Speaking on Friday at the University of Michigan, President Obama declared, “I want this to be a big, bold, generous country where everybody gets a fair shot, everybody is doing their fair share, everybody is playing by the same set of rules. That’s the America I know. That’s the American I want to keep. That’s the future within our reach.” How did the President propose to achieve his goal? The wrong kind of federal intervention into higher education with the goal of bringing down the cost of attending college. The …
Once upon a time, those who favored racial and ethnic preferences in college admissions at least admitted that their goal was to help certain minority applicants who they argued were underrepresented due to a legacy of discrimination and other social ills. This is an appealing and well-meaning goal, even if such government preferences tended to reward a subset of minority students who were not disadvantaged and harm other students who were less well off—and raised a host of other moral and constitutional problems. When the Supreme Court ruled squarely, in …
On Tuesday, Senator Mike Enzi (R–WY) took a stand against the Department of Education’s (DOE) assault on the for-profit college sector, walking out of a hearing on the DOE’s new regulations limiting access to higher education. The new “gainful employment” rule issued by the DOE on June 2 restricts access to student loans for students attending for-profit universities. Enzi noted in a statement released after the hearing: Many of these affected schools provide important training for those who choose to become mechanics, plumbers and electricians. This rule uses a heavy …
Of course it’s not surprising news at all: there are many more liberals than conservatives in the universities. But this reality has become an inconvenient truth refusing to stay under the rug. The New York Times reports a finding by University of Virginia social psychology professor Jonathan Haidt: 80% of social psychologists openly admit a liberal preference. Haidt confronted his peers with this disproportion between liberals and conservatives at the Social Psychology conference in San Antonio last month. While any other major disproportions (age, sex, race) in the discipline would …
The Goldwater Institute has released a new report, authored by Dr. Jay Greene of the University of Arkansas and researchers Brian Kisida and Jonathan Mills, examining the “administrative bloat” at America’s colleges and universities. According to the report, Administrative Bloat at American Universities: The Real Reason for High Costs in Higher Education: In U.S. higher education, there have actually been diseconomies of scale. Universities employ more people and spend more money to educate each student even as those universities increase their enrollment. … Between 1993 and 2007, the number of …
“If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.” This is the government’s view of the economy, according to the late President Reagan. The Department of Education (DOE) is clearly using this flawed approach as it pursues regulation of the highly successful for-profit university system. Higher education enrollment increased by 31 percent from 1998 to 2008. During this same period, enrollment at for-profit schools, such as DeVry University and the University of Phoenix, rose a staggering 225 percent. These schools are meeting …
Who was it who said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? According to the Department of Education, the Obama administration’s budget proposes: “$173 billion in loans, grants, tax credits and work-study programs to help students go to college.” But experience has shown that simply increasing federal subsidies for higher education hasn’t solved the college affordability problem. After all, federal spending on student aid has doubled over the past decade, but college tuition costs are higher than ever. Since …
This week, the College Board released its annual report on Trends in College Pricing which found bad news for students and taxpayers. American colleges continue to hike tuition rates to record high levels—well ahead of the consumer price index. At 4-year public institutions, tuition and fees rose by 5.9 percent. At private 4-year (not for profit) colleges, tuition and fee costs rose by 4.4 percent. This year’s increases follow a trend that has lasted for decades with post-secondary education costs skyrocketing at rates well ahead of inflation. Policymakers on Capitol …
Amidst the flurry of programs and initiatives that President Obama announced last night, one particularly unwise one has escaped substantial notice: his call for “America [to] once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world” by 2020. The experience of Britain since 1999 with a very similar goal reveals the fallacies behind this arbitrary and top-down vision. One minor fact evidently escaped Obama’s attention: according to the OECD, the U.S. already has the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. Where it does less well is …
Citizens and public officials earned an F, on average, in the most recent annual report on Civic Literacy, released by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute last week. More than 2,500 randomly selected Americans took the test on Civic Literacy, and more than 1,700 of them failed. The average score was a 49%. More shocking, the average score of elected officials was 44%, meaning that our public officials performed worse than citizens selected at random. Less than 1% of those surveyed (21 of 2,508) earned an A on the test (90% or higher). This report builds …
