Category Archives: education

A Sort of Start on a Student Loan Fix

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Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon has proposed a series of steps to correct our nation’s student loan miasma.

• mov[e] roughly 1.8 million borrowers into repayment plans and restart collections of loans in default
• in some cases wages would be automatically garnished
• push colleges to be responsible and transparent

That last is especially curious. McMahon does not say how she defines “responsible and transparent,” nor does she say what constitutes her “push,” how hard she will push, or what consequences—concrete, measurable, and publicly accessible—she will apply for noncompliance, or how promptly.

These steps need to be taken, but by themselves they can be only stopgap, and they are wholly inadequate. What’s really necessary is to get the Federal government completely out of the student loan business: no Federal student loan guarantees, no Federal student loan-supporting programs whatsoever.

Because money is fungible, that must include drastically curtailing the range of student grants and scholarships originating from Federal programs. The same reasoning for getting rid of DoEd altogether applies to any sort of Federal involvement in education.

McMahon can do these things from within DoED while she’s setting the stage for Congress’ elimination of the Department (note: not merely defunding the department; eliminate it altogether). However, for the complete solution, Congress needs to act:

• statutorily require colleges and universities to publish the average, median, and range of income at the five years employment mark for their graduates in each of the major fields offered
• statutorily require student loans to be originated by private lenders or colleges and universities
• statutorily require colleges and universities to guarantee at least 50% of each loan granted their students
• statutorily allow current and future student loans to be discharged in “ordinary” bankruptcy proceedings

Only when private lenders and colleges and universities are the only ones with skin in this student loan game will those loans and their borrowers be carefully screened for repayment risk. That will prove optimal for the student borrowers and for us taxpayers.

Harvard Doesn’t Need the Money

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The Federal money transfers in the form of grants and contracts, that is.

Some thoughts on the matter:

The school’s fundraising machinery has swung into gear, sending several email blasts to alumni seeking gifts during what one solicitation called “a critical moment,” and many donors say they are stepping up their efforts.
At the same time, school leaders including President Alan Garber are focusing on conversations with the school’s heaviest-hitting donors as they seek to offset the Trump administration’s $2.26 billion federal funding freeze, according to people familiar with the efforts.

To the extent these efforts are successful, and early indications are that they are succeeding, this strongly suggests that Harvard has no intrinsic need of Federal—us taxpayers’—dollars. That’s eliding the more than $53 billion endowment with its 9.6% return on investment and roughly 5% year-on-year growth, net of disbursements from the endowment.

Some big donors…said Harvard, and not the federal government, should steer the school’s operations and priorities.

That, by itself is entirely true. However, just as private donors get to call the shots on how their donations must be used by the school, so it is with Federal dollars: the government gets to specify how its transfers are used by the school. Even more, just as those private donors have no intrinsic obligation to donate at all, so it is with the government—it has no obligation at all, intrinsic or otherwise, to send any money at all to the school.

Harvard can operate entirely freely if it does not accept Federal dollars, and Harvard has no obligation, intrinsic or otherwise, to accept those dollars.

Little donors illustrate another reason for donating to Harvard. Lawyer Jim Ehrman:

…I am convincing myself that I am making a statement in support of Harvard’s “No” to Trump.

This has nothing to do with the legitimacy, or lack, of the Federal government continuing to fiscally support, with its funding transfers, the school’s antisemitic bigotry and support for terrorist-supporters on its campus. This is, instead, centered on knee-jerk Never Trumpism.

They Don’t Have to Accept the Deal

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The Trump administration has frozen $2.2 billion in funds for Harvard, out of some $9-ish billion in progress, over Harvard’s refusal to rid itself of the antisemitic bigots and terrorist-supporters in its student, professor, and school management populations. The editors at The Wall Street Journal object, but they’re missing the point.

