Has America Changed Too Much?

Has America Changed Too Much?“Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.” — Barry Goldwater

In 1960, Barry Goldwater published The Conscience of a Conservative. In it, he noted:

“Conservatism is not an economic theory, though it has economic implications. The shoe is precisely on the other foot: it is Socialism that subordinates all other considerations to man’s material well-being. It is Conservatism that puts material things in their proper place — that has a structured view of the human being and of human society, in which economics plays only a subsidiary role.

The root difference between the Conservatives and the Liberals of today is that Conservatives take account of the whole man, while Liberals tend to look only at the material side of man’s nature.”

Fifty-three years later that remains a constant. Unfortunately for conservatives, much of the hand-wringing over paths forward to victory involve haggling over taxes and balanced budgets and spending and debt to GDP ratios, etc.

Writing in Real Clear Politics Ben Domenech gets to the heart of this:

“The choice for the Republican Party is whether to invest more in the 2010 strategy of this populist strain, to refine it and connect more policy proposals to it … or to embark on an effort to restore the party’s standing as the adult in the room – the competent, clean cut, good-government technocracy that sees the chief appeal of Republican politicians as combining agencies and seeking out efficiencies rather than rolling back government power and draining bureaucratic swamps. The GOP swung back to this technocratic approach on a national scale in 2012, and let’s just say the electoral results left much to be desired.”

The budgetary and economic wonkery only gets the GOP so far and that isn’t far enough to victory.

In truth, I think it will take a magnetic personality to pull the GOP out of the gutter. We live in an age of personality politics. But that personality will have to have a message that resonates with the American public. What resonates right now with the American public is a deep-seated distrust of government. Any Republican way forward must capitalize on this. In other words, the faces in Washington who can play the role are very limited to people like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and — if immigration can go away as an issue and the base forgives him — Marco Rubio.

The message to seize on is pretty straight forward. Under Republican and Democrat policies in Washington, particularly accelerated in the past five years, the United States meritocracy has given way to an aristocracy.

Only those of means can get ahead. Increasingly, they view their role as making life comfortable for the less well-off instead of enabling the less well-off to become well off. Wall Street, banks, major corporations, politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and the rich are the only ones who can prosper because they are the only ones who can either navigate the system or afford to pay others who can figure out how to navigate the system.

For the rest of Americans, from small business to the middle class, the only path is one of dependence on a governmental structure too byzantine to figure out and, should one be smart enough to figure out, too costly through litigation, regulation, and complication to navigate through.

An America where, as Lincoln said, every man can make himself, is replaced by an America where men are made by how the government takes cares of their individual circumstances. Students are no longer trained to be creative, entrepreneurial citizens, but to be workers for others. The self-employed are encumbered to the point of needing to be employees of others. The nuclear family is disincentivized and destabilized.

The America where one could work hard and get ahead is less and less possible because Democrats wish to force us all onto a safety net on which all are entangled, ensnared, and punished if we escape. Republicans, for fear of being disliked, would rather nibble at numbers than paint a picture of a better America for everyone.

Just one fact worth noting: under the present system, enabled by Republican and Democrat alike, a single mother on $29,000 a year and government benefits would have to get to $60,000 in salary to make it worth her getting off the safety net. This is a bipartisan construct, but one only an outsider conservative can build a campaign around fixing to the betterment of the single mom and everyone else.

Ideas of the 1960s have now grown reactionary in our world that is vastly different from a half-century ago.

Take well-meaning subsidies for those over age 62. Why are there still senior discounts, vast expansions in Social Security and Medicare, and generous public pensions?

Five decades ago all that made sense. There was no such thing as double-dipping. Seniors often were physically worn out from blue-collar jobs. They were usually poorer and frequently sicker than society in general. The aged usually died not long after they retired.

Not now. Seniors often live a quarter-century or longer after a mostly white-collar retirement, drawing subsidies from those least able to pay for them.

Seniors are not like today's strapped youth, scrimping for a down payment on a house. Most are not struggling to find even part-time work. None are paying off crushing student loans. In a calcified economy, why would an affluent couple in their early 60s earn a "senior discount" at a movie, while the struggling young couple with three children in the same line does not?

Affirmative action and enforced "diversity" were originally designed to give a boost to those who were victims of historical bias from the supposedly oppressive white-majority society. Is that still true, a half-century after these assumptions became institutionalized?

