Spurred on by the need to court a waning youth vote, the Obama Administration addressed a concern that has been on many students’ and recent graduates’ minds: The cost of education in America. Calling college presidents from across the country into the Oval Office, President Obama chastised university leaders for their high prices and lack of leadership in the area of cost control and admonished them to rethink the “cost equation” that accompanies higher education.

The take-away message from President Obama’s private meeting with higher-education leaders on Monday was threefold: There needs to be a new sense of urgency on college affordability, there won’t be a one-size-fits-all solution as policies will have to affect all sectors of higher education, and the country needs innovations and cost-management from colleges and leadership from state legislatures.

That’s according to Thomas J. Snyder, President of Ivy Tech Community College, who participated in the meeting. President Obama and Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, are now in what Mr. Snyder described as listening mode, “but I suspect some pretty substantial proposals will evolve in the next few months,” he said.

Even Education Secretary Arne Duncan got in on the action, lecturing university leadership on the difficulties faced by recent graduates and called on colleges to “clamp down” on education costs. Soros-funded Campus Progress heralded these actions as a “step in the right direction” and praised Obama for his work helping students afford higher education. Obama patted himself on the back for his efforts, saying that his administration would “help more Americans attain a higher education at an affordable price.”

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“3 Reasons We Shouldn’t Bail Out Student Loan Borrowers” is written and narrated by Nick Gillespie and produced by Meredith Bragg.

About 3.33 minutes long. Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason’s YouTube channel to receive automatic notifications when new material goes live.

As the cumulative total of student loan borrowing approaches $1 trillion dollars, calls to forgive some or all of that debt are mounting. Federally guaranteed student loans make up more than half that total and Barack Obama is pushing to cap the amount any borrower must pay back in a given year and forgive outstanding balances after 20 years.

Among Occupy Wall Street protesters, calls to bail out student loan holders are arguably the single-most voiced demand and sites such as Forgive Student Loan debt beat the drum for immediate and widespread relief.

But forgiving student loan debt is a very bad idea for at least three reasons.

1. These loans are voluntary. All borrowers are excrutiatingly well-informed of how much they’re borrowing and how much they’re going to have to pay back.

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More than 50 years after Sam Cooke first sang about his educational deficiencies, many American teens “don’t know much about history.”  Or so their latest test scores suggest.

Only 12 percent of all 12^th graders are “proficient” or “advanced” in U.S. History according to the 2010 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP).  And less than half of all high school seniors display even a “basic” knowledge about American History.

The latest NAEP scores for civics are almost as bad:  Less than two-thirds of all seniors show a “basic” understanding of our system of government.  And a 2010 study commissioned by the American Enterprise Institute concluded that “civics, once the cornerstone of public education, has fallen off the radar” as teachers have felt increasing pressure to show progress in other areas.

That many educators today give considerable attention to other subjects would not disturb America’s founders.  While we tend to think of them largely as political figures, America’s founders recognized that there are many higher and grander pursuits in life than those in the political realm.

This no doubt explains why the scientifically-curious Ben Franklin went outside in a thunderstorm with his kite – and why the educationally-minded Thomas Jefferson had his gravestone identify him as the founder of the University of Virginia, but not as the third president of the United States.

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Just because the #OccupyWallSt crowd is drowning in student loans and unable to find jobs in Obama’s economy doesn’t mean they’ve given up on higher education completely. If one worthless degree in gender or culture studies doesn’t cut it in today’s competitive marketplace, why not add two or three more? Well, the #OccupyWallSt crowd is ON TOP OF IT!

On Wednesday they decided that what they really needed was an Anarchist College. (We’re not kidding.) And, they took to the web to solicit instructors (sorry, facilitators):

Liberty Plaza Anarchist College Seeks Teacher/Facilitators

Posted on October 5, 2011 by thehumanchannel

The main goals and values of this college is to teach how important establishing the values of any group is, and that a society or environment of non-dominance and non-hierarchy is the one in which its members thrive. Anarchy literally means without a ruler, so an individual who oppresses any other individual by limiting their autonomy including if it is a member of the establishment’s protection service, (i.e. police) who is not directly involved in oppression, would not be an anarchist since they would be dominating the other without warrant. Unprovoked oppression not for defense of ones own autonomy is not anarchy.

Please refer teachers and materials to OWSEducation@gmail.com. A short intro to the class you’d like to teach will help pair you with other facilitators.

