Yeah, I thought this kind of perfectly encapsulated the whole piece.
The DOE is "efficient" in the sense that it accomplishes its goals with little overhead (sending out lots of money, selectively enforcing anti-discrimination law, etc.).
But I'd say it's questionable that the DOE is efficient in terms of spending its large budget in the ways that would best benefit American society. The article doesn't even really try to argue that it does.
That's fair, and it's valuable to have pieces like this. But I also think it's kind of natural to read this and think "eh... I'm not so sure I'm impressed."
E.g., imagine if instead SB had some DOGE guy write an explainer about what they do. He explains that everyone is a 10x'er who works 18-hour days, and they couldn't possibly be doing more with less overhead.
I still wouldn't come away thinking "wow, I'm so impressed! Thank God the US has DOGE!"
More than welcome to express a critique, I just don’t think the editorial responsibility we have for a DOGE explainer is the same at all as the department of education.
The part that bugged me was that the piece is subtitled "America’s least understood and most efficient agency, explained" and then it didn't seem to defend the part that seems fairly well understood and inefficient to me, the student loan system.
Money spent on degrees that are never used for anything, not worth anything, not even finished, that can't be paid back because the "education" the person received wasn't worth anything. That money is being spent extremely inefficiently!
Just because you "send the money out the door efficiently" doesn't mean that you are efficiently accomplishing your goals.
To be fair to the author, they have very little control over those things in the Department itself. Even if the agency is completely blown up, the student loans will just move somewhere else like Treasury (as noted in the article).
I don't think that's true - the DOE has significant control over who gets federal student loans. They put requirements both on the students who can receive student loans, and the institutions that are charging tuition.
For example, look at all of the rules the DOE enforces through Title 9. They clearly have a lot of control over university behavior.
"Money spent on degrees that are never used for anything, not worth anything, not even finished, that can't be paid back because the "education" the person received wasn't worth anything. That money is being spent extremely inefficiently!"
This is a fake problem that you have been propagandized to believe by people who oppose having an educated populace.
Most degrees have great economic utility both for the degree-holder and society writ large.
What about the fact that the massive amount of money spent on student loans is often wasted and contributed significantly toward the rising cost of college?
I read the article as saying “hey the DOE does a lot of important stuff that you may not know about in addition to the stuff that is controversial (much of which would get folded into other departments anyway, like student loans), so indiscriminate slashing, which, impedes these functions and may not move the needle much of the controversial stuff, is a bad idea” and a lot of the responses are BUT THEY ALSO DO CONTROVERSIAL STUFF!!!
Right, but I don’t think anyone in the comments section is pro-DOGE, which makes the article feel lacking for purpose. I think a better framing might have been “here is how you should reform the DOE, and this is why DOGE isn’t achieving that; meanwhile, they’re cutting a lot of important functions”. When you skip over treating existing problems in the DOE it feels like more of the same tired defense of a broken system that got us to this place. People who love something that isn’t working can’t just defend it and gloss over glaring problems without losing the audience along the way.
>But I'd say it's questionable that the DOE is efficient in terms of spending its large budget in the ways that would best benefit American society. The article doesn't even really try to argue that it does.<
Perhaps that's because DOGE has gutted (or is trying to gut) *administrative employment* at DOE. It's not attempting (yet, in any event) to slash DOE's "large budget."
What are you referring to here? Is anti-Asian discrimination common in public schools? Is the civil rights division ignoring complaints of harassment against Asian students?
The fact that this comment has so many likes suggests that there’s something familiar you are talking about here - do you think that college admissions processes are part of the system, and the civil rights division is getting complaints about that?
Yes I think anti-Asian discrimination is common in public schools as well as colleges. Gifted programmes and various specialist schools have been closed down because the beneficiaries were Asian. I think that is explicitly illegal and the Department of Education Civil Rights division was ignoring the issue. Discrimination in higher education was even more explicit and overtly illegal and was also being ignored by an organisation whose job was enforcing laws against such discrimination.
Google 'affirmative action asian personality score' without quotes. It's an informative15 minutes.
Universities created a personality score on which they rated their applicants. Asians consistently scored lower on personality, but higher on grades and test scores. Asians noticed this trend and sued. Universities said the personality scores are necessary to ensure a diverse student body. The supreme court overturned affirmative action, but this stuff was legal for a long time.
I think these policies were always completely illegal even when they were widely practiced. They never would hold up in court, there was just total inaction by civil rights organisations when faced by blatant discrimination which is a large part of my initial point.
But Kenny asked if you thought the government (the DOE which is what this article is about) is discriminating against Asians in K-12 public schools. You responded as to how universities are practicing this discrimination. I’m not arguing the government isn’t discriminating against Asian students (though I don’t see evidence it is), just that you’ve not addressed the question.
If the government is suing districts for discrimination only when they discriminate against certain groups, and letting discrimination against others slide, that is a major problem
I think it's actually possible that the civil rights people are doing their job well and fight anti-Asian discrimination (the post specifically mentions anti-Asian harassment!), but that would mean that testing is basically fake/bad, so why do you keep the people that administer NAEP and Pisa? I think that these two specific claims (fighting anti-Asian discrimination and providing useful tests and statistics) are mutually exclusive.
I think that people who say that making tests for college admissions optional (or abolishing test-based schools) is not racist towards Asians support their position by claiming that tests don't actually reflect student quality that well. I can buy that argument, but then I don't buy why testing is so critical that it's a problem if Trump abolishes it.
I think you’re confusing the tests. NAEP’s purpose is entirely different from the SAT, AP, or ACT. Those tests are taken by a self-selected group of students and interpreted by colleges and universities for their own purposes. They’re neither administered by nor used as an actionable measure of K-12 efficacy by the federal government. NAEP, on the other hand, is a statistical sampling administered by the DOE to give the country an idea of how their public education system is working across the student population, and to suggest when and where interventions are needed.
I'm not confusing the tests, but I may have confused you with my argument. Again, the general argument that testing is bad/inadequate (with which I disagree, to be clear) doesn't depend on who administers a test or for what purpose.
Sorry, what was your argument? In the comment I was responding to, I think you said some people argue the College Board tests don’t reflect student quality so how could these same people be upset if Trump did away with the NAEP. If that was indeed your argument, I still say it’s pretty blatantly logically flawed. If it’s not what you meant to say, can you explain?
"tests don't actually reflect student quality that well."
This seems like something that could be studied empirically, given how long this debate has been going on. How well do students perform in school compared to how they do in tests? How do they do in the workforce?
For some reason we act like these are hypothetical questions when they have answers that people with resources could find and share.
Reminds of some 25 years ago when my branch chief was meeting with one of the Cal Biserkely engineering deans, discussing enrollment. The dean pointed to a stack of applications and commented he could fill the engineering department with 100% asian applicants.
One can debate the merits of what the Dept of Ed does, but I thought this was an really informative and well-written post that I plan on sharing with others. More stuff like this, please
Agree. I’m not sure what my view is on what is worthwhile vs not*, but this is a great primer on what the dept does for those of us who may not have paid much attention before.
*My inclination is that we will regret losing the research function held by DoEd.
I can't get past the fact that one person files thousands of civil rights complaints each year. In 2022, this person filed 7,330 out of 18,804 complaints, or 39% of all Education Department civil rights complaints. 550 people in the Office for Civil Rights and this person is either (1) wasting their time or (2) requiring the department to hire lots of people that aren't needed.
Meanwhile, this person's identity appears to be confidential, so they do this same thing year after year without repercussion. Shameful.
Seems to be common thing 90% of noise complaints about Dublin Airport came from one guy.
"He filed 6,227 complaints in the year 2020 and within the first three months of this current year, he has reportedly filed 5,276 complaints—or about 59 cases per day—of a total of 5,573 complaints the DDA has received."
Only if he is doing it deliberately. I did once deal with a person who made ADA discrimination complaints to the AG office at least twice per week. The inspector is obligated to come out. I felt for the poor guy, because he would sigh and say 'yeah, it's him again'. The thing is that the complainer really believed what he was complaining about, it was not malicious. He really believed that we could order planes to not fly over him, or that we could force his neighbors to remove their well-maintained trees because he was allergic to those trees, or that we could ban his neighbors from using legal weed killer in their own yards, or ban anyone on his street from owning or walking a dog because he had a phobia. He really believed that we were just choosing not to accommodate what he believed were reasonable requests for an accommodation.
I think it goes toward explaining the comment with the most likes. How can ED handle all the civil rights complaints with only 550 people? Because a large number come from just one person who can probably be ignored.
The individual isn't filing thousands of complaints each year. The numbers of complaints 2022 and 2016 were anomalously high because of this person but the intervening years saw much lower numbers of complaints, e.g., 8,935 complaints in 2021 and 9,719 in 2020.
Informative, but it might have taken on the ideas that presumably lie behind the -- possibly misguided even from their own point of view -- hostility to the Department such as:
preference for public schools over voucher programs/charters.
the fall in educational achievement nationally
yes curriculum constant phonics, direct instruction
power of teachers unions over curriculum
student loan forgiveness
lack of due process of people accused of violating university rules on sexual and verbal abuse
The "dear colleagues" letter that supposedly legislated DEI in universities.
Just to say that formally the Department does not have legal authority on these matters misses the political point.
There was apparently an expansion of Title IX authority that didn’t follow the normal commenting and review process that the Administrative Procedures Act requires under Obama. (Francis Fukuyama brought it up in a recent podcast.)
If you don’t like the substance of the change, just say that. But does anyone really give a shit if they opened things up for 60 days of comments, then did the same thing? Did the world really miss having lawyers process, categorize, and summarize feedback that’s barely a step above internet comments and come up with some reason why they’re doing what was in the NPR anyway?
Asked as someone whose job it is to, well, do that stuff.
I am not massively attached to the notice and comment period, but there's something Freddie deBoer calls "stolen base politics" where you push through policies your Groups want that you'd get crushed on if you ran them by the voters. And that sort of thing is antithetical to democracy.
Certainly the Dear Colleague stuff in both the Obama and Biden administration should have never happened. If you want to make massive changes of that sort, convince the voters that you are right first. They didn't do that and tried to do it on the down low because they knew the voters would not want this.
I am saying they knew they couldn't get this through Congress OR bring it to the public as an executive order, so that's why they used the arguably illegal procedure of a letter with no notice and comment.
They tried to massively change policy without any democratic input and that is terrible.
I strongly disagree with the merits of the policy change, but it was an extremely public decision that (as I recall) was announced with some fanfare. I do not think it is “antithetical to democracy” for a president to, at worst, skip what is effectively a paperwork formality in an area reserved to the executive’s discretion: enforcement of an anti-discrimination law. I think myriad roadblocks to the exercise of government authority are what have lowered US state capacity.
One angle you could use to support the “antidemocratic” claim is to say that going the “no notice and comment guidance” route rather than the “final rule” route evaded Congressional review under the CRA. But the Obama era letter was issued while the Democrats held the Senate.
Also, while you mention FDB, Barro’s concept of stolen base politics feels quite different from this issue. He was talking about people relying on ideological values to shut out arguments against progressive maximalism, to regard anyone who argued against COVID restrictions as someone advocating the genocide of disabled people. We’re talking about paperwork. Not substance, paperwork.
1. This had nothing to do with executive discretion. It was a policy change.
2. It had nothing to do with enforcement of anti-discrimination law, which does not say that college students accused of sexual assaults must be denied due process.
3. It was a massive policy change.
4. Notice and comment is crucial for democratic legitimacy. Indeed the ONLY reason to send a Dear Colleague letter here is because they knew that if they actually let citizens comment on this they would have been deluged with extremely negative public opinion.
5. NEVER did Obama, Biden, or Harris EVER run on stripping due process protections for college students accused of assault, and it would have cost them massively if they did.
I’ll stop at point 1. A policy change is within the discretion of the executive branch. I can’t get past point one. If you think it’s illegitimate for a president to do a substantive thing that changes government policy, that’s basically QAnon to me.
When you broaden authority and rules for regulating a large number of entities beyond what current standards and statutes suggest then it is on the regulating entity to make the case as to why they have the authority to make such broad reaching changes. And substantive comments are the ones that matter anyways (usually they come from lawyers and attachments detailing their support or opposition to said action.)
We are seeing violations of the APA and other laws governing executive action with this current administration. We can argue whether APA is warranted or valuable. I am just repeating what I heard from Fukuyama when discussions turned to executive overreach.
Yes I'm one of those conservatives that's not in favor of getting rid of the department of education, while at the same time VERY much understanding the impulse.
