Last night was magic

I’m a fan girl, which is obvious to anyone who knows me. I have books all the places beside my bed subbing for a nightstand and by my couch subbing for a coffee table…perhaps I should buy more furniture. But last night, one of my childhood dreams came true, I heard Jack Kelly sing about the power of unions.

Summary in brief, Newsies is the best Disney flop of all time. It was my favorite movie and immediately behind that was Dark Crystal  #dontcare. It came out in 1992 (and for those of you doing the math I was about seven) starring Christian Bale or as you know him, Batman. The general story is Batman takes on newspaper barons by organizing the child labor in New York at the turn of the 20^th Century. It is obviously more complex, but at the end of the day it is a feel good story about class war where the underdog wins. The whole thing centers around child labor pre-child labor laws, or most labor laws as we know them, work place injuries and the underclass getting screwed. I am happy to have a screening at my house if anyone doubts the wonder of this movie. The role of women might be the biggest differences between the movie and musical. Essentially, in 1992, the only active women characters were Davey’s sister and Ms. Medda. In the musical, my guess to reflect more diversity not only are there more men of color, it transforms the reporter from Bill Pullman to a girl. We’ve come so far.

I could also talk for a while about the addition of a girl reporter and her relationship to Jack, and essentially the promise of class jumping as a new ending, vs. the movie version where everyone stays in the appropriate class. While there are some flights of fantasy in both the movie and musical, this last one where Jack gets to class jump kind of ruined it for me. Because, I can suspend belief, but no way in hell would the powerful of New York in 1900 give power over to someone who then believes himself their equal and class jumps. They would have rather seen the city burn because the way this works is if we all go back to the place we belong, but I digress. All of this comes from the real life Newsboys Strike of 1899, where I believe a 14 year old boy stop New York by blocking traffic, sounds kind of familiar.

This movie is the first real exposure to the power of collective organizing for a lot of kids (I’m not kidding, I can think of a handful of progressive bloggers, podcasters, etc. who feel the same way, and they are overwhelmingly women—Batman). As babies of the 80s we didn’t get to see the power of unions, only their decline and this from a daughter of two machinists in Ohio where the belief of the good union job is still strong. Notably, this is the first positive representation of unions I can remember receiving from the media, outside of folk songs, which I’m guessing many of my peers weren’t exposed to.

I can’t help but wonder if the resurgence of plays that discuss class hint at something larger. It isn’t just Newsies and Les Miserables that saw a revival; Rent never went out of style. Additionally, Wicked, Chicago, Dirty Dancing (someone explain how this is a stage production), and Annie all have class elements, and those are all coming to Baltimore in the next year.  It was interesting sitting in the Hippodrome, a location that has had some ups and downs. While Baltimore gentrifies there has been a continued push to leave the Hippodrome alone. My friend explained to me that the Hippodrome is the last real theatre left in Baltimore. It is also right off of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and not the best of neighborhoods. So having paid a significant amount, I’m sitting there in a theatre full of disproportionally white, young people in the middle of a predominantly black city watching a musical about class resistance was pretty surreal. I mean, the boys sitting behind me were in designer jackets singing along with a song called “The World will know.” Don’t get me wrong I love the song too, but even as a kid I knew what that song was about and why it was so clever…PUNS!

Of course, this interest in class is seen in books. For example, We were liars, The Girl who Saved the Kind of Sweden, and The Interestings are bestselling, critically acclaimed books I’ve read in the last year that have strong class commentary. How about movies? Anyone see Snowpiercer or any of the Hunger Games films? There has been a strong push for media that address class clearly. You can obviously read into media and see the class implications, but the production of Les Mis I saw, and the movie, emphasized class more than the stage productions had in the past. I mean the closing scene where Jean ValJean goes to heaven, the barricade is there with all those lost to the cause revolution and poverty. Notably, Hugo strongly pushed the redemptive nature of love; meaning to love another person selflessly is to redeem your soul. It comes across in a lot of his work. The movie asserted revolution for the poor counts as redemptive love. That’s not in the play, and maybe not the novel, but it has been a love time since I read that.

I’m going to conclude with a comment on creators and their agendas. I don’t think Disney meant to revive the image of organized labor in anyway, in fact I think they are banking on the nostalgia of my generation. However, I know JK Rowling was writing about Parliament and the relationship with Blair and Bush in Harry Potter. With that knowledge, I want to know what Suzanne Collins was really writing about in The Hunger Games. I want to know what the agendas are behind this new push for discussion of class within media.

A permanent underclass

First, let me begin by saying I’m not dead. I’ve been sick and over-worked for the last week. However, the snow day gave me 14 hours sleep and some relaxation so I feel much better.