Subjects needed

Consensus Process, facilitator neutrality and values

Horticulture/Permaculture

green anarchy etc

anarchy

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Pejman Yousefzadeh and Kevin Holtsberry are joined by Lee Doren’s new book, Please Enroll Responsibly: Avoiding Indoctrination at College, concerning how best to avoid ideological indoctrination at institutions of higher learning, and how to get a rigorous and valuable education that will prepare students for the job market.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by John Zmirak, to discuss if college is really necessary these days, how faith centered universities have developed and what will their influence be in the future.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi is joining her Kentucky colleague Jack Conway in waging a war on for-profit colleges – with taxpayer funds – while turning a blind eye to problems in non-profit and state schools.  Except, in Bondi’s case, there are demonstrable instances of mismanagement, fraud, and abuse in those taxpayer-funded colleges that she appears to be ignoring for the time being.

A few examples of taxpayer waste that Bondi should be focusing on:

• State-funded Daytona State College, Florida A&M University, Edison State College, and Miami-Dade College all currently face losing their accreditation due to issues ranging from low performance standards to admitting students without required courses to employing too few professors.

• Florida’s biggest state universities are under fire for rampant abuses within their athletic programs.  Numerous Florida State University athletic teams have been forced to vacate wins due to academic misconduct, while University of Miami athletes have been discovered accepting illegal gifts and money.  The University of Central Florida is also under investigation for recruiting misconduct.

• The Florida state college corruption extends all the way up to state elected officials; former Florida House Speaker Ray Sansom came under fire for securing funding for a building at Northwest Florida State College that was in fact an airport hangar for political donors’ private jets.

Sounds like enough material for some high-profile state investigations, right?  Actually, Attorney General Bondi is focusing her government investigation on a handful of small, for-profit schools.  The charges against the schools largely revolve around allegedly false claims used by recruiters leading to enrollment of students who were under-qualified and/or unable to repay their loans upon completion.

Could it be that Bondi and others, including federal regulators, are attacking for-profit colleges chiefly because they have taken a piece of the higher education pie in recent years that was traditionally serviced by state-run community colleges and vocational schools?  The fervor with which state officials in Florida, Kentucky, Texas, and other states are going after for-profit schools suggests motivation beyond the desire to prevent a few gullible students from falling for glitzy ad campaigns.

At the federal level, the Department of Education’s proposed ‘Gainful Employment’ rule would create new narrow metrics to define “gainful employment” based on student debt-to-income levels and loan repayment rates.

What the DOE’s formulaic approach is missing is that these institutions serve student communities with significant risk factors such as low incomes, full-time employment, and delayed enrollment which adversely impact degree attainment and account for their having a higher loan default rate than less inclusive institutions.  Even with these challenges, the fact remains that for-profit colleges have a better record of graduating low-income and minority populations than public institutions and private, not-for-profit schools, at a substantially lower total government and taxpayer cost.

The controversy over reform in Texas higher education has confused the public. Which side is right?

Watching a charge from one side, then a counter-charge from the other side loses the reader in the weeds of detail. The charge and counter-charge often do not meet head-on but speak past one another, leaving the reader with what seem to be apples/oranges comparisons.

I propose a different way to approach the controversy. Having been a college or university professor for 27 years, an editor of an academic journal for many years, a college vice president, and director of the Fulbright Program for the U.S. government, I know how universities operate. Hard experience has taught me that fundamental reform in higher education is a must.

Consider the following prototype of Professor X.

He got a Ph.D. at age 29, then worked through the ranks for seven years to be given tenure at age 36. Tenure guarantees lifetime job security, so Professor X no longer needs to publish anything ever again. Even though former Harvard president Derek Bok reports that “fewer than half of all professors publish as much as one article per year,” Professor X still wants to publish that one article per year.

An academic journal publishes his article, but it is so esoteric that only very few scholars read it or cite it. The article has no value to students or to classroom pedagogy.

Professor X teaches two classes per semester – each class with an average of 16 students, translating to 32 per semester and 64 for the entire year. He has taught these two classes several times over the years, so he needs little preparation for each lecture – just some brief reviewing of old notes.

He posts three office-hours per week to meet with students. He needs to grade papers, but with only 32 students for the semester, such grading is not heavy lifting. He also serves on a few committees, but elects not to do much for them.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Ben Boychuk to discuss how new regulations from Washington will make it harder for the next generation to go to college, the impact of for-profit colleges and the future of higher education.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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A firestorm now rages in Texas over transparency and accountability in higher education. Governor Rick Perry and the Texas Public Policy Foundation have encouraged regents to peek inside the ivory towers, and the universities are responding. History argues that we must peek.

