Our view paying for college: To stretch education dollars, cut out the middleman

USA Today Opinion:

Obama seeks student aid hike, falls short on cost control.
To look at higher education these days, it seems that no one cares about financially strapped students.
On the one hand, colleges have long been raising tuition at a rate faster than the cost of living. On the other, lenders have treated families’ increased borrowing needs as an invitation to easy profits.
To address this, President Obama wants to expand federal Pell Grants for low- and middle-income students. The expansion would be financed by ending the private, scandal-plagued Federal Family Education Loan Program and replacing it with direct government lending.
The obvious question is: Will all this actually make college more affordable? In the past, universities have driven up costs through lavish building, money-losing sports, swelling bureaucracies and a tolerance of professors who barely teach. Simply throwing more money at them isn’t going to prompt necessary belt-tightening.

5 thoughts on “Our view paying for college: To stretch education dollars, cut out the middleman”

  1. With direct financial control will come direct usage and condition control. How will religious schools be handled? Forced community service in exchange for tuition? Money for subjects the government thinks are important and not for others?
    I remember Labor Secretary Robert Reich from the last decade. He was talking about jobs and schooling. I paraphrase, but it went something like this. “Suppose we have a situation where the government determines there are too many hairdressers in a particular area, yet many are still going to school to be a hair stylist”. His last quote, and I remember it well, was, “we cannot allow that to happen any more.”
    Some people see nothing wrong with this kind of thinking. It scares the hell out of me.

  2. To answer Reed: Direct aid to students from the government does not limit the number of hairdressers, only the number of hairdressers that the government is going to aid with a loan.
    However, though none of us likes the idea that those with the money have the right (power?) to determine what the money is used for, at the same time, we demand that the money (our tax dollars) not be wasted — “pork”, bank bailouts, welfare (corporate and otherwise) — instead used for good policy purposes.
    Senator Proxmire made quite a name for himself with his “Golden Fleece” awards highlighting “wasteful” spending — but wasteful in his view. The same arguments were made and echoed regarding the Recovery act spending programs that were funded. I think Senator McCain made some criticism of proposed research on pig oder. There are detractors of money spent for the space program, the space station, money for stem cell research, military spending, foreign aid, money to the IMF, money spent supporting the UN, research on any number of topics which others (and I) might classify the same as “pig oder”.
    There is now little financial support for K-16 programs in history, literature, poetry, foreign languages, music, the arts, etc — you know, anything not tested or testable under NAEP, or TIMSS (the only knowledge of import is science and math?).
    We demand that the government only spend its (our resources) on things that are important and not for things that are unimportant. And, it cannot do so without the government making the determination of what is important and not important.
    Reeds statement that “It scares the hell out of me” that the government can make these policy decisions, which I have argued is precisely what we expect and demand of government when spending our tax money, crosses the line into the delusional.

  3. If I told you 25 years ago the government would ban smoking in a bar, you would have called me delusional. Same with an honor student being expelled for accidentally bringing a butter knife to school, or the government taking control of the car companies and banks, or being ticketed for not wearing a seat belt, or my son seeing Al Gore’s global warming flic 4 times in school in the last 2 years, etc.,etc.,etc..
    My point was that I fear a government education czar determining jobs needed in the economy and then distributing student loans based on what they see in their crystal ball. It has to do with basic freedoms.

  4. Here’s a quote from Robert Reich, advocating that if you incur student debt, you should only pay 10% of your pay for 10 years, even if that is not enough to pay off the loan. The graduate who makes a lot of money will pay 10% for 10 years, even if it is more than the loan.
    “So here’s an idea: Make repayment of government-subsidized loans depend on how much money they earn. Say everyone has to pay 10 percent of their income for the first 10 years of their fulltime work. And then the loans are considered paid off.
    My student who’s landed that private-equity job would pay 10 percent of his income for 10 years, which would be a hefty sum. My students who go into social work or become artists would pay 10 percent of theirs, which would be far less. The private-equity guy would, in effect, subsidize the social worker and the artist. And why not? This way all of them could follow their callings.”
    and I’m delusional?
    http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/05/16/student_loans_on_a_graduated_scale/

  5. Yes, Reed, you’re delusional.
    You simply cannot successfully argue, as you did in your first comment, against the process in which those who pay get to determine what the money is used for, and if it’s a loan, what constitutes repayment, for example.
    You or I may disagree with how priorities are set, and how the government balances interests, but that they can and in fact must do so is beyond debate.
    That a school can suspend a student for carrying a butter knife as though it were a weapon (actually a sharpened lead pencil is more of a weapon — especially if a #3), or, as in recent case before the US Supreme Court, a girl can be strip-searched for carrying extra-strength aspirin (alleged by another student), goes well beyond stupidity in my view.
    The fact that we, as citizens, allow these priorities and power to be so misbalanced by decision makers, is a substantive issue, and not one of legitimacy of decision making process itself.

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