Stipulate that the feds have a duty to enforce civil-rights laws, and Harvard failed to protect Jewish students during anti-Israel protests. But the university agreed to strengthen protections for Jewish students in a legal settlement with Students Against Antisemitism, which praised it for “implementing effective long-term changes.”
The Trump Administration nonetheless demanded last week that Harvard accede to what is effectively a federal receivership under threat of losing $9 billion. Some of the demands are within the government’s civil-rights purview, such as requiring Harvard to discipline students who violate its discrimination policies. It also wants Harvard to “shutter all diversity, equity and inclusion” programs, under “whatever name,” that violate federal law.
But the Administration runs off the legal rails by ordering Harvard to reduce “governance bloat, duplication, or decentralization.” It also orders the school to review “all existing and prospective faculty…for plagiarism” and ensure “viewpoint diversity” in “each department, field, or teaching unit.”

Leave aside the underlying premise that the words of “the university” have any value given the ongoing assaults against Jewish students, interference with their getting to class and the ability to participate in class/hear the lecture of those who do make it, interference with their ability to speak at all, and the ongoing disruptions by the terrorist supporters.

Stipulate that Harvard is a private institution, and it can do pretty much what it wants concerning “governance bloat, duplication, or decentralization,” “plagiarism,” and “viewpoint diversity.” As long as the school takes Federal dollars, the Federal government gets to specify how those dollars get used, just as any other donor can do.

Harvard doesn’t have to accept the deal on offer. Harvard also doesn’t have to get Federal dollars. The one is intrinsic in the school’s status as a private enterprise. The other is not at all intrinsic in it. Those Federal donations are nothing more than that—a privilege being received by Harvard, not anything to which Harvard has any right, in any sense of that term.

Disingenuosity in our “Elite” Universities

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Recall that the Department of Energy has frozen or cut Federal funding to a number of our allegedly elite universities over their refusal to deal with the antisemitic bigots and terrorist supporters in their student bodies and professor work force, and recall the Department’s decision to cap at 15% what those universities skim off the top of the research grants the Department sends for what those universities are pleased to call indirect costs. Now, MIT, Brown University, Cornell University, and Princeton University among others, are suing DoE over the cuts.

Per their lawsuit:

The pace of scientific discoveries in the national interest will be slowed. Progress on a safe and effective nuclear deterrent, novel energy sources, and cures for debilitating and life-threatening illness will be obstructed. America’s rivals will celebrate, even as science and industry in the United States suffer.

This is disingenuous. The universities do not have an inherent right to those Federal—our tax-remitted—dollars, which is the only rational reason for that claim. To the extent the pace will be slowed, to the extent that progress will obstructed, that’s entirely on these universities, and their demand for continuing the Federal spigot flow. These universities each have large and burgeoning endowments that would support their programs for decades, which would be plenty of time into which to shoehorn in the weeks required for the required reforms.

To the extent our national rivals—the universities’ cynical lumping in of our enemies with our competitors—will celebrate, that’s also on these universities and their desperation to continue receiving the…donations…these enemy nations and competitors pay over.

Excellent but Insufficient

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Kristin Shapiro, of the Independent Women’s Forum, has an excellent idea for checking up on colleges’ and universities’ admissions criteria and seeing whether they’re still using race and gender in their admissions decisions, even though those plainly racist and sexist criteria are illegal.

[R]equire colleges and universities to report the average standardized test scores and grade-point averages of admitted and enrolled students by race.

This can be improved on, however. In addition to publicly reporting those averages for admitted and enrolled students, the institutions should be required to post the averages’ standard deviations, which measure the degree of dispersal of those scores around their averages, and they should be required to post as well the median scores of those distributions. Medians tend to be less heavily influenced by extreme outliers. In addition, the institutions should be required to do that for the populations of students whose applications were rejected.

Better still, would be to require the institutions to make publicly available and searchable their databases of raw scores and GPAs, redacted only of student-identifying data while leaving in the identifications of the high schools and transferred-from colleges and universities of admitted students and of students whose applications the institutions rejected.

Let independent analysts conduct their own investigations rather than requiring the public to rely on the claims of institutions whose integrity already is questionable.