Perry wrote on May 13 that “efforts to protect taxpayers and get more results from our schools are not universally welcomed in academia. The attitude of some in the university world is that students and taxpayers should send more and more money, and then just butt out.” He adds, “Four-year graduation rates at Texas institutions of higher education currently average just 28.6 percent.”

Asserts the governor: “The big lie making the rounds in Texas is that elected or appointed officials want to undermine or deemphasize research at our colleges and universities. That disinformation campaign is nothing more than an attempt to shut down an open discussion about ways to improve our state universities and make them more effective, accountable, affordable and transparent.” Such a goal nationwide at all universities would be laudable.

A barn burning study last month from Richard Vedder’s Center for College Affordability and Productivity revealed that of the more than 4,200 faculty members at the University of Texas at Austin, the 840 most productive faculty members teach an extraordinary 57 percent of student credit hours, while the least productive 840 members teach only 2 percent of student credit hours.

But this disparity is not the greatest abuse.

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As the war against for-profit schools drags on, several organizations continue to cry wolf in the hopes of landing the final blow to the resilient colleges. One of the biggest players in recent battles has been the New American Foundation. A seemingly ‘nonpartisan public policy institute’, this group is layered with traces of political leanings and loaded assertions.

The most vocal arm of the New America Foundation has been their publication of ‘Higher Ed Watch.’ Editor Stephen Burd remains one of the strongest opponents of for-profit schools having slandered the industry at every turn. Articles such as, “For Profit Higher Education’s New Conspiracy Theory” and “Heads Will Roll At For-Profit Colleges — But Not The Right Ones,” have allowed Burd to preach from his soapbox and reveal the political tendencies of the foundations largest donors.

George Soros, one of the looming figures behind the war against for-profit schools, has managed to force his philosophies into the group by means of a quite sizeable contribution. New America Foundation received between $250-000 and $999,999 from short seller Soros’ Open Society Institute. Steve Coll, President of New America Foundation, receives a base compensation of $271,000. The former contributor at The New Yorker Magazine calls the shots at NAF amid a cloud of outsider influence. With staff salaries paid in part by the contribution of George Soros, NAF’s alleged ‘bi-partisan’ reputation becomes an ever harder pill to swallow.

Even the chairman of the New America Foundation’s board, Eric Schmidt, can be called into question. Schmidt, the Chairman and CEO of Google, not only campaigned for President Obama but is also rumored to be on the short list for Commerce Secretary. Given all the incestuous political ties, it remains difficult to ignore the administration’s ability to force the hand of various non-profits.

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The national campaign against bullying and hate may be in the news, but it’s nowhere in evidence as an American university wreaks revenge, not just on a dissenter who ran for Congress—but on his children, and on a brave professor who blew the whistle.

Michelle Obama may deplore playground name-calling, humiliation, and taunting. But she says nothing about powerful administrators wrecking the careers of our most promising students and distinguished professors, by actions and not just words?

Here’s the background: In one of the most astonishing races in the 2010 election, renowned scientist Arthur Robinson took on 12-term progressive incumbent Peter DeFazio for his congressional seat in Oregon’s District 4. DeFazio won the 2008 election with 82% of the vote. When the polls showed Robinson coming very close to winning, DeFazio unleashed a last-minute smear campaign.

That much is not unexpected. Americans have gotten used to vicious lies by politicians. Character assassination seems to be protected political speech.

But on November 4, after the election results were known, another campaign took off: against the three younger Robinson children, who are working toward their Ph.D. degrees in nuclear engineering at Oregon State University (OSU). The stellar academic records of all six home-schooled Robinsons (a Ph.D. in chemistry from Caltech, two veterinary medicine doctorates from Iowa State, and undergraduate degrees in chemistry or mathematics for the younger Robinsons) were an embarrassment for DeFazio, who is strongly supported by public education unions.

The twins, Joshua and Bethany, have nearly finished work that would qualify them for a Ph.D. at any normal university. They are highly regarded by the scientists and engineers who have worked with them. They continued to work hard, while noticing some oddities—that made sense when Professor Jack Higginbotham alerted them to plans hatched in closed-door departmental meetings. Political ideologues in control of the department had decided that Joshua and Bethany, and if possible their younger brother Matthew, would not be allowed to complete their degrees at OSU.

