Why Does College Cost So Much? (in the Motley Fool)

Why Does College Cost So Much?
By Rich Smith
October 29, 2009 | Comments (55)



Two William & Mary professors tackle the "hot-button issue" of the skyrocketing cost of higher education in a new book to be published by Oxford University Press next year. Here, Fool contributor Rich Smith shares the answers he got from his former economics professor David Feldman, co-author of the book with colleague Robert Archibald.

Why does college cost so much? If you have kids in college -- or kids, period -- in America today, the question's more than academic. It can mean having to make a choice between getting your child a college degree or planning a comfortable retirement for yourself.

As college tuition costs soar, a lot of us wonder why. What's wrong with these people that they keep raising prices that are already unaffordable? And what can we do about it? I sat down with Professor Feldman to talk over these issues, and more.

Rich Smith: So, Professor, let's tackle the question head-on -- does college cost too much?

David Feldman: Not "too" much. "So" much. What we've tried to do in this book is go back over the history of the last 60 years and examine college from an aerial view that is rooted in broader U.S. economic history, comparing cost trends in the higher education "industry" to those of other similar industries. We take each of the common arguments against college costs -- that colleges are dysfunctional, that they engage in arms races with their peers, and that give "Country Club U." amenities to their students -- and examine whether they hold water, whether college costs really are rising faster than they should, and if so, why?

Smith: And ...?

Feldman: And what we've found may surprise you: College costs are rising faster than the inflation rate. But that isn't because they're "country clubs" -- it's more because they're "prep schools."

To prepare an undergraduate these days requires a lot more expensive stuff, like high-intensity lasers and big computing resources, than it did in the past. It costs money, sure, but our students demand it because their potential future employers demand it.

Nor is higher education alone in seeing higher costs. Lots of other industries show trends in cost appreciation that mirror those found in higher education, and there are two key reasons for this -- neither of which supports the "country club" critics. If you look at the trends in education costs at not-for-profit four-year colleges, at two-year community colleges, and at for-profit educational institutions like Apollo Group (Nasdaq: APOL), they're virtually identical, up across the board. Yet you don't have the same "gold-plating" at a two-year community college or for-profit institution as critics suggest afflicts four-year, on-campus universities. So clearly, there's something else driving costs upwards.

To understand what's happening, you need to understand that college is a service. As opposed to manufacturing, where labor is just one input in pricing and improvements in productivity generally lead to lower costs, labor is the primary input in service industries like higher education. This makes college especially vulnerable to cost disease ...

Smith: Hold up a sec. "Cost disease?"

Feldman: Right. That's the real culprit behind the rising cost of college. You see, in a labor market, when one worker's wages rise, so do wages for other workers -- because employers compete to attract them. How does this work in higher education? Improvements in productivity can lead to higher wages at firms like Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ). But they also raise wages at colleges that must compete for a limited supply of labor.

The problem lies in the fact that when HP raises wages, it can offset higher labor cost with improvements on its other input costs -- more energy-efficient machinery, better manufacturing processes. As a result, PC prices actually get cheaper every year. Colleges are different because their primary input cost -- labor -- is terribly resistant to productivity improvements.

Example: In 1960, students paid roughly the same for tuition and fees as they did for room and board. Today, you see tuition and fees together exceeding room and board by perhaps two to four times. So tuition has been growing much faster.

Why is this? You can make the teaching process more "efficient" by using Blackboard (Nasdaq: BBBB) software and the like. But generally speaking, every move you make to decrease the amount of time a professor spends with students is viewed not as "improved productivity" but as less personal service.

And so costs rise faster than inflation in any service-intensive industry -- higher education, law, or medicine. This is exacerbated by the fact that ever since the 1980s, workers with college degrees and even higher levels of education have become much more expensive than workers without such degrees. This accelerates the rise in the cost of any industry that uses a lot of this well-educated labor, and directly leads to increased costs for service-oriented industries like higher education.

Smith: So what's your take on last week's news that the government is slashing compensation for executives at AIG (NYSE: AIG), Citigroup (NYSE: C), and the other bailout recipients? Would you expect this to depress wages for university professors, for example, and lower college costs?

