While I’m late to this party, but argument boils down to this:
Get rid of it, because it hasn’t done any good. There has been no measurable increase in student learning, school improvement, or other social good coming from the Department of Education.
All those federal college loans? Well, they certainly have led to a river of money going into universities. This has definitely pumped the price of school up, but it’s not actually improved anything. We have a buynch of people taking bigger loans to get more education, but it doesn’t seem to actually improve their ultimate success; we can chart that much earlier based on their SAT scores, and their education has very little to do with it in the long run.
In short, it doesn’t really matter what arguments you have to the contrary, because the outcomes are clear. There’s simply no evidence that it has any measurable impact. As a result, it doesn’t matter what nice programs it runs or how good it makes people feel.
It is now an entrenched bureaucracy-and will lobby hard to prevent ANY attack on its funding. It is another monster spawned by the Federal Government-and it lacks any reason to exist-except to purpetuate itself.
Another thing-why not have a committe to evaluate it, and present a ballot question to either keep it or disband it? It costs a lot of money to run it…and with very little results to show for the expenditure of billions/year.
I suspect most reasonable people would call the millions of students who graduate college thanks to the federal student aid programs “a result”.
As for this:
The Federal Constitution doesn’t include a mechanism for closing executive agencies by plebiscite (or for popular referenda generally), is why. What ballot would this question appear in?
I wouldn’t. Not a positive result anyway. Most of the value in having a college degree comes from distinguishing yourself from others. Pushing millions of extra people into college just creates degree inflation and wastes a lot of peoples’ time and money. And saddles hundreds of thousands of young people with billions of dollars of dollars in debt which can never be discharged in bankruptcy.
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I wouldn’t. Not a positive result anyway. Most of the value in having a college degree comes from distinguishing yourself from others. Pushing millions of extra people into college just creates degree inflation and wastes a lot of peoples’ time and money. And saddles hundreds of thousands of young people with billions of dollars of dollars in debt which can never be discharged in bankruptcy.
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The value of a college degree in terms of distinguishing oneself from others comes from its ability to demonstrate that the holder can handle intellectual challenges of a certain rigor (and thus, can handle careers requiring a certain level of intellectual prowess).
Prior to widespread availability of financial aid, that value was limited by the fact that only a certain number of people could afford to obtain a degree, regardless of intellectual ability. Lots of other people who could have completed college were unable to do so because they didn’t have the money.
The massive number of working-class people who were able to graduate college thanks to the GI Bill is obvious proof.
Any “waste” is the result of grade inflation, not the availability of financial aid. That’s not the fault of the Department of Education, because it doesn’t establish curricula for higher education (or at any level). It’s the fault of accrediting organizations for not insisting on a certain level of academic rigor.
Accreditation of higher education institutions is handled on a central level in most countries. In the US, thanks to the limited authority granted to the Department of Education, accreditation is handled by largely unaccountable private organizations (the Secretary of Education “accredits” accrediting agencies, but most were grandfathered in under Title IV of the Higher Education Act).
In other words, the shortcomings you perceive in the Department of Education are at least in part the result of its having too little authority, rather than too much.
I guess you might genuinely feel that education should be for the haves, rather than the have-nots, but I doubt it.
That’s essentially false. Before widespread financial aid, it was possible to “work your way through college” at a minimum wage job. I know it sounds crazy in 2012, but just do the math. For example, in 1950, tuition room and board at the University of Pennsylvania was 740 per year. The minimum wage at that time was .75 per hour. So you could work part time during the year and full time in the summer and work your way through college. And plenty of people did it.
Also, there were still government subsidies at the state and local level. For example, plenty of smart but poor kids went to CCNY and did not pay a dime in tuition or fees.
It’s not unless you assume that everyone who can afford to go to college will do so given the choice. Believe it or not, there was a time when most people went straight to work out of high school and did just fine without a college degree.
Where’s your evidence or argument to back up this assertion?
I think that everyone in the country should be entitled to a basic level of free education, i.e. through high school. After that, higher education should be for the intellectual haves, perhaps the top 15 or 20 percent of the population in intelligence. I don’t object to a government subsidy for education; my objections are to (1) the everyone should go to college idea; and (2) subsidies through student loans and grants which allow greedy colleges to soak up most of the benefits.
ETA: I agree that under the system I envision, children of the rich will have more and better opportunities than everyone else’s children. But this is an inescapable consequence of a capitalist system. Even today, with billions of dollars in funding for education, health care, and everything else, the rich have more and better opportunities than everyone else. I don’t see this as a big problem.
Even if you worked full-time all year, you’d only make $1560 at $0.75 per hour.
I believe it. Unfortunately, that was at a time when most workers didn’t need a college degree. Three times as many Americans (about 10 million) worked on farms in 1950 as today.
Basing an educational system on the 1950s completely ignores the fact that today’s economy and job market are nothing like those of the 1950s. We don’t need 10 million welders and 15 million ditch diggers anymore.
