About half-priced education

By Oh Young-jin

Assistant managing editor

Let’s stop kidding ourselves. For half the price, you get half the quantity or quality or both. This is true with buying fish. So is it with college education.

Trying for a higher learning opportunity for half the current tuition is a bad dream, as unrealistic as buying an apartment at half the price and as unhealthy as betting on Lotto for a comfortable retirement.

A Cassandra would say that, by this time next year, when the general elections are over, everybody will wake up to face a gigantic hangover, feeling duped by, as usual, sleight of hand by politicians.

It would be too late to realize that politicians are like drug pushers, keep selling one sick idea after another to us addicts. We are ready to give them our votes to buy heaven on a temporary basis.

First, why is half-priced college tuition possible but not possible?

The economic principle of supply and demand works to the advantage of colleges.

Virtually all high school graduates want to go to college for one of two reasons or both. Not going to college doesn’t look cool. No sheepskin often spells trouble in getting a decent job or finding a nice spouse to marry.

Thus, colleges see more students applying for available openings, although some colleges complain about the lack of applicants. However, this more-demand-than-supply phenomenon has rotted some colleges, offering poor education and being run as a family business.

This also gives birth to a systemic quirk, as the nation’s ivory tower turn into factories churning out graduates, their number far larger than the job market can accommodate. This means acute unemployment among highly-educated young people.

A close look at how the ruling conservative Grand National Party (GNP) has brought the populist half-priced tuition pledge from the grave of President Lee’s campaign promises may give away one or two peeks into the crafty way their thinking process goes.

Simply put, the revival of the promise can be their solution to a problem that will hamper their attempt to cling on to power: youth dissatisfaction about fewer jobs to go around and the young generation’s expected show of disapproval at the ballot.

So far it has worked for the GNP, as it has seized the national narrative of the moment and passed the buck to colleges. But it will all come down to the sustainability of this issue for the next eight months or so.

From the perspective of students and parents, going to college at half the price looks and sounds irresistible, although they know that it won’t be possible.

Horror stories abound on campuses.

Some students give up schooling for good or temporarily because they can’t afford to pay the tuition.

It is not uncommon to hear of students who are heavily in debt because of loans they took out for tuition. Even after graduation, they look in vain for a decent job but end up working on a part-time basis for a meager wage.

Perhaps collegians are protesting to get a 50 percent discount, hoping against hope that their protests will help the schools become accountable for their financial affairs and reduce wasteful elements in their management, resulting in a drop in tuition of any size. Maybe, they are protesting just out of passion over what they see as acts of institutional injustice, seeing their efforts as a classic class struggle.

But either way, their efforts are doomed because they misread the picture.

What they should rather demand is a higher level of education, not cheaper education. In other words, don’t get confused about the reason why they are in college in the first place.

They should institutionalize a better evaluation of faculty so incompetent professors and presidents can be weeded out. They have to follow trails of money to keep tabs on how tuition is spent and demand that more should be used for better lab equipment and student loans at lower interest rates.

Some students may argue that they have tried it all but without success so they are jumping on the half-priced tuition wagon in order to pay just enough for what their education is worth. But that method multiplies the negative ― lower tuition for an education that is bound to go downhill in quality. In other words, the concept is a nonstarter.

Some progressives and conservatives come up with figures that are patched up to make the idea of slashing tuition college look plausible. But forcing the colleges to sell their real estate holdings and spend the proceeds for lower tuition would go against the basic tenet of capitalism this society stands for. Engineering a way to make them cough up their wealth in any other way would carry social costs, for instance, through mounting cases of litigation.

There is no shortcut or royal path in this half-tuition dispute, just like any other big social issue.

As with any intractable problem, a solution to the dispute of paying half the price for a college education is not easy to find and takes time.

But we know of a solution-finding process to this kind of problem. It starts with the debating stage, moves to the phase of building a consensus on a realistic basis and creating a solid social narrative around it before implementation.

You may be surprised to find that you have the power to get this process moving by voting against those who dupe you and for those who cross you. In other words, all you need is a little bit of patience and a somewhat extended memory that reminds you of what happened this year until next April, at least. Self-empowerment is the beginning of solving the half-priced tuition issue.