Feldman: Actually, no. Remember our aerial view! Compensation in finance has soared relative to compensation in many other industries that use similarly educated people. Ask engineering grads. They'll tell you. What happens in one industry, like finance, is not likely to have a big impact on higher-education wages unless it is part of a much larger market movement toward lower compensation for highly educated workers. I don't see that at present.

Smith: So what is the solution?

Feldman: There really isn't any -- this is a solution in search of a problem. You see, the fact is that the same productivity growth that's pushing education costs up by driving wages higher ... drives wages higher. This provides the income needed to pay the higher costs of higher education.

Our research shows that despite the rapid increase in education's cost, over the long haul, higher wages mean families wind up with more money in real dollar terms after paying the tuition bills.

Smith: Good to know. But let's see if we can help our readers keep even more money. From your vantage point at the college, can you see any "bargains" in higher education? How can parents of soon-to-be-college students best spend their dollars wisely?

Feldman: You can get a fine education at many of the nation's flagship public universities, where tuition remains quite low compared to elite private universities. But remember, list price tuition is paid by a small fraction of students at private universities. Between federal financial aid and discounted tuition that most universities offer on a "need" or "merit" basis, very few students pay the list price.

Smith: Professor, before we close, I'd like to ask if you see the high price of higher education shutting out qualified students. Will the 21st century see U.S.-based companies like Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) starved of talent?

Feldman: It could happen. While our research shows that a rise in the cost of higher education is not a problem on the whole, it is a problem in certain instances -- namely in how it discourages poorer students from seeking a higher education.

Over the past 30 years, income in the U.S. has become increasingly polarized. More people are becoming very rich -- and more very poor. The hollowing of the middle class is an even bigger affordability issue than cost disease. But we believe that a few common-sense changes to how we distribute financial aid could make real progress towards making college more accessible to those who need it most.

Start with the FAFSA application for federal student aid, which all students seeking Pell Grants much fill out. Currently, students must fill out and submit a FAFSA indicating their income and assets, then apply to colleges, and then find out how much financial aid they qualify for. It's absurd to require students to apply to colleges before they know which colleges they can afford.

Second, the government can improve access to higher education and reduce the price of it (not the cost, mind you, but the price students pay directly) by increasing financial aid. We realize that increased government spending is not a popular subject these days, but if legislators were to offer a universal, standard stipend -- and make this the standard student financial aid package -- this could gain broad support and improve access to higher education across society.

Such financial aid, by the way, would be only an incremental increase over the substantial, but extremely disorganized, system of federal programs that currently exists. As such, it would not cost much more than we are already spending on financial aid. In fact, Prof. Archibald and I have developed new evidence suggesting that increases in federal financial aid lower the list price tuition. It could be that extra federal aid reduces each school's need to discount tuition for its own needy students, and this allows the school to cut the list price tuition faced by everyone else.

The changes we suggest in the federal financial aid system would not cost much more than the current system -- really, they would just make it more straightforward, easier to understand, and more reliable for the students.

What do you think about the cost of college, and how are you handling it?

Sometimes, Putting on a Happy Face Does a Disservice to Reality

This is a very powerful piece on poverty and society with a very different twist.



November 2, 2009 by Teresa Basich from her her blog , Overcommunicated
Breaking through the noise.


Update: After receiving some feedback about this post coming off as whiny and entitled, I want to clarify a few things. I didn’t bring up my inability to buy an iPhone or expensive body wash to shine a light on “Poor Little T”–I made those points to show that I *feel* the quality of my life has diminished; things that I used to be able to afford without question now qualify as investments I have to mull over. Seeing and feeling the quality of your life diminish is a bad and scary thing, no matter who you are. I think a heightened sense of awareness to change in quality of life is common in those of us who’ve lost our jobs, and it bears recognizing. Honestly, I bet we all are a little more aware right now. And I’m sure it’s especially obvious, and infinitely scarier, to job seekers taking care of children and spouses, and I know they have a harder road to walk down than I do. I get that.

The face of poverty and financial hardship isn’t just the face of a starving child in Africa. Am I discounting the validity of supporting children in Africa? Not at all! We all deserve fair and good treatment. But, fair and good treatment is becoming less and less prevalent in the US, and if we don’t recognize where we’re heading we won’t be able to stop our momentum before it’s too late. THAT is my point.