The DOE was used as a cudgel in the culture wars to push society in one direction (while ignoring their primary job of actually educating kids). That predictably back fired and now the actual important work they do is in jeopardy.
Most of these arguments, as succinctly laid out in the piece, have little to do with the DoE. The DoE doesn’t create curriculum, doesn’t manage relations with teacher unions, doesn’t enforce educational achievement nationally, can’t enforce DEI. Student loan forgiveness was bad but legality of giving public money to vouchers/charters is unclear and probably would need Congress to update the laws.
It kind of doesn't miss the point if the thing they DID about their supposed critiques is this DOE gutting. You kind of do have to examine the whole 'DOE thing' if that's what they chose to do. Slow boring tends to publish various critiques of K12 issues but it doesn't try to make the Republicans case for them. It's kind of on them to do that!
I think you misunderstand the SB piece. He’s not writing to defend DOE per se, but rather point out some factually true and little-known realities of DOE’s place in a system run by states and local districts.
In terms of how DOE keeps it from being worse? Well the Title 1 money and the existence of special ed is better than those things not existing. Having administrative oversight means those funds aren’t stolen or mis-spent. How many school districts, absent oversight, would find a way to spend their special ed money on a new football field or raises or a nicer building rather than on special ed, since the decisionmakers are skeptical the sped kids will ever learn anything? Uh, more than a couple.
Not possessing basic rudimentary facts about how K12 is structured in america makes it hard to have a coherent opinion about improving it with policy. Which leads to initiatives like “lets just lay off 50% of the federal office related to this stuff and see what gets worse or better”
But to be informative this day when abolishing the department is on the table is either a defense or a waste of today’s time. The post did not give anyone the information with which to discus the questions, possible reasons for hostility to the Department’s activities.
Ben - thanks for a wonderful primer on the Department of Education's form and function. Quick side note- I grew up in Meriden, CT, and was my school's student representative to the board of education when Miguel Cardona was an assistant superintendent, so I knew your old boss! He was always a wonderful guy.
It really clicked when I read the section of Office of Federal Student Aid that that's the real target here. Kneecapping the administration of student loans will result in less accessibility and lower matriculation, and could be a severe financial blow to a number of institutions. I am sure that's the core reason the Trump admin wants to dismantle the Department. It's another blow against the "academy" that they want to destroy in their crusade to use state power to reshape America's cultural landscape.
But this is also another instance where there's some real possibility for reform. I am concerned that increasing accessibility of larger and larger amounts of student loans is what led to costs increasing at many universities in the 2010s. Universities could charge whatever they wanted knowing that more or less students would have access to a large amount of federal loans. This both burdened students with a good deal of debt and led to bloat and mission creep in universities, with the classic example being the increasing share of budget sent on administration and administrators, not to mention luxe student accommodations.
Do you see any truth to the accessibility of federal loans leading to the faster than inflation cost surge of attending college? Is that a legitimate area of reform or is it a GOO talking point that has been wonkified just enough to be taken seriously?
I'm honestly not sure how one could see the rising costs and not link it to the increased availability of federal funds. Since the Middle Income Student Assistance Act was passed in late 1970s, each $1 increase in federal aid has lead to a $0.65 increase in tuition. An example of how good intentions can lead to very bad outcomes if you don't think through the consequences of a particular action
I think CAN be a good idea. But the amount of loan offered needs to be tied to job prospects based on the degree. If the average income from that degree can't pay for the loan then you can't borrow that amount.
Also, the debt should be dischargeable in bankruptcy (if the person really is bankrupt and expected to remain that way, not a doctor that just graduated). But if that happens a certain percent needs to be billed back to the education institution.
Not the whole thing, but say 10-20% seems reasonable. Colleges need to have skin in the game.
I’ll have to go find the link but @bronxzoocobra shared a while back that average tuition costs have been falling since about 2015 despite the growth in loans. From what I remember it was ambiguous as to why. Competition, perhaps, but it’s not like we suddenly got a thousand new cheap colleges in the last decade threatening the expensive private schools. Anyway, maybe bzc has it on hand otherwise I’ll go looking in a bit and share back.
I know Forbes is kinda suspect sometimes and I suppose The College Board has every reason to portray the costs of college as falling but I don't see anything obviously outrageous about what's reported. It does call into question the idea that college prices are majorly impacted by the availability student loans. Certainly changed my thinking.
Even without the current administration’s meddling the current model of loading up students with debt, admitting everyone who can co-sign, and hamstringing professor agency was breaking due to demographics. We will just see an acceleration of closings and school mergers.
By tying financial incentives to students the game becomes keeping warm bodies enrolled. This means faculty are under greater pressure to pass students, lower standards, and are subject to punitive arbitration and appeals processes when it comes to grade appeals, academic dishonesty, and spurious allegations of discrimination/misconduct. All this restricts instructor agency and ability to teach.
When more funds come from taxpayers there is less pressure to bend over backwards to retain students.
Why would it matter where the money comes from? I feel like the pressure is there regardless.
One thing I notice is that I think the student loans are delaying the pressure on the student side. We sometimes see students who fail the same class 5-6 times. Yes, the university should just kick them out, but also the student needs to realize they are chasing good money after bad and need to drop out (or transfer) and get their shit together before coming back.
Wouldn’t we be tying money to warm bodies, whether it’s taxpayer money or loan money? I still have the same incentive to keep enrollment in my classes up so my department is better funded.
It’s the direct tying of funding. When it comes from tax dollars then you don’t have the same incentive comparability problem. The incentive is to please the authority granting funding not the students. Incentives for juicing enrollment and passing students is indirect.
The cost increases were due to the number of administrators these schools now have on staff. At some schools, it’s more than the students in matriculation.
This is often wildly overstated. For example, counting graduate research assistants as “administrative” employees. And it probably is a good thing that educators aren’t personally responsible for administrative jobs, as they were prior to the 1970s.
"The Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative is a “multi-phase” project of Stanford’s IT leaders. The list took “18 months of collaboration with stakeholder groups” to produce, the university tells us. We can’t imagine what’s next, except that it will surely involve more make-work for more administrators, whose proliferation has driven much of the rise in college tuition and student debt. For 16,937 students, Stanford lists 2,288 faculty and 15,750 administrative staff.
"
Same thing at UMICH and many other schools. Most of these people should probably be fired, but I think AI is going to cause higher education collapse before they figure this out.
You have not rebutted my assertion in the slightest. Again, how many research assistants, TAs, etc. are they including in these numbers? How many grounds keepers and janitors?
There were ground keepers, janitors and TA's 40 years ago. So I remain skeptical if they account for the doubling of admin staff over 25 years
"it’s noted that between 1987 and 2012, the number of administrative staff more than doubled, adding over 500,000 administrative and professional employees. "
I don’t think you’re responding to this question. If doubling at universities generally means 500,000 added, then I don’t think that the number you are talking about includes 15,000 at Stanford alone. Your numbers are using a different definition of “administrative staff” than the other person in this thread.
If you want to make claims about numbers, you have to be clear about what you are counting so that you don’t run very different sorts of things together.
You got it backwards. That's what the schools spend their money on once they were charging it. But the money to pay the admins was driven, in part, by federal loans.
Hi, this an area of professional expertise (or at least, know enough to talk about). As others have pointed out, net tuition paid by families has actually DECREASED over the past few years, as states expanded their budgets in the aftermath of the Great Recession. The primary driver of tuition increases in the years beforehand was a gutting of state support during the Great Recession, and in fact during many prior fiscal crises dating back to the early 80s. Moreover, direct federal loans - while a significant portion of overall outstanding loans - do not come close to covering the cost of attendance for full-time undergraduate students at residential universities, and are not competitive with the interest rates homeowner parents can receive on home equity loans. The creation of the mortgage backed security in the early 80s coincided pretty closely with the first erosions of public funds and essentially covered it over as home prices rose (at least for middle class families).
What is true is that at many schools, there has been a widening gulf between sticker price (the price in the brochure) and net price (the average price paid net of financial aid). Essentially, wealthy families have been footing the bill for lower income students. Whether consciously or not, much of the backlash against higher ed stems not just from elitism, but from a sense among white upper middle class conservatives that they're being overcharged (they are) for the services they receive. That gets compounded when they see identity based programming that their kids don't utilize.
Beyond all that, Bayes Cost Theorem is real in higher ed.
One other quick point: all of the above is in regards to undergraduate education. Graduate and professional schools are another matter; federal loans do indeed cover the full cost and have absolutely led to rising prices there (and those contributions to net assets do indeed get plowed back into undergraduate ops).
"Whether consciously or not, much of the backlash against higher ed stems not just from elitism, but from a sense among white upper middle class conservatives that they're being overcharged (they are) for the services they receive. That gets compounded when they see identity based programming that their kids don't utilize"
I suspect white upper middle class liberals feel the same way
I can't speak for all of us - and my kids are just starting elementary school, so perhaps I'll change my tune - but as a certified WUMCL I don't think we feel quite the same. Maybe to a certain extent, but there is a set of values folks ascribe to on the left, including belief in the value of diverse classmates for your own kids, that changes the equation a bit.
If you think diversity as a value is overrated, then paying extra to ensure it is going to sting differently. That's doubly true in higher ed where there is a zero sum game around admissions, and efforts to promote diversity threaten your own kids' access to these institutions.
" It's another blow against the "academy" that they want to destroy in their crusade to use state power to reshape America's cultural landscape."
But didn't a lot of this start because this was already happening but from the left?
The left has controlled education for decades now, and has been trying to use it to push the culture in a different direction. Predictably that has pissed a LOT of people off and now they are trying to do the reverse.
I guess you could close one eye, squint with the other, and call the Dept of Education efficient, but it’s not. The student loan program is especially inefficient, as it has led to legions of students getting worthless degrees while accumulating mounds of debt. Buying something of little value for lots of money is inefficient, but Matt calls it efficient because the DOE didn’t steal a lot as it passed through their hands.
“ But where shuttering proponents are often silent is on the importance of the requirements and standards the Department of Education attaches to the money it awards.”
Why are these standards important? Are they improving our levels of education? I have hired over 500 engineers for my former company. I’ve also worked with hundreds of our clients’ engineers. Some of this second group came from colleges from which I would never dream of hiring. These are, for example, electrical engineers who don’t have the foggiest idea what the power triangle is. Their degrees are worthless to society.
Here in New Orleans, about a dozen years ago, we had a valedictorian of a local high school who could not pass the high school exit exam. Thanks for those standards DOE. What is the purpose of measuring and tracking those stats and not doing anything to improve education? The DOE is little more than an artificial industry made up of jobs programs for the Democrat Party. Get rid of it; return the function to the states; and allow the states to capture the taxes that pay for it if they think it’s wise.
If we are worried about disadvantaged students simply mandate their inclusion.
I'm sympathetic to your concerns, but I'm not clear what you're advocating for.
Do you think the DOE needs to dramatically restrict which institutions are eligible for student loans? I'm not sure how they'd do this. Perhaps by developing and administering some sort of exit exam required for graduates (of all subjects!) to verify that these colleges and tech schools are teaching them adequately?
This seems directionally opposite of the current administration's approach.
The Obama administration had a proposal to create a scoring system for colleges and universities that focused on, among other things, job placement and salaries after graduation. Coming in the latter part of the second term, it didn't get enough traction to take off.
I advocate for the abolition of the DOE, the establishment of which, is clearly unconstitutional. Government should always be performed at the level closest to the people as is possible.
However, that ship has probably sailed. The DOE lavishing of grants and loans has had the perverse effect of driving educational inflation through the roof. High school graduates who are not really college material are taking the money to extend their adolescence.
Napoleon won the Siege of Toulon at 25; he defeated the insurgents in Paris at 27; and he was the First Consul at 30. We stay on our parents’ insurance until we are 26. We have infantilized our young adults, and the DOE is part of that.
Other points aside, the "stay on our parents' insurance until we are 26," is mostly downstream of challenges around the way we handle health insurance in the U.S.
I was trying to make the point that we coddle young adults way past the time they should be standing on their own feet. And healthcare and the DOE are both part of that.
What does the department of education have to do with health insurance? And why is getting health insurance from the employer of the person who gave birth to you 26 years ago any more infantilizing than getting health insurance from the department that sent you to war 30 years ago?
My mention of health insurance was to give a reinforcing example of infantilizing our youth. A normal 25 year old should not be supported by his parents. I gave an historical example to show that it didn’t used to be so. And that are forcing insurance companies to do that is an example of infantilizing our youth.