Through greater intermarriage and immigration, America has become a multiracial nation. Skin color, general appearance, accent or the sound of one's name cannot so easily identify either "oppressors" or "victims."

So who exactly should receive privileges in job-hiring or college admissions — the newly arrived Pakistani immigrant, or the third-generation, upper-middle-class Mexican-American who does not speak Spanish? Both, or neither? What about someone of half-Jamaican ancestry? What about the children of Attorney General Eric Holder or self-proclaimed Native American Sen. Elizabeth Warren? What about the poor white grandson of the Oklahoma diaspora who is now a minority in California?

Even if the 21st-century state could define who is a minority, on what moral grounds does the targeted beneficiary deserve special consideration? Is his disadvantage defined by being poorer, by lingering trauma from his grandparents' long-ago ordeals, or by yesterday's experience with routine racial prejudice?

If Latinos are underrepresented at the University of California, Berkeley, is it because of the stubborn institutional prejudices that also somehow have been trumped by Asian-Americans enrolling at three times their numbers in the state's general population? Are women so oppressed by men that they graduate from college in higher numbers than their chauvinist male counterparts?

Of all the consequences that would result from amnesty, one that hasn't been discussed enough is the expansion of affirmative action.

Affirmative action takes existing racial grievances, institutionalizes them, and then magnifies them. Affirmative action encourages "a victim-focused identity in minorities" and fosters "a parasitic diversity industry"

Affirmative action policies will benefit minority immigrants, and minority immigrants will naturally support affirmative action policies. How do we know? Because Hispanics are telling pollsters so.

Sixty-five percent of Hispanics believe that affirmative action should be used to ensure that more Hispanics get to college or university, and 68% support affirmative action in employment, according to a 2011 Angus Reid opinion poll. A 2012 Georgetown University poll showed that 63% of young Hispanics (18-24) support affirmative action to "redress past discrimination," along with 75% of young blacks, but only 19% of whites.

Of course, making up for past discrimination doesn't apply to people whose ancestors never set foot in this country, but fairness was never the goal of racial preferences; former Democratic Senator James Webb famously noted that affirmative action simply favors "anyone who does not happen to be white."

The policy is bad enough. The greatest harm is the poisonous racial grievance reinforced by the policy.

People who believe that their racial group is often discriminated against will support affirmative action. On this point, the open-borders Republicans have done an extremely poor job of understanding Hispanic viewpoints about how this country treats them. Sixty-four percent of Latino adults claim that discrimination against Hispanics in schools is "a major problem," and 58% said the same of the workplace, according to a recent Pew poll.

There are very few policy issues that liberals don't reduce to supposed racism. Even "righteous indignation against diversity and reverse discrimination" is one of the "implements of racism" for upper-class whites, according to law professor Mari Matsuda, a founder of the highly influential critical race theory

It's safe to say that when a racial group perceive a high degree of supposed discrimination, they will not be voting for limited government, but will instead favor reverse discrimination. Those who assert the contrary — pro-amnesty Republicans — have the extraordinary burden of showing some basis in history or logic for believing that groups with a racial victim mindset will reject racial preferences.

It is a false hope that any significant number of those who receive amnesty will vote Republican, unless the GOP gets in the affirmative action game. Give a group amnesty, and they'll be thankful to all Democrats and a few Republicans, but Democrats will give them more of what they want from the state. The choice will be simple.

Consider also the calcified assumptions about college education. The expanding 1960s campus was touted as the future gateway to a smarter, fairer, richer and more ethical America. Is that dream still valid?

Today, the college-educated owe a collective $1 trillion in unpaid student loans. Millions of recent graduates cannot find jobs that offer much chance of paying off their crushing student debts.

College itself has become a sort of five to six-year lifestyle choice. Debt, joblessness or occasional part-time employment and coursework eat up a youth's 20s — in a way that military service or vocational training does not.

In reaction, private diploma mills are springing up everywhere. But there are no "diversity czars" at DeVry University. There is no time or money for the luxury of classes such as "Gender Oppression" at Phoenix University. Students do not have rock-climbing walls or have Michael Moore address them at Hillsdale College.