I in no way meant to display any sense of entitlement here other than the entitlement we as humans have to a life we each subjectively define as good, fair and abundant.

—-

No snark. No wit. Just numbers. And anger.

The 2009 poverty line, stated to be an individual’s or family’s pre-tax annual income, for a single person living in one of the 48 contiguous US states is $10,830.

California awarded me unemployment benefits of approximately $11,500 for a year. My weekly award is the maximum a jobless individual can receive from the state.

But, I’m not receiving regular unemployment right now. Because of the inadequacy of my state’s employment department, because it finds you guilty before proven innocent, I’ve received $470 this year from the state. Even though I paid into this system. Even though this system was created to protect me from severe financial hardship.

Read this. Then come back so we can talk about it, because we’ve been sweeping the implications of rising unemployment under the rug for too long and I’ve had it with the bullshit cover-ups.

You know what stuck out to me in this piece? The inadequacy of our current means of poverty measurement and the potential alternative forms of measurement we could be using to better gauge what poverty really means—specifically, the alternative that measures not only material hardship but “…to what extent that hardship blocks full participation in society.”

Financial hardship blocks full participation in society.

How many of your friends and family are struggling with financial hardship right now due to unemployment, furloughs or reduced pay? Are you struggling?

Have you thought about what that financial hardship has done to their or your ability to engage with society?

And, related, have you taken the time to consider the completely outlandish distribution of money in this country?

Does all this make you angry? Does it make you want to FIX things?

It should.

But the funny thing is here we are, still trying to follow the same business strategies that got us into this mess, still acting from a greedy and self-absorbed place, still being narrow-minded and decidedly ignorant about what the future holds if we keep going down this road.

What the hell is it going to take to get us to change?!

In my current situation I can’t really participate in society. I haven’t been able to for about 6 months. When I do, now, it’s because some gracious individual stepped in to make it possible. And it’s SO invigorating that when I go back to non-participation, to living in limbo, it’s like I had the breath knocked out of me…and I can’t seem to get enough breath to bring me back to good.

My luxury item is coffee twice a week. That iPhone I wanted? Yeah, that was a joke. I used to buy this fantastic body wash from Lush—haven’t purchased it in a year. Those slacks my mom helped me buy for MPDM? I didn’t wear ‘em, so they’re going back to the store this week. I need that money to help pay my car insurance.

And I consider myself lucky. I have a family willing to help me.

Do you guys GET this? Do you understand what all this means? This problem of non-participation and real, increasing levels of poverty that keep us from CONSUMING will perpetuate for as long as we ignore what’s caused it—working and living from a place of greed and covering up the truths of what that’s done to people.

Don’t ask me to cheer up or make the best of my situation. I do that often enough. Don’t tell me it’ll all be okay. Let me cry for a bit and show people what the frustration of financial hardship and a year of job searching really look like. Constantly covering up these issues doesn’t motivate us to work to fix them; it just lets us ignore their existence. And the more we continue to ignore, the worse life and business and this world will get

Think about what you’ve sacrificed this year and let yourself be mad about it. You don’t have to cover up all the time what’s happened to your life this past year.

Masks are made to be temporary, and we, as a nation, have worn the “Everything is Okay, This is Just a Phase” mask for way too long. Only when we recognize how far we’ve fallen and where we’ve landed can we plot an effective course back to the top.

About one in eight girls at Robeson High School are pregnant. Officials say a variety of factors are to blame.

We obviously are letting our kids down. What are the answers?
------------------------------------------------------

Why Did 1 Of 8 Girls Get Pregnant At Robeson High?
Officials Say A Mix Of Factors Are To Blame, As They Try To Help The Young Women

CBS 2's Kristyn Hartman reports.

All those young ladies are moms or moms-to-be at Paul Robeson High School. It's not a school for young mothers, it's a neighborhood school. And all of the pregnancies have happened, despite prevention talk.

If you want to know why, the people closest to the situation say there's no simple explanation.

Chicago Public Schools says it does not track the overall number of teen moms in the district. But Robeson Principal Gerald Morrow knows the count at his school in Englewood: 115 young ladies who are either expecting or already have had children.

To put it in perspective, their school pictures would fill roughly six pages of their high school year book.

Why is it happening at Robeson?

