The politics of higher
education
By John S. Pinto
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The Higher Education Act was passed in 1965. This act injected the modern
bureaucratic state into higher education. The Act provides direct aid from the federal
government to colleges and universities and their students. With the money come
thousands of rules and regulations that are probably beyond the knowledge of any
person. Each year, the rules are adjusted, refined, forgotten, remembered and even
reinterpreted by the bureaucrats. Federal aid to higher education is politically
advantageous. It is true because the public believes in higher education and thinks it
worthy of public support. Education is seen as a way to a better life. It is also true
because people who work at colleges and universities are powerful.
However, since the passage of the Act, college expenses have exploded, especially
in recent years. It seems that everyone, with the possible exception of the richest
people, fears the cost of college. Government help towards the cost of education is
welcomed by people with children approaching college age. These same people are
probably unaware of the impact that federal regulation and subsidy has had on the
cost of education. Since 2001, defense spending had increased by 47 percent, while
spending on higher education had increased by 133 percent! The result has been that
tuition has risen sharply, making a college education almost unattainable.
Federal education policy has been driven by the miserable failures in basic skills,
especially in math, science and literacy, of America's high school and college
graduates. They are built on the notion that in the 1950s, the Soviet Union fired a rocket
into space, before the U.S. did, and so the federal government started funding higher
education, and because of that we had a coordinated national effort and we became
leaders in science and technology. It is a nice story, but untrue. Sputnik went up in
1957, after Americans had invented the telephone, the laser, the transistor, and settled
a continent to name a few accomplishments. We managed to do this without the
Department of Education or federal aid. We landed on the moon in 1969. It was not
enough time for the 1965 act to have had any important impact on the moon landing.
The greatest irony is that some of our public officials claim that we beat the Soviet
Union by duplicating their methods! It can be fairly said that the 1965 act has served to
impede progress in education. America had progressed in spite of the act, not
because of it.