Earlier in the week I saw an article by Hope Yen for the Associated Press on the earning a between young adults with and without college degrees, which is the widest it has been in 48 years, and I’d argue that we’re creating a permanent underclass.

Yen argues that this shows the raising value of a college degree despite rising tuition costs, however, I’m not ready to say that instead I’m arguing college degrees are devalued, but not nearly as much as a high school degree. Yen arrived at this conclusion based on census data. The findings state that young adults with only a high school diploma earned 62 percent of the typical salary of college graduates, which is down from 81 percent in 1965 (the earliest year this was calculated).

Additionally, Pew shows increasing economic difficulties for young people without bachelor degree are more likely to live in poverty and be dissatisfied with their jobs. This is seen in a stratification of high and low wage work. According to Paul Taylor, Pew’s executive vice president and co-author of the report, “In today’s knowledge-based economy, the only thing more expensive than getting a college education is not getting one. Young adults see significant economic gains from getting a college degree regardless of the level of student debt they have taken on.”

With the rising costs of tuition resulting in college graduates having large debt and few employment opportunities. Affordable higher education would result in upward mobility for young people, of course there would have to be jobs available. A college degree now yields more earnings (adjusted for inflation), while a high-school diploma is worth less than ever before. The article used an example of college graduates ages 25 to 32 working full time earned $17,500 more annually than employed young adults with a high school diploma, $5,500 and $28,000, respectively. The median earning for high-school graduates fell more than $3,000 from $31,384 to $28,000 between 1965 to 2013.

Now, 22 percent of high-school graduates live in poverty compared to 7 percent in 1979. Taylor continued to say, “Despite their higher levels of college completion, today’s young adults overall are doing no better—and on many key indicators of economic well-being, they’re doing worse—than older generations were doing when they were the same age that Millennials are now. This is mainly because the economic penalties for not for not getting a college degree are so much stiffer now than in the past.”

The report also showed the young employed college graduates are more likely to say their job is a job is a career or a stepping stone then their peers with a high0school diploma. Those with high-school diplomas are three times more likely to consider their work as just a job to get by than college graduates.

GOP’s new strategy: Child labor

I’m not even kidding, ‘Merica. I hear them now, it will save on taxes because more kids will have to drop out of school to work. I read about this from Melissa McEwan and Keith Edwards.

Governor LePage of Maine thinks we aren’t using out most valuable resources, which is apparently the exploitation of young people. LePage says, “We don’t allow children to work until they’re 16, but two years later, when they’re 18, they can go to war and fight for us. That’s causing damage to our economy. I started working far earlier than that, and it didn’t hurt me at all. There is nothing wrong with being a paperboy at 12 years old, or at a store sorting bottles at 12 years old.”

This obliviousness is kind of amazing. LePage says he started working at 11. Maine like every state has specific laws about child labor, in Maine children under 16 have to get a work permit from the superintendent and meet other requirements. The injustice of it all.

Child labor kind of flies in the face of a jobless economy because they can drive down wages because people see children and think minimum wage is fine, which decreases available job for adult and the jobs available can pay less. Additionally, a lot of kids can’t maintain a job and school so they are either constantly tired or don’t have time for school work.

McEwan notes that LePage isn’t the only Republican on this the “tiny fingers better craftsmanship” ticket. He joins Newt Gingrich, Ray Canterbury, and Jack Kingston.  She also notes that this is class war. After all kids who work for pocket money is very different than kids who work to help pay the rent. But I guess this model is the new model:

Class War: Higher Education

Today in class war, Jordan Weissmen for Atlantic Wire has an article on how colleges are charging low-income students more than their wealthy peers. Take a minute for that to ruminate.

The article begins with a fun fact that reads: “If the federal government were to take all of the money it pours into various forms of financial aid each year, it could go ahead and make tuition free, or close to it, for every student at every public college in the country.”

#IHateEverything.

Anyway, back to the article. Weissmen began his article this way because wanted to remind everyone of an article he previously wrote about the money subsidizing expensive tuition at dubious private institutions. He had singled out the for-profit college industry (as many of you know I hate them), which devours federal aid dollars, while charging poor students obscene prices. Weissmen then apologizes to the University of Phoenix and its elk because, wait for it, plenty of non-profit colleges are sucking the system dry too! I’d like to state again, #IHateEverything.

Stephen Burd of the New America Foundation released a report on the state of financial aid in higher education. It shows how the poorest undergrads are asked to pay obscene costs while the same institutions lavish discounts on the children of wealthy families to lure them to campus. It happens at hundreds of institutions. Burd argues that many colleges are playing an “elaborate shell game” relying on federal funds to cover the costs of poor students while using their own funds to provide aid to wealthier undergrads. Burd wrote, “With their relentless pursuit of prestige and revenue, the nation’s public and private four-year colleges and universities are in danger of shutting down what has long been a pathway to the middle class for low-income and working-class students.”

