Federal regulators need to keep busy. There is always something more that they might find hasn’t yet been brought under government control. The latest flap at the Department of Education concerns college attendance-taking for online courses. They want to make sure that colleges are doing so, and that has some schools upset.
In today’s Martin Center article, Graham Hillard covers this dustup.
He writes:
To sum up, the federal government wishes not to pay colleges to educate students who no longer exist. Ensuring some measure of alignment between accepting loan dollars and teaching the actual loan-ees will take a few minutes of administrators’ time. Many colleges already keep track of online attendance, as doing so is relatively simple. All well and good? One might have assumed so until universities responded as if the world had collapsed.
This is a squabble over a bit of federal money — money that the feds shouldn’t be dispensing in the first place.