The DOE is lavishing money, in loans and grants, on “students” who should never have gone to college. This is being used by them to extend their adolescence. They go to college, party for six years on government money, then find themselves with a ton of debt and a worthless degree. And then the Dems have this great constituency they can offer to bribe with cancellation of student debt.
The health insurance example was to show that this extended adolescence is a wider government policy.
Your comparison of being subsidized by your parents to being subsidized by the Department of Defense is parallelism. The second one is part of a deal that was made. The Department of defense offers a level of pay and benefits in exchange for service. The health insurance 30 years later is part of that deal. There was no such deal made with the newborn infant; it’s just a benefit and cost forced on working parents by an overweening federal government.
That’s an absurd accusation. I don’t like it that people living on the public dole can vote, however I don’t think it’s unconstitutional. So you are wrong on your literal accusation.
You are also wrong on your implication that the mission of the DOE is constitutional.
Tenth Amendment
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The Commerce Clause is the portal the left generally drives through, but no reasonable person could say it applies here.
I consider myself fairly reasonable, so I'll bite on your point re the Commerce Clause: If I take out a loan to attend graduate school in NY and later move to California, which state should regulate that?
"We have infantilized our young adults, and the DOE is part of that."
"This younger generation behaves like infants!" A common through-line from older generations throughout history (for centuries). My read is the DOE was established in 1977. I'm amazed you're able to string even a single sentence together especially given your clearly "worthless degree" - though, each and every one is total fucking bullshit.
I gave an example to illustrate the fact that we are infantilizing our young adults. It’s true that each generation generally thinks the youth are sissies and the world is going to hell in a hand basket. You assumed I meant that this tendency to pamper youth occurred after me; I did not. It’s gotten worse, but it’s been happening ever since WW2 ended.
So your post consists of an erroneous assumption and ad hominem attacks - nothing else, lol.
I sympathize with the educators. I think a big part of the problem is the parents. I went to a mediocre Catholic high school. A new teacher, who was coming from one of our public schools, told us that she was going to put us in alphabetical order. We all got up, walked around until we figured our place out, and in about a minute we were in order. She was flabbergasted. I was too, because I knew we weren’t the sharpest bunch.
The public schools system is much worse in the Greater NOLA area because our Catholic school system drains away a leavening force. Butt that teacher, in the public school system, was just not going to get much teaching done. And that’s because the parents aren’t giving them much to work with.
Same kids, same messed up family life, dramatically different results.
Something similar can be seen in Steubenville's dramatically different reading results (again a poor school district). And they've maintained those results for over 2 decades
"The DOE is little more than an artificial industry made up of jobs programs for the Democrat Party. Get rid of it; return the function to the states"
I'm sure every single state, including all those in the Old South, can be counted on to do a crackerjack job monitoring and enforcing high education standards. It's just those dastardly federal DOE agents who have been holding them back!
Also, calling it the "Democrat Party" is, as we say, a tell.
Ryan, seems like you didn't read the article and are here to shout out your preconceived notions. Clearly whatever degree you have is worthless as it taught such poor reading comprehension. Try to read it by sounding out each word like a toddler and then come back to us, ok little guy?
I confess that in my Electrical Engineering courses they never emphasized double checking whether a guest writer had been engaged. You’ve scored a heavy blow with this one, lol.
Right now it completes its mandate very efficiently, such that “let’s cut the workforce by half” doesn’t make much sense. Are all the programs it administers creating a lot of value for dollar spent is a different (important!) question. Slashing staff just means we get the same programs you don’t like (the federal spending on student loans), but done worse, while also risking useful but labor intensive stuff like labor collection and standard setting.
I get what you’re saying, but from my perspective the DOE is a source of evil and the less staff they have the less likely they are to achieve their aims. That’s a great thing to me, and probably to most Americans.
Slightly distressing how many slow bore commenters seem to be so blase about the Musk/Trump administration maybe rewriting Federal policy by other means. Everyone here seems to be wishcasting their preferred outcome onto Musk's extra-legal shake up.
In one way I get it, the Academic left has been very annoying and arrogant for a while. But the US has had the best university system in the world and it's a huge economic advantage. In addition, this isn't going to be primarily felt by Harvard or Yale, but by middle tier private and state schools and students.
Lastly, even in the extremely unlikely event these cuts lead to well thought out changes that moderate and rationalize federal education policy rather than just deal out dis-affinity group punishment, the extra-legal process being used is bad.
All we can do right now is give a collective shrug and hope that the admin gets bogged down in litigation. Remember this admin only has so many contempt humans because they select solely on sycophanty.
“education is not and never was federalized” is true in the narrow sense that the feds don’t run schools—but the post then gives a long list of ways in which the federal government actually does exert an extraordinary amount of power.
For example:
—Attaching a lot of strings to the formula money it gives out
—Telling schools nationwide who can be on which sports team [+Obama did the same for bathrooms]
—Litigating cases related to individual students
—Telling a (private!) university to place an individual academic department into receivership
—Creating grant programs whose real purpose is to get schools and states nationwide to change their policies (via meeting requirements to compete for the grant)
Surely you’ve got to admit that this is an extraordinary amount of power for a department that’s technically not in charge? A lot of it is pretty blatantly trying to find back doors to accomplish things that would otherwise be unconstitutional.
By contrast, Canada genuinely has no federal education department and doesn’t do most of the things on this list. The Canadian constitution says education is a provincial responsibility, and it works fine.
It has incredibly little power. They get to attach strings to like 10% of the funding. The grant programs don't compel any school or state to participate in them!
10% of a budget is a large fraction of a budget and not really practicable to forego. Moreover, that's an average. I suspect the feds provide significantly more than that fraction for some school systems and states.
Imagine a state or school district saying to its constituents, "You pay taxes to the federal government, which are then returned to you via substantial school subsidies. We've decided not to take those school subsidies." Refusing federal money (and the strings attached to it) is as much a choice as refusing optional protection from the mob.
Exactly! Just like how technically there’s no federal drinking age, but realistically there more or less is, because no state wanted to give up a portion of its highway funding for which its residents paid taxes.
And on education specifically, the mandates that are issued (e.g. the recent one on school sports teams) are often described by both the White House and the press as being a new general requirement—and it’s not until you get many paragraphs down that it’s revealed that technically it’s just a string attached to receiving federal money. Because everyone involved understands that coercion is the point.
It’s a little more complicated than that. If X amount of your students are low-income, you get Title 1 money to ameliorate the costs of being a low income area, likely with less property tax funding, to educate your more low income population, who usually cost more to educate. And your special education can be paid for by the feds, but you have to follow A B and C processes and rules and requirements for educating them with that money. It definitely varies a lot state by state, district by district.
Either way it is a small decision-maker compared to state and district actors. People just don’t have it in them to get mad at 50 states’ education departments and 8000 districts’. If (almost) all of those are having trouble, it implies that the problem is itself a hard problem, and not that there are some nefarious bureaucratic villains in one office in DC fucking it up for the good folk of the land.
I don't think anything you just wrote contradicts my point that state and local school systems didn't really have any choice about complying with federal mandates.
I mean most institutions want more funding to do some of their mission even if it requires oversight paperwork or participating in a legal architecture they have qualms with, I guess. But DOE-specific oversight is indeed factually limited to things like administration of Title 1 and IDEA funds; various targeted grants; and civil rights law. What is the DOE-specific mandate that you think is responsible for the problems you see in K12, to a greater degree than local or state authorities?
Look back at the thread. You wrote, "[The DOE] has incredibly little power. They get to attach strings to like 10% of the funding. The grant programs don't compel any school or state to participate in them!"
I responded that school systems can't reasonably be expected to forego federal funding (since 10% is a large amount), and hence they have to comply with DOE mandates. So I disagree both with the claim that the DOE has very little power and the claim that school systems can choose to ignore that power.
This is not my policy area. But I think this elides the massive IDEA/IEP bureaucracy that is mostly left to states and localities with the federal government “checking their work” to say what falls short. Here in NYC, 1 in 5 students has an IEP. There is a ton of front end expenditure in developing, updating, and carrying out IEPs. And on the back end, there is litigation to give force to those rights. Private law firms arguing that schools didn’t give some extremely troubled child enough attention, and then the City is forced to pay *hundreds of thousands* of dollars in the form of private remedial education benefits. The law firms get a statutorily mandated fee. The teachers, the feds, the lawyers, the Blue city bureaucrats, they’re all imperfect checks on money going out the door because it’s all for the benefit of the “disabled” kids who just want an education.
And the Biden DOE thing about restraining or isolating students with disabilities certainly sounds like it could have contributed to the perception that disruptive students are increasingly endangering the ability of other students to have a suitable learning environment. There is a huge overlap between students with disabilities (as we define it today), students with low incomes from broken homes, and students that cause classroom disruptions. Read teachers talk online about how they feel the profession has been post COVID. Seems like they kinda miss being able to freely separate the problem kids and having the school administration back them up. I don’t think that’s all the Biden DOE (or independent Blue state equivalent efforts), granted.
This is an important and underrated point. I have experience outside of NYC and my experience is largely similar. I wrote elsewhere that it's not just some extreme conservatives who are unhappy with our current system of including students with disabilities in mainstream settings. Many quite normal parents, teachers, and district officials are also quite unhappy. My worry is that we go down a road of simply rejecting inclusion, repeal or neuter (perhaps via vouchers) IDEA and other related law, and end up back in a pre-DOE purely exclusionary system.
Also, IEPs are being systematically abused by academically ambitious families to get a leg up for their kids. You get a de-rigeur ADHD diagnosis, and now your kid gets more time on all the tests.
While providing a lot of useful information, the essay seemingly ignores an important political element. Disregarding the issue of legal mandates, DOE is enmeshed in debatable elements of pedagogy that trigger widespread anger related to perceptions of poor school performance, and has been involved in numerically trivial but culturally massive issues like transgender athletes. I don't think Trump's efforts to kill the department nor the substantial public support for his approach can be understood without mentioning such issues.
It would be helpful to say how the department of education has been involved in any of these things. Which of the mentioned programs are involved in which of the things you are talking about?
I face a basic asymmetry, since Mr. Miller is a long-term expert on educational policy with extensive first-hand knowledge of DOE. Nevertheless, to list a couple of examples:
(a law against educational discrimination by sex) is subject to interpretation by federal agencies. In recent years, a lot of its practical rules have been issued by DOE, apparently including the requirement that XY students who self-identify as girls must be allowed to play on girls' teams.
2. The policy of "mainstreaming" for students with special needs has been discussed for many years
and apparently has been championed by DOE. I have no informed knowledge, but apparently it potentially benefits the special needs student at some cost to non-special needs classmates. Is it wise policy? I don't know, but it seems a topic worth discussion and political debate, not simply a technocratic no-brainer.
"it seems a topic worth discussion and political debate, not simply a technocratic no-brainer."
This seems right and important to me. It's frustrating that both the original post and most of the comments mentioning it seem to be dancing around it without just coming out and saying what the policies are, and what their justification or opposition is based on.
Well they for one issued a "Dear Colleague" letter under Obama that gutted important due process rights.
And of course under Biden they conflated sex with Gender and pushed for biological boys to be allowed to play in women's sports or go into women only areas such as locker rooms and bathrooms if they "said" they are women.
What is the actual force of a “dear colleague” letter? I’ve seen people mention them a lot, but I don’t know if they require universities to do things, threaten to withhold funding from universities that don’t do things, or just strongly recommend that universities do things?
And what are the due process rights here? Are they about criminal law, or about enrollment in an institution? Are there due process rights to continued enrollment in an institution?
"What is the actual force of a “dear colleague” letter?"
Hard to say, but when the people that regulate you send out a memo a lot of people take is seriously. And a LOT of them changed their policies based on that.
The due process was about being at the school. But that matters. Think about what happens when you are kicked from your college because of allegations of sexual assault or rape. Those are REALLY serious charges. The types of charges that could make it impossible to get enrolled somewhere else. They could also make it hard to get a job.
Emily Yoffe has been on this beat for over a decade. Hundreds of civil suits against universities for denial of due process have been filed (and many of them won). Here's a relatively recent piece of hers that also links to some of her earlier Atlantic articles.
I feel like the Title I program is severely underappreciated. It seems like most people aren't aware that low-income schools (including and especially predominantly Black and Latino schools) receive more per-pupil spending than the typical majority white school.
