If you want to go after institutions of higher learning that saddle students with massive debt and don't send them off with the earning power they need to make the expense worth it, you could start with - oh, I don't know - every university in America.
But the Obama White House is not going to do that because public-sector universities are employment factories for union-affiliated professors and others who are part of the Democrat orbit. Now private-sector institutions are another matter entirely. Organizations like the University of Phoenix, DeVry University and ITT - Democrats hate them because they provide competition for government-controlled schools and they don't use union faculty. So the Department of Education is launching an all-out assault on these schools, imposing new standards on them that threaten the ability of students to receive federal loans to enroll and take their courses.
The new regulation, which would take effect in 2016, would flag programs as weak if their graduates’ average loan payments ate up 8 percent or more of their total earnings or 20 percent or more of their discretionary earnings. They would also be flagged if the default rate for former students exceeded 30 percent.
Any program that failed those tests two out of three consecutive years would face a crippling penalty: The Education Department would refuse to extend financial aid to its students. That would choke off the colleges’ primary source of revenue — and effectively force them to close the targeted programs.
The White House pretends it's not picking on the private schools because the standards apply to everyone, but there are two problems with that. First, they appear to have cherry-picked their standards to have the maximum negative effect on private schools. Second, public universities receive massive state allocations, where as private schools have to rely entirely on student tuition. So when you cut off federal loans for tuition, you do a lot more damage to private schools than you do to public.
Private universities already operate according to a much leaner model. They usually build or lease utilitarian office and classroom space rather than maintaining massive, stately campuses with gobs and gobs of support staff, along with high-priced professors who tenure, sabbaticals, etc. If you want to save students money, maybe public institutions can focus more on career-focused instruction and less on all the other nonsense they spend money on.
Of course, there are deeper problems here. A person seeking instruction to help with a career goal shouldn't need a federal loan. The only reason such instruction is so expensive is that college-level learning in general has become so gunked up with crap that students don't really need. And of course, if government at every level wasn't usurping so much capital from the private sector, people would have more of their own cash to invest in the training they need. When no one can afford career training without a loan from the government, there is a lot more wrong than just the price of tuition.
But clearly, Obama's larger agenda here is to eliminate private-sector competition that threatens government's monopoly on higher education. Public universities represent huge opportunities for those connected to left-wing causes to receive employment, funding and attention on the taxpayers' dime. If more and more students opt for private institutions instead, that's threatened. Obama is not going to let that happen if he can help it. And when you have no regard whatsoever for the legitimate limits on your own power, I guess you can help it.
