The Next Government Grab – Higher Education

While Egypt and Syria are falling apart and our economy continues in a malaise of tepid growth, I guess the best thing to do, if you don’t like governing, is to change the subject. That is exactly what President Obama did this past week. He did what he likes to do, take vacations, play golf, and go on campaign trips and give speeches that inspire selected audiences and tells them what they want to hear.

For the last 5 years he has been telling college students how his financing programs would make college more affordable. You recall that he push through a $1trillion student loan program for which the U.S. tax-payer is the guarantor. Now he does a 180 degree turn and tells them that our economy can’t afford a trillion in outstanding student loan debt. His solution is for the federal government to rate colleges on their effectiveness and efficiency and then, as an incentive, allocate federal subsidies to those schools that Washington believes is providing the best education at the lowest cost.

How is that for irony? The federal government should look in the mirror before it rates anyone on effectiveness and efficiency, when you consider its track record! Why can’t the professional academics, parents, and students decide on the best universities to attend? The rise in tuition costs since 1965 is a direct result of the federal subsidy machine of tax-payer guarantor student loans and federal grants and loans to colleges which caused them to increase staff, salaries, and curriculum. This is what always happens when the government starts to provide incentives. The price goes up. Since 1983 tuition and fees have risen by 257% while family incomes advanced 16%.

We should think hard and long before allowing the Federal government to dominate our system of higher education. Like Obamacare, this is just another step toward statism; when government influences what is taught and how colleges spend their money. There is no place for this in our society and it sounds more like what Hitler or Lenin would do. How would conservative universities compete with lefty schools with this administration?

The best approach is to stop the increase in grants and subsidized loans that Obama has greatly accelerated.  Instead of “tinkering” with a system of higher education that is second to none in the world; a system that thousands of foreign students flee to every year to get the best education they can. We have enough college grads and can’t even find jobs for them right now.

 The federal government should get out of higher education. As much as those lefty professors abhor the idea of a free market, I bet they go ballistic at the thought of politicians running their universities.