Feds Want More Control Over Colleges

ARE YOU SURPRISED? The federal government is worried about higher education. A year ago Education Secretary Margaret Spellings set up a commission, according to Sam Dillon in The New York Times,

to examine access, affordability and accountability, to determine whether colleges were turning out students qualified to compete in the global economy.

You can see her point. The federal government pours billions of dollars into the nation’s colleges and what do they get for it?

Well, now Spellings’ commission has voted on a report in which

[i]t calls for public universities to measure learning with standardized tests, federal monitoring of college quality and sweeping changes in financial aid.

This sounds like No College Student Left Behind. Why not, after the stunning success of No Child Left Behind?

But the truth is that government intervention in education has been a disaster.

It used to be that parents stumped up big money for their children’s education. The poor even starved themselves so that their children would not have to work at the mill or go down the mine. Now parents sit around and complain as their children fail to learn at the compulsory government school.

It used to be that youngsters went to work in their teens, and struggled to get an education at night school. Now they sit around and party.

The fact is that we really don’t know what we want our education system to do. Every generation some group of enthusiasts comes along and demands that the government spends money on their pet educational project. Then they go away and another tranche of cash gets thrown down the education rathole.

But jealous legislators and bureaucratic control freaks also have an agenda. They want control. When they are spending billions on professors and administrators they want accountability. Or at least they want to call the shots.

So every five years or so they come up with another plan to assert bureaucratic control over the sprawling educational establishment.

But what is really needed is to find out what kind of education people would seek out if they were spending their own money. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about whether students “were qualified to compete in the global economy.” You could say, instead: Hey, they got a job don’t they?

If parents and students spent their own money on education then you wouldn’t need expensive commissions and draconian controls.

When people spend their own money, they get the education they pay for, and the government has no business interfering.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.