The College Fix

“People are pessimistic and sad,” a 19-year-old law student in Athens told Bloomberg News, as wild dogs fought nearby in a spot frequented by drug dealers and addicts. “The sadness is all around the air.”

To understand what caused Greece’s problems, it helps to examine the country’s higher-education system, which has been brought to the brink of collapse by a curious mix of anti-statist restrictions on law enforcement and uber-statist government handouts.

Greek universities, which are supported by the state, have had their budgets cut nearly 25 percent since 2009. Pay for professors is fixed. There isn’t enough money to heat campus buildings or maintain facilities. According to the same Bloomberg report, stray dogs run rampant on campus, including buildings that are covered in anarchist graffiti.

Campus disorder in Greece dates back to the 1970s, when citizens voted in referendums to bar police from setting foot on university grounds. What a brilliant idea. Of course, those campuses immediately became havens for criminals as a result.

Even now, police can’t enter a higher-education institution unless invited by the administration — something deans are apparently reluctant to do because the police are unpopular with students. Under the Greek system, students actually have power to elect their university deans.

While Greeks resist government authority when it comes to police, they have no problem embracing the government when demanding free services. All Greeks enjoy free tuition, a benefit they actually took the trouble to write into their constitution.

The people of Greece have chosen artificial equality over genuine prosperity and faux security over opportunity. Like other nations that have embraced socialism, they now find that redistribution wasn’t a very good growth strategy for the underclass.

Now that the government teat has run dry, the economically unweaned Greeks are looking elsewhere for sustenance. Bloomberg reports that many students are studying foreign languages in hope of landing work abroad. Youth there are angry, and understandably so. Their parents handed them a bankrupt economy.

But do young Greeks understand why their nation is bankrupt? Somehow I doubt it. Most blame the government, but they have yet to see their culture of entitlement as a problem.

The unemployment rate for 15-to-24-year-olds in Greece is over 50 percent. The jobless rate is above 20 percent for the general population. In the United States, we started to panic when unemployment hit 10 percent. It’s clear the Greeks are facing a crisis on an entirely different level.

The fix may be as much about changing the cultural expectations as it is economic policies. Despite their desperate circumstances, Greeks are still largely resisting the austerity measures and other fundamental economic reforms that are needed.

The Bloomberg story seemed to suggest that investing more government money in higher education is the answer. It quoted Gayle Allard, an economist at IE Business School in Madrid as saying: “For an economy like Italy or Spain or Greece, higher education is a driver for turning yourself into a high-productivity economy. They’ve got to break through this and that’s why education is more important for them than for other countries.”

But Greece’s higher-education participation rate is already above that of Germany, which is faring far better economically. So does it really make sense to say that ensuring more Greek kids graduate from university will solve all of the country’s problems? Isn’t it a waste of resources to provide free tuition to students for whom there are simply not enough jobs?

Jobs come from businesses, not bachelor’s degrees. The government may be able to produce more of the latter, but nothing other than the energy, innovation, and determination of the Greek people can create the former.

To emerge from their economic nightmare, the rising generation of Greeks will have to throw off the mind-set of government dependency that ensnared their parents.

Pericles, perhaps the greatest Greek who ever lived, said this: “Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it.”

This article originally appeared in the International Business Times and is reprinted here with permission. Follow Nathan on Twitter @nathanharden