The private-sector campus makes other assumptions. One is that the hallowed liberal arts general-education requirement has been corrupted and no longer ensures an employer that his college-graduate hire is any more broadly educated or liberally minded than those who paid far less tuition for job-training courses at for-profit alternative campuses.

Scan the government grandees caught up in the current administration's ballooning IRS, Associated Press and Benghazi scandals. In each case, a blue-chip Ivy League degree was no guarantee that our best and brightest technocrats would prove transparent or act honorably. What difference did it make that White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Eric Holder, President Barack Obama and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice had degrees from prestigious universities when they misled the American people or Congress?

The now-aging idealists of the 1960s long ago promised us that a uniformly degreed citizenry — shepherded by Ivy League-branded technocrats -- would make America better by sorting us out by differences in age, gender, education and race.

It is now past time to end that fossilized dream before it becomes our collective nightmare.

But, to begin, the Republicans must be able to relate. With distrust in government at an all-time high, a relevant Republican is probably going to be a guy who hates the status quo, not one who talks Washington wonkspeak.

As Domenech concluded:

“The Republican Party needs to understand that shrinking its policy aims to more modest solutions is not going to be rewarded by the electorate. Yes, they need to tailor their message better and find policy wedges which peel off chunks of the Democratic base (winning political strategy is built on an understanding that every drama needs a hero, a martyr, and a villain). But what’s truly essential is that the party leadership rid themselves of the notion that politeness, great hair, and reform for efficiency’s sake is a ballot box winner, and understand instead that politicians who can connect with the people and deliver on their limited government promises – not ones who back away from them under pressure – represent the path forward.”

Unless the Republicans can find candidates who can eloquently express true conservative they will not win. Just putting up candidates like Mitt Romney who had one note to play is not enough. They must convince the majority of the electorate that only through a return to the values of our Founders and the Constitution can this Republic be saved from the tyranny of bigger and bigger government.

How Government Increases Prices

“Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.” — James Madison

The other day I went to Costco, one of those big box discount stores, with my wife to buy some groceries and household sundries. One of the items I needed were some light bulbs — the type that go into those ceiling fixtures and can be controlled with a dimmer switch. There were three choices available. One was a plain 65 watt bulb with one of those curly-cue CFL, mercury-laden bulbs inside of the larger bulb. This type was the least expensive at $4.00 per bulb. I used to buy three of the “old fashion” incandescent bulbs that were dimmable for $10.00 at Lowes. To buy a CFL bulb that was dimmable the price escalated to $17.00 for three bulbs. The most costly were the new LED bulbs that were going for $27.00 each.

While I was deciding on the bulbs to buy another fellow walked up and began perusing the selection of bulbs. He commented on the high cost of the bulbs and queried as to the high cost. Naturally I had to enter a dialog with him and explained that whenever government passes a law that forces you to buy one type of a technology over another it creates a monopoly for the serving technology and the consumer loses his freedom to choose. This is exactly what Bastiat meant when he wrote:

“Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a whole—with their common aim of legal plunder—constitute socialism.”

In essence Bastiat was telling us that when a government regulates business it creates a monopoly thus causing prices to rise for the consumer. This caused inflation, which affects the value of your money and cannot be considered as anything else but legal plunder.

I ended up purchasing the least expensive bulbs and continued on with my shopping noticing how prices have risen on almost everything across the board. Oh, the fellow I was talking with seemed not to have the slightest clue as to what I was telling him. He must have been an Obama zombie.

This plundering, initiated by government affects everything; food, clothing, fuel, education, and health care. Suppose you own a fruit stand and your largest selling item is apples. You have the biggest, most tasty, and competitively priced apples on the block and your customers flock to your stand for the apples You are serving you customers well selling them the apples at a 30% margin and making a profit to cover your direct and indirect costs. The government steps in and issues food stamps or EBT cards for apples. Now people buying your apples are not as concerned over the price as they used to be as the government is subsidizing their food costs. It takes an angel not to increase the price of the apples and their margin to 40% knowing his customers will pay more for his apples with their government provided money — money they have taken from others including you. This is how plunder works. As Bastiat stated in his second rule of plunder; “Everybody plunders everybody”

Now we come to one of the most egregious examples of government sponsored to date — higher education.

Federal student financial assistance programs are costly, inefficient, byzantine, and fail to serve their desired objectives. In a word, they are dysfunctional, among the worst of many bad federal programs.

