Loading ...BRILLIANT !!!
FROM JEFF CHILDERS…THE PROGRAM IS BRILLIANT AND JEFF’S SARCASM IS OFF THE CHARTS HILARIOUS 🙂
SEE FIRST COMMENT
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Notice that phrase: federal taxpayers. Not “free college.” Because there is no such thing as “free college.” There is only “college paid for by other people who didn’t get to go to college, because they were busy working to pay for your college.” Every time a politician promises “free college,” what they actually mean is, “We are going to take money from the guy who fixes your plumbing and give it to the university so they can build a new diversity center with its own rock-climbing wall.”
Earlier this month, NPR quietly reported some more very encouraging education news, headlined, “Under a new federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid.” I’d bet you never heard of this terrific and common-sense development, even though last year, this kind of thing would have provoked a rage hurricane of progressive wrath. Now, the most we get are liberal sunshowers of ennui.
According to PBS, what’s left of the Department of Education is rolling out a new accountability test for colleges called, simply, the “do no harm” test. The concept is so straightforward it probably gave several university administrators a spontaneous eye-twitch: If graduates from an undergraduate program don’t earn more money than people who never went to college at all, that program gets cut off from federal student loans.
You, a sane person, are probably wondering right now why this wasn’t already the rule. (Don’t be dense. You know why.) The Trump Administration is finally forcing educational bureaucrats to admit that maybe, just maybe, borrowing $150,000 to get a degree in 14th-Century Early Transgenderism doesn’t make financial sense if your post-graduation career plan involves asking people if they want you to leave room for cream.
Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said, “If a program cannot show that it leaves its graduates financially better off than if they had never enrolled, it should not be underwritten by federal taxpayers.”
Notice that phrase: federal taxpayers. Not “free college.” Because there is no such thing as “free college.” There is only “college paid for by other people who didn’t get to go to college, because they were busy working to pay for your college.” Every time a politician promises “free college,” what they actually mean is, “We are going to take money from the guy who fixes your plumbing and give it to the university so they can build a new diversity center with its own rock-climbing wall.”
Naturally, the administrators paid to run the programs that produce unemployable graduates are furious. (Sadly, it’s not bigger news, because progressives writ large have too many problems right now, and will have to call their educational brethren back.) In what can only be described as a ‘This is Fine Dog’ defense, the angry administrators argued that earnings aren’t everything.
NPR interviewed quadruple-namer Lee Ann Scotto Adams, the executive director of the NGO Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), which apparently is a real organization and not a secret evil society from a James Bond movie. (Honestly, we aren’t sure yet.) She said, and I quote, “Earnings is only a small piece of that puzzle.”
A very small piece, apparently. Basically microscopic.
Remember: The new DOE rule isn’t about education grants. They’re not charitable gifts funding fun, artsy, explorative degrees that even Lee Ann Scotto Adams admitted lack practical value. No, this is about loans for a degree. A loan repaid over 30 years at about triple the original face value. A loan from private investors, guaranteed by taxpayers— who, with the investors, presumably agreed to this arrangement expecting the degrees to generate enough income to pay off the loans.
Lee Ann Scotto Adams continued, still misunderstanding the problem. She expanded on her thesis that taxpayers should fund economically non-viable degrees anyway, arguing, “Yes, you need to earn money to make a living, but we see our creative workers want the ability to have independence in their work. They want jobs that are socially conscious. They want to make an impact culturally. These are all metrics that fall outside of just straightforward earnings metrics.”
Translation: We know our graduates are broke, but they feel really good about themselves while they are broke. Or in plainer English: young skulls full of mush who don’t know anything are easily tricked into taking out vast loans for an education that sounds good in the course catalog and is rumored on campus to feature an easy-A, which accommodates a weeknight partying schedule.
But understanding any of that reality would end the grift.
? NPR also platformed Cindy Flores, a mariachi teacher who (still) owes $55,000 in federal student loan debt. Ms. Flores explained her life choices (ungrammatically). “It is never about the money. I realized I wanted to have a career in music when I was in the eighth grade, because every music teacher I had were such good role models in my life and I wanted to be part of that community.”
(A few more English grammar classes might also have been helpful and arguably more valuable.)
I bet you didn’t even know you could get a degree in mariachi, much less that there were people dumb enough to pay $55,000 for that ‘degree.’ Portland readers: this famous ethnic musical style features a dense repertoire of about four songs with memorable names like “La Cucaracha,” and a lively but repetitive beat— which usually accompanies one or more flour tortillas stuffed with rice and either chicken or beef. It’s not the chords of the gods or anything. It’s not Beethoven.
Ms. Flores’s poignant desire to emulate her anonymous childhood music teachers is a lovely sentiment. It really, truly is. But here is the thing: if it’s “never about the money,” then … why should the taxpayers be on the hook, or even involved at all? If you want to study mariachi music, somatic body work (which NPR noted has one of the highest predicted failure rates), or interpretive bi-curious dance theory, you should absolutely do that. But pay for it yourself.
The Department of Education estimated that about 18% of undergraduate certificate programs would fail the earnings test, with cosmetology and the previously mentioned somatic body work (which doesn’t even produce a massage license) leading the pack. Among more traditional four-year degrees, degrees with failing marks include theater, music, and studio art. Even prestigious schools like The Juilliard School and the New England Conservatory have programs predicted to fail.
The media frame here is predictable: Trump is destroying the arts. But the reframing stat is right there in the open. The test follows basic conservative principles. And the threshold for passing this test is incredibly low. In many states, graduates would only need to earn between $30,000 and $41,000 a year to pass.
Let that sink in. If a college program cannot produce graduates who make at least $31,000 a year —about $15 an hour— it loses federal funding. Even Christopher Madaio, director of TICAS, a left-leaning consumer group, admitted, “This is really a very low floor; high school earnings is not an exceedingly high metric.”
Still, the reaction gap is staggering. Instead of asking, “Why are we charging students tens of thousands of dollars for degrees that don’t even qualify them for a position at Buc-ee’s brisket counter?”, the overpaid academic establishment is asking, “How dare you measure our success with money?”
Simple. Because it’s not your money. It’s ours.
The “do no harm” rule is a massive paradigm shift. It exposes the higher-education grift for what it is: a system designed to transfer wealth from the working class to the academic class, while leaving the goofy students themselves saddled with debt they can never repay.
Democrats want taxpayers to forgive student loans. The DOE just showed everyone why the programs shouldn’t even exist in the first place.
More like this, please. Faster.