The rest of my post. Where’s your evidence to back up any of your assertions?
I happen to agree that “college for everyone” is a bad idea. However, the states have mostly failed to provide a reasonable basic level of education, and college has become the place where decent students learn the things their high schools didn’t teach them.
But, like today, its the rare person who can work full time and go to school full time at any school, much less Harvard.
My dad was one of those 1960’s era grads who worked his way through school. For most of it, he lived at home with his mother, worked almost full time and went to school full time. And he paid for three daughters to go to school wanting us to work “for pocket money” because he was well aware of how hard it was to pull off.
One of the big changes for a lot of universities between 1950 and now is the age of their facilities. Older buildings are very expensive to maintain and heat. A few colleges have been able to replace older buildings, but some just don’t have the money - construction costs are significantly higher than they were at the turn of the century.
It’s not even necessary to work full time. If you worked 20 hours a week during the school year and 60 hours a week during the summer at a minimum wage job, you would have made $1267 – far more than the total dollars for tuition, room, and board for Penn. Not only that, it’s possible to save a lot of money by crashing on a friend’s couch; eating at the local shelter; staying with your parents; taking your minimum wage job at a restaurant; etc.
By the time you went to school, it was far more difficult to pull off than for your father. And today, it’s completely impossible. If tuition room and board at an Ivy League school is $50k per year, that means you would have to work 6900 hours at the minimum wage to pay it. Actually a bit less since you would presumably get overtime. Still, it’s impossible to work anywhere near that many hours in a year while you are attending school.
I’m extremely skeptical that it costs tons more today (in real dollars) than it did in 1950 to construct and maintain a building. Since 1950, tuition and fees at Penn have increased seven-fold in real dollars. Do you have any evidence that costs to build and maintain buildings has increased anywhere near that much?
It does, in part due to historical buildings and the requirements involved in upkeep. When I was in facilities management we had a $3M project to roof a historic building - and the building wasn’t that big - and that was 20 years ago. The shingles has to be specially constructed. Many of the buildings at the school I went to were constructed around 1910. By 1950 they were only 40 years old and had been electrified in the 1920s. By 1990 we were rerunning electrical, plumbing was failing, windows needed to be replaced - it was the constant battle anyone who has ever lived in an old house has, but with 40 buildings.
Also in 1950 it wasn’t normal to air condition buildings, now its expected.
So I did some Google searches and found this chart which lays out construction costs for single family residences. Adjusted for inflation, there has been a modest increase – like 10% or so – since 1964.
Of course academic buildings are not the same as single family residences. But it’s hard to believe that there isn’t a decent correlation in construction costs between the two.
When Shippensburg University, my alma mater, renovated two adjoining classroom buildings several years ago, the project included upgrades to meet codes for accessibility; improving energy efficiency; safety code upgrades; and hazmat abatement. All this at a cost of $4.8 million just for that piece. (Hereis more information about this project, and here is some information about other college renovations.)
In any event, you don’t compare college construction to residential construction; the closest parallel would be to commercial construction, and even that’s a stretch. Private houses, for example, don’t have to be ADA-compliant, while commercial buildings do, and university buildings especially do. Private houses also don’t have specially-designed rooms for things like science, media, and computer labs; smart classrooms; and commercial food service facilities. In fact, part of the hassle of the Rowland Hall renovations was having to factor media labs into the design and construction, because those required acoustical engineering in addition to the regular kind. Rowland also had to be wired for Internet access, and since the building had never been wired, that had to be taken into account as well.
How much did the entire project cost? What would it have cost in 1950? Over how many years was the project capitalized? What is Shippensburg’s annual budget? Without knowing this information, it’s hard, perhaps impossible, to assess the possible interplay between building costs and tuition.
You do understand, don’t you, that in 1950 academic buildings did not grow on trees, right?
How much does it add to a project to make it ADA-compliant? 5%? 10%? 500%?
And what law says that university buildings need to have “specially-designed rooms,” and have to be “wired for Internet access”? And even assuming these things really are required, how much extra do they cost?
You’re missing the point here. Comparing construction costs to 1950 dollars and today’s dollars is irrelevant because technology changes, the law changes, and university needs change. A building built for $1 million in 1950 wouldn’t be built today because it probably wouldn’t meet modern needs and codes.
This is only relevant if ADA compliance is the only thing being done to the building. But it’s usually not, so those costs are wrapped into the whole project. But I can tell you that ADA compliance can be expensive.
Well, there is the law of supply and demand, for one. Universities that don’t have reasonably modern facilities can’t compete against those that do. No students means no tuition dollars and limited alumni support, among other things. It’s also difficult to attract faculty who can attract grant money if you don’t have the facilities for them to work in.
And there are those pesky safety regulations and best practices, like making sure chemistry labs are properly vented so chemical fumes and gases can’t build up and suffocate people or explode. Y’know, little things like that.