I think this is in part a vestige of the misconception that public schools are still dominantly funded on the local side; in fact nationwide state funding is now at parity with local, if not higher. That dynamic itself is heavily influenced by race and economic demographics, with the poorest schools receiving the most state and federal funds.
My kids go to schools that get a lot of this funding. It helps to pay for things that are vital, such as school bus transportation, school nurses for kids that often don't have access to regular medical care, translators . It's hard to say whether or not scores would be worse without this funding, but the students' and teachers' school days would definitely be worse and more demoralizing.
To analogize with a different example, drug possession laws were never intended to be used primarily as plea bargaining tools when people are stopped for other crimes.
I agree with you. But, alas, schools are now expected/required to provide tons of these types of services, just like public libraries are also expected to provide social services. Neither of them are set up for this, but it is where we are. More and more things are getting dumped on the schools, especially in low income areas.
I am not sure. We would almost definitely have them for special ed. We use city buses for grades 6-12, and I am not sure how that is paid for. We would probably have to eliminate school buses for grades K-5 for kids that live more than 1.5 miles from the school - which is what the funds currently pay for - but maybe they would be able to provide city bus passes for those kids.
It’s telling that there is more emphasis on identifying students with disabilities than there is on identifying gifted kids from working class families. The absolute best use of money in education is to give a boost to smart kids who don’t get enough stimulation at home.
A significant part of this problem is they’re just ran through the same fucking straw.
It’s the same staffing specialists and psychologists and we get spoken to if we refer too many of either into the system and hide the real power behind magic words (if parents ask for testing for either we have to test them but we aren’t supposed to say this to them).
correct, but it’s not uncommon to see kids be a few inches taller than their parents. an iq of 115 or 120 is worth cultivating, might make a perfectly fine accountant/paralegal/teacher/nurse
I don’t think this is actually true, but it’s commonly assumed. The truly bright and gifted kids are better thought of as special needs in and of themselves.
So I'm fully willing to believe DoE should get an A+ in terms of overhead efficiency (although I'd love to know the "base rate" for comparison). Just because something is larded full of pork doesn't mean it should be reformed in a ham-fisted manner, except, this is already 90/10 lean turkey. That's genuinely good to know, along with the actual department responsibilities, which are actually fairly narrow!
But I feel like there's also this implicit...argument in favour of the status quo, which feels rhetorically slippery, false-dichotomizing. Some amount of self-recommending is expected, of course, but the prevailing model of How American Education Works and What It's Even For is pretty muddled. I think we could find bipartisan agreement there, although of course different people see different imperfections. Casey's comment nods at one such snaggle, the parasitic codependence of university admissions <-> student loan dollars. Somehow, despite setting increasing amounts of money on fire, we see educational outcomes trending down, not up...like any credential, a degree's value lies not just in its proof of ability (decreased by significantly) but in its scarcity (also decreased by significantly). If that's the main stepping stone for modern meritocratic success, then...well...solve for the equilibrium! It's good that DoE also funds CTE and other non-college education, but it's still a fraction of the bucket versus "formal education".
One could go on in this vein for several other subtopics as well. I don't even wanna touch the cultural stuff, like the Columbia fiasco, which...definitely falls in the While I Do Not Condone This category, at best.
Let’s say Trump hired me to take over the DOE at its current funding level. And I repurpose 99% of the funding to sponsoring mandatory classes in pole vaulting - only 1% for overhead! The DOE would have become even more efficient than Matt thinks it currently is. But…
You would be breaking the law because Congress appropriates money more specifically than just giving the department a funding level. They specify amounts for certain things you must do.
I don’t misunderstand; it is you, and our substack writer who are confused. He (she?) thinks it is simply a measure of what percentage of their budget gets passed on rather than consumed in department overhead. I introduced the obvious point that it should also consider how much effect its spending is having on the problem. The DOE does well on the former; does anyone think the DOE is doing great on the latter? Still confused?
I don’t see that. The DOE is spending a bunch of money that is having the primary effects of torturing our curricula into ineffective twaddle - constantly changing the way we teach reading and arithmetic - inflating higher education costs, building enormous education bureaucracies at colleges and universities, and encouraging pursuit of worthless degrees. That makes the DOE part of the problem.
My personal opinion is that the larger problem is crappy parents. My wife and I taught our four children to read before they turned four years old. And it was easy. We read to them every night. I know, I know, we were privileged.
I'm using overhead in the narrow sense that the post does (and, incidentally, the way the term is used in the charitable sector), the portion of funding that goes to paying salaries and other administrivia rather than actually Doing The Thing that the department/institution/trust/whatever is set up for. Mr. Miller says 3.4% is pretty good, so I'll take his word for it, given that I'm too lazy to <s>ask an LLM</s> <s>google</s> research the comparable figures for other Federal departments. Assuming that's a faithful representation, it means that cutting the DoE on specifically budgetary grounds is like...well, kinda like slashing PEPFAR because every penny saved counts.
No judgement on how costs might be passed on to the state and local level. That's a "once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down, that's not my department" thing - it'd be neat to get a further breakdown of such money flows, but it seems out of scope for this current article. Did try to make clear in second half of comment that I'm personally lukewarm at best on many of the actual *effects* of those funds/stipulations. But the point was, even approaching with lots of skepticism *and* assuming good-faith intentions, the current state of affairs is a dumb way to do much-needed reform. Using a shotgun when a 9mm would suffice, or some metaphor to that effect. There's a lot of ruin in the American educational system, and yet our top colleges are still somehow envied across the globe - let's try not to cook that particular golden goose, yeah? It's good to be king!
Sign up for a free record, get hounded by bills forever after. Gotta keep that endowment going! Clever business model, but Federal grants are a lot less predatory by comparison.
I find the scrapping of data collection and assessment at the DoE to be uniquely disturbing. Just at a gut level if new leadership comes in to reform an agency and immediately cuts all of the contracts that measure performance that's highly suspicious. But more practically, the uniqueness of these assessments (and part of the reason the federal government is tasked with carrying them out) is that they use consistent methodology over multiple administrations so that researchers and voters can evaluate whether certain policy changes worked or didn't work. The reason we know that there was substantial learning loss during COVID is because we could compare the same assessment to prior years; if the Trump 1 administration had rescinded these assessments in 2017 we would have essentially no idea what happened to our students. Even if the Biden admin re-initiated the contracts, the loss of infrastructure and continuity creates substantial batch effects in these studies -- instead of following a single cohort with a single methodology, you're now restarting with a new cohort. A world where each administration implements their own quality metrics and we have no ability to accurately evaluate policy changes across administrations becomes "post truth" in a very fundamental way.
Thank you for the summary. Now that I understand all of that, I'm OK with tearing it down. As Erick Erickson said this morning, "The left chose to advance its agenda from within these otherwise neutral institutions, infecting them, and now the only cure is tearing them down."
There is truth behind the notion that many cultural, educational, and governmental authorities have been co-opted to push the ideological agendas on certain activists. Does not mean we should destroy these institutions.
I am just sitting here with an awards booklet from the previous admin on my desk where so many DEIA awards were given out… something that has little to do with our actual mandate work. It just makes me wonder who we are appealing to.
Things have gone so weird so quickly in our politics and culture. It’s like a contest of showing off for social media or something.
I agree with the criticisms but disagree with the solution.
We do need national standards and testing. We do need education research. States have proven time and time again that left to their own decides they will just keep lowering standards and passing people that can't read and write.
Communists colonize whatever social organizations and entities they can infiltrate and co-opt them for their mission of bringing about their prophesied utopia. (Only slightly glib with this take.)
So tangentially related question: Does anyone have any clue what's gonna happen to repayment of student loans like my wife's that are stuck in SAVE plan legal hell? This is still gonna be stuck in court for a while. I assume it's probably dead at some point, but what then? The administration has to move all those loans to some other repayment plan some how? Which one? How's that gonna work? Is this all gonna be held up for as long as the courts have it? Or is there something else in the works? I assume the Trump people probably would like to kill it even if somehow it withstands the legal process. Is there plausibly gonna be some DoE intervention that moots the legal fight? Is the any chance of these loans getting paid again before like 2027? This is no way to run a railroad and our ability to budget for the future is a giant mess.
The failure of the Biden admin to genuinely work at untangling the student loan quagmire instead of merely taking legally dubious, partisan inflected, executive actions is gonna look real stupid real quick I suspect.
What they actually did was the worst kind of middle ground where it managed to be:
1. Bad politics
2. Utterly ineffectual
3. Institutionally harmful
All at the same time. Basically anything else from making it a congressional priority, to doing nothing, to simply lawlessly deleting every student loan record would have only hit 2 of those at most.
This is definitely a problem older than Biden that he definitely ran on addressing and then handled incredibly stupidly in a manner highly representative of systemic failure of the Dems to be a viable party. I highlight these failures because I would really desperately appreciate a effective opposition right now.
I think you’re placing too much blame on the Biden administration. The SAVE income driven repayment plan meant basically no one would be burdened by student loan payments. While it has since been blocked by the courts, it uses the same statutory language as other plans that had been in place for many years. In short, SAVE seemed to be an effective solution on clear legal footing.
Also how this will affect everyone paying federal student loans - whether you think federal student loans are good or not, there are still millions of us in repayment who rely on the payment portal functioning and people to answer questions…
Refinance to a private 30-year loan for a low-ish payment? Probably lower than the standard repayment plans they're going to try and force everyone onto. Added "benefit" is you can bankruptcy out of the refinanced private loan.
I'm pretty sure there's at least one legally sound, statutorily mandated IBR plan that forgives balances after 20 or 25 years I think. I doubt it makes sense to lock into a 3rd party loan that seems guaranteed to persist regardless of future political remedies.
It is hard to reconcile a 550 person civil rights division with an education system openly and pretty explicitly practicing anti-Asian discrimination.
Yeah, I thought this kind of perfectly encapsulated the whole piece.
The DOE is "efficient" in the sense that it accomplishes its goals with little overhead (sending out lots of money, selectively enforcing anti-discrimination law, etc.).
But I'd say it's questionable that the DOE is efficient in terms of spending its large budget in the ways that would best benefit American society. The article doesn't even really try to argue that it does.
This piece should be read more as a briefer. department of ed, explained
That's fair, and it's valuable to have pieces like this. But I also think it's kind of natural to read this and think "eh... I'm not so sure I'm impressed."
E.g., imagine if instead SB had some DOGE guy write an explainer about what they do. He explains that everyone is a 10x'er who works 18-hour days, and they couldn't possibly be doing more with less overhead.
I still wouldn't come away thinking "wow, I'm so impressed! Thank God the US has DOGE!"
More than welcome to express a critique, I just don’t think the editorial responsibility we have for a DOGE explainer is the same at all as the department of education.
Also I'd personally love it if Big Balls from DOGE pitched an explainer on this site.
Which explainer would you like them to pitch: the official one, or the honest one?
The part that bugged me was that the piece is subtitled "America’s least understood and most efficient agency, explained" and then it didn't seem to defend the part that seems fairly well understood and inefficient to me, the student loan system.
Money spent on degrees that are never used for anything, not worth anything, not even finished, that can't be paid back because the "education" the person received wasn't worth anything. That money is being spent extremely inefficiently!
Just because you "send the money out the door efficiently" doesn't mean that you are efficiently accomplishing your goals.
To be fair to the author, they have very little control over those things in the Department itself. Even if the agency is completely blown up, the student loans will just move somewhere else like Treasury (as noted in the article).
I don't think that's true - the DOE has significant control over who gets federal student loans. They put requirements both on the students who can receive student loans, and the institutions that are charging tuition.
For example, look at all of the rules the DOE enforces through Title 9. They clearly have a lot of control over university behavior.
"Money spent on degrees that are never used for anything, not worth anything, not even finished, that can't be paid back because the "education" the person received wasn't worth anything. That money is being spent extremely inefficiently!"
This is a fake problem that you have been propagandized to believe by people who oppose having an educated populace.
Most degrees have great economic utility both for the degree-holder and society writ large.
I both agree with the comment and think it's a great piece! I'm glad you ran it.
What about all the stuff about collecting statistics and mandating inclusion for the disabled etc?
Not a hot-button political issue so it got ignored.
What about the fact that the massive amount of money spent on student loans is often wasted and contributed significantly toward the rising cost of college?
I read the article as saying “hey the DOE does a lot of important stuff that you may not know about in addition to the stuff that is controversial (much of which would get folded into other departments anyway, like student loans), so indiscriminate slashing, which, impedes these functions and may not move the needle much of the controversial stuff, is a bad idea” and a lot of the responses are BUT THEY ALSO DO CONTROVERSIAL STUFF!!!
