Public Education Can't Be Left to the Private Sector

Source: Low waged and students of color are the majority at for-profit colleges

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

GED/HEO

8-17-22

 

When, through whistleblowers or those rare occasions that the corrupt, rotten dealings in the private sector are so widespread that the capitalist state has to take action, we hear about it in their mass media. But we only hear what amounts to damage control and must be left with the impression that the “rule of law” and decency prevails. The conclusion we must draw is the system works.

I see that yesterday, the US Department of Education cancelled the debt of all the remaining federal student loans, of the now defunct for profit university outfit, the ITT Technical Institute.  This $4 billion taxpayer relief will cancel the debt for 208,000 students who attended the college from 2005 to 2016 when the company closed down after being banned from enrolling new students (receiving federal aid). The company filed bankruptcy in 20

This bailout is the second for ITT as in August 2021 the US Dept. of Education forgave $1.1 billion in loans after discovering that the company had defrauded students using legal chicanery. According to the Wall Street Journal, in all, the Biden Administration (the US taxpayer) has paid out $13 billion in loan relief that is connected to institutions that it claims “swindled borrowers.”.

“For years, ITT’s leaders intentionally misled students about the quality of their programs in order to profit off federal student loan programs, with no regard for the hardship this would cause,” Miguel Cardona, US Secretary of Education said in a press release.

And the Biden Administration responds as any Democratic or Republican Administration would, it turns to workers and the middle class to make us pay for the failure of the so-called free market. The same happened in the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980’s and 90’s. Politicians in Washington deregulated the S&L industry which eventually led to many of them going bust with horrible consequences for the working class people whose mortgages were held by them. The taxpayer bailed out this industry to the tune of some $300 billion and then a government agency, the Resolution Trust Corp was set up to sell the salvageable ones back to the private sector at bargain basement prices.

What About Profits

In cases like these, it is always public sector money, or the taxpayer, that comes to the rescue whether it’s legitimate capitalist enterprises or corrupt and outright thuggish ones. If we take abandoned factories that are no longer profitable, or mines, or any industrial site or facility whose owners find not so profitable anymore and abandons it, the environmental cleanup, which with many industries in considerable, is borne by the taxpayer.

But when the public or the state (the taxpayer) is called upon to salvage the failures and destruction of private sector, the so-called free market, why is it that we bear the brunt of the costs?

In the case I raise here, education, who are the actual owners of this industry? Who are the investors, the owners of capital that they applied to this industry, in return for, well, a return. Money without working, that’s freedom for them.

Look at what the US is doing at the moment. It is leading a global effort to take from any Russian capitalists, their land, property, homes, yachts and so on. As the world’s dominant economic power it is not allowing these capitalists access to their money in US banks.

So who are the individuals that profited from conning a huge amount of US youth claiming they were providing a serious education for them that would guarantee them a secure future? Who are the individuals robbing the US taxpayer by making billions of dollars in the process as the money the young people paid these profiteers for an education is ours in the first place in the form of federal loans? What are their names?

When we are forced to pay for their failures, and look for recompense we must include not just who they are, but what they spent the profits on. Their yachts, their houses, their land, their speculative investments, and in some cases their private islands. We need to liberate these products of stolen wealth from their owners. We can guarantee them a place to live, a job, health care, security and other necessities; something they presently deny the rest of us.

In response to the competition from China, the US is being forced to introduce more government in to the market. Jason Furman, former chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisors under Barack Obama had this to say, “The Biden and Trump era is one of a government that wants to play a much bigger role in what is produced, where it is produced, how it is produced and with what labor it is produced.”

It’s extremely rare they public recognize there is such a thing as production in the sense that there are roles in that process. But there are roles in this process, class roles. Engels wrote that, The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged.

Education should be a right in any civilized society. But we do not live in a civilized society; we live in capitalist society where profit trumps social need. In many other countries of the world, education is free. But in the US, and its closest economic and military ally, the UK we are moving in the opposite direction. The forces of production that Jason Furman mentions above must be taken under public ownership under democratic control and management.

Not only with failed market solutions to social needs, but all the important productive forces in society should be publicly owned and managed and that includes the financial sector, the banks and so forth.

The private sector, capitalism cannot provide jobs for millions of workers and it cannot provide the basic necessities of life even in the richest and most powerful capitalist nation in human history.
 

Society needs new managers.