Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Do You Ever Have That "I've Just Been Milked" Feeling?


Ever heard of a "Cash Cow"?

"Cash cow" is used sarcastically by money people to describe a customer or organization that has no control over its spending. The poor slobs that provide them with excess revenue to be invested elsewhere, somewhere not beneficial to the cash cow themselves.

If you have received a degree from any postsecondary institution within the last 20 years all you have to do is look in the mirror to see one. Seriously, you paid too much for what you bought and you have been paid too little for what you are doing with it. In addition if you borrowed money to pay for your education you are what is known in the trade as a "perpetual cash cow."

Once-upon-a-time in the 1990s the Congress created a series of offices in each State Called the State Postsecondary Review Entity (SPRE). To simplify what it was to do, it was supposed to make sure that the students got their money's worth and could benefit from the cost of going to school and borrowing money to do so. It examined in every State every postsecondary school, proprietary, private, and public. Guess what it found? Yep, every college, university, and proprietary school was overcharging and under delivering. All of them. Yes, even those where the students were fully funded by the State like many Vo-techs are.

Would it be a surprised that at that point, it was the largest and most prestigious universities that got the U. S. Senate to kill SPRE?

Down in Tillman County we had a saying," What goes around comes around." So here it is back again. But just like last time we will start with the trade schools (proprietary) and then when the attention shifts upwards to the State Universities it will be shut down once again.

Maybe not this time. The sins are so egregious, maybe, just maybe, there will have to be repentance and retribution, or not.

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