Having benefited from an excellent primary and secondary education in a 1950’s-1960’s public school system that, even if segregated, still performed its basic functions of requiring students to demonstrate competency in didactic, not cultural, venues, I view the evolution of “public” education over the last forty years with dismay. Yes, many of us from that era were advantaged by parents in the first generation broadly college-educated thanks to the GI Bill and the scientific-technical needs of the post-WWII Pax Americana. Like many I was raised in a household that enjoyed tubes and screens (old fashioned television) but valued books and magazines more. Regular reading provided broad training in vocabulary, grammar, and reasoning. Standards for those three disciplines were set by academics unsullied by induced cultural guilt, not by the consumer. Now it is said that the average newspaper, or news report, is written at a 6th grade reading level. We know, thanks to our federalized education revolution over the last two generations that most high school graduates can’t read at that level. And up to 50% in some areas don’t graduate. Of those that do, a large percentage have substantial absenteeism, but were passed along anyway. The money maker for public school systems (and for colleges and universities) is not student accomplishment, but attendance for state and federal capitation.

That governmental compensation, divorced from any actual accomplishments amongst the student bodies in school systems, always expands within programs and through new programs that most often represent variations on prior failed projects. As noted in a recent WSJ editorial, the federal Department of Education spends $270 billion yearly, with $100 billion spent on K through 12th grades. Much of this is in repetitive or duplicative programs that could be “collapsed” with resultant reductions in overhead, etc. Title 1 grants to states based on poverty levels of students should not be gameable by the states—the variations in cost of living in states is recognized, but a federal standard should be used, and the states not allowed to establish it. Furthermore, any and all programs should be based on demonstrated effectiveness in a short period of time with a reduction in dollars awarded for failure to meet that standard(s) over a two-year period (the term of a House member) and an automatic sunset to the program after six years (Senate term) if it does not generate system-wide improvements. No new program, similar to the current President’s regulatory policy, should be passed or funded without ending several programs with even now well-proven failure to improve educational performance in classic basic forms, not socio-cultural norms.

Of course, all this could be more easily collapsed into effectiveness if Congress will return education to its proper Constitutional steward, the states. The states retain all areas of authority not specifically enumerated in the Constitution as belonging with the federal government. This oft-ignored provision was a carry over from the Articles of Confederation, wherein the states had maintained sovereignty above their federal cooperation. They discovered via trial and error that certain areas of common interest could only be handled by a stronger federal government strictly limited in its powers. Education was not one of them. The intent of maintaining state “individuality” was that they became engines of competitive experimentation in government, with the populace individually free to travel amongst them to where those individuals felt their private needs were most fulfillable through their own efforts. That at a time when travel was indeed onerous. Now our populace, who can move about the states often within a day of easy travel, seems to require that their needs be fulfilled by the states, not themselves. And those needs must be fulfilled in an nationally equitable manner, regardless of the peculiarities of that state’s history, geography, economy, and demographics. We have traded our rights and responsibilities away for a federalized security, absolving parents of responsibility and authority. Even when that security is provided with the least common denominator of mediocrity. We might remember that the original federal office of education, established in about 1871, had four employees, and was responsible only for collecting statistics on education from the states. And the majority of that data came from schools funded privately and locally. Value in that education was perceived privately and locally, and rewarded when found with greater support by the local communities. Parental supervision was the keystone of that support. Advanced education was earned by merit (when not subverted by racism or sexism) and funded by personal effort or awards from private groups. That too has become a federalized entitlement no longer related to merit or utility of outcome.

Entitlement of higher education to anyone desiring it regardless of the most basic levels of demonstrated capability has made colleges and universities parasitic leeches of tax dollars and federal credit. Not long ago the federal government “took over” the entirety of previously private loan programs for higher education, again to provide more equitable opportunity for those desirous of a university education. Regardless of their demonstrated capacity to achieve such, or of a plan to use it to provide personal or societal utility. This in support of “the general welfare”, a phrase misused for over two centuries, given that its formal definition at the time the Constitution was written referred to the States, not the population (see any of Noah Webster’s dictionaries of that time). As more funding became available based in federal tax dollars and federal creation of credit that would subject taxpayers to ever higher taxes in the future and diminish purchasing power of what few monies they were allowed to keep, the colleges and universities found more and greater uses of those funds. Their curricula, and their supervisory administrations, became ever larger. Those created new areas of curricula and need for support. As those new areas of inquiry were invented, they wandered farther away from any societal utility, with their formally trained practitioners of little use except as new academicians. With no limits on the responsibility of student loan support, the ability of those sociocultural shamans to repay the support withered, with no realistic hope of return on the public’s involuntary “investment”. What are some particulars of that investment and its loss?

In 2024, student loan debt in the U.S. totaled $1.77 trillion and was held by 42.7 million borrowers, roughly $35,000 per borrower according the the Education Data Initiative. During Mr. Trump’s first term, his Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos commissioned an independent audit that found, at that time, that probably $500 billion would be “written down” as uncollectable. During the Biden administration, massive amounts of this ever-growing debt to taxpayers (including the student borrowers) was discharged by administrative fiat. Some of those measures were overruled by the courts. Another large portion was transferred into a forgivable tranche in return for public service by the borrowers. $17 billions of student debt were discharged due to student claims that they had been deceived by the colleges that recruited them with loans into career tracts that would not pay them enough to service those loans. This latter method, mostly due to “for profit” technical colleges, provides one possible model for returning any governmental support for what is truly elective higher education to a more rational method.