These programs are commonly rationalized on three grounds: on the grounds that assuring more young people a higher education has positive spillover effects for the country; on the grounds that higher education promotes equal economic opportunity (or, as the politicians say, that it is “a ticket to achieving the American Dream”); or on the grounds that too few students would go to college in the absence of federal loan programs, since private markets for loans to college students are defective.

All three of these arguments are dubious at best. The alleged positive spillover effects of sending more and more Americans to college are very difficult to measure. And as the late Milton Friedman suggested shortly before his death, they may be more than offset by negative spillover effects. Consider, for instance, the relationship between spending by state governments on higher education and their rate of economic growth. Controlling for other factors important in growth determination, the relationship between education spending and economic growth is negative or, at best, non-existent.

What about higher education being a vehicle for equal economic opportunity or income equality? Over the last four decades, a period in which the proportion of adults with four-year college degrees tripled, income equality has declined. (As a side note, I do not know the socially optimal level of economic inequality, and the tacit assumption that more such equality is always desirable is suspect; my point here is simply that, in reality, higher education today does not promote income equality.) Just look at the complaints from the Occupy crowd when it comes to finding jobs “commensurate” with their degrees. It just isn’t happening. After all how many firms have need of a person with an advanced degree in women’s studies, political science, or phycology?

Finally, in regards to the argument that capital markets for student loans are defective, if financial institutions can lend to college students on credit cards and make car loans to college students in large numbers—which they do—there is no reason why they can’t also make student educational loans.

Despite the fact that the rationales for federal student financial assistance programs are very weak, these programs are growing rapidly. The Pell Grant program did much more than double in size between 2007 and 2010. Although it was designed to help poor people, it is now becoming a middle class entitlement. Student loans have been growing eight to ten percent a year for at least two decades, and, as is well publicized, now aggregate to one trillion dollars of debt outstanding—roughly $25,000 on average for the 40,000,000 holders of the debt. Astoundingly, student loan debt now exceeds credit card debt.

Nor is it correct to assume that most of this debt is held by young people in their twenties and early thirties. The median age of those with loan obligations today is around 33, and approximately 40 percent of the debt is held by people 40 years of age or older. So when politicians talk about maintaining low interest loans to help kids in college, more often than not the help is going to middle-aged individuals long gone from the halls of academia.

With this as an introduction, let me outline eight problems with federal student grant and loan programs. The list is not exclusive.

In this month’s issue of Imprimis, the monthly newsletter from Hillsdale College Richard Vedder, Professor of Economics at Ohio University writes about the unintended consequences of federal student aid.

“(1) Student loan interest rates are not set by the forces of supply and demand, but by the political process. Normally, interest rates are a price used to allocate scarce resources; but when that price is manipulated by politicians, it leads to distortions in the use of resources. Since student loan interest rates are always set at below-market rates, too much money is borrowed for college. Currently those interest rates are extremely low, with a key rate of 3.4 percent—which, after adjusting for inflation, is approximately zero. Moreover, both the president and Governor Romney say they want to continue that low interest rate after July 1, when it is supposed to double. This aggravates an already bad situation, and provides a perfect example of the fundamental problem facing our nation today: politicians pushing programs whose benefits are visible and immediate (even if illusory, as suggested above), while their extraordinarily high costs are less visible and more distant in time.

(2) In the real world, interest rates vary with the prospects that the borrower will repay the loan. In the surreal world of student loans, the brilliant student completing an electrical engineering degree at M.I.T. pays the same interest rate as the student majoring in ethnic studies at a state university who has a GPA below 2.0. The former student will almost certainly graduate and get a job paying $50,000 a year or more, whereas the odds are high the latter student will fail to graduate and will be lucky to make $30,000 a year.

Related to this problem, colleges themselves have no “skin in the game.” They are responsible for allowing loan commitments to occur, but they face no penalties or negative consequences when defaults are extremely high, imposing costs on taxpayers.

(3) Perhaps most importantly, federal student grant and loan programs have contributed to the tuition price explosion. When third parties pay a large part of the bill, at least temporarily, the customer’s demand for the service rises and he is not as sensitive to price as he would be if he were paying himself. Colleges and universities take advantage of that and raise their prices to capture the funds that ostensibly are designed to help students. This is what happened previously in health care, and is what is currently happening in higher education.”