Right, but I don’t think anyone in the comments section is pro-DOGE, which makes the article feel lacking for purpose. I think a better framing might have been “here is how you should reform the DOE, and this is why DOGE isn’t achieving that; meanwhile, they’re cutting a lot of important functions”. When you skip over treating existing problems in the DOE it feels like more of the same tired defense of a broken system that got us to this place. People who love something that isn’t working can’t just defend it and gloss over glaring problems without losing the audience along the way.
>But I'd say it's questionable that the DOE is efficient in terms of spending its large budget in the ways that would best benefit American society. The article doesn't even really try to argue that it does.<
Perhaps that's because DOGE has gutted (or is trying to gut) *administrative employment* at DOE. It's not attempting (yet, in any event) to slash DOE's "large budget."
I mean, I agree. I don't think DOGE is doing anything productive here. I'd really like them to stop whatever they're doing, to be clear.
What are you referring to here? Is anti-Asian discrimination common in public schools? Is the civil rights division ignoring complaints of harassment against Asian students?
The fact that this comment has so many likes suggests that there’s something familiar you are talking about here - do you think that college admissions processes are part of the system, and the civil rights division is getting complaints about that?
Yes I think anti-Asian discrimination is common in public schools as well as colleges. Gifted programmes and various specialist schools have been closed down because the beneficiaries were Asian. I think that is explicitly illegal and the Department of Education Civil Rights division was ignoring the issue. Discrimination in higher education was even more explicit and overtly illegal and was also being ignored by an organisation whose job was enforcing laws against such discrimination.
Google 'affirmative action asian personality score' without quotes. It's an informative15 minutes.
Universities created a personality score on which they rated their applicants. Asians consistently scored lower on personality, but higher on grades and test scores. Asians noticed this trend and sued. Universities said the personality scores are necessary to ensure a diverse student body. The supreme court overturned affirmative action, but this stuff was legal for a long time.
I think these policies were always completely illegal even when they were widely practiced. They never would hold up in court, there was just total inaction by civil rights organisations when faced by blatant discrimination which is a large part of my initial point.
But Kenny asked if you thought the government (the DOE which is what this article is about) is discriminating against Asians in K-12 public schools. You responded as to how universities are practicing this discrimination. I’m not arguing the government isn’t discriminating against Asian students (though I don’t see evidence it is), just that you’ve not addressed the question.
If the government is suing districts for discrimination only when they discriminate against certain groups, and letting discrimination against others slide, that is a major problem
I think it's actually possible that the civil rights people are doing their job well and fight anti-Asian discrimination (the post specifically mentions anti-Asian harassment!), but that would mean that testing is basically fake/bad, so why do you keep the people that administer NAEP and Pisa? I think that these two specific claims (fighting anti-Asian discrimination and providing useful tests and statistics) are mutually exclusive.
What does testing have to do with anti Asian discrimination?
I think that people who say that making tests for college admissions optional (or abolishing test-based schools) is not racist towards Asians support their position by claiming that tests don't actually reflect student quality that well. I can buy that argument, but then I don't buy why testing is so critical that it's a problem if Trump abolishes it.
> tests don't actually reflect student quality that well. I can buy that argument
I don't buy that, and apparently a lot of universities that are returning to mandatory tests don't either anymore.
To be clear, I'm also on the testing-is-good side of that debate.
I think you’re confusing the tests. NAEP’s purpose is entirely different from the SAT, AP, or ACT. Those tests are taken by a self-selected group of students and interpreted by colleges and universities for their own purposes. They’re neither administered by nor used as an actionable measure of K-12 efficacy by the federal government. NAEP, on the other hand, is a statistical sampling administered by the DOE to give the country an idea of how their public education system is working across the student population, and to suggest when and where interventions are needed.
I'm not confusing the tests, but I may have confused you with my argument. Again, the general argument that testing is bad/inadequate (with which I disagree, to be clear) doesn't depend on who administers a test or for what purpose.
Sorry, what was your argument? In the comment I was responding to, I think you said some people argue the College Board tests don’t reflect student quality so how could these same people be upset if Trump did away with the NAEP. If that was indeed your argument, I still say it’s pretty blatantly logically flawed. If it’s not what you meant to say, can you explain?
"tests don't actually reflect student quality that well."
This seems like something that could be studied empirically, given how long this debate has been going on. How well do students perform in school compared to how they do in tests? How do they do in the workforce?
For some reason we act like these are hypothetical questions when they have answers that people with resources could find and share.
I’m curious what the definition of student quality is here?
Reminds of some 25 years ago when my branch chief was meeting with one of the Cal Biserkely engineering deans, discussing enrollment. The dean pointed to a stack of applications and commented he could fill the engineering department with 100% asian applicants.
They could use any filtering method apart from race, which is illegal and deeply unpopular. Maths results, SATS, random lottery etc
Isn’t the main anti-Asian discrimination in private colleges, like Harvard, which are outside DOE control?
Bingo.
One wonders whether there is an alternative to this problem other than burn it all down
One can debate the merits of what the Dept of Ed does, but I thought this was an really informative and well-written post that I plan on sharing with others. More stuff like this, please
Agree. I’m not sure what my view is on what is worthwhile vs not*, but this is a great primer on what the dept does for those of us who may not have paid much attention before.
*My inclination is that we will regret losing the research function held by DoEd.
I can't get past the fact that one person files thousands of civil rights complaints each year. In 2022, this person filed 7,330 out of 18,804 complaints, or 39% of all Education Department civil rights complaints. 550 people in the Office for Civil Rights and this person is either (1) wasting their time or (2) requiring the department to hire lots of people that aren't needed.
Meanwhile, this person's identity appears to be confidential, so they do this same thing year after year without repercussion. Shameful.
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/the-ed-dept-received-the-most-civil-rights-complaints-in-history-last-year/2023/05
Seems to be common thing 90% of noise complaints about Dublin Airport came from one guy.
"He filed 6,227 complaints in the year 2020 and within the first three months of this current year, he has reportedly filed 5,276 complaints—or about 59 cases per day—of a total of 5,573 complaints the DDA has received."
https://www.newsweek.com/major-airport-receives-12000-noise-complaints-one-man-1698708
If the courts faced someone like that they'd make him famous with a vexatious litigant order.
Only if he is doing it deliberately. I did once deal with a person who made ADA discrimination complaints to the AG office at least twice per week. The inspector is obligated to come out. I felt for the poor guy, because he would sigh and say 'yeah, it's him again'. The thing is that the complainer really believed what he was complaining about, it was not malicious. He really believed that we could order planes to not fly over him, or that we could force his neighbors to remove their well-maintained trees because he was allergic to those trees, or that we could ban his neighbors from using legal weed killer in their own yards, or ban anyone on his street from owning or walking a dog because he had a phobia. He really believed that we were just choosing not to accommodate what he believed were reasonable requests for an accommodation.
I think it goes toward explaining the comment with the most likes. How can ED handle all the civil rights complaints with only 550 people? Because a large number come from just one person who can probably be ignored.
Dufuk?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack
The individual isn't filing thousands of complaints each year. The numbers of complaints 2022 and 2016 were anomalously high because of this person but the intervening years saw much lower numbers of complaints, e.g., 8,935 complaints in 2021 and 9,719 in 2020.
Informative, but it might have taken on the ideas that presumably lie behind the -- possibly misguided even from their own point of view -- hostility to the Department such as:
preference for public schools over voucher programs/charters.
the fall in educational achievement nationally
yes curriculum constant phonics, direct instruction
power of teachers unions over curriculum
student loan forgiveness
lack of due process of people accused of violating university rules on sexual and verbal abuse
The "dear colleagues" letter that supposedly legislated DEI in universities.
Just to say that formally the Department does not have legal authority on these matters misses the political point.
There was apparently an expansion of Title IX authority that didn’t follow the normal commenting and review process that the Administrative Procedures Act requires under Obama. (Francis Fukuyama brought it up in a recent podcast.)
If you don’t like the substance of the change, just say that. But does anyone really give a shit if they opened things up for 60 days of comments, then did the same thing? Did the world really miss having lawyers process, categorize, and summarize feedback that’s barely a step above internet comments and come up with some reason why they’re doing what was in the NPR anyway?
Asked as someone whose job it is to, well, do that stuff.
I am not massively attached to the notice and comment period, but there's something Freddie deBoer calls "stolen base politics" where you push through policies your Groups want that you'd get crushed on if you ran them by the voters. And that sort of thing is antithetical to democracy.
Certainly the Dear Colleague stuff in both the Obama and Biden administration should have never happened. If you want to make massive changes of that sort, convince the voters that you are right first. They didn't do that and tried to do it on the down low because they knew the voters would not want this.
It's a Josh Barro saying. https://www.joshbarro.com/p/against-stolen-base-politics
I really don't like that terminology. Stolen bases are good!
Only if it is your team that is winning the game.
I don’t follow your grievance. Do you mean to say that the scope of regulatory change wasn’t to your liking, ie too much or the content of the change?
Secondarily, why isn’t this the fault of Congress?
I am saying they knew they couldn't get this through Congress OR bring it to the public as an executive order, so that's why they used the arguably illegal procedure of a letter with no notice and comment.
They tried to massively change policy without any democratic input and that is terrible.
Ok, I misread in that case. For some reason I was thinking you meant the APA wasn’t democratic.
I strongly disagree with the merits of the policy change, but it was an extremely public decision that (as I recall) was announced with some fanfare. I do not think it is “antithetical to democracy” for a president to, at worst, skip what is effectively a paperwork formality in an area reserved to the executive’s discretion: enforcement of an anti-discrimination law. I think myriad roadblocks to the exercise of government authority are what have lowered US state capacity.
One angle you could use to support the “antidemocratic” claim is to say that going the “no notice and comment guidance” route rather than the “final rule” route evaded Congressional review under the CRA. But the Obama era letter was issued while the Democrats held the Senate.
Also, while you mention FDB, Barro’s concept of stolen base politics feels quite different from this issue. He was talking about people relying on ideological values to shut out arguments against progressive maximalism, to regard anyone who argued against COVID restrictions as someone advocating the genocide of disabled people. We’re talking about paperwork. Not substance, paperwork.
You are wrong in every respect.
1. This had nothing to do with executive discretion. It was a policy change.
2. It had nothing to do with enforcement of anti-discrimination law, which does not say that college students accused of sexual assaults must be denied due process.
3. It was a massive policy change.
4. Notice and comment is crucial for democratic legitimacy. Indeed the ONLY reason to send a Dear Colleague letter here is because they knew that if they actually let citizens comment on this they would have been deluged with extremely negative public opinion.
5. NEVER did Obama, Biden, or Harris EVER run on stripping due process protections for college students accused of assault, and it would have cost them massively if they did.
I’ll stop at point 1. A policy change is within the discretion of the executive branch. I can’t get past point one. If you think it’s illegitimate for a president to do a substantive thing that changes government policy, that’s basically QAnon to me.
When you broaden authority and rules for regulating a large number of entities beyond what current standards and statutes suggest then it is on the regulating entity to make the case as to why they have the authority to make such broad reaching changes. And substantive comments are the ones that matter anyways (usually they come from lawyers and attachments detailing their support or opposition to said action.)
We are seeing violations of the APA and other laws governing executive action with this current administration. We can argue whether APA is warranted or valuable. I am just repeating what I heard from Fukuyama when discussions turned to executive overreach.
Following process is good, actually.
It’s entirely possible I just hate my job, lol.
Yes I'm one of those conservatives that's not in favor of getting rid of the department of education, while at the same time VERY much understanding the impulse.
The DOE was used as a cudgel in the culture wars to push society in one direction (while ignoring their primary job of actually educating kids). That predictably back fired and now the actual important work they do is in jeopardy.
Most of these arguments, as succinctly laid out in the piece, have little to do with the DoE. The DoE doesn’t create curriculum, doesn’t manage relations with teacher unions, doesn’t enforce educational achievement nationally, can’t enforce DEI. Student loan forgiveness was bad but legality of giving public money to vouchers/charters is unclear and probably would need Congress to update the laws.
It kind of doesn't miss the point if the thing they DID about their supposed critiques is this DOE gutting. You kind of do have to examine the whole 'DOE thing' if that's what they chose to do. Slow boring tends to publish various critiques of K12 issues but it doesn't try to make the Republicans case for them. It's kind of on them to do that!
