UTB-TSC SEPARATION AN OPPORTUNITY TO REVERSE PAST ERRORS

By Juan Montoya
With the approaching separation of Texas Southmost College from the University of Texas-Brownsville and the UT System just around the corner, its trustees have begun to set the groundwork to establish a community college that will not succumb to the fallacies that have destroyed institutions of higher learning, have made the United States a debtor nation, and condemned debt-strapped graduates to a lifetime of struggle to keep their head above financial doom.
Under the model advocated by the administration of UTB President Juliet Garcia and her cadre of technocrats and pliant college boards, many students entering UTB-TSC from the local school systems often were required to take remedial courses before they were admitted to take classes at the university level. Coupled with their policy of charging university-level tuition fees and rates to all UTB-TSC students, this often resulted in many students using up their federal grant money in these classes, incurring huge amounts of debt, and then leaving the institution with little or nothing to show for it except a huge debt with no way to pay for it.
For the better part of two decades, the production line was fed with yet another high school senior class from the local school with the same results. UTB-TSC attained an embarrassing freshman class retention rate of less than 50 percent and a dismal 17 percent graduation rate over six years.
After the failure of the partnership became blatantly obvious, a determined group of community residents elected members to the TSC board who did not want to see the pattern repeated for the next 79 years, the envisioned length of the "partnership."
Under their leadership, the college set about to reestablish itself as the independent entity it had been for 65 years before it hooked up in that unhappy living arrangement as the UT System's concubine, enduring a yearly "transfer" of some $50 million a year to its abusive partner, and starting about the process to regain the accreditation it had lost when it handed itself over to the "partnership."
The very first thing that the board majority did early this month was to cut tuition and fees for new students entering TSC after August 2013 when it regains operational control of its finances. To a full-time student, it'll mean shaving off a cool $1,000 from tuition and fees per semesterBrownsville Herald said would result in a "cheaper" education. This same cynical attitude is revealed in comments from Juliet Garcia sycophants who claim that TSC will revert to a small-time institution which was raised to a world-level outfit only by its association with the UT System, regardless of the cost or the academic results achieved by the hybrid institution.
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But some of us see things differently. Here is a prime opportunity to not repeat the mistakes that brought down the partnership. When TSC starts anew, it starts with few, if any, overpaid "tenured" professors. As Jim Rogers, author of the bestselling "Hot Commodities and Adventure Capitalist" states in his book "Street Smarts; Adventures on the Road and in the Markets," tenure, which was established to guarantee academic freedom without fear of retaliation, has degenerated into a farce.
"American universities used to be places where excellent teachers could be found, where the best of them rose to the top," he writes. "But then along came tenure . It is the brass ring on the academic merry-go-round, and excellence in teaching has never been the way to attain it. Publishing and research and campus politics are what lead one to tenure."
Tenure in academics, he said, results in teaching becoming the only profession "anywhere in the world where if you work for seven years you get a lifetime guarantee of a job. Under the Garcia regime, tenure was handed out to palace royal court favorites, and as the lawsuit filed by those academic handed pink slips against Garcia and the UT System indicate, the dismissals were similarly tainted.
The tenure system, he argues, works to encumber the institution with unsustainable obligations in bloated salaries that eat away at the schools' financial position, so when the bubble bursts and cuts must be made, the emperor will find he has no clothes.
If it's an education you  want, he said, and are willing to apply yourself, you can get it at any number of places, including TSC. In the past, before the partnership, the common practice was for local students to get the core requirements at TSC and transfer to a university. TSC being accredited, the majority of those courses were accepted at most major universities. What institutions like UTB is selling today is nothing more than the sticker – the brand name, the label. And now, as the going gets tough, fewer and fewer people  are going to be able to afford to pay so much for so little.
Technology is also looming as a threat to the traditional views of a university, Rogers says.
"Does America need 30,000 expensive tenures Spanish professors? Is the Spanish professor at Princeton going to teach you Spanish better than anyone else? You can learn Spanish better and certainly for a lot less money by going online. Likewise, with the accounting, physics, and calculus. What you need is a great teacher. Why not find one very talented professor, tenured or not, and let him teach the course over the web? Why not find two or three great teachers and whom everybody can learn from giving millions of students access to the best instruction available?"
Universities' failings have come about in part to the fact that they have been run by academics; not entrepreneurs. They are so badly managed that not even their endowments can save them, and they have to issue bonds (debt) to stay afloat.
