New Deal Stacked Again

Campus Report ^ | December 19, 2008 | Bethany Stotts

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New Deal Stacked Again

by: Bethany Stotts, December 19, 2008

On December 15, thirty prominent academic associations lobbied Congress for the inclusion of funds for schools in the upcoming economic stimulus bill, adding higher education to other industries looking for federal aid in the midst of the economic turndown. Other businesses calling for government funding include failing newspapers and two Detroit automakers—Chrysler and GM.

Drafted by Molly Corbett Broad, President of the American Council on Education (ACE), the December 15 letter requests that Congress allocate six percent of the upcoming economic stimulus bill to higher education. Suggested expenditures include a new federal block grants program for “ready-to-start” college construction projects, increasing Pell Grants by $700, and doubling the funding for Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant (SEOG) Program from $858 million to $1.87 billion.

The seeds of the coalition’s requests can be found four days earlier in a letter sent by Association of American Universities (AAU) President Robert M. Berdahl to Barack Obama requesting that his administration add approximately $3.7 billion in new funding to his stimulus bill for higher education. Berdahl also requests that Congress “consider the creation of a federal facility that frees up markets for university-issued short-term and construction-related debt, perhaps through extended and additional federal guarantees, underwriting, and insurance.”

Less than $1 billion in Berdahl’s outlined additional funding would go directly to students in the form of federal grants or loans. Most of the requested funds go to science or green-related projects, or, with costs unmentioned, college facility renovation.

Then, on December 16 the Carnegie Corporation placed double-paged ads in The New York Times and Washington Post to directly ask for a much larger sum: $40 to $45 billion.....

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Shut down all public schools that have union teachers. The 'need' will go down and the quality will group.

This is another union polluted industry that needs to go bankrupt.