"It can be a lot of things that are happening in the home or not happening in the home, if you will," Morrow said. Absentee fathers are another factor, he said.

LaDonna Denson and two other Robeson students say parents not talking to teens and, in some cases, the pursuit of public assistance also factor into the pregnancies. None of them thought they'd be moms at such a young age.

They said they have support at home. But not all girls do, they said. In fact, some girls get thrown out of the home.

Not on Morrow's turf. "We're not looking at them like 'Ooh you made a mistake,'" he said. "We're looking at how we can get them to the next phase, how can we still get them thinking about graduation?"

So there's help in a teen parent program. And coming soon, right across from Robeson, developers are turning a one-time crack house into a day care for student use. "We have to provide some type of environment for them and some form of support for them," Van Vincent, CEO of VLV Development, said.

It's all made an impression.

"Just cause you have a baby, that doesn't mean your life is over," one student said.

One thing they might not know about their principal: His mom had him when she was 15. That's why accepting the problem -- and working through it -- is so important to him.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

Nixon's plan of 71 and Obama's plan of today-similar?

Article written by Jim Toedtman, editor of the AARP Bulletin in October issue.

“A sweeping new program,” President Richard M. Nixon called it when he introduced his bold national health plan in 1971. “One that builds on the strengths of the present system, and one that does not destroy these strengths. One based on partnership, not paternalism.”

Nixon’s plan required employers to provide health care insurance for their employees. It provided federal subsidies for the poor and created rural health clinics and a network of state committees to set industry standards, guarantee basic coverage and coordinate insurance for the self-employed. In the process, it would have extended health care coverage to almost all Americans.

The late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, author of his own national plan, led the critics. “It’s really a partnership between the administration and insurance companies,” he raged. “It’s not a partnership between patients and doctors of this nation.”

That was then. On reflection, Kennedy came to view the Nixon proposal as a missed opportunity. “We should have jumped on that,” he told the Boston Globe earlier this year. In the years since Democrats rejected Nixon’s “sweeping new program,” battle lines have hardened and the partisan breach has widened. And costs have soared. When Nixon proposed his plan, health care spending accounted for less than $100 billion, 7 percent of the $1.4 trillion U.S. economy. Today, it accounts for $2.3 trillion, approximately 17 percent of the economy. And the number of uninsured has nearly doubled—to 46.7 million last year.

Republicans have championed the free market as the key to reform. They stymied the last major overhaul effort 16 years ago. With the help of the drug industry and AARP, they expanded Medicare with a prescription drug plan. They created tax-free health savings accounts (and named them after Republican chairmen of the House Ways and Means Committee). As recently as April, House Republicans voted overwhelmingly to convert Medicare into a system of vouchers that future retirees could use to purchase private insurance. And they seem to have set their sights on scuttling President Obama’s health care initiative.

Democrats, just as stridently, have pursued successive iterations of Kennedy’s original, federally funded and regulated plan. The Clinton administration’s public and private plan, hatched in private and in suffocating detail, collapsed.

Today, with control of Congress and the White House, Democrats are advancing Obama’s plan, a combination of private, employer-provided and individual-based coverage and care. It’s striking how closely that resembles the plan outlined by Nixon four decades ago.

There’s a lesson here, and an important one that Kennedy learned four decades too late: Don’t allow partisanship and ideology to blind you to opportunity. But who in the nation’s all but dysfunctional capital has learned Kennedy’s lesson? Who has the common sense and the willingness to listen? Who will set aside the partisanship that has paralyzed the health care debate? Who will step forward and seize the opportunity before them?

Barack Obama, College Administrator by Victor Hanson

Our commander-in-chief seems to think he’s president of the University of America.

If you are confused by the first nine months of the Obama administration, take solace that there is at least a pattern. The president, you see, thinks America is a university and that he is our campus president. Keep that in mind, and almost everything else makes sense.

Obama went to Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard without much of a break, taught at the University of Chicago, and then surrounded himself with academics, first in his stint at community organizing and then when he went into politics. It shows. In his limited experience, those who went to Yale or Harvard are special people, and the Ivy League environment has been replicated in the culture of the White House.

