Posted on 09/04/2013 4:32:43 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
College began across the country last week. Opportunists associated with the higher-education establishment took the occasion to engage in special pleading.
First was the leader of the organization most on the hook for higher ed, the federal government. Last year, the feds dished out $112 billion on student loans, an amount nicely equal to the combined endowments of all eight of the Ivy League universities plus Stanford. Grants to universities for research and other federal higher-ed handouts amounted to another $50 billion. The total is hard to measure, in that all sorts of federal agencies exist to funnel money to universities, from the Education and Energy and Defense Departments to the National Institutes of Health to the National Science Foundation to the National Endowments for the Humanities and the Arts.
President Obama rang in the new academic year with a threat. Unless colleges become more affordable, in particular unless their students stop taking out large (federally supported) loans, they will face the prospect of being ranked by the government in such a way as to shear them of funding.
The thinking is that with the federal government plowing so much cash into higher education, there is no reason for the institutions to refrain from cutting tuition and fees. Except that there is a reason. The more money that students have (via federal loans and so forth), the more the institutions can charge.
This verity is a commonplace, thanks to both simple logic and the labors of economist Richard Vedder over the years. Anyway, it is not clear that President Obama’s heart is in his college-cost curtailment scheme. The president also wants student-loan forgiveness for people who choose government careers—a benefit that cannot be broadly valuable unless student-loan balances are high.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
AUTHOR NOTES:
Up to the second decade of the 20th century, this nation was very marginally educated, in school at least. About 10% of the nation had a high-school diploma circa 1913. A major finding of the World War I draft of 1917-18 was that a large proportion of the nation’s young men were illiterate. Compulsory education, which had made some inroads before, then expanded its reach massively, such that by the 1930s and 1940s the whole nation was being pushed through high school. By the 1950s and 60s, it was on to college.
The correlation with economic growth? Negative. Brute fact stands in the way of associating mass education with economic growth. The pattern goes the other way.
I know a heavy equipment operator that now owns half the town. The dishwasher buys the restaurant. The plumber becomes a developer. The pest control guy hires 15 and is the president of the local Rotary. A college drop out invents a personal computer in his garage that changes the world.
That’s the America Obama wants to kill.
It’s crazy how some advocate for a government grant of rights except where it might be appropriate. If there was ever an industry which cried out for universal coverage, it is law. The government creates and administers everything having to do in the courts (which it controls), yet individuals are expected to pay out of pocket to navigate through a labyrinth of interlocking mumbo-jumbo.
College/University communities will crash at some point. The 6-figure incomes by the commie-bubble inhabitants can’t last. Folks are not going to pay the 5-figure /yr costs once they finally find out the university provosts are making 7-figures like the CEOs they hate, and, the endowments at some are in the billions. Universities keep having more and more dorms and condos built like the economy hasn’t changed.
The lawyers have figured out that the more laws, the more need for lawyers. When the gov't pays both sides, some desk jockey will figure out that the more complicated the law, the easier it will be to ensure that the gov't wins every dispute as it gives the gov't lawyers (both sides being paid by the gov't) more wiggle room to let the gov't win.
Universal legal coverage will mean that the government pays your lawyer to explain to you how to bend over to make it hurt less.
Just as the government wants to limit the amount of money a physician can charge for a procedure, so it should limit the cost per hour for legal services. If you have a right to the services of a physician, you certainly are entitled to a competent “navigator” with respect to dealing with arcane language and indecipherable legal boilerplate.
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