Every day when I sit down with the newspaper or turn on Yellowstone Public Radio to get the day's news updates, I'm torn. Do I scream and yell about the latest thing that Roger Koopman said or do I groan along with Rick Jore's idiocy? And how can I forget about Joe Balyeat, always there to raise my blood pressure in that uncomfortable way? It makes it hard to give out the Top Hat award (Top [ass]Hat), that's for sure.
We've got Koopman teaming up with his fellow education experts to bring forth a bold new era in which the title "teacher" can be given to anyone with a pulse. We've got Balyeat testifying* about his experiences as a college wunderkind living in an abandoned trailer with his pregnant wife, madly studying accounting, presumably to get done with school before the baby arrived. No time for beer bongs when baby's on the way...right, Joe? Oh, and then we've got Mr. Life-Begins-at-Conception Jore, who wants to amend the Montana Constitution to fit his own religious beliefs.
I guess the good news is that both Koopman and Jore's ill-advised attempts have gone down in flames. That doesn't make the attempts any less offensive. And if Balyeat goes off one more time about how Montana college students are clearly just too lazy to work as hard as he did, I'm going to lose my mind, right after I send him my college transcripts, total of scholarship and work earnings, pictures of my college vehicles (depending on which was working, a 1972 Mazda truck or 1978 Peugeot that didn't reverse), and student loan statements.
It is possible, no doubt, to earn an accounting degree in two and a half years as Balyeat did. It was probably even easier in 1978, when--and someone can correct me if I'm wrong here--General Education credits were not as stringent as they are now. I had enough credits to graduate with one degree by that time, but the way I saw it, I owed it to myself to get as good and complete an undergraduate education as I could. If Balyeat was happy with his truncated experience, that's great. I would not have been, and I damn sure wouldn't have gotten into an Ivy League grad school with an academic record like that.
We shouldn't expect today's college students to squat just to pay the bills, as romantic and RENT-y as that sounds.
Here are the hard facts, as reported in the Chronicle:
In 1978, a typical UM
student taking 12 class credits would have paid $625.50 a year for
tuition and fees, according to Mick Hanson, UM financial aid director.
If
that $625.50 in tuition and fees had increased at the national
inflation rate, today it would cost $1,971, according to the
Minneapolis Federal Reserve’s on-line calculator using the Consumer Price Index.
However,
UM’s tuition and fees actually cost students $5,030 a year. That’s two
and a half times greater than what a student paid in 1978, adjusted for
inflation.
Part of that disparity comes directly from the fact that Montana taxpayers in 1978 shouldered a much larger--like 300 percent larger--share of the cost of Balyeat's education. That's right, my parents helped put Balyeat through college. But now that Joe's got his, he doesn't want to help out the rest of us.
I'm not sure that across-the-board student loan forgiveness is the right way to deal with the burden of college costs, but I can tell you for certain that comparing 1978 to 2007 is the absolute wrong way. Doesn't he realize that he sounds for all the world like Dana Carvey doing Grumpy Old Man? (Back in myyyyyyyyy day, we didn't have no fancy-schmancy residence halls. We lived in abandoned trailers with no heat! That's the way it was, and we liked it! We loved it!)
The way I see it, the Republicans in power in the Montana legislature have only one attitude toward public education: contempt. They see Montana's public schools and colleges as wasteful, godless places where poorly educated teachers foist their liberal ideas on defenseless children. The only way to "save" the system is to destroy it. Make no mistake, in Rick Jore's ultimate fantasy, homeschooling wouldn't be an option to exercise but a requirement. And if Koopman had his way, we could declare our pet goats to be teachers, because, as we all know, anybody can teach. As for Balyeat, I'm sure he would want to rid our universities of ridiculous, distracting requirements like general education. Because college is nothing more than vocational training, in his eyes. It's not like you're supposed to, you know, learn how to think critically.
We'll just call them the Triple Crown. There's enough asshat to go around.
*Quoted from the Chronicle, 2/11/2007: “Today’s college students tend to have a higher standard of living. Most college students are driving nicer cars than I am right now,” Balyeat said. Balyeat graduated in 1978 from the University of Montana, earning an accounting degree in just two and a half years. He
said he and his pregnant wife lived in an abandoned trailer behind
someone’s house that was heated with an old stove that had to be fired
up every morning. “I worked my way through college, with no loans at the end,” he said.