Note how baffled the administration is by sinking polls, tea parties, town halls, and, in general, “them” — the vast middle class, which, as we learned during the campaign, clings to guns and Bibles, and which has now been written off as blinkered, racist, and xenophobic. The earlier characterization of rural Pennsylvania has been expanded to include all of Middle America.

For many in the academic community who have not worked with their hands, run businesses, or ventured far off campus, Middle America is an exotic place inhabited by aborigines who bowl, don’t eat arugula, and need to be reminded to inflate their tires. They are an emotional lot, of some value on campus for their ability to “fix” broken things like pipes and windows, but otherwise wisely ignored. Professor Chu, Obama’s energy secretary, summed up the sense of academic disdain that permeates this administration with his recent sniffing about the childish polloi: “The American people . . . just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act.” Earlier, remember, Dr. Chu had scoffed from his perch that California farms were environmentally unsound and would soon disappear altogether, “We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.”

It is the role of the university, from a proper distance, to help them, by making sophisticated, selfless decisions on health care and the environment that the unwashed cannot grasp are really in their own interest — deluded as they are by Wal-Mart consumerism, Elmer Gantry evangelicalism, and Sarah Palin momism. The tragic burden of an academic is to help the oppressed, but blind, majority.

In the world of the university, a Van Jones — fake name, fake accent, fake underclass pedigree, fake almost everything — is a dime a dozen. Ward Churchill fabricated everything from his degree to his ancestry, and was given tenure, high pay, and awards for his beads, buckskin, and Native American–like locks. The “authentic” outbursts of Van Jones about white polluters and white mass-murderers are standard campus fare. In universities, such over-the-top rhetoric and pseudo-Marxist histrionics are simply career moves, used to scare timid academics and win release time, faculty-adjudicated grants, or exemption from normal tenure scrutiny. Skip Gates’s fussy little theatrical fit at a Middle American was not his first and will not be his last.

Obama did not vet Jones before hiring him because he saw nothing unusual (much less offensive) about him, in the way that Bill Ayers likewise was typical, not an aberration, on a campus. Just as there are few conservatives, so too there are felt to be few who should be considered radicals in universities. Instead everyone is considered properly left, and even fringe expressions are considered normal calibrations within a shared spectrum. The proper question is not “Why are there so many extremists in the administration?” but rather “What’s so extreme?”

Some people are surprised that the administration is hardly transparent and, in fact, downright intolerant of dissent. Critics are slurred as racists and Nazis — usually without the fingerprints of those who orchestrated the smear campaign from higher up. The NEA seems to want to dish out federal money to “artists” on the basis of liberal obsequiousness. The president tells the nation that his wonderful programs are met with distortion and right-wing lies, and that the time for talking is over — no more partisan, divisive bickering in endless debate.

That reluctance to engage in truly diverse argumentation again reveals the influence of the academic world on Team Obama. We can have an Eric Holder–type “conversation” (a good campusese word), but only if held on the basis of the attorney general’s one-way notion of racial redress.

On most campuses, referenda in the academic senate (“votes of conscience”) on gay marriage or the war in Iraq are as lopsided as Saddam’s old plebiscites. Speech codes curb free expression. Groupthink is the norm. Dissent on tenure decisions, questioning of diversity, or skepticism about the devolution in the definition of sexual harassment — all that can be met with defamation. The wolf cry of “racist” is a standard careerist gambit. Given the exalted liberal ends, why quibble over the means?

Some wonder where Obama got the idea that constant exposure results in persuasion. But that too comes from the talk-is-everything mindset of a university president. Faculties are swamped with memos from deans, provosts, and presidents, reiterating their own “commitment to diversity,” reminding how they would not “tolerate hate speech,” and in general blathering about the “campus community.” University administrators instruct faculty on everything from getting a flu shot, to covering up when coughing, to how to make a syllabus and avoid incorrect words.


Usually the frequency of such communiqués spikes when administrators are looking for a jobelsewhere and want to establish a fresh paper trail so that their potential new employers can be reminded of their ongoing progressive credentials.

Obama has simply emulated the worldview and style of a college administrator. So he thinks that reframing the same old empty banalities with new rhetorical flourishes and signs of fresh commitment and empathy will automatically result in new faculty converts. There is no there there in health-care reform, but opponents can be either bullied, shamed, or mesmerized into thinking there is.