This is exactly like the example of the apple stand I previously stated above. Dr. Vedder continues:

“(4) The federal government now has a monopoly in providing student loans. Until recently, at least it farmed out the servicing of loans to a variety of private financial service firms, adding an element of competition in terms of quality of service, if not price. But the Obama administration, with its strong hostility to private enterprise, moved to establish a complete monopoly. One would think the example of the U.S. Postal Service today, losing taxpayer money hand over fist and incapable of making even the most obviously needed reforms, would be enough proof against the prudence of such a move. And remember: because of highly irresponsible fiscal policies, the federal government borrows 30 or 40 percent of the money it currently spends, much of that from overseas. Thus we are incurring long-term obligations to foreigners to finance loans to largely middle class Americans to go to college. This is not an appropriate use of public funds at a time of dangerously high federal budget deficits.

(5) Those applying for student loans or Pell Grants are compelled to complete the FAFSA form, which is extremely complex, involves more than 100 questions, and is used by colleges to administer scholarships (or, more accurately, tuition discounts). Thus colleges are given all sorts of highly personal and private information on incomes, wealth, debts, child support, and so forth. A car dealer who demanded such information so that he could see how badly he could gouge you would either be out of business or in jail within days or weeks. But it is commonplace in higher education because of federal student financial assistance programs.

(6) As federal programs have increased the number of students who enroll in college, the number of new college graduates now far exceeds the number of new managerial, technical and professional jobs—positions that college graduates have traditionally taken. A survey by Northeastern University estimates that 54 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed or unemployed. Thus we currently have 107,000 janitors and 16,000 parking lot attendants with bachelor’s degrees, not to mention bartenders, hair dressers, mail carriers, and so on. And many of those in these limited-income occupations are struggling to pay off student loan obligations.

Connected to this is the fact that more and more kids are going to college who lack the cognitive skills, the discipline, the academic preparation, or the ambition to succeed academically. They simply cannot or do not master well much of the rather complex materials that college students are expected to learn. As a result, many students either do not graduate or fail to graduate on time. I have estimated that only 40 percent or less of Pell Grant recipients get degrees within six years—an extremely high dropout or failure rate. No one has seriously questioned that statistic—a number, by the way, that the federal government does not publish, no doubt because it is embarrassingly low.

Also related is the fact that, in an attempt to minimize this problem, colleges have lowered standards, expecting students to read and write less while giving higher grades for lesser amounts of work. Surveys show that students spend on average less than 30 hours per week on academic work—less than they spend on recreation. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa show in their book “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses”, critical thinking skills among college seniors on average are little more than among freshmen.

(7) As suggested to me a couple of days ago by a North Carolina judge, based on a case in his courtroom, with so many funds so readily available there is a temptation and opportunity for persons to acquire low interest student loans with the intention of dropping out of school quickly to use the proceeds for other purposes. (In the North Carolina student loan fraud case, it was to start up a t-shirt business.)

(8) Lazy or mediocre students can get greater subsidies than hard-working and industrious ones. Take Pell Grants. A student who works extra hard and graduates with top grades after three years will receive only half as much money as a student who flunks several courses and takes six years to finish or doesn’t obtain a degree at all. In other words, for recipients of federal aid there are disincentives to excel.”

If the Law of Unintended Consequences ever applied, it is in federal student financial assistance. Programs created with the noblest of intentions have failed to serve either their customers or the nation well. In the 1950s and 1960s, before these programs were large, American higher education enjoyed a Golden Age. Enrollments were rising, lower-income student access was growing, and American leadership in higher education was becoming well established. In other words, the system flourished without these programs. Subsequently, massive growth in federal spending and involvement in higher education has proved counterproductive.

Bastiat wrote about the Law of Untended Consequences in his 1850 easy on the “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen”:

“In the economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause—it is seen. The others unfold in succession—they are not seen: it is well for us if they are foreseen. Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference—the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen and also of those which it is necessary to foresee. Now this difference is enormous, for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the ultimate consequences are fatal, and the converse. Hence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good, which will be followed by a great evil to come, while the true economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil.”