Academia has not been heeding the warnings from researchers which see the dark clouds on the horizon. They have gone along with the destructive policies of globalization and offshoring of service jobs that have transferred the manufacturing industries to other places, leaving behind Americans with low-end jobs, if any jobs are to be had. For a while, Americans accepted a policy that stated that assembly-line and piece work occupations such as assembling electronic parts or windshield wipers could be best left to Third-World country workers working for cents on the hour.
But in 2008, a study by the U.S. Dept. of Labor found that as many as 160 service occupations – one quarter of the total service workforce, or 30 million jobs – could go offshore. In "The Betrayal of the American Dream," Pulitzer Prize authors Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele write that "Jobs in those 160 categories were growing at a faster rate than service jobs overall and, ominously for future middle-class incomes, they were among the highest-paying service jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics calculated the annual wage for those jobs at $61, 473 – significantly higher than the $41,610 in annual wages in all service occupations."
The Bureau's list of the vulnerable jobs and their average annual earnings is "breathtaking," they write.
Aerospace engineers ($92,700), aircraft mechanics ($49,670), architectural drafters ($45,280), biochemists ($85,290), chemical engineers ($84,240), chemists ($68,520), epidemiologists ($63,600), fashion designers ($71,170), financial analysts ($81,700), graphic designers ($45,340), insurance underwriters ($60,120), market researcher analysts ($66,980), mathematicians ($90,930), microbiologists ($66,430), multimedia artists ($61,010), nuclear technicians ($65,850), pharmacists ($98,930), and tax preparers ($34,890).
The authors wonder why, since it is "clear that free trade, as practised by the United States, is driving down the income of millions of working Americans, the economic elite are sticking to their message that America is on the right track?"
The result of these policies have proven even the rosiest predictions by their proponents wrong. In 1992, Stephen Cooney, a senior policy director for the National Association of Manufacturers said that with any luck, the trade deficit would disappear by 1995. The deficit then was $39 billion. By 2011, it stood at $560 billion. Likewise, the "advent of NAFTA" was crowed by many economists as the answer to the nation's economic woes. NAFTA, they said, would "generate a & to $9 billion trade surplus that would ensure the job creation of 170,000 jobs in the U.S. economy in the first year."
Instead, NAFTA caused an immediate trade deficit with Mexico. "By 2012, the cumulative total was $700 billion. More importantly, NAFTA wiped out hundreds of thousands of good-paying manufacturing jobs in the United States."
How does all this tie to education of worker and local college students? Education itself has become a trap, they say. Elites say that if free trade isn't working out for millions of middle-class Americans, they need more education so they can upgrade their skills and compete in the global economy.
This ignores the fact that it is not the education of American workers that has caused the capital and manufacturing flight to cheap labor and others have been driven to the lure of offshoring and outsourcing. They say that the real cause is the failure of the trade policy in the first place.
"The theory that all you need is a sheepskin and jobs will seek you out is not rooted in reality...Flooding a job sector with new applicants can only have one result; lower wages for everyone, which is exactly what is happening."
The entry level for a college graduate in 2010 was $21.77 compared with $22,75 in 2000.
Yet, students who do attend college should be aware that by the end of 2011, total outstanding debt in the U.S. totaled more than $1 trillion – more than all credit card debt. The average college student graduates with a debt of about $24,000.
What does this mean to the rest of the nation's economy?
"It means that young people the traditional first-time homebuyers, are unable to obtain a mortgage, hence priced out of the market. This further impacts the dismal prospects of the home building industry....The rising cost of college has been the major reason for the growth of student debt, but a parallel cause has been the economic collapse of the American middle class. In the past, many middle-class parents could save enough to pay for the education of their children. No more."
With student loans specifically excluded from bankruptcy protection and "loan rehabilitation" schemes that double, triple, and even quadruple the amounts owed and tack on even more charges, this means that "Americans who have college loans will never pay them off. Instead, say the writers, "they will be relegated to a lifetime of debt slavery."
The victims of the last 20 years of a failed "partnership" – with only a partial education and a huge debt load on their shoulders – have had to leave the area and work at something other than the professions they had sought.
It is improbable that we will change out trade policies overnight, but our TSC administration and college boards must assure that future generations of college student won't suffer the same fate. Lowering tuition is one firm first step in the right direction.