Czars are a university favorite. Among the frequent topics of the daily university executive communiqués are the formulaic “My team now includes . . . ,” “I have just appointed . . . ,” “Under my direction . . . ” (that first-person overload is, of course, another Obama characteristic), followed by announcement of a new “special” appointment: “special assistant to the president for diversity,” “acting assistant provost for community affairs and external relations,” “associate dean for curriculum enhancement and development.”

Most of these tasks are either unnecessary or amply covered by existing faculty, department chairs, and deans. Czars, however, proliferated on campuses for fairly obvious reasons. First, they are spotlights illuminating the university administration’s commitment to a particular fashionable cause by the showy creation of a high-profile, highly remunerative new job. When loud protests meet the university’s inability to create a new department or fund a trendy but costly special program, administrators often take their loudest critics and make them czars — satisfying the “base” without substantial policy changes.

Second, czars are a way to circumvent the usual workings of the university, especially faculty committees in which there is an outside chance of some marginalized conservative voting against putting “Race, Class, and Gender in the Latina Cinema” into the general-education curriculum.

Special assistants for and associates of something or other are not vetted. Czars create an alternative university administration that can create special billets, hire adjuncts (with de facto security), and obtain budgeting without faculty oversight. The special assistant or associate rarely is hired through a normal search process open to the campus community, but rather is simply selected and promoted by administrative fiat.

One of the most disturbing characteristics of the new administration is a particular sort of whining or petulance. Dissatisfaction arises over even favorable press coverage — as we saw last weekend, when Obama serially trashed the obsequious media that he had hogged all day.

Feelings of being underappreciated by the public for all one’s self-sacrificial efforts are common university traits. We’ve seen in the past a certain love/hate relationship of Professor Obama with wealthy people — at first a Tony Rezko, but now refined and evolved much higher to those on Wall Street that the administration in schizophrenic fashion both damns and worships.

Michelle Obama during the campaign summed up best her husband’s wounded-fawn sense of sacrifice when she said, “Barack is one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics.”

Academic culture also promotes this idea that highly educated professionals deigned to give up their best years for arduous academic work and chose to be above the messy rat race. Although supposedly far better educated, smarter (or rather the “smartest”), and more morally sound than lawyers, CEOs, and doctors, academics gripe that they, unfairly, are far worse paid. And they lack the status that should accrue to those who teach the nation’s youth, correct their papers, and labor over lesson plans. Obama reminded us ad nauseam of all the lucre he passed up on Wall Street in order to return to the noble pursuit of organizing and teaching in Chicago.

In short, campus people have had the bar raised on themselves at every avenue. Suggest to an academic that university pay is not bad for ninth months’ work, often consisting of an actual six to nine hours a week in class, and you will be considered guilty of heresy if not defamation.

University administrators worship private money, and then among themselves scoff at the capitalism that created it. Campus elites, looking at a benefactor, are fascinated how someone — no brighter than they are — made so much money, even as they are repelled by a system that allows those other than themselves to have pulled it off. No wonder that Obama seems enchanted by a Warren Buffett, even as he trashes the very landscape that created Berkshire Hathaway’s riches. No president has raised more money from Wall Street or has given it more protection from accountability — while at the same time demagoguing it as selfish and greedy.

Many of the former Professor Obama’s problems so far hinge on his administration’s inability to judge public opinion, its own self-righteous sense of self, its non-stop sermonizing, and its suspicion of sincere dissent. In other words, the United States is now a campus, we are the students, and Obama is our university president.

-- NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Miranda Warning for the Pledge-What's your reaction

By Allison Pataki in Fox News

Students recite the Pledge of Allegiance in class.

It's a new school year, but an old fight is brewing in American classrooms. Teachers and administrators around the country are scratching their heads once again over the Pledge of Allegiance.

The courts have consistently ruled that students have the right not to recite the pledge in public schools. But now some First Amendmentadvocates are taking it one step further, arguing that the law compels educators to inform kids at the beginning of school that the decision is entirely up to them.

They're advocating a "Miranda warning" for the Pledge -- an administrative notice to students that they have the right to remain silent.

“The Pledge of Allegiance creates a constitutional problem. You have to tell students they can opt out,” the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told FOX News.

