Federal Funding and Regulations on Campus?
July 21st, 2006 by Paul BurksYesterday the Democratic Leadership Council unveiled a plan for higher education that will cost taxpayers $150billion and will hold schools and students accountable to Washington. As Neil McCluskey of explains in an article posted at Cato, politicians want votes, professors and administrators want more money and prestige, and students want to pay less tuition, leading to an easy “solution†to problems in higher education that sends a lot of money through broad spending programs to a lot of people. Yet, as an editorial in the Washington Times point out, voters believe that more than half of every dollar the government collects is wasted and they want something in return for their taxes. This opens the door to new regulations imposed by the government in the name of accountability, threatening the independence that has made American higher education the envy of the world. Just imagine a bureaucrat from the education department trying to tell a Ph.D. what to study, and telling college presidents what buildings to build.
July 21st, 2006 at 8:14 pm
Paul;
So what’s the alternative? I spent a few years in public higher education and money was always tight for both me (I have a community college degree) and my two institutions.
Just posing the eventual question. . .
July 22nd, 2006 at 11:29 am
Paul;
I’m going to take the liberty of expanding and revising my remarks - having read the Democrat Leadership Council (DLC) policy paper after the CATO article on the flaws of higher education policy (such as the cycle of tuition relief request - tuition aid - increase tuition to get more money - tuition relief request). The DLC has proposed along with consolidating tax relief for higher education, “truth-in-tuition by setting multi-year tuition and fee levels so incoming freshmen know how much 4 years of college will cost” and requiring states to “agree to maintain current higher education spending, hold tuition increases to the overall inflation rate, and spend the funds on two purposes — making college more affordable and increasing the number of graduates”.
In theory, the DLC is right on. The Democratic Leadership Council also proposes to pay for this new program, “an independent, non-partisan commission to scrutinize and propose the elimination of wasteful, outdated business subsidies. By presenting its recommendations to Congress for an up-or-down vote, this commission would produce an estimated $200 to $250 billion in savings over 10 years.”
I would tend to think FreedomWorks would rise to the challenge of either a pithy alternative proposal or explain how somehow the DLC proposal will overregulate.
July 29th, 2006 at 11:44 am
Hey, how come my comments haven’t been approved or disapproved yet?