In summary the federal government with the support of the colleges, universities, and banks, have created a monopoly for the colleges and universities. As in any monopoly the institutions benefiting from the monopoly can do what they will to the consumer. In this case the consumers are the students and their parents. With ample government money available for student loans the colleges and universities have grown way beyond their rational size and scope. They construct new buildings and hire staff that for most cases are not needed to provide a liberal arts or technical education. They offer degrees in subjects that have meaning only if the graduate can work in some boutique organization or return to academia to teach the same courses to some other foolish students.

Today we need trained technical workers. Workers trained and skilled in auto and aircraft maintenance, computer aided design and drafting, manufacturing processes, and computer technology. These people can come from a variety sources including trade and vocational schools, for profit technical universities, and community colleges at a much lower cost than the 4-year university.

For the past 30 years the colleges and universities, with the encouragement of the federal government have been tipping off the consumer. With the ratio of debt to GDP rising nationally, and the federal government continuing to spend more and more taxpayer money on higher education at an unsustainable long-term pace, a re-thinking of federal student financial aid policies is a good place to start in meeting America’s economic crisis.

Our Throw Away Society

"Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty.” —" Thomas Jefferson

Last night I attended a dinner in honor of the retirement of two of my former partners and colleagues from the Land Surveying and Civil Engineering firm where I was once one of the co-owners before I hung up my spikes five years ago. It was a great event and I was able to spend some time with many of former partners still doing battle with the dragon of today’s stagnant economy. I was shocked to hear of the staff reductions that had been made over the past four years in order to keep this sixty year old business alive. As Thomas Paine stated during the Revolutionary War; “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

During the dinner I sat next to a former partner and colleague who is still fighting the good fight in the Sacramento office. We talked of many things. We reminisced on past days and how business is going today. When I asked him if he was still as involved in supporting one of our state universities with their surveying program he informed me that the program was in danger dur to the soon to be departure of the professor who had run the program for the past twenty years and that the university was searching for an endowment to keep the program alive. They not only needed the money, they also needed students. It seems as though today high school students entering college are more interested in studying Italian Renaissance Arts, psychology or Women’s studies than the more demanding disciplines of engineering.

This dilemma is no doubt in part due to the lack of recruiting at the high school level and the dwindling number of students prepared in math and science to enter engineering and scientific courses of study. Conversely there is a lack of qualified instructors to teach such classes. Obviously if we have a dwindling cadre of students we will eventually have a deficiency in those who can recruit and teach the students.

On my drive home I began thinking about this two-fold problem facing the nation today. Since it was a drive of some 100 miles to my home I came up with several ideas that I believe would alleviate this condition.

First of all we need qualified instructors who can not only teach the fundamentals of the engineering disciplines, but who can make the learning exciting and fruitful. There are thousands of retired engineering professionals who have years of practical experience in managing and building projects of all types. They also have experience in running business, hiring and mentoring people, serving clients, and making a profit. These things also need to be taught to students in preparation for a career in engineering.

The problem is that these folks do not have the academic union card of a PhD. The academic community jealously protects its profession by requiring an instructor to have one of these union cards no matter how knowledge or experience a person with fifty years of experience he or she may have. This is known as academic elitism. In the Socratic Method of teaching the job of any instructor is to assist the student if learning and discovering on his own, not on indoctrination. It is a form of inquiry and debate between individuals with opposing viewpoints based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to illuminate ideas. It is a dialectical method, often involving an oppositional discussion in which the defense of one point of view is pitted against the defense of another; one participant may lead another to contradict himself in some way, thus strengthening the inquirer's own point.

You cannot convince me that a thirty-year old person with a PhD who has done all of his or hers required book learning, written papers and convinced a panel of academics that he or she is deserving of a PhD is more qualified to teach students in the engineering discipline than a person with a successful career of managing and building projects, running a business, serving clients and making money. This is how it was many years ago before the academic mafia of elites began to take over our schools.

This malady is also prevalent in other professions. My brother is a practicing attorney who owns a law firm. He tells me a similar tale about our law schools. They have professors of law who have never tried a case or entered a court room except as an observer. On the other hand there are many retired attorneys and judges with thousands of years of experience who could share this with the students, thus better preparing them for a career in the law.

