Rudy Acuna - The Horror of Neoliberalism

 rudy acuna <acunarudy427@gmail.com>

Out of Africa the protagonist left Africa muttering "the horror the horror of it all" these are my feelings viewing what neo-liberals have done to education. .. “Horatio Alger: The Illusion of Public Higher Education,” by Rudy Acuna

The United States is the land of illusions. Like Disneyland, it is more fiction than reality. The American Dream imposes a form of social control blinding Americans from seeing the injustices, inequalities and imperfections of American society. Like old Shirley Temple movies, Americans are princes and princesses who pass through bad times thinking that they will be saved because they are Americans.
These illusions were constructed by myths such as that of Horatio Alger that has persisted for over 150 years. The stairway to the American Dream was meritocracy and education. America is the land of opportunity, every American if he works hard enough could get an education; it is free and more accessible in the United States than any place in the world. Opportunity is knocking, and it is your fault if you did not take advantage of it. The Horatio Alger Myth resembles other fantasy tales. In 1966 the illusion of equal opportunity suffered a fatal blow with the election of Governor Ronald Reagan who led the assault on the University of California.  Reagan vowed to “clean up that mess in Berkeley” that, according to him, was led by “outside agitators” and left-wing subversives. Reagan laid the foundations for a shift to a tuition-based funding model. The goal was to eliminate taxes and privatize public institutions.  Moneyed interests nationwide set out to destroy public two-year schools, which served almost one-half of the nation’s first-year college students.  By the 21st century, as tuition soared at the four year universities, students were pushed down to the community colleges.

The Great Recession of 2008 ended all illusions of universal public education. By 2011, the UC officially switched from a system of fees to an explicitly tuition-centric model. Moreover, since 2007, the UC has promoted the admission of out-of-state and foreign students as a way of raising revenues. Incentives were built into the admission process to admit fewer California students. The California State Universities followed suit.

California stopped building new colleges and universities; new buildings were built with student funds.  Most programs such as the UNAM/CSUN accord are vested in student funds. According to many critics the privatization process was irreversible. From 2005 to 2010, over 75 percent of newly accredited colleges and universities were for-profits funded in global capital markets. For-profits now make up over 25 percent of all post-secondary institutions in the United States. Without saying, they are more expensive than the former public universities. The outcome is fewer students graduate and those who do  leave college with higher student debts.

By 2011, California public colleges and universities received 13 percent less in state funding; this was not by accident. By this this time “nearly half of all graduates of public and private four-year schools in California were saddled with an average debt load of $18,000”[6] (https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_9028681534356987698__ftn6); the national average was $26,682.It was also not an accident that funding for community colleges remained static although demand increased. Reduced class offerings, fewer sections of the classes, and the laying off of faculty and staff forced many students into for profit schools. These overbooked classes took the two year colleges to the breaking point.

One proposed solution was to charge students an extra fee to get priority registration for impacted classes. In 2010, because of a student uproar, a contract was cancelled with the for-profit Kaplan University to offer discounted online classes to community college students for community college credit.

Globally, education is important. When asked what was the key challenge facing Latin America over the next decade, the top answer among students was education. Students saw it as the key to jobs.  However, increasingly through the intervention of American institutions such as the International Monetary Fund its leaders were adopting the American neo-liberal model, and for-profit colleges are flourishing in Brazil, Mexico and Chile.

Reading about for profit colleges only makes the silence of the lambs more deafening. The Daily Caller published an article titled “Why are the Clintons hawking a seedy, Soros-backed for-profit college corporation?” George Soros supposedly one of the good billionaires hired Bill Clinton as a pitchman for Laureate Education Inc., a for-profit higher education powerhouse. Laureate owns 75 schools in 30 countries. And it boasts of 800,000 students worldwide. Also promoting this venture is Henry Cisneros and other Clinton stalwarts.[7] (https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_9028681534356987698__ftn7)

The Chickens Will Come Home to Roost

The lambs had a problem hearing the sounds of the clarion because they lacked long term memories. They could not remember the Zapatistas January 1, 1994 revolt in reaction to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) never sunk in. It could be that the word neoliberal was too foreign to the lambs, and they had a difficult time comprehending that the word takes different forms.
News that University of California President Janet Napolitano began two days of meetings to Mexico about expanding academic and research cooperation with Mexican universities and scientific and cultural organizations has raised fears among many of us.[8] (https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_9028681534356987698__ftn8) The U.S. War on Drugs had ravaged Mexico to the point that few U.S. students wanted to study there. As a consequence, about 40 out of 233,000 UC students study in Mexico each year, while about 1,900 Mexicans attended UC schools in 2013.

Ironically, Napolitano as the former secretary of Homeland Security was involved in making U.S. drug policy; her visit coincides with that of Secretary of State John Kerry.  According to the UC president this part of the, “UC’s many and varied partnerships, exchanges and collaborations with Mexico are integral to bettering lives on both sides of our national border … I’m here to ensure we grow that relationship by establishing our new project to enhance the mutual exchange of students, faculty and ideas across the border.”[9] (https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_9028681534356987698__ftn9)
For over 50 years, the Mexican American community encouraged exchange programs lobbying for programs with Mexico. However, many had come to realize that just studying in Mexico, or studying in the United States did not always have positive outcomes.

Vicente Ramírez wrote about these exchanges, “They’re [the UC and CSU] not going to recruit the working class–it’s a class war… They’re recruiting Mexico’s elite students so that they can then go back and apply neoliberal policies. All of Mexico’s secretaries of Economy (Secretario de Economía) and Finance (Secretario de Hacienda y Crédito Público) have gotten their Ph.D.’s from American universities since the mid-1980s. Mexico’s current Secretario de Hacienda, Luis Videgarray who successfully pushed for the privatization of PEMEX got his Ph.D. from MIT.” Ex-Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, arguably the intellectual godfather of Mexican neoliberalism, received his MA and PhD in economics from Harvard.”

It should be made clear that exchanges were not about diversity or cultural enrichment. The recruitment was global and it was about profit. When the UC or CSU turned away students the for-profit university sector in both countries thrived.

Neoliberalism at its worse recruited wealthy Mexican students to displace U.S. minority students, charging them out of state and foreign student fees. Not too many if any working class Mexican students would be able to afford the tuition and dorm costs. The prize for the neoliberal university was Mexico set a goal of sending 100,000 Mexican students a year to the U.S. by 2018. In addition, the UC and CSU system recruited in China, the Middle East, Asia and the U.S. The large numbers of international students impacted minorities and working class students who were priced out of the market.  The Mercury News reported that UC Berkley’s “revenue from out-of-state and international students has grown to about $160 million, about 7 percent of its annual operating budget and more than half of its state subsidy.”[10] (https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_9028681534356987698__ftn10)

At UCLA just under 28 percent of the incoming freshmen were out of state students while just over 3 percent were African American.[11] (https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_9028681534356987698__ftn11) In 2012, Inside Higher Ed wrote that “The number of foreign and out-of-state students admitted to the University of California’s 10 campuses soared by 43 percent this year, while the overall number of would-be freshmen admitted from within the state’s borders grew by just 3.6 percent, the university system … Out-of-state and foreign students made up nearly one in five students admitted for next fall, 18,846 of a total of 80,289.”[12] (https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#m_9028681534356987698__ftn12)

This led to an insidious policy that limits space for low income students and justifies higher fees and tuition. It gave students who were turned away no alternative, but to go to for-profit universities. Recently, a scheme by the community colleges to enter into a contract with the University of Kaplan to offer classes online to community college students (at a substantial fee) was derailed because of public outcry. ( Kaplan was a tutorial center'