I mean if I wanted to defend DoE, I’d want to do a lot better than that they oversee spending a lot of money with a pretty small staff.
It didn’t go anywhere but I was in such an exchange: education sucks; abolish DOE. I’d like to respond with how DOE keeps it from being worse.
I think you misunderstand the SB piece. He’s not writing to defend DOE per se, but rather point out some factually true and little-known realities of DOE’s place in a system run by states and local districts.
In terms of how DOE keeps it from being worse? Well the Title 1 money and the existence of special ed is better than those things not existing. Having administrative oversight means those funds aren’t stolen or mis-spent. How many school districts, absent oversight, would find a way to spend their special ed money on a new football field or raises or a nicer building rather than on special ed, since the decisionmakers are skeptical the sped kids will ever learn anything? Uh, more than a couple.
Not possessing basic rudimentary facts about how K12 is structured in america makes it hard to have a coherent opinion about improving it with policy. Which leads to initiatives like “lets just lay off 50% of the federal office related to this stuff and see what gets worse or better”
I agree. I said it was “informative.”
But to be informative this day when abolishing the department is on the table is either a defense or a waste of today’s time. The post did not give anyone the information with which to discus the questions, possible reasons for hostility to the Department’s activities.
Ben - thanks for a wonderful primer on the Department of Education's form and function. Quick side note- I grew up in Meriden, CT, and was my school's student representative to the board of education when Miguel Cardona was an assistant superintendent, so I knew your old boss! He was always a wonderful guy.
It really clicked when I read the section of Office of Federal Student Aid that that's the real target here. Kneecapping the administration of student loans will result in less accessibility and lower matriculation, and could be a severe financial blow to a number of institutions. I am sure that's the core reason the Trump admin wants to dismantle the Department. It's another blow against the "academy" that they want to destroy in their crusade to use state power to reshape America's cultural landscape.
But this is also another instance where there's some real possibility for reform. I am concerned that increasing accessibility of larger and larger amounts of student loans is what led to costs increasing at many universities in the 2010s. Universities could charge whatever they wanted knowing that more or less students would have access to a large amount of federal loans. This both burdened students with a good deal of debt and led to bloat and mission creep in universities, with the classic example being the increasing share of budget sent on administration and administrators, not to mention luxe student accommodations.
Do you see any truth to the accessibility of federal loans leading to the faster than inflation cost surge of attending college? Is that a legitimate area of reform or is it a GOO talking point that has been wonkified just enough to be taken seriously?
I'm honestly not sure how one could see the rising costs and not link it to the increased availability of federal funds. Since the Middle Income Student Assistance Act was passed in late 1970s, each $1 increase in federal aid has lead to a $0.65 increase in tuition. An example of how good intentions can lead to very bad outcomes if you don't think through the consequences of a particular action
And yet the actual tuition paid by families has not budged for a very long time:
https://jabberwocking.com/college-tuition-is-down-40-over-the-past-10-years-thats-not-a-typo/
https://jabberwocking.com/college-tuition-is-about-the-same-as-30-years-ago/
If you have a problem with this, feel free to take it up with Kevin Drum using whatever medium you wish.
I think it’s at least worth asking whether federal student loans are a good idea. Perverse incentives and all that.
I think CAN be a good idea. But the amount of loan offered needs to be tied to job prospects based on the degree. If the average income from that degree can't pay for the loan then you can't borrow that amount.
Also, the debt should be dischargeable in bankruptcy (if the person really is bankrupt and expected to remain that way, not a doctor that just graduated). But if that happens a certain percent needs to be billed back to the education institution.
Not the whole thing, but say 10-20% seems reasonable. Colleges need to have skin in the game.
I’ll have to go find the link but @bronxzoocobra shared a while back that average tuition costs have been falling since about 2015 despite the growth in loans. From what I remember it was ambiguous as to why. Competition, perhaps, but it’s not like we suddenly got a thousand new cheap colleges in the last decade threatening the expensive private schools. Anyway, maybe bzc has it on hand otherwise I’ll go looking in a bit and share back.
Here we go: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereknewton/2023/11/21/the-cost-of-college-continues-to-decline/
I know Forbes is kinda suspect sometimes and I suppose The College Board has every reason to portray the costs of college as falling but I don't see anything obviously outrageous about what's reported. It does call into question the idea that college prices are majorly impacted by the availability student loans. Certainly changed my thinking.
Maybe still related? This is from 2018, but it looks like the limits haven't changed.
https://www.savingforcollege.com/article/growth-in-student-loan-debt-at-graduation-slows-as-borrowers-hit-loan-limits
Even without the current administration’s meddling the current model of loading up students with debt, admitting everyone who can co-sign, and hamstringing professor agency was breaking due to demographics. We will just see an acceleration of closings and school mergers.
How do student loans hamstring professor agency?
By tying financial incentives to students the game becomes keeping warm bodies enrolled. This means faculty are under greater pressure to pass students, lower standards, and are subject to punitive arbitration and appeals processes when it comes to grade appeals, academic dishonesty, and spurious allegations of discrimination/misconduct. All this restricts instructor agency and ability to teach.
When more funds come from taxpayers there is less pressure to bend over backwards to retain students.
Why would it matter where the money comes from? I feel like the pressure is there regardless.
One thing I notice is that I think the student loans are delaying the pressure on the student side. We sometimes see students who fail the same class 5-6 times. Yes, the university should just kick them out, but also the student needs to realize they are chasing good money after bad and need to drop out (or transfer) and get their shit together before coming back.
Wouldn’t we be tying money to warm bodies, whether it’s taxpayer money or loan money? I still have the same incentive to keep enrollment in my classes up so my department is better funded.
It’s the direct tying of funding. When it comes from tax dollars then you don’t have the same incentive comparability problem. The incentive is to please the authority granting funding not the students. Incentives for juicing enrollment and passing students is indirect.
Also, those IES cuts are just depressing. Absolutely devastating. Should be priority #1 to restore in ED when we eventually take back power.
The cost increases were due to the number of administrators these schools now have on staff. At some schools, it’s more than the students in matriculation.
This is often wildly overstated. For example, counting graduate research assistants as “administrative” employees. And it probably is a good thing that educators aren’t personally responsible for administrative jobs, as they were prior to the 1970s.
But they definitely can and should cut back.
https://archive.is/00tAU#selection-459.0-692.0
"The Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative is a “multi-phase” project of Stanford’s IT leaders. The list took “18 months of collaboration with stakeholder groups” to produce, the university tells us. We can’t imagine what’s next, except that it will surely involve more make-work for more administrators, whose proliferation has driven much of the rise in college tuition and student debt. For 16,937 students, Stanford lists 2,288 faculty and 15,750 administrative staff.
"
Same thing at UMICH and many other schools. Most of these people should probably be fired, but I think AI is going to cause higher education collapse before they figure this out.
You have not rebutted my assertion in the slightest. Again, how many research assistants, TAs, etc. are they including in these numbers? How many grounds keepers and janitors?
There were ground keepers, janitors and TA's 40 years ago. So I remain skeptical if they account for the doubling of admin staff over 25 years
"it’s noted that between 1987 and 2012, the number of administrative staff more than doubled, adding over 500,000 administrative and professional employees. "
https://www.collegefactual.com/parents/choosing-a-college/the-rise-in-college-administrative-staff/index.html
I don’t think you’re responding to this question. If doubling at universities generally means 500,000 added, then I don’t think that the number you are talking about includes 15,000 at Stanford alone. Your numbers are using a different definition of “administrative staff” than the other person in this thread.
If you want to make claims about numbers, you have to be clear about what you are counting so that you don’t run very different sorts of things together.
You got it backwards. That's what the schools spend their money on once they were charging it. But the money to pay the admins was driven, in part, by federal loans.
Well higher education has reinvented their missions to with everything other than actual learning.
Hi, this an area of professional expertise (or at least, know enough to talk about). As others have pointed out, net tuition paid by families has actually DECREASED over the past few years, as states expanded their budgets in the aftermath of the Great Recession. The primary driver of tuition increases in the years beforehand was a gutting of state support during the Great Recession, and in fact during many prior fiscal crises dating back to the early 80s. Moreover, direct federal loans - while a significant portion of overall outstanding loans - do not come close to covering the cost of attendance for full-time undergraduate students at residential universities, and are not competitive with the interest rates homeowner parents can receive on home equity loans. The creation of the mortgage backed security in the early 80s coincided pretty closely with the first erosions of public funds and essentially covered it over as home prices rose (at least for middle class families).
What is true is that at many schools, there has been a widening gulf between sticker price (the price in the brochure) and net price (the average price paid net of financial aid). Essentially, wealthy families have been footing the bill for lower income students. Whether consciously or not, much of the backlash against higher ed stems not just from elitism, but from a sense among white upper middle class conservatives that they're being overcharged (they are) for the services they receive. That gets compounded when they see identity based programming that their kids don't utilize.
Beyond all that, Bayes Cost Theorem is real in higher ed.
One other quick point: all of the above is in regards to undergraduate education. Graduate and professional schools are another matter; federal loans do indeed cover the full cost and have absolutely led to rising prices there (and those contributions to net assets do indeed get plowed back into undergraduate ops).
"Whether consciously or not, much of the backlash against higher ed stems not just from elitism, but from a sense among white upper middle class conservatives that they're being overcharged (they are) for the services they receive. That gets compounded when they see identity based programming that their kids don't utilize"
I suspect white upper middle class liberals feel the same way
I can't speak for all of us - and my kids are just starting elementary school, so perhaps I'll change my tune - but as a certified WUMCL I don't think we feel quite the same. Maybe to a certain extent, but there is a set of values folks ascribe to on the left, including belief in the value of diverse classmates for your own kids, that changes the equation a bit.
If you think diversity as a value is overrated, then paying extra to ensure it is going to sting differently. That's doubly true in higher ed where there is a zero sum game around admissions, and efforts to promote diversity threaten your own kids' access to these institutions.
" It's another blow against the "academy" that they want to destroy in their crusade to use state power to reshape America's cultural landscape."
But didn't a lot of this start because this was already happening but from the left?
The left has controlled education for decades now, and has been trying to use it to push the culture in a different direction. Predictably that has pissed a LOT of people off and now they are trying to do the reverse.
Hasn’t education *always* been the territory of the left? Just as the military has always been the territory of the right?
I guess you could close one eye, squint with the other, and call the Dept of Education efficient, but it’s not. The student loan program is especially inefficient, as it has led to legions of students getting worthless degrees while accumulating mounds of debt. Buying something of little value for lots of money is inefficient, but Matt calls it efficient because the DOE didn’t steal a lot as it passed through their hands.
“ But where shuttering proponents are often silent is on the importance of the requirements and standards the Department of Education attaches to the money it awards.”
Why are these standards important? Are they improving our levels of education? I have hired over 500 engineers for my former company. I’ve also worked with hundreds of our clients’ engineers. Some of this second group came from colleges from which I would never dream of hiring. These are, for example, electrical engineers who don’t have the foggiest idea what the power triangle is. Their degrees are worthless to society.
Here in New Orleans, about a dozen years ago, we had a valedictorian of a local high school who could not pass the high school exit exam. Thanks for those standards DOE. What is the purpose of measuring and tracking those stats and not doing anything to improve education? The DOE is little more than an artificial industry made up of jobs programs for the Democrat Party. Get rid of it; return the function to the states; and allow the states to capture the taxes that pay for it if they think it’s wise.
If we are worried about disadvantaged students simply mandate their inclusion.
I'm sympathetic to your concerns, but I'm not clear what you're advocating for.
Do you think the DOE needs to dramatically restrict which institutions are eligible for student loans? I'm not sure how they'd do this. Perhaps by developing and administering some sort of exit exam required for graduates (of all subjects!) to verify that these colleges and tech schools are teaching them adequately?
This seems directionally opposite of the current administration's approach.
The Obama administration had a proposal to create a scoring system for colleges and universities that focused on, among other things, job placement and salaries after graduation. Coming in the latter part of the second term, it didn't get enough traction to take off.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/07/colleges-and-analysts-respond-obama-ratings-proposal
I advocate for the abolition of the DOE, the establishment of which, is clearly unconstitutional. Government should always be performed at the level closest to the people as is possible.
However, that ship has probably sailed. The DOE lavishing of grants and loans has had the perverse effect of driving educational inflation through the roof. High school graduates who are not really college material are taking the money to extend their adolescence.