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The ultimate goal of rationalizing education support or loans is to return it firstly to private and state-based funding. As in education as a whole, the federal government has no Constitutional role in funding public education. Certainly not higher education which is in all cases (except military academies) private or state based. All data over time, at each level, has demonstrated the failure of federal (and indeed state) support with increasing dollars per student to improve educational outcomes. Setting aside higher education, the experience in my local community is telling. Our county recently published the educational outcomes for all local school districts. They were all very similar in their dismal records. Language capacity in each district’s students by testing was in the thirty percentile range. Mathematic performance was in the high teens. The standards were those expected to be achieved to conduct life in our complex society, much less to be eligible for entering higher education. Shockingly, all our local school districts feed into one high school district. The results for language and mathematics capacity in those students who finished high school (remembering a high percentage drop out and substantial truancy days occur in the final graduates) were actually worse on a percentile basis than those produced by the feeding school districts. The high schools, in common, were reducing the capacities of the students sent to them. This the result of yearly increases in state and federal dollars per student day, and massive ongoing increases in the ratio of administrators to actual teachers. My spouse, when taking certification classes at a local university to allow her to teach a single subject in secondary education, was told directly by her professor that the expected career goal for every teacher was to go into administration! No options, no freedom, are available to the average family to choose another source of education with demonstrated superiority of results. Rapid almost automatic passage, with now almost mandatory student loan support from involuntary taxation, of a significant percentage of those poorly served by the primary public education system into higher education colleges and universities now occurs without guidance as to true marketability of whatever skills might be acquired. Those degrees now require five to six years for matriculation, often due to one to two years of “remedial” education to fix the deficits from the public school systems. Of course those extra years involve further governmental loans. With little to no guidance by the university as to the value, in the real world of income and debt, of degree programs being supported. Herein lies an avenue of change.

In the real world, any product or service must have a perceived value by the purchaser in order to attract their demand. That perceived value must exceed the return from the fulfillment of other demands and at least equal the purchaser’s own produced value used for the purchase. The subversion of this principle is behind governments’ constant substitution of “investing” for spending. Government seeks to justify its bribery and favoritism with returns on that “investment” that are almost always illusory. Often based in data that the government generated and evaluated, without independent audit. The siren song of the universities and the government is of a higher lifetime income for those with a college degree. Recently this argument has faded due to grade, subject, and degree inflation. Inflation is always the devaluing of something due to artificial provision of excessive amounts of that something. In Keynesian economics that something is money and credit. In education it is degrees of no demonstrable utility funded by unsecured credit via socialized loans. Those last three characteristics are the legitimate targets of educational reformation, at least for higher education.

When the most desired universities have many billions of dollars in their endowments, it is hard to fathom their existential need for a few hundred millions of dollars from the federal government with few strings attached. True investments always carry definable risks to the investor. For the university and for most students under recent executive branch and legislative actions, that risk has been fully transferred to the taxpayers without their consent. The first step in reversal of this process is to place primary financial risk on the university or college. Any student loans made for the sake of attending a college or university will be guaranteed by that institution. If the student defaults, the institution becomes fully liable for the capital and the accruing interest. Some universities or colleges may respond by using their large endowments as self-financing, by charging the qualified applicants only a small reasonable percentage of their family’s verified discretionary income as tuition and fees. They thus may have more freedom to establish new educational efforts in imaginary outcomes. Other funds provided by government, if at all, would require a verifiable Return On Investment protocol, showing that the funding would produce a defined useful financial outcome in a reasonable period of time. Any other unrestricted funding for grants or research would need be provided by the voluntary private economy such as companies or foundations (provided that those NGOs are not “pass-throughs” for federal or state dollars). Most universities and colleges would begin to scrutinize the value of their graduates’ degrees carefully, as they would be “on the hook” if the graduate could not find adequate recompense in such a field as “the effects of Inuit sealing practices on South American climate change”. An additional layer of financial accountability might be added for some schools by requiring them to post private bonds against their students’ debts. The schools, or their bondsmen, would directly examine the economy’s defined incomes available to the graduating student in their chosen field, along with expected costs of living, to discover if that area of study and work was really “worth” the investment.

That might lead, of necessity, to the colleges and universities more careful examination of their incoming student’s abilities and aptitudes, with very direct counseling as to what field would best be suited to their capacities, interests, and attainment/maintenance of a financially independent lifestyle. This guidance would be very frank, and for both the school and the student perhaps the first encounter with reality rather than theory. Here the student would be faced with evaluating whether “they were being deceived by the colleges that recruited them with loans into career tracts that would not pay them enough to service those loans.” Perhaps the most valuable life lesson any college level student could learn.

None of this actively discriminates against those who intend to go into academia rather than the private economy or truly wish to study or work in fields of “imaginary outcomes”. The universities and colleges would carefully vet candidates for future academic positions since they would be self-financing and could certainly know what the school’s return on investment would be in a new faculty member. Those who wished to go into fields for which the market has little present or foreseeable reward would know this at the outset, and be responsible for seeking private funding under whatever circumstances did not involve socialized involuntary funding with no personal responsibility. Contrary to much popular opinion, higher education, beyond that intended to make one a basically capable and self-sustaining citizen, is a privilege to be attained, not a right granted or entitlement required.

Only when, if ever, we as a country chose to recognize the truth of that last sentence above will the endless metastasis of inflated and ever-more devalued education end.

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