Higher education in America has been subject to government meddling ever since the 1944 GI Bill allowed the federal camel to get its nose under the tent. The increasing pace of such meddling has turned it into an extraordinarily expensive and often useless waste of resources.
In this AIER article, Neal McCluskey of Cato Institute gives us the path to improvement: Get the federal government out. It should never have gotten in, and we must get it back out if we want better educational results at less cost.
He writes:
We would all be better off if the feds withdrew from higher education, requiring ivory tower denizens to sustain themselves not with money originally belonging to involuntary third-party participants — taxpayers — but students, lenders, and research patrons using their own money to buy what the tower is hawking. That would make higher education more efficient, effective, and better for society.
Well, almost everyone. There are a lot of rent-seekers holding jobs in higher education and as government regulators who’d have to look for other work initially. Everyone else would be better off if those people had to find work that people would be willing to pay for with their own money.
Defenders will say, “Look at all the degrees people now have! Surely all that higher attainment is a good thing for the country.” McCluskey thinks not:
This ballooning of credentials is, of course, only beneficial if all of those degrees indicate that the possessors attained valuable knowledge that could most efficiently be accessed in college, as opposed to on-the-job training, outside reading, or other, less expensive education avenues. But that is often in doubt.
Correct. A great many jobs that call for nothing above basic trainability are now open only to people who have gotten their college credentials. That wastes their time and that of all those instructors and administrators.
Read the whole thing.