The Feds are Fixing to "Fix" Higher Education

One exasperating thing about discussing my political views is that my statist conspecifics frequently resort immediately to the argument that without government we would have the war of all against all. If I suggest that some government agency is superfluous, I get the whole fear of chaos spiel right out of the chute. The idea that some perceived problem might be permitted to go without a federal governmental solution is so frightening that it brings up visions of warlords and total violent disorder.

I think that the Department of Education is altogether expendable. We did just fine without it up until 1980 when it was established. Now it has 4500 employees and spends $71.5 billion per year. All it does is redistribute money and meddle in local affairs. If it were abolished tomorrow, who, other than the 4500 unemployed bureaucrats and some grant seeking parasites, would miss it?

It seems that the Department of Education doesn’t have enough to do and is now poised to meddle more in post secondary education: http://www.ed.gov/news/pressreleases/2006/09/09262006.html

A third of Americans are getting college degrees now, and the DOE thinks that is not enough. The DOE thinks everybody should go to college and aims to help us pay for school if we are short of funds and prepare for it if we are short of abilities. The DOE thinks it can improve on post secondary education through central planning.

What would happen if DOE didn’t pursue this initiative? Would warlords take over the higher education system? I think not. The “system” seems to be doing fine now without the extra DOE guidance. In my opinion, the DOE has contributed to significant problems in the “system” through meddling, especially via financial aid programs.

When I was born, only about 4% of the population got college degrees. A college degree really meant something in those days. When I entered college in 1976, a beneficiary of a local company’s private scholarship program, some 25% of the population had college degrees. A college diploma signified much less, and it was understood that a graduate or professional degree was wanted to provide the distinction that a bachelor’s degree once did. This increase in enrollment and graduation was accomplished without the DOE but was due in part to government financial aid programs and student loans.

Now one in three Americans is a college graduate, and the cost of a college education has skyrocketed at the same time that the quality of that education has gone down. Graduates are saddled with crippling debt and find that their degrees don’t count for all that much in the job market. They have to have them to get jobs that once required only a high school diploma, and employers know that a pretty stupid person can graduate from a college nowadays. There are lots of schools that make a pretty good buck churning out clueless graduates. Tuition and fees go up astronomically as the demand for college increases and because the costs are deferred, reducing the incentive of students to economize.

This is problematic, but it is a problem that government contributed to, and more government interference is not going to make it better. I suspect that cutting back on student loan programs and the enormous subsidy that this constitutes for higher education would lead to necessary corrections through the application of market forces. These will not be painless, of course, but neither is the current situation without its victims. Ultimately, higher education would become less costly, and lower income students will be able to avail themselves of it without mortgaging their futures.

If intelligence is normally distributed, we might expect that 25% to 33% of the population will be minimally capable of doing college level work. This would be the upper limit of how many of us should go to college, and everyone else would be better off with some other kind of non-academic training. But I would not for the life of me impose my view of things on anyone, and I would be content for folks to pursue their own choices without let or hindrance from me or the DOE. But that would be chaos, wouldn't it?