Today the House of Representatives is debating a terrible bill to reauthorize the Higher Education Act (HEA), the primary federal law governing America’s ivory tower. The legislation would, among other things, force states to keep up their higher ed spending to get federal money, forgive loans for people in myriad “public service” jobs, and interfere with private student loan markets.
The good news in all of this could be that the Bush administration opposes the measure. But then we see why that isn’t a silver lining: As Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings makes clear in an op‐ed in today’s Politico, the administration dislikes the law because it would prohibit the Department of Education from forcing standards and testing requirements on the nation’s diverse colleges and universities. In other words, it would prevent Spellings from imposing No Child Left Behind on the Ivy League.
It’s the overall tragedy of the Bush administration in microcosm. Sure, they’re fighting the Democrats, but to get more government interference, not less. And this push is extra sad because No Child Left Behind has, if anything, made matters worse in K-12 education, and in trying to blame higher ed for our problems Spellings herself actually hints that government‐dominated elementary and secondary schooling is our real crippler:
They “get” where the U.S. is lagging behind, and they know the culprits: rising tuition costs, a burgeoning debt load and the fact that only half of all minorities get out of high school on time [italics added] and fewer than half of all adults have a college certificate or degree, when 90 percent of the fastest‐growing jobs in America require post‐secondary education.
No matter how much Spellings and Bush inveigh against it for being “unaccountable,” in very stark contrast to K-12 schooling American higher education is the envy of the world, and it got that way precisely because it is not very accountable to government. Rather than answering to a central authority and teaching what politicians think best, our colleges and universities are autonomous, our students are able to choose the schools that are right for them, and competition and innovation are unleashed.
Of course, there are significant problems with America’s ivory tower, such as rampant tuition inflation and great inefficiency driven by government subsidies, but they are actually minor in comparison to the troubles in countries with centralized higher ed. But rather than fix the problems we do have, unfortunately, the Bush administration wants to give us new ones that are much, much worse.