You don’t say. Burd’s paper doesn’t indict the whole higher education establishment, just most of it. The worst offenders are the small, private colleges with meager financial resources, or public schools concentrated in a handful of states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina, which have moved to the “high tuition, high aid” model. The theory is that when state budgets tighten, you can charge wealthy students more and then charge poor students reasonably. Shockingly, this hasn’t worked out well. Burd explains now, it is more common for colleges to hand out aid packages based on “merit” rather than financial need. Anyone know what “merit” is? It is a fluid concept we use to set people apart.

Sometimes, colleges are just competing to outbid each other for star students, but there are economic incentives at play as well. Burd writes, “After all, it’s more profitable for schools to provide four scholarships of $5,000 each to induce affluent students who will be able to pay the balance than it is to provide a single $20,000 grant to one low-income student.”

Burd’s study notes, according to the Department of Education’s more recent study, that 19% of undergrads at four-year colleges received merit aid despite scoring under 700 on the SAT. WTF.

Full disclosure, I received merit aid and aid because I was low-income/working class, but my merit aid increased overtime when I stayed in school and my GPA continued to improve year after year. Additionally, I was sixth in my high school class (a college prep school), and while my SAT score wasn’t great it was about 1300 (this was before they had a writing portion). Cleveland had a scholarship program for low-income residents. They provide you a small amount of aid the first year, and it increases every year you stay in school and your GPA goes up. Eventually, they gave me $10,000 for my final semester (I graduated early to save money). I paid about $500 that semester out of pocket, which by the way was hard to come by. I also have undergraduate loans, which suck. They are nothing compared to my graduate loans with their shitty interest rate, but I’ll be paying all of these for a long time. Twenty years of loan debt is the price of attempting to class jump.

Weissmen notes there isn’t anything wrong with providing tuition breaks to the middle class or the rich, but the problem is that is happening at the expense of the poor. At 89% of the 479 private colleges Burd examined, students from families earning less than $30,000 a year were charged an average of more than $10,000 (this was the “net price” being the full annual cost of attendance minus all the institutional and government aid). It is what a student can expect to pay. At 60% of the private colleges the net price was more than $15,000. So, poor students are asked for more than half of their family income to send them to a private college for a year. This is why my sister dropped out. CSU told her our parents could pay her tuition if they pulled my other sister and me out of school. Obviously, my parents weren’t willing to do that given the state of Cleveland public schools. Additionally, the message it would have sent us as younger siblings. Finally, that wasn’t the deal, our parents paid for private school, we’re on our own for college.

Many of these institutions enrolled large numbers of poor students, with the federal money. Burd noted 287 private colleges where more than one quarter of the student body received federal Pell Grants, which go to low-income and working class families. Weissmen pulls a list from The New York Times which shoes many of the “high-Pell, high-net-price” schools provide generous amounts of merit aid to undergrads. He noted three:

• “At Georgia’s Berry College, 30 percent of students receive Pell Grants, and low-income students pay an average net price of $16,174. Yet 25 percent of its freshmen also receive merit aid, averaging more than $10,000 apiece.
• “At Wabash College in Indiana, 28 percent of students receive Pell Grants, and low-income students pay an average of $15,480. Yet 12 percent of its freshmen get merit aid, averaging $15,393 each.
• “At Case Western Reserve [Ohio!], one of the better known institutions among the high-Pell, high-net-price schools, 23 percent of students receive Pell Grants grants, and low-income undergrads pay $18,381 on average. And yet 19 percent of freshmen also receive merit aid, averaging $18,359 each.”

So schools taking government funds to make college accessible for low-income students, but they are still getting charged extravagantly. While they hand out aid to wealthier students because of high test scores (racist, sexist, classist, etc. test scores) or extra revenue. Weissmen does not that it is possible that these institutions are charging their low-income students less than the data suggests because the net-price takes room and board into account, but a survey by Sallie Mae suggests 40% of four-year private college students live at home. The data suggests that many institutions are undercutting the intent of the Pell program, if not abusing it outright. This problem appears to be less severe at public colleges. About three-quarters of the state schools Burd examines showed low0income students paid a net price of under $10,000. Half of those where they paid more were in eight states where experiments with “high tuition, high aid” model ran wild.

So let’s get Sen. Warren’s plan through for education debt, and then pass education reform that result in free higher education. That way we can just shut this shit-show down.