EDUCATIONAL NEOLIBERALISM inspired my most sardonic diagram ever (bottom of the page)

"People say I'm the life of the party because I tell a joke or two"

US Department of Education (UsDoE) states that its “Mission Statement”[1] is “to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.” Well, obviously, the US Department of Education is clearly failing at its mission to “foster educational excellence” and these students graduating from programs with no legitimate examinations, zero academic rigor, and zero demonstration/modeling of professional behavior clearly won’t be prepared for anything other than blustering and bluffing their way slowly forward as they carry an unnecessary burden of debt with them for years/decades (average 20 years of debt per undergraduate diploma and 23 years of debt per graduate degree[2]).

These students won’t be prepared for routine daily patient care, let alone anything as lofty and fantastical as competing on a global level—the idea that these students have any chance whatsoever of being “prepared for global competitiveness” is a drunk self-deceptive fantasy. Because the US Department of Education has deferred its supervisory responsibilities to privatized regional accreditors who themselves have essentially zero supervision, UsDoE has no idea what is happening in the schools that it is accrediting by profiteering proxy. Any reasonable system of regulation would not function in a pay-to-pay manner and would never allow conflicts of interest such as allowing school presidents to sit on its directing boards, allowing them to facilitate the advancement of their own schools while playing hardball against other competing institutions to suppress their advancement. The repeated and confirmed observations that this level of extreme administrative anarchy, profiteering, and corruption have been allowed to exist, persist, and flourish in American academia is clear evidence of the failure of the US Department of Education and its privatized high-profit “non-profit” pay-to-play regional accreditors. The idea that these regional accreditors and these independent unsupervised feral schools would be able to “self-govern” was and is a bastard fantasy spawned from the ménage à trois of personal/institutional laziness, idealistic naivete, and strategic stupidity (ie, purposeful ignorance and self-serving underperformance).

At the educated/adult/institutional level (as I have said before) persistent stupidity/ignorance/underperformance is always intentional to serve a strategic end, or multiple strategic goals or payoffs, which are typically psychic/emotional and hegemonic/financial.

Neoliberal-profiteering infiltration and contamination of nearly every aspect of education regulation and delivery is characterized by hijacking the language and values of classic liberalism (eg, education, enlightenment, self-actualization, individualization, freedom, liberty, free-market capitalism, professionalism [eg, as opposed to unskilled serfdom and perpetual feudalism], “student achievement” [personal-societal advancement] and “equal access” [equality, fraternity] as quoted from the UsDoE mission statement, etc) to result in government-corporate deregulation and private/corporate profiteering. Deregulation/neoliberalisation of the education industry includes “liberating” educational institutions from moral/ethical norms and standards of quality/outcomes in order to maximize profitability, without any consideration for the damage done to faculty, staff, students, society and nation. Allowing more students to enter educational programs with low admissions standards means that federal/government educational loans are guaranteed to become private bank profit as the government loan agencies sell the student debt to private “shark” banks/investors/capitalists which then charge exorbitant fees and high interest rates, the combined power of which keeps graduates indebted for decades, and many never escape their debts. In my personal experience, my “government educational loan” was sold to a debt-shark company (Navient) that charged me $20,000 (twenty thousand US dollars) per “service fee” to cover the provision of nothing—no requested “service” and no provided “service”; Navient was eventually found guilty of illegal practices in 2017 and had to pay $1.85billion in penalties[3], which equated to less than pennies-per-dollar, ie, $260 of relief per victim[4] when these graduates carry an average of $35,000 in high-interest debt[5] equates to 0.007—less than one penny of relief per dollar of high-interest debt, which means that these indebted graduates will never notice the “justice” and Navient will never feel the penalty. This is how government colludes with private industry via occasional virtue-signaling events and “slap on the wrist” penalties that do effectively nothing to protect the public nor penalize illegal corporate activities.

The government/politicians receive multi-billions of dollars from the private education, bank, and debt-servicing industries, decorated with the additional bonus of a passive and disengaged debt-enslaved population; as famously summarized by Noam Chomsky, “Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can’t afford the time to think. Tuition fee increases are a disciplinary technique, and, by the time students graduate, they are not only loaded with debt, but have also internalized the disciplinarian culture. This makes them efficient components of the consumer economy.”

This is how and why the educational system in the United States is essentially unregulated:

1. Benefit to education institutions and privatized accreditors: Low-quality high-volume education equates to high profits as schools churn out virtual diplomas for real cash, eg, “swipe your credit card here, then print your diploma.” Privatized regional accreditors pay themselves exorbitantly for low-level performance and pay-to-play (ultimately bogus and meaningless) accreditation, which is necessary for schools to qualify for receipt of government educational loans, which later become privatized debt.

2. Benefit to loan-shark banks/capitalists: Low-quality high-volume education equates to government education loans becoming privatized debt at high interest rates that students (partly because of the low value of their education) cannot repay for decades if at all; this obviously strengthens the cash-political power of the private loan/bank industry to further bribe/influence/”lobby” lax laws in education and banking.

3. Benefit to government/politicians: Government/politicians receive multi-billions of dollars from the private education, bank, and debt-servicing industries. Government/politicians receive benefit of a passive and disengaged debt-enslaved population, thereby empowering political neoliberalism/profiteering.

Trapped in the middle of this swirl are the overcertified undereducated overindebted students and the disempowered society of which they are part and to which they desire to contribute; student and societal/national benefit are flushed down the toilet of educational neoliberalism as profiteering banks/sharks and schools/accreditors run wild with government-empowered government-funded deregulation.  

See final version of ADMINISTRATIVE ANARCHY IN AMERICAN ACADEMIA [PDF+VIDEO+EBOOK]

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[1] US Department of Education. Overview and Mission Statement. ed.gov/about/landing.jhtml accessed 6May2024

[2] “A study from the OneWisconsin Institute finds that it takes graduates of Wisconsin universities 19.7 years to pay off a bachelor’s degree and 23 years to pay off a graduate degree.” https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/03/this-is-the-age-most-americans-pay-off-their-student-loans.html

[3] “Attorney General Josh Shapiro announced today that Navient, known as one of the nation’s largest student loan servicers, will provide relief totaling $1.85 billion to resolve allegations of widespread unfair, deceptive, and abusive student loan servicing practices and abuses in originating predatory student loans.”  https://www.attorneygeneral.gov/taking-action/attorney-general-josh-shapiro-announces-1-85-billion-landmark-settlement-with-student-loan-servicer-navient/. See also: "WASHINGTON, D.C. 18Jan2017– Today the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is suing the nation’s largest servicer of both federal and private student loans for systematically and illegally failing borrowers at every stage of repayment." https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-sues-nations-largest-student-loan-company-navient-failing-borrowers-every-stage-repayment/

[4] “About 350,000 federal student loan borrowers whom Navient placed in long-term forbearance – which allowed them to temporarily stop making payments – will receive about $260 each, totaling $95 million in restitution.”  https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/13/politics/navient-student-loan-settlement/index.html

[5] “The average student loan debt for bachelor’s degree recipients was $29,400 for the 2021-22 school year, according to the College Board. Among all borrowers, the average balance is $38,290, according to mid-2023 data from Experian, one of the three national credit bureaus.” https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/money/average-student-loan-debt