the University of Kansas, and, you guessed it, Clemson University.
All of this leads to a system where highly similar public schools attempt to poach students from each other’s states in order to be able to realize the increased revenue available through nonresident tuition. Applicants from Virginia who are rejected by Virginia Tech will instead enroll at Clemson, and applicants from South Carolina who are rejected from Clemson will instead enroll at Virginia Tech. This inevitably drives up costs for all students.
The situation has gotten so dire that it has become a trend for wealthy parents in the Chicago suburbs to sever their guardianship of their children so those children will be eligible for Pell Grants and other need-based aid.8 This was attempted by one family with a household income over $250,000 a year; they were living in a $1.2 million dollar home, but their savings had been tapped out by spending $600,000 on their children’s educations. Yes, we can judge these people for making the choice to send their kids to expensive colleges and living above their means, but they too are products of a dysfunctional system. But in the end, thanks to those who figure out how to game the system whenever it even slightly disadvantages them, it is the low-income students who are harmed the most.
Please pardon my language, but if our public colleges and universities are supposed to serve as an ecosystem that provides access to economic opportunity regardless of the accident of your birth, this is some fucked-up shit. We have broken faith with millennials and the members of Generation Z. The promise that hard work will translate into opportunities for education and prosperity is gone. And it isn’t the pandemic that killed it.
To break this cycle, we must recognize that we cannot view education as a consumer good any longer. Education—public education—is infrastructure, and we should treat it that way.
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