Getting good grades, following all the rules, working hard—and achieving mastery of a difficult, important field in which few Americans can qualify—are not enough, if your name is Robinson.

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Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and the author of, most recently, Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College.

Drawing rave reviews from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Crazy U is a very funny yet very serious look at the higher-education industry, especially the status anxiety college invokes in parents. Ferguson roams the countryside with his diffident son, touring various campuses and meeting characters such as a sharp-tongued counselor who charges $40,000 to shepherd high schoolers through an increasingly competitive and byzantine admissions process.

Reason’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Ferguson and his son Gillam, who is now a sophomore at the University of Virginia (discussed as “Big State University” in the book). Shot by Jim Epstein and edited by Josh Swain.

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Liberals will tell you they support freedom of choice, but they won’t tell you that freedom they are willing to extend you begins and ends with abortion. Try to exercise it in any other aspect of your life and they’re there, ready to pounce with some regulation or law forbidding you from moving forward with your liberty workout. It doesn’t matter to them what the impact is, they want what they want and they’re willing to step all over you to impose it.

The latest whipping boy in the crosshairs of these statists is the post-secondary for-profit education system. Odds are this battle won’t impact your life directly, but their attacks rarely do. They never attack the heart of that which they seek to control or destroy, they chip away at the edges until it no longer resembles that which it was. It still exists, but in such a way so as to no longer function effectively and eventually dies. Look at what they’ve done to off-shore drilling without so much as passing a law.

For-profit education is the choice for millions of Americans who, for any number of reasons, can’t or choose not to matriculate to traditional colleges and universities. The reasons vary – poor grades in high school, young children at home, etc. These schools serve mostly poor, underprivileged students who have very limited options. You’d think liberals would be for anything that helps the very people they claim to champion. But their rhetoric rarely matches their actions.

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Over the last several months, as attention has been focused elsewhere, the Obama Administration and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have been waging a quiet war against for-profit schools and universities – educational institutions that offer  job training and degrees in in-demand fields to students looking for an alternative to four-year non-profit schools, or a more accessible price tag.

The Administration has fired a number of rounds at the industry, but recently unveiled it’s secret weapon: a “gainful employment” restriction on federal loan money available to students at for-profit schools. While for-profit schools have had their difficulties, their deficiencies aren’t that dissimilar to those of their not-for-profit counterparts, but this weapon could kill off for-profits as a viable option to not-for-profit education. Essentially, students at for-profit schools that have either a low graduation rate or an unacceptably high number of unemployed, graduated students would be denied federal student loan and grants. As Forbes points out, these schools serve primarily lower-income and minority communities who depend so heavily on student loans, such a restriction could put the whole industry in jeopardy.

Which, of course, is exactly what the Obama Administration would like to see happen. And, from recent news, it seems that they and their network of associates will do just about anything to make sure it happens.

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It is not unusual for the public to wake up to live television footage of student protestors in Islamabad, Athens, Caracas, Jakarta or Cairo waving red banners, smashing windows, breaking into buildings and then starting fires.  However, this morning, the city was London and the protestors were British students burning books.  The press is reporting that the students are angry over an expected doubling of the cost of higher education tuition next year.  I believe the protests are associated with the rising angst of young people in the developed world who believe their economic well-being is in permanent decline.

When most public policy “experts” talk about structural unemployment, it is assumed they are referring to the under privileged in depressed intercity and rural communities.  The high school dropout rate in these forlorn populations continues is twice suburban rate and their standardized test scores are approximately 20% lower.  Consequently, only the most gifted students in these societies can expect to go on to the hoped for permanent lifestyle improvement of a college education.

As shown in the U.S. Department of Labor graphs above for the year 2009, 25 and older workers with a high school diploma make 40% more than a drop-out and those with four year college degrees make over 50% more than a high school graduate.  Consequently, there has been a tremendous push to try to lift Americans out of poverty through a college education.

What the graphs above conveniently ignore is that unemployment for college-educated 20-24 year-olds is currently 9.6 percent, virtually identical to the national average.  In December of 2007, before the Great Recession started, the rate for 20-24 year old college graduates was 3.4 percent.  This 282% increase in unemployment for recent college graduates is the largest percentage increase among all education and age groups.  Furthermore, the unemployment rate for college educated 20-24 year-olds does not include the graduates who are employed part-time, which is at a 17.5% rate.

