I'm not sure what you think you know about my politics, but there is nothing at all nationalistic about my points. How many times do I need to say that I feel exactly the same way about ALL for-profits? The extra issue with Carib is the lack of US standards and regulations, the misleading marketing AND the taxpayer subsidy. It's not nationalistic. As I said, I have zero doubt the bulk of the money never leaves the USA.
Bitching about the Harvard endowment is fine, but it is not being distributed as dividends to investors, and that would be fine too, as long as it didn't take public money to do so. Harvard serves a public good, even if you don't like the way it does so. Adtalem makes no such pretensions, and accordingly, should find a private sugar daddy to fund its operations.
For me, it's not about keeping American dollars in America. It's about seeing taxpayer dollars used for things that benefit taxpayers. I had no problem with a US airline bailout, since air transportation is critical infrastructure. And this is even though the airlines are for profit. I also had no problem denying a bailout to American corporations (cruise lines) that chose to domicile operations overseas to avoid US taxation and US regulations.
Again, the money would not have gone overseas, since those companies are all based in FL. But, foreign jurisdictions are how the companies avoided obligations other American companies have to comply with (labor laws, taxes, etc.), and politicians just couldn't justify a handout to companies that go out of their way to avoid US regulation and aren't critical, even though they are important to places like FL, AK, etc. In the end, Panama and the Bahamas didn't bail them out, but they sure do pay their workers next to nothing!!
Finally, why are we still going back and forth? I know I'm not going to convince you. Do you honestly think you are going to convince me???
I will keep responding to points as they are made, regardless of whether they convince you. First, it is probably a generally rare occurrence that anyone with a position is converted to a counter position by one, two, or ten debates. However, silence automatically forefeits the narrative. So, while you continue to make points I will continue to answer them. Second, you aren't exactly the audience. Anyone reading this is the audience. I have been more than clear of my position that I would not recommend going to Carib schools because of the excessive risk associated with them. Because I believe you would be absolutely negligent to go to these schools unaware of the risks (since they are clearly discussed in the open) I don't support any policies that would
unfairly target these schools. People can judge my arguments as they see fit regardless of your willingness to explore them in good faith.
I can't claim to know much about your politics all I can say is that the argument you advance is uncharacteristically nationalistic. To quote you: "Well, yeah. US public money, US public institutions! My point is simply that taxpayers voting for politicians that vote for programs benefiting "bloated" American non-profit institutions is fine. Off shore, for-profit, not so much." The point you are making here (since you immediately make an unworkable caveat in the next sentence) is "taxpayer ROI be damned, so long as the cash is going into American systems." This is purely a nationalistic American-first argument which would be reasonable, however at the scale we are talking the amount that foreigners are benefited by Carib schools is a drop in the bucket compared to the trillions in subsidies that end up abroad.
If we are talking about things that benefit taxpayers then we should be talking about an ROI. But, as I've pointed out, if we want to critically examine ROI in education spending then Carib schools are hardly our white whale. Beyond the general platitude of "education is good" you have no answer for this. Certainly people with college degrees make more money, however when nearly half the people who attempt them don't achieve them then we have a credible claim for massive amount of waste.
Also, Carib schools do benefit the US. 50% of the people completing these programs are getting into residency. They are going on to practice medicine in the US, paying off these loans, and then paying a lifetime of taxes at a high income. If you want to say these schools some how harm the US then I suggest you present the figures of how much money the taxpayer is eating because of these schools versus the amount of debt that actually does get paid off and the lifetime tax potential of the graduates who make it to residency.
As for Harvard, I simply pointed out that they are an immensely wealthy non-profit private school that nominally brings value to the US but certainly takes care of it's own donors and interest, like any other institution. In 2017 the total value of the top 20 College and University endowments was nearly $600B and had grown by 10% in 2016 alone. Thus the top 20 schools are worth 35% of the total debt held by college students in the US.
As a case study, Harvard's endowment was transferred to the Harvard Management Company in1974, valued at $1.1B. It is now worth over $40B. Despite being able to pay for every students tuition by increasing it's rate of return at 1.5%, Harvard invoked austerity measures at the beginning of the pandemic, including pay and hiring freezes and threats of furloughing workers. This didn't stop Harvard from accepting more than $8 million in emergency relief from the Feds, half of it mandated for students by the fed. It wasn't until Trump criticized the move that Harvard came out and declined any further aid. With a $40B endowment its nice to know that the feds mandated about $181 in relief across all of Harvard's 22,000 students.
If we look at the total funding for just Ivy league schools the numbers are stark. The Ivies have total endowment of $120B which is enough to pay the tuition of every one of their students for the next 51 years. This doesn't stop them from taking in gobbs of federal funding, more than that allotted to 16 entire States. This includes $33 million in Pell grants. Think of that, the federal taxpayer is subsidizing what is the essential talent mining of poor populations. These organizations are undoubtedly rich enough to cover this measly expenditure.
Its worth noting that as non-profits these institutions pay no taxes on the growth of their endowments.
Why am I bringing this up? Because the for-profit/non-profit paradigm you insist on is BS. The Ivies pay millions in lobbying efforts. The government is full of their graduates. Their endowments are untouchable. They receive billions in federal taxpayer subsidies. By all accounts these are organizations that are run like businesses and they aim to turn a profit, if only for themselves. If this wasn't education we would all decry this is completely corrupt. These top schools have carved out a niche where they are the wealthiest schools in the country, where they receive billions in taxpayer funds, and where they get to cherry pick the best and brightest students so that they can maintain their positions (and funding) on the top of the federal hierarchy. The 114th US Senate boasted 18% of it's membership as graduates of Ivies - imagine if 18% of the Senate were previous Facebook or Twitter employees.
But alas no! It's these dinky Carib Med Schools and their shareholders that are massively distorting federal education funding. The fact that the wealthiest endowments aren't taxed (unlike profits from Carib med schools withdrawn by US shareholders), the fact that these schools command more funding than 16 states, the fact that 18% of a very recent Senate graduated from these schools, that's just smoke, not fire.
Nah, there are massive distortions of the public interest here. The education system broadly is a massive transfer of wealth and power from the taxpayers and small-time students to University administrators and those who sit atop a Government-Research complex. Eisenhower cites this in his farewell address, the one that professors often used to warn about the
military-industrial complex but leave unmentioned his warning about the influence of public funding on the university, or vice versa: "Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite."
Folks will probably respond to this as if I've gone off the rails and taken a discussion about Carib schools way out of context. More my point is that the same charges you hold against Carib schools are equally applicable to almost the entire education system and the schools we are most culturally conditioned to hold in high esteem. Lots of people are making money off our our federal-education complex. It isn't you or I, we will get what is leftover from the fruit of our labor. However, if you think that the noble American
taxpayer is getting a good deal out of any of it, I think you are mistaken.
At the close of Fiscal Year 2019, Harvard’s endowment was valued at $40.9 billion, the largest sum in its history. Then came the coronavirus pandemic.
www.thecrimson.com
Penn spends the most on lobbying out of any Ivy League university — $5.3 million, a full 29 percent of the total Ivy expenditure on lobbying.
www.thedp.com
The NCES Fast Facts Tool provides quick answers to many education questions (National Center for Education Statistics). Get answers on Early Childhood Education, Elementary and Secondary Education and Higher Education here.
nces.ed.gov
finance.yahoo.com
Adtalem is nothing more than a publicly traded money machine, partially built on misleading and unethical marketing, ultimately crushing the hopes and dreams of many of those unable to gain admission to a legitimate medical school, and all made possible through the stupidity and generosity of the American taxpayer.