Napoleon won the Siege of Toulon at 25; he defeated the insurgents in Paris at 27; and he was the First Consul at 30. We stay on our parents’ insurance until we are 26. We have infantilized our young adults, and the DOE is part of that.
Other points aside, the "stay on our parents' insurance until we are 26," is mostly downstream of challenges around the way we handle health insurance in the U.S.
I was trying to make the point that we coddle young adults way past the time they should be standing on their own feet. And healthcare and the DOE are both part of that.
What does the department of education have to do with health insurance? And why is getting health insurance from the employer of the person who gave birth to you 26 years ago any more infantilizing than getting health insurance from the department that sent you to war 30 years ago?
You ask a reasonable question.
My mention of health insurance was to give a reinforcing example of infantilizing our youth. A normal 25 year old should not be supported by his parents. I gave an historical example to show that it didn’t used to be so. And that are forcing insurance companies to do that is an example of infantilizing our youth.
The DOE is lavishing money, in loans and grants, on “students” who should never have gone to college. This is being used by them to extend their adolescence. They go to college, party for six years on government money, then find themselves with a ton of debt and a worthless degree. And then the Dems have this great constituency they can offer to bribe with cancellation of student debt.
The health insurance example was to show that this extended adolescence is a wider government policy.
Your comparison of being subsidized by your parents to being subsidized by the Department of Defense is parallelism. The second one is part of a deal that was made. The Department of defense offers a level of pay and benefits in exchange for service. The health insurance 30 years later is part of that deal. There was no such deal made with the newborn infant; it’s just a benefit and cost forced on working parents by an overweening federal government.
Everything you don't like is clearly unconstitutional.
That’s an absurd accusation. I don’t like it that people living on the public dole can vote, however I don’t think it’s unconstitutional. So you are wrong on your literal accusation.
You are also wrong on your implication that the mission of the DOE is constitutional.
Tenth Amendment
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The Commerce Clause is the portal the left generally drives through, but no reasonable person could say it applies here.
I consider myself fairly reasonable, so I'll bite on your point re the Commerce Clause: If I take out a loan to attend graduate school in NY and later move to California, which state should regulate that?
Napolean died at 51. Should we be aiming for that too?
Why are you like this?
That seems irrelevant, but my answer is No.
It's not irrelevant at all. Longer lifespans mean we don't have to move through life stages as quickly. It's very linked.
"We have infantilized our young adults, and the DOE is part of that."
"This younger generation behaves like infants!" A common through-line from older generations throughout history (for centuries). My read is the DOE was established in 1977. I'm amazed you're able to string even a single sentence together especially given your clearly "worthless degree" - though, each and every one is total fucking bullshit.
I gave an example to illustrate the fact that we are infantilizing our young adults. It’s true that each generation generally thinks the youth are sissies and the world is going to hell in a hand basket. You assumed I meant that this tendency to pamper youth occurred after me; I did not. It’s gotten worse, but it’s been happening ever since WW2 ended.
So your post consists of an erroneous assumption and ad hominem attacks - nothing else, lol.
I'm very sympathetic to your critiques. But getting rid of strict national tests seems like it will make the problem get worse.
It's states that are dumbing down the standards because they don't want to be held accountable.
https://www.apmreports.org/story/2025/02/20/steubenville-ohio-reading-success-for-all
I sympathize with the educators. I think a big part of the problem is the parents. I went to a mediocre Catholic high school. A new teacher, who was coming from one of our public schools, told us that she was going to put us in alphabetical order. We all got up, walked around until we figured our place out, and in about a minute we were in order. She was flabbergasted. I was too, because I knew we weren’t the sharpest bunch.
The public schools system is much worse in the Greater NOLA area because our Catholic school system drains away a leavening force. Butt that teacher, in the public school system, was just not going to get much teaching done. And that’s because the parents aren’t giving them much to work with.
Except that people like Roland Fryer have shown that dramatically different results CAN be achieved.
he took over 20 of the worst performing schools in Houston, and within just a couple of years eliminated the racial achievement gaps.
https://www.econtalk.org/roland-fryer-on-educational-reform/
Same kids, same messed up family life, dramatically different results.
Something similar can be seen in Steubenville's dramatically different reading results (again a poor school district). And they've maintained those results for over 2 decades
https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
(Steubenville is featured in episodes 12-14)
Note I'm not saying family life doesn't matter, of course it does. But schools CAN make a difference. But how they are run matters a LOT.
"DOE, the establishment of which, is clearly unconstitutional"
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
However, great point about Napoleon which absolutely nails your argument.
I addressed the constitutionality in a response to a more worthy post. You can read it if you choose, or remain steeped in foolishness.
I’ll go with #2.
"The DOE is little more than an artificial industry made up of jobs programs for the Democrat Party. Get rid of it; return the function to the states"
I'm sure every single state, including all those in the Old South, can be counted on to do a crackerjack job monitoring and enforcing high education standards. It's just those dastardly federal DOE agents who have been holding them back!
Also, calling it the "Democrat Party" is, as we say, a tell.
“ calling it the "Democrat Party" is, as we say, a tell.”
Ya think? Lol.
Ryan, seems like you didn't read the article and are here to shout out your preconceived notions. Clearly whatever degree you have is worthless as it taught such poor reading comprehension. Try to read it by sounding out each word like a toddler and then come back to us, ok little guy?
This is simply an ad hominem attack with no other content. Congratulations!
You have written so much bullshit in the comments - more than happy to take your time having to read an ad hominem attack.
I agree with the "not even wrong" point about efficiency, but this was a guest article, Matt didn't write it
Ahh, I didn’t notice that.
Did you read any part of this article? Matt did not write it. Now I find myself questioning the worth of your degree.
I confess that in my Electrical Engineering courses they never emphasized double checking whether a guest writer had been engaged. You’ve scored a heavy blow with this one, lol.
The measure of efficiency is carrying out Congressional will.
And what is congressional will?
Right now it completes its mandate very efficiently, such that “let’s cut the workforce by half” doesn’t make much sense. Are all the programs it administers creating a lot of value for dollar spent is a different (important!) question. Slashing staff just means we get the same programs you don’t like (the federal spending on student loans), but done worse, while also risking useful but labor intensive stuff like labor collection and standard setting.
I get what you’re saying, but from my perspective the DOE is a source of evil and the less staff they have the less likely they are to achieve their aims. That’s a great thing to me, and probably to most Americans.
Slightly distressing how many slow bore commenters seem to be so blase about the Musk/Trump administration maybe rewriting Federal policy by other means. Everyone here seems to be wishcasting their preferred outcome onto Musk's extra-legal shake up.
In one way I get it, the Academic left has been very annoying and arrogant for a while. But the US has had the best university system in the world and it's a huge economic advantage. In addition, this isn't going to be primarily felt by Harvard or Yale, but by middle tier private and state schools and students.
Lastly, even in the extremely unlikely event these cuts lead to well thought out changes that moderate and rationalize federal education policy rather than just deal out dis-affinity group punishment, the extra-legal process being used is bad.
All we can do right now is give a collective shrug and hope that the admin gets bogged down in litigation. Remember this admin only has so many contempt humans because they select solely on sycophanty.
Love your Freudian typo...
“education is not and never was federalized” is true in the narrow sense that the feds don’t run schools—but the post then gives a long list of ways in which the federal government actually does exert an extraordinary amount of power.
For example:
—Attaching a lot of strings to the formula money it gives out
—Telling schools nationwide who can be on which sports team [+Obama did the same for bathrooms]
—Litigating cases related to individual students
—Telling a (private!) university to place an individual academic department into receivership
—Creating grant programs whose real purpose is to get schools and states nationwide to change their policies (via meeting requirements to compete for the grant)
Surely you’ve got to admit that this is an extraordinary amount of power for a department that’s technically not in charge? A lot of it is pretty blatantly trying to find back doors to accomplish things that would otherwise be unconstitutional.
By contrast, Canada genuinely has no federal education department and doesn’t do most of the things on this list. The Canadian constitution says education is a provincial responsibility, and it works fine.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/settle-canada/education.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Canada
To be clear, I appreciate the detail provided in the post—I just think it undermines one of its foundational arguments.
It has incredibly little power. They get to attach strings to like 10% of the funding. The grant programs don't compel any school or state to participate in them!
10% of a budget is a large fraction of a budget and not really practicable to forego. Moreover, that's an average. I suspect the feds provide significantly more than that fraction for some school systems and states.
Imagine a state or school district saying to its constituents, "You pay taxes to the federal government, which are then returned to you via substantial school subsidies. We've decided not to take those school subsidies." Refusing federal money (and the strings attached to it) is as much a choice as refusing optional protection from the mob.
Exactly! Just like how technically there’s no federal drinking age, but realistically there more or less is, because no state wanted to give up a portion of its highway funding for which its residents paid taxes.
And on education specifically, the mandates that are issued (e.g. the recent one on school sports teams) are often described by both the White House and the press as being a new general requirement—and it’s not until you get many paragraphs down that it’s revealed that technically it’s just a string attached to receiving federal money. Because everyone involved understands that coercion is the point.
It’s a little more complicated than that. If X amount of your students are low-income, you get Title 1 money to ameliorate the costs of being a low income area, likely with less property tax funding, to educate your more low income population, who usually cost more to educate. And your special education can be paid for by the feds, but you have to follow A B and C processes and rules and requirements for educating them with that money. It definitely varies a lot state by state, district by district.
Either way it is a small decision-maker compared to state and district actors. People just don’t have it in them to get mad at 50 states’ education departments and 8000 districts’. If (almost) all of those are having trouble, it implies that the problem is itself a hard problem, and not that there are some nefarious bureaucratic villains in one office in DC fucking it up for the good folk of the land.
I don't think anything you just wrote contradicts my point that state and local school systems didn't really have any choice about complying with federal mandates.
I mean most institutions want more funding to do some of their mission even if it requires oversight paperwork or participating in a legal architecture they have qualms with, I guess. But DOE-specific oversight is indeed factually limited to things like administration of Title 1 and IDEA funds; various targeted grants; and civil rights law. What is the DOE-specific mandate that you think is responsible for the problems you see in K12, to a greater degree than local or state authorities?
Look back at the thread. You wrote, "[The DOE] has incredibly little power. They get to attach strings to like 10% of the funding. The grant programs don't compel any school or state to participate in them!"
I responded that school systems can't reasonably be expected to forego federal funding (since 10% is a large amount), and hence they have to comply with DOE mandates. So I disagree both with the claim that the DOE has very little power and the claim that school systems can choose to ignore that power.
That's all I'm saying.
This is not my policy area. But I think this elides the massive IDEA/IEP bureaucracy that is mostly left to states and localities with the federal government “checking their work” to say what falls short. Here in NYC, 1 in 5 students has an IEP. There is a ton of front end expenditure in developing, updating, and carrying out IEPs. And on the back end, there is litigation to give force to those rights. Private law firms arguing that schools didn’t give some extremely troubled child enough attention, and then the City is forced to pay *hundreds of thousands* of dollars in the form of private remedial education benefits. The law firms get a statutorily mandated fee. The teachers, the feds, the lawyers, the Blue city bureaucrats, they’re all imperfect checks on money going out the door because it’s all for the benefit of the “disabled” kids who just want an education.
And the Biden DOE thing about restraining or isolating students with disabilities certainly sounds like it could have contributed to the perception that disruptive students are increasingly endangering the ability of other students to have a suitable learning environment. There is a huge overlap between students with disabilities (as we define it today), students with low incomes from broken homes, and students that cause classroom disruptions. Read teachers talk online about how they feel the profession has been post COVID. Seems like they kinda miss being able to freely separate the problem kids and having the school administration back them up. I don’t think that’s all the Biden DOE (or independent Blue state equivalent efforts), granted.
This is an important and underrated point. I have experience outside of NYC and my experience is largely similar. I wrote elsewhere that it's not just some extreme conservatives who are unhappy with our current system of including students with disabilities in mainstream settings. Many quite normal parents, teachers, and district officials are also quite unhappy. My worry is that we go down a road of simply rejecting inclusion, repeal or neuter (perhaps via vouchers) IDEA and other related law, and end up back in a pre-DOE purely exclusionary system.
Also, IEPs are being systematically abused by academically ambitious families to get a leg up for their kids. You get a de-rigeur ADHD diagnosis, and now your kid gets more time on all the tests.
Agreed, I do think the way the rich abuse things is less harmful resource-wise but it does even more to undermine the legitimacy of the system.