Before I continue let me state that I am not advocating eliminating all professors and teachers in favor of retirees. What I am advocating, however, is the use of these retired professional as adjunct lecturers for the recruiting and teaching of students. They can make their professions come alive and exciting for the students and potential students. I also do not wish to impugn the hard work and study that goes into obtaining a PhD or its value. I do, however, believe that the purpose of a PhD is to allow the holder to go out into the world and do great things, not look for a place at the table of the elites in the ivory tower of academia where they can sit in the faculty lounge and exchange similar points of view with one another.

Let me tell a personal tale. When I want to high school many years ago I was not a good student at math. In fact I failed algebra in my freshman year. I no doubt did this due to my lack of interest and my inability to see any practical use of the subject. Obviously my parents did not take kindly to this. In my sophomore I eschewed any math courses for classes in science and industrial arts. In between my sophomore and junior years I got a summer job as a surveyor’s assistant. This opened my eyes to the potential of a great career where I would not have to work in the steel mills of my home town or in the building trades. I realized I would need the advanced math if I wanted to pursue a career in surveying or civil engineering. My eyes were opened because I was working in the field under the supervision of professionals who were showing me the possibilities.

In my junior year I once again challenged the algebra. This time I had a young teacher, just out of the army, who was no nonsense teacher who knew his subject. I excelled and finished with an A. In my senior year I took plane geometry and saw the relevance of this subject in my chosen career. Once again I did well finishing with another A. In the meantime I kept working as a surveyor’s assistant during summer vacation, other holiday periods, and Saturdays. Yes we worked Saturdays in those days. The mentorship of my supervisors was taking hold.

I realized that if I wished to continue down this path I would need more advanced math like trigonometry, the back bone of surveying, and spherical geometry. After graduation I went to work full time for the surveying and engineering firm that had given me the opportunity as a high school student. I also need to go to night school for the advanced math.

I enrolled in a class in trigonometry and was very fortunate to study under one of the most brilliant math teachers I have ever met. She was not an academic, but an instructor doing this because she needed a few extra dollars and het love of teaching math. She had a PhD in math, but more so she was a mathematician at the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory — a contributor to the space program in Cleveland, Ohio. Like Jaime Escalante in the film Stand and Deliver who taught AP Calculus at Garfield High School in Los Angeles, she made math come alive. For every trigonometric function she would take us back to Pythagoras and bring us forward to how the function was developed. Boy did the lights go one for me. Once again I completed the class with an A and she told me I should pursue a career in mathematics —this for a fellow who failed algebra in freshman year in high school. I was flattered, but I still wanted a career in civil engineering and surveying. 55 years later after many night school classes, a ten-year stint as a highway engineer for the California Division of Highways (CALTRANS), ten years of owning my own civil engineering and surveying business, and 23 years of being a part owner of another civil engineering and surveying firm that employed 850 persons at the end of my career I retired after a long and successful career.

I share this tale not to boast, but to illustrate the value of mentorship (the Socratic Method of teaching), competent and inspiring teachers, and being motivated by practical examples of what could be achieved.

My tale in in no way is unique. Many other successful professionals in all careers have gone this route. They achieved great heights, not because they were smarter or more fortunate that others but because they had the advantage of the mentorship and instruction from experienced professionals who could motivate them and impart their practical knowledge upon them. Learning is achieved through motivation. Just think back on all of the teachers you have had in your life and identify the ones who motivated you the most.

In today’s society we are throwing away the knowledge and experience of our successful elders. In bygone days it was these elders who were looked to for their knowledge and understanding of the world. What better teacher could a business major have than a successful businessman who has spent years serving the public? Or an engineering major an engineer who has built bridges, highways and other civil structures or a student of the law a lawyer who has tried both criminal and civil cases or served as a judge.

This not only pertains to our universities, but it relates to our high schools where it may have even greater value. Wouldn’t an aerospace engineer add more value for the students than a math teacher who also coaches the basketball team? But we have a monopolistic government school system that is captive to the teachers unions that vigorously protects their turf. Yes, I understand that a measure of vetting would be needed to retain the services of these retired experts, but our current spate of teacher scandals points out that those union teachers have their problems with morality. Also there would be considerable savings by using these retired professionals. They would not need gold-plated pension or health care plans.

As a society where retired professionals are living longer, healthier lives we are missing a great opportunity to take advantage of their knowledge and experience. I once had a conversation with a very successful client who told me he looked upon gray hair as a positive, not a deterrent to procuring the services of a consultant. If this philosophy works in the real world why can’t it work in the halls of academia?