Cost of college: Government push to gauge students’ bang for their buck gains steam

This is in the wsj, and I can’t read the article. But I think this is a dumb extra regulation coming from the government, just because some people have a pet peeve that not everyone needs a college degree.

It is make work that will require them to hire more useless bureaucrats. Most admissions offices and alumni associations put this kind up info up where you can see it as a matter of pride. if it’s not there, the PARENTS, not the Government should pay heed. It will do no one any good to see that people that graduate from Georgetown Law can afford birth control right on their first job. And Harvard Law too. Just make parents anxious that they don’t have that kind of money for Ivy graduate schools.

Here are some remedies that would fix some of what you see as over enrollment in college and the student loan boom.

1. Make Pell Grants Merit based. Sorry, you don’t get x on the SAT/ACT, sorry again, I know it’s unfair, and you didn’t get all A’s because some teachers were Mean. How about A’s and B’s? And No Pell Grant if you did not get through college prep math and science. College is not the place to waste money on remedial high school classes. It is NOT unfair if you can’t go to college because you did not finish college prep classes, it is your own fault? Repeat 12th grade until you get it right?

2. Pell Grant students get only one school year to fail, then they have to go home and think about it.

3. Make admissions Merit based and financial aid Need Blind, so that the most meritorious students receive the financial aid. Most middle class families taking out those student loans today, used to get the merit scholarships when you baby boomers were in college. Today’s Pell grant scheme uses up all the money with this rule: Pell grant students have to have their Need filled 100% before any money can be spent on Merit Scholars and middle class families who are more prepared for college, but still unable to pay…and Merit scholarships are considered Unfair, when really they are the only way forward. Without the Pell grant system, you can charge parents the cost, and not the cost of their own kid plus more to cover the Pell grant student. This is the practice at many colleges, where they know how many full paying parents they need to admit to balance the books. Non profits should not profit off one parent to pay for another…at least without giving you a tax deductible receipt.

I think the problem is not that you don’t NEED a college degree to work at, say, The Banana Republic, but that most college graduates were not intending on working their after they graduated.

And another problem I do see is, that businesses used to like to take the liberal arts graduates because there were literate and easily trained, but most businesses today think the government ought to do all the customized training that their business needs, or the community college ought to do it, they won’t invest in the skills for their own companies because they want something “back” from government. And unless a school is able to work with a company, customized employees are still a ways off.

Conservatives cannot spend their time being Mad at the colleges and the young people that are raised up to study hard and were told they could then make something of themselves. They might spend their time getting on boards of Trustees and seeing how the money is spent, and curbing some of the liberal insanity that is forced on the kids there. Especially the republican governor’s in states with big state universities.

Fleuries on February 12, 2013 at 7:49 PM