See Thru Edu is a project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation
Thomas K. Lindsay, Ph.D., Editor in Chief and Director, Center for Higher Education, Texas Public Policy Foundation
Expecting accreditation to prevent students from wasting government grant and loan money on college programs that have minimal value was a blunder. We shouldn’t rely more on accreditation, I suggest that we no longer rely on it at all.
From a policy perspective, the biggest, most billowy red flag is that Rubio does not even mention eliminating, or at least substantially reducing, federal student aid. Heck, it appears he might expand it. But federal student aid is absolutely the primary problem in higher ed!
While our federal student financial assistance programs are not the cause of all that is wrong in higher education, they are a contributing factor. Senator Alexander single-handedly managed to kill off, at least temporarily, the Perkins student loan program by keeping it from coming up for a Senate vote.
In order to fund rising college administrative budgets, not only are students and taxpayers paying more, but many on the faculty are receiving less—through being “adjunctified.”
While many high achieving students have taken AP courses in high school, allowing them to earn college credits, many of these students are not aware that almost the entirety of a college degree can be completed through these exams.
Higher education, with all its rankings and competition, is kind of like a sport. Well now the federal government is going to help us keep score with the College Scorecard, which promises to give all Americans “access to reliable data on every institution of higher education.”
529 plans’ uses should be broader and allow families to save for K-12 expenses and job training expenses after college and graduate school. We should be able to learn and save money in order to improve our skills using a 529 account at any point in our lives.
just because you are small, or even if you are skewed toward wealthier, private institutions, does not mean higher education lobbyists want you to go away. No, all money is good money if spent on “education”!
When six or seven percent of the entire American population is in college, that means a significant reduction in work effort occurs because otherwise highly productive persons in the physical prime of their lives are only lightly utilized in making things or providing services.
We can see the destructive effects of the college-for-all agenda when we look more closely at each of the elements of our higher-education crisis mentioned above—affordability, debt, and poor student learning.
