will be faced with having to import talent to keep its vaunted high technology sector alive. That may not be a problem: a steady flow of graduates will always be attracted to California’s climate and beaches. But it makes the state dependent on other parts of the country and, possibly, even more dependent upon a flow of foreign graduates.

The damage being done is insidious and may be hidden from the average taxpayer view. Many may not even care. Eventually though the state’s standard of living will fail to keep up: a weak education system is a sure indicator of a nation, or state, in decline.

We have just witnessed Obama being treated with a certain contempt in Asia – not just China – because American decline is now becoming evident. Our rapacious borrowing and complete disdain for investment in infrastructure – physical and intellectual – will assuredly accelerate the pace at which Asian economies overtake ours. It is not possible to imagine the Chinese slashing education investment. The Chinese seem to understand that cause and effect of investment in knowledge. It is the very bedrock of prosperity.

We evidently don’t get that.

We persist in the beggar thy neighbor attitude towards taxation that has produced the debacle in California. Unwilling to pay for anything long term we seem to expect others to supply an endless stream of stuff to fill the gaps we don’t want to pay for ourselves.

We already rely on imported talent. The gap is only going to get worse.

That gap will be compounded by the social stratification we are building in: most Americans have no clue that social mobility – here we call it the American Dream – is greater in most other industrial countries than it is here. A child born into a poor American family has less chance of reaching middle class status than a similar child most anywhere in Asia or Europe – even in those horrible neo-socialist Nordic countries like Sweden. By making education harder to come by California is reinforcing the stasis here. Poor kids will find it harder to get ahead. America will build a class structure based upon access to education. It will become rigid and riddled with divisive social and political issues. It will become old.

We have trashed the American Dream in the space of two generations. Greed and a total lack of community are the cause.

That’s shortsighted and dangerous.

It’s also a damn shame.