this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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Late Stage Anglo-American Empire
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The supply and demand angle is only half-right. There's an intent to raise the costs to control the amount of people entering college as wages rise, it's supposed to be a class barrier. Combined with admissions tests (which literally started as "IQ" tests) having the scores to gain funding opportunities for education is a eugenic test. It's class-eugenicist poll-tests and poll-taxes performed nationally.
Also much of these schools are funded directly by land thefts in the US: https://www.hcn.org/issues/52-4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities/
The University of Minnesota founders started a war to create the school (and the state): https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/great-university-land-grab
This was during the US Civil War. The Dakota uprising was punished by Lincoln with the largest mass execution in US history, of 38 Dakotas, down from the original 200 captured for execution.
The endowments many of these schools have are predominantly funded from these land cessions. Washington State University's land cessions of PNW nations funded enough to fill its entire endowment with royalties from logging leases. Texas A&M and Arizona are funded by active subterranean oil drilling rights.
The other reason is because the jobs college degrees provide are getting higher wages and the schools can charge that much and someone will take it, and the banks have the surplus funds from Imperialism and the housing racket.
Yeah this supply and demand thing is mostly bullshit. This whole video reels of diverting blame. "It's not the greedy capitalist running the colleges raising prices exponentially. It's all you damn kids wanting to be educated." Just ignore the fact that many other countries have far more affordable colleges and way better graduation rates.
A big part of it is government funding. Decades ago the government was pumping tons of cash to try and get the population educated and bringing down and controlling college prices. I worked with some old fuck boomer for a while that went on and on about how "I PAID for my college by working for it." Dumb old fuck had his college subsidized without even asking. Now all the subsidization is gone.
Now, on top of your points there's also the fact that student loan debt is a major player in Wall Street. Banks and other debt holders bundle them up and use them as assets to back their stock market gambles and other fuckery. This is why Biden made it impossible to get out of student debt even with filing for bankruptcy. They learned from the crash of 2008, which was kicked off by people defaulting on their mortgages and filing bankruptcy. Wallstreet was using those mortgages as their collateral. They are still doing it now but student loan debt is the big cash cow now cause its safer. This is also why the government will NEVER do student loan forgiveness. It would be an immediate economic collapse of they did. So the more student debt there is to bundle up and use as collateral,the happier the banks and wallstreet is.
Incidentally this is why they fight so hard to kill remote work. Another big asset they use is commercial real estate... So they NEED offices being bought up and rented.
Yeah colleges were heavily subsidized and California had one of the largest public systems in the country. That system also gave Bobby Seale and Huey Newton an education so it's not a coincidence that 1969 was when college prices started to spiral.
The colleges themselves are racketeers, I recommend Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris who writes about the creation of Stanford U and its subsequent role in Colonialism and Anti-Communism. Stanford's campus land houses all of the big weapon makers and it produced Herbert Hoover, the man responsible for mining gold during Australia's genocide, modernizing the March on Africa, and the modern semi-state food cartels and housing policy.