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The public is not aware of what’s happening within higher education, and for good reason:  the self-serving universities want to keep it that way.  Even worse, they will excoriate those on the inside who reveal the truth about the scam.

Ben Franklin said that “an example is the best sermon.”  Let us look at a real example from an insider whose name must remain anonymous?  Why?  Because the tenured professor pleaded to me that if the instructor’s name is revealed along with disclosures, “I’m dead.”  There are ways to punish even tenured professors.

I know this to be the case the hard way:  I once crossed a university picket line and encountered the most traumatic experience in my life, exceeded only by my wife’s death.  My professorial colleagues and friends treated me brutally.

Professor X writes in a private e-mail that at X Texas university,  even  despite the state budget crunch, that “tenured faculty will be not be teaching more classes. . . . Regular faculty must pursue research to generate prestige to enhance each college’s ranking.”

Prof. X adds:  “The number of classes offered will decline.  Remaining classes will be much larger and not particularly well taught:  faculty don’t want to take time away from their research. . . . Many courses once taught by competent lecturers will be handed over to graduate students.”

It gets much worse.

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From Glenn Reynolds’ latest column in today’s Washington Examiner:

Right now, people are still borrowing heavily to pay the steadily increasing tuitions levied by higher education. But that borrowing is based on the expectation that students will earn enough to pay off their loans with a portion of the extra income their educations generate. Once people doubt that, the bubble will burst.

So my advice to students faced with choosing colleges (and graduate schools, and law schools) this coming year is simple: Don’t go to colleges or schools that will require you to borrow a lot of money to attend. There’s a good chance you’ll find yourself deep in debt to no purpose. And maybe you should rethink college entirely.

Many people with college educations are already jumping the tracks to become skilled manual laborers: plumbers, electricians, and the like. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that seven of the ten fastest-growing jobs in the next decade will be based on on-the-job training rather than higher education. (And they’ll be hands-on jobs hard to outsource to foreigners). If this is right, a bursting of the bubble is growing likelier.

What about higher education folks? What should they (er, we?) do? Well, once again, what can’t go on forever, won’t.

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Profit used to be a good thing; it allowed companies to reinvest in their businesses, to lower prices and bring new products to market, to employ people, and enable those people to live comfortable lives.  In the last few years, however, the word “profit” has taken a negative turn.  It has gone from that which affords companies their ability to continue to operate to an affront to consumers, the result of greed. So it is not surprising that the mentality that profit is bad has crept into the realm of for-profit higher education.

Education is rarely thought of as a business. With so many universities operating with tax dollars subsidizing their every move and reports of large endowments in the news, it’s no wonder the concept of for-profit college is foreign to many.  But there are many for-profit universities operating and educating people on campuses and in the privacy of the student’s homes across the country, and these institutions have recently become targets for criticism.

Why attack? The ostensible reason is concern over quality.  In the past most for-profit higher learning institutions were Internet based and unaccredited. Neither of these facts are unknown to their students when they enroll, and neither are of any concern to anyone other than the students themselves.

Accreditation is a certification by one of many regional boards that makes transferring from one accredited university to another much easier by allowing for credits earned at one to count towards a degree at another. This system saves student’s money by assuring the classes they took at, say, a community or two-year college will count towards their degree should they transfer to a four-year school.  Accreditation is like the popular club colleges and universities seek to join to be part of the “in” crowd, even though it’s not necessary in order to operate.

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This week will be a defining moment for Congress and our country. As Democratic leaders map out their health care end game, we as elected officials have a choice to make: Will people control their lives, or will government?

The stakes of the health care debate are clear. On the table is a bill that would put the federal government in charge of one-sixth of the American economy and, perhaps even more stunningly, the way Americans get medical care. Yet far too few Americans realize there is another government takeover in the offing – this one in how Americans pay for college.

First, some history. Since 1965, the Federal Family Education Loan Program has helped tens of millions of students and parents by providing low-cost, federally guaranteed loans. This public-private partnership offers students and schools choice and competition among loan providers, as well as essential value-added benefits such as college outreach, debt management and financial literacy.

For these reasons, FFELP has consistently been the more popular choice among colleges and universities. It leverages the innovation and competitive forces of the private sector with congressionally mandated benefits and protections that keep interest rates and fees low.

Yet right now, the Majority in Congress and the President want to make it more difficult to pay for college by putting the government between you and the money you need to pay for higher education.

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