New Mexico dealt with this question last month when its education secretary upheld that students are permitted to opt out of the Pledge, but rejected an ACLU-backed amendment that would require schools to inform parents and students that they have the option.

In Florida, schools have tried to resolve uncertainty by announcing a new policy — students don't have to participate, as long as they have a letter from Mom and Dad.


These are just the latest in a litany of challenges to the Pledge and its place in the classroom.

Americans have recited the tribute to the stars and stripes since the oath was written by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister, in 1892. But Bellamy's pledge did not include the words "under God," which were added by Congress in 1954 during the McCarthy era, when Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union — an atheist nation — were high in the United States.

Thirty-six states now have laws requiring that the Pledge of Allegiance be recited daily in public schools. But the oath as it's written does not sit well with some Americans.

“The Pledge doesn’t even state the truth. We are not one nation under God," Lynn said. "I don’t think we should lie to students, and there’s no way we can require them to say it.”

But supporters of the Pledge insist that the words are both constitutional and an important part of our national heritage.

“There has been a recurring effort by the ACLU and others to try to stop the Pledge of Allegiance from being said. The fact of the matter is that the American people like the Pledge of Allegiance, they like it the way it is,” Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the Eagle Forum, told FOXNews.com.

“The teachers are government employees, their paychecks are paid by the taxpayers, and the American people support the Pledge. I’m with the American people,” Schlafly said.

The majority of Americans do, in fact, overwhelmingly support the Pledge of Allegiance in its current form. A FOX News/Opinion Dynamics Poll from November of 2005 showed that 90 percent of Americans approve of the oath. Only 7 percent of people polled said they would change the language of the Pledge, while three percent of Americans were undecided.

The Pledge's popularity aside, the Supreme Court ruled in 1943 that mandating a student to participate in the oath was an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment right to free speech.

Now the ACLU and other critics of the Pledge are taking the dispute a step further — arguing that students, whether they do or don't support the oath, should be told up front that they are not required to recite the words.

They lost the first round in New Mexico last month, when state Education Secretary Veronica Garcia ruled not to change state policy — which requires that the Pledge be recited daily — to inform students of their right to opt out.

"The department believes that the existing rule and practice in schools respects the rights of all students," Garcia said a statement. "Any issues related to rights of students will be handled at the local school district level," the statement read.

New Mexico ACLU Director Peter Simonson protested the ruling, telling the Associated Press, "I think it's a cop-out not to affirmatively state that students have a First Amendment right not to participate in the Pledge." Simonson declined to elaborate when contacted by FOXNews.com.

In Florida, ACLU attorney Randall Marshall successfully argued a case before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in defense of high school student, Cameron Frazier, who abstained from reciting the Pledge because of “personal political beliefs” and, according to the lawsuit, was “singled out and humiliated” by his teacher.

“We made the case that students must be informed that they are not required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance,” Marshall told FOXNews.com.

"It’s not a challenge to the content of the Pledge. Only that students be informed that they are not required to recite it."

The Children of 9/11 Grow Up by Peggy Noonan

OPINION: DECLARATIONSSEPTEMBER 11, 2009
The Children of 9/11 Grow Up
College students talk about how the attack shaped their lives.
By PEGGY NOONAN

It is eight years since 9/11, and here is an unexpected stage of grief: fear that the ache will go away. I don't suppose it ever will, but grieving has gradations, and "horror" becomes "absorbed sadness." Life moves on, and wants to move on, which is painful for those who will not forget and cannot be comforted. Part of the spookiness of life, part of its power to disorient us, is not only that people die, that they slip below the waves, but that the waves close above them so quickly, the sea so quickly looks the same.

I've been thinking about those who were children on 9/11, not little ones who were shielded but those who were 10 and 12, old enough to understand that something dreadful had happened but young enough still to be in childhood. A young man who was 14 the day of the attacks told me recently that there's an unspoken taboo among the young people of New York: They don't talk about it, ever. They don't want to say, "Oh boo hoo, it was awful." They don't want to dwell. They shrug it off when it comes up. They change the subject.

This week, in a conversation with college students at an eastern university, I brought it up. Seven students politely shared some of their memories. I invited them to tell me more the next morning, and was surprised when six of the seven showed up. This is what I learned:

They've been marked by 9/11 more than they know. It was their first moment of historical consciousness. Before that day, they didn't know what history was; after that day, they knew they were in it.

