Student loans enable

My husband’s first teaching job after his MBA was a summer course at a private two-year college in Ohio. It’s probably a good thing I’m not sure of its name; he hated it. Everywhere we went, government helped pay for classes, housing, and even food. Because government paid in grants and loans, colleges encouraged students to apply for as much as aid as they could get. That private two-year college in Ohio had a large percentage of poor students, who could only attend college with financial help. Many of the students were there because they couldn’t get into a more difficult school, or they had problems with discipline or attendance or childcare. The policy was, as long as they pay their bills, you may not flunk them. No matter if they didn’t know the business end of a pencil, you couldn’t flunk them for not being able to write coherently, for not doing any assignments, for not showing up at all ever. Period. If government paid their bills, and they wanted to be students, they were students.

He called it “keeping their -sses in classes”. And yes, he cussed about it. He only stayed for that summer class. We moved across country and he enrolled in a PhD program to get away from it. When he taught at other schools later, he insisted on students being on time and prepared. He was a stickler for turning in assignments and attending class. He put a lot of work into teaching; he bent over backwards to help students who tried. But he would not carry people. He hated the systems that enabled students to borrow far more money than they could ever repay, to get mediocre educations or no education at all.