It was a life-splitting event. Before it they were carefree, after they were careful. A 20-year-old junior told me that after 9/11, "a backpack on a subway was no longer a backpack," and a crowded theater was "a source for concern." Every one of them used the word "bubble": the protected bubble of their childhood "popped." And all of them said they spent 9/11 and the days after glued to the television, watching over and over again the footage—the north tower being hit by the plane, the fireball. The video of 9/11 has firmly and ineradicably entered their brains. Which is to say their first visual memory of America, or their first media memory, was of its towers falling down.

I'd never fully realized this: 9/11 was for America's kids exactly what Nov. 22, 1963, was for their parents and uncles and aunts. They were at school. Suddenly there were rumors in the hall and teachers speaking in hushed tones. You passed an open classroom and saw a teacher sobbing. Then the principal came on the public-address system and said something very bad had happened. Shocked parents began to pick kids up. Everyone went home and watched TV all day, and the next.

***
Simon, a 20-year-old college junior, was a 12-year-old seventh-grader at a public school in Baltimore. He said: "It's first-period science, and the teacher next door, who was known to play jokes on other teachers, comes in completely stone-faced and says a plane has hit the World Trade Center, and no one believes him." Simon didn't know what to believe but remembered reading that in 1945 a plane had struck the Empire State Building, and "the building stayed up," so he didn't worry too much.

"At lunch time the vice principal comes up and he explains that two planes had hit the World Trade Center and one had hit the Pentagon and the World Trade Center was gone, and I never—when you have your mouth agape it's never for anything important, but I remember having my mouth agape for a minute or two in complete and utter shock. I went to my art period and I remember my art teacher sitting there with her hands on her face just bawling, she was so frightened. My mom picked me up, and I remember walking with her, and I'm saying 'This is Pearl Harbor.'"

Nine-eleven, he felt, changed everything for his generation. "It completely destroyed our sense of invincibility—maybe that's not the right word. I would say it made everything real to a 12-year-old. It showed the world could be a dangerous place when for my generation that was never the case. My generation had no Soviet Union, no war against fascism, we never had any threats. I was born when the Berlin Wall came down. It destroyed the sense of carefree innocence that we had."

***
Juliette, also 20 and a junior, was in eighth grade in Great Falls, Va. "I think the kids were shocked," she said. "The major question was how could this happen, who would do that—like, how does something so crazy happen? What I had is a sense that it was going to be one of those days of which 30 years down the road, people would ask me, What were you doing on that day, where were you on 9/11?—that my children would ask me. And so I set myself to remembering the details."

I told her that it is interesting to me that no great art has yet come from 9/11. The reason may be that adults absorbed what had happened, and because we had absorbed it, we did not have to transmute it into art. Maybe when you are still absorbing, or cannot absorb, that's when art happens. Maybe your generation will do it, I said.

She considered this. "There's always the odds that something much more horrible will happen that will really shake us out of our torpor, that will wake us up," she said.

***
The attack was not only an American event. Robbie, an 18-year-old freshman, was 10 and in primary school in England. "We were near the end of school. There were murmurs from teachers about something happening. I remember going back home, and my mum had both televisions on with different news channels. I remember the tower and the pillar of smoke. The big pillar of smoke was very vivid to me, and my mother trying to explain the seriousness of it. I think 9/11 brought us bang slap into the 21st century. I remember when the millennium came people said 'new time, new world,' but 9/11 was the 'new time, new world.' I understood it was something big, something that changed the world."

Then he told me that after we had talked the previous evening, he'd had a dream. "I was back in my old school in England, and in front of me I could see the city of Bristol, nothing distinct, but big towers, big buildings. And I could see them crumbling and falling. There was a collective fear, not just from myself but amongst everyone in the dream. I remember calling in the dream my mum, and saying 'Are you safe, are you safe?' I think this perhaps shows that after 9/11 . . . as a small child you felt safe, but after 9/11, I don't think I personally will ever feel 100% safe. . . . I think the dream demonstrates—I think the dream contained my hidden feelings, my consciousness."

He remembered after 9/11 those who rose up to fight terrorism. Even as a child he was moved by them. There are always in history so many such people, he said. It is always the great reason for hope.