While providing a lot of useful information, the essay seemingly ignores an important political element. Disregarding the issue of legal mandates, DOE is enmeshed in debatable elements of pedagogy that trigger widespread anger related to perceptions of poor school performance, and has been involved in numerically trivial but culturally massive issues like transgender athletes. I don't think Trump's efforts to kill the department nor the substantial public support for his approach can be understood without mentioning such issues.
It would be helpful to say how the department of education has been involved in any of these things. Which of the mentioned programs are involved in which of the things you are talking about?
I face a basic asymmetry, since Mr. Miller is a long-term expert on educational policy with extensive first-hand knowledge of DOE. Nevertheless, to list a couple of examples:
1. the so-called Title IX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_IX#Addressing_sexual_harassment_and_sexual_violence
(a law against educational discrimination by sex) is subject to interpretation by federal agencies. In recent years, a lot of its practical rules have been issued by DOE, apparently including the requirement that XY students who self-identify as girls must be allowed to play on girls' teams.
2. The policy of "mainstreaming" for students with special needs has been discussed for many years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstreaming_(education)
and apparently has been championed by DOE. I have no informed knowledge, but apparently it potentially benefits the special needs student at some cost to non-special needs classmates. Is it wise policy? I don't know, but it seems a topic worth discussion and political debate, not simply a technocratic no-brainer.
"it seems a topic worth discussion and political debate, not simply a technocratic no-brainer."
This seems right and important to me. It's frustrating that both the original post and most of the comments mentioning it seem to be dancing around it without just coming out and saying what the policies are, and what their justification or opposition is based on.
Well they for one issued a "Dear Colleague" letter under Obama that gutted important due process rights.
And of course under Biden they conflated sex with Gender and pushed for biological boys to be allowed to play in women's sports or go into women only areas such as locker rooms and bathrooms if they "said" they are women.
What is the actual force of a “dear colleague” letter? I’ve seen people mention them a lot, but I don’t know if they require universities to do things, threaten to withhold funding from universities that don’t do things, or just strongly recommend that universities do things?
And what are the due process rights here? Are they about criminal law, or about enrollment in an institution? Are there due process rights to continued enrollment in an institution?
"What is the actual force of a “dear colleague” letter?"
Hard to say, but when the people that regulate you send out a memo a lot of people take is seriously. And a LOT of them changed their policies based on that.
The due process was about being at the school. But that matters. Think about what happens when you are kicked from your college because of allegations of sexual assault or rape. Those are REALLY serious charges. The types of charges that could make it impossible to get enrolled somewhere else. They could also make it hard to get a job.
A good summary is here
https://www.thefire.org/news/why-office-civil-rights-april-dear-colleague-letter-was-2011s-biggest-fire-fight
Emily Yoffe has been on this beat for over a decade. Hundreds of civil suits against universities for denial of due process have been filed (and many of them won). Here's a relatively recent piece of hers that also links to some of her earlier Atlantic articles.
https://www.thefp.com/p/bidens-sex-police
I feel like the Title I program is severely underappreciated. It seems like most people aren't aware that low-income schools (including and especially predominantly Black and Latino schools) receive more per-pupil spending than the typical majority white school.
I think this is in part a vestige of the misconception that public schools are still dominantly funded on the local side; in fact nationwide state funding is now at parity with local, if not higher. That dynamic itself is heavily influenced by race and economic demographics, with the poorest schools receiving the most state and federal funds.
Should it be appreciated if it has little positive effect?
Hard to say if it does or not. Those schools generally don't perform well, but woudl they perform worse without the funding?
My impression is that the money doesn't improve performance, but it is education research so the studies are generally rubbish.
My kids go to schools that get a lot of this funding. It helps to pay for things that are vital, such as school bus transportation, school nurses for kids that often don't have access to regular medical care, translators . It's hard to say whether or not scores would be worse without this funding, but the students' and teachers' school days would definitely be worse and more demoralizing.
Education spending going towards gaps in healthcare coverage is a complete misallocation of funds even if it has a positive impact.
You can't complete separate these things.
To analogize with a different example, drug possession laws were never intended to be used primarily as plea bargaining tools when people are stopped for other crimes.
I agree with you. But, alas, schools are now expected/required to provide tons of these types of services, just like public libraries are also expected to provide social services. Neither of them are set up for this, but it is where we are. More and more things are getting dumped on the schools, especially in low income areas.
So if the DoE were abolished tomorrow, your school district would not have any buses?
I am not sure. We would almost definitely have them for special ed. We use city buses for grades 6-12, and I am not sure how that is paid for. We would probably have to eliminate school buses for grades K-5 for kids that live more than 1.5 miles from the school - which is what the funds currently pay for - but maybe they would be able to provide city bus passes for those kids.
Why can’t the city buy buses and hire some drivers?
It’s telling that there is more emphasis on identifying students with disabilities than there is on identifying gifted kids from working class families. The absolute best use of money in education is to give a boost to smart kids who don’t get enough stimulation at home.
A significant part of this problem is they’re just ran through the same fucking straw.
It’s the same staffing specialists and psychologists and we get spoken to if we refer too many of either into the system and hide the real power behind magic words (if parents ask for testing for either we have to test them but we aren’t supposed to say this to them).
IQ is as heritable as height. Do you occasionally see a 6’5” son of 5’6” parents? Sure. But not often.
You also get working class parents with reasonably high iqs who have been held back by lack of money or behavioral issues.
Behavioral issue, such as addiction, are also highly heritable.
but not 100% heritable. plenty of kids whose dads were alcoholics avoid that.
correct, but it’s not uncommon to see kids be a few inches taller than their parents. an iq of 115 or 120 is worth cultivating, might make a perfectly fine accountant/paralegal/teacher/nurse
Smart kids need fewer resources and find ways to learn things, as every smart kid knows.
Smart by itself doesn't matter. You need the culture that encourages the hard work necessary to turn it into achievement.
There are plenty of smart people that never go anywhere.
I don’t think this is actually true, but it’s commonly assumed. The truly bright and gifted kids are better thought of as special needs in and of themselves.
I saw this a few years ago and never forgot it: https://youtu.be/QUjYy4Ksy1E?si=2GeUFmIUPRDMCS5l
And an article for those who’d rather read: https://www.healthygamer.gg/blog/why-gifted-kids-are-special-needs
the effort it takes to teach yourself x is vastly greater than the effort needed to learn x from a good teacher.
Last I checked, children had a lot of free time.
but not the patience to use it well without direction
If the goal is to just make sure 95% of high school graduates can read an Encyclopedia Brown story, sure.
So I'm fully willing to believe DoE should get an A+ in terms of overhead efficiency (although I'd love to know the "base rate" for comparison). Just because something is larded full of pork doesn't mean it should be reformed in a ham-fisted manner, except, this is already 90/10 lean turkey. That's genuinely good to know, along with the actual department responsibilities, which are actually fairly narrow!
But I feel like there's also this implicit...argument in favour of the status quo, which feels rhetorically slippery, false-dichotomizing. Some amount of self-recommending is expected, of course, but the prevailing model of How American Education Works and What It's Even For is pretty muddled. I think we could find bipartisan agreement there, although of course different people see different imperfections. Casey's comment nods at one such snaggle, the parasitic codependence of university admissions <-> student loan dollars. Somehow, despite setting increasing amounts of money on fire, we see educational outcomes trending down, not up...like any credential, a degree's value lies not just in its proof of ability (decreased by significantly) but in its scarcity (also decreased by significantly). If that's the main stepping stone for modern meritocratic success, then...well...solve for the equilibrium! It's good that DoE also funds CTE and other non-college education, but it's still a fraction of the bucket versus "formal education".
One could go on in this vein for several other subtopics as well. I don't even wanna touch the cultural stuff, like the Columbia fiasco, which...definitely falls in the While I Do Not Condone This category, at best.
Let’s say Trump hired me to take over the DOE at its current funding level. And I repurpose 99% of the funding to sponsoring mandatory classes in pole vaulting - only 1% for overhead! The DOE would have become even more efficient than Matt thinks it currently is. But…
You would be breaking the law because Congress appropriates money more specifically than just giving the department a funding level. They specify amounts for certain things you must do.
It was a hypothetical to make a point about efficiency; it wasn’t a plan of action.
But it also suggests the DoE isn't the problem.
Ryan has consistently misunderstood what "efficiency" means and seems to see it as a moral quality.
I don’t misunderstand; it is you, and our substack writer who are confused. He (she?) thinks it is simply a measure of what percentage of their budget gets passed on rather than consumed in department overhead. I introduced the obvious point that it should also consider how much effect its spending is having on the problem. The DOE does well on the former; does anyone think the DOE is doing great on the latter? Still confused?
I don’t see that. The DOE is spending a bunch of money that is having the primary effects of torturing our curricula into ineffective twaddle - constantly changing the way we teach reading and arithmetic - inflating higher education costs, building enormous education bureaucracies at colleges and universities, and encouraging pursuit of worthless degrees. That makes the DOE part of the problem.
My personal opinion is that the larger problem is crappy parents. My wife and I taught our four children to read before they turned four years old. And it was easy. We read to them every night. I know, I know, we were privileged.
Regarding reading, I suggest you listen to the excellent "Sold a Story" podcast.
The book "The Knowledge Gap" by Natalie Wexler is an important addendum to that.
But the problems in how we teach reading largely aren't the fault of the DOE. But local efforts
Join claimed that DoE is spending money as directed by congress. Neither of your replies acknowledged or addressed John's claim.
“So I'm fully willing to believe DoE should get an A+ in terms of overhead efficiency…”
I’m not, given that the cost of compliance with DoE rules is borne by state and local governments.
I'm using overhead in the narrow sense that the post does (and, incidentally, the way the term is used in the charitable sector), the portion of funding that goes to paying salaries and other administrivia rather than actually Doing The Thing that the department/institution/trust/whatever is set up for. Mr. Miller says 3.4% is pretty good, so I'll take his word for it, given that I'm too lazy to <s>ask an LLM</s> <s>google</s> research the comparable figures for other Federal departments. Assuming that's a faithful representation, it means that cutting the DoE on specifically budgetary grounds is like...well, kinda like slashing PEPFAR because every penny saved counts.
No judgement on how costs might be passed on to the state and local level. That's a "once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down, that's not my department" thing - it'd be neat to get a further breakdown of such money flows, but it seems out of scope for this current article. Did try to make clear in second half of comment that I'm personally lukewarm at best on many of the actual *effects* of those funds/stipulations. But the point was, even approaching with lots of skepticism *and* assuming good-faith intentions, the current state of affairs is a dumb way to do much-needed reform. Using a shotgun when a 9mm would suffice, or some metaphor to that effect. There's a lot of ruin in the American educational system, and yet our top colleges are still somehow envied across the globe - let's try not to cook that particular golden goose, yeah? It's good to be king!
What’s the Columbia fiasco?
Sign up for a free record, get hounded by bills forever after. Gotta keep that endowment going! Clever business model, but Federal grants are a lot less predatory by comparison.
antisemitism.
What’s the “fiasco” here?
I find the scrapping of data collection and assessment at the DoE to be uniquely disturbing. Just at a gut level if new leadership comes in to reform an agency and immediately cuts all of the contracts that measure performance that's highly suspicious. But more practically, the uniqueness of these assessments (and part of the reason the federal government is tasked with carrying them out) is that they use consistent methodology over multiple administrations so that researchers and voters can evaluate whether certain policy changes worked or didn't work. The reason we know that there was substantial learning loss during COVID is because we could compare the same assessment to prior years; if the Trump 1 administration had rescinded these assessments in 2017 we would have essentially no idea what happened to our students. Even if the Biden admin re-initiated the contracts, the loss of infrastructure and continuity creates substantial batch effects in these studies -- instead of following a single cohort with a single methodology, you're now restarting with a new cohort. A world where each administration implements their own quality metrics and we have no ability to accurately evaluate policy changes across administrations becomes "post truth" in a very fundamental way.
Thank you for the summary. Now that I understand all of that, I'm OK with tearing it down. As Erick Erickson said this morning, "The left chose to advance its agenda from within these otherwise neutral institutions, infecting them, and now the only cure is tearing them down."
Should Congress maybe pass a law to tear down these Congressionally-authorized programs?
You’re ok with tearing down funding for poor students and disabled students and protecting Black students from discrimination?
Erick Erickson is pro-tearing down stuff infected with “The Left Agenda,” why am I not surprised?
There is truth behind the notion that many cultural, educational, and governmental authorities have been co-opted to push the ideological agendas on certain activists. Does not mean we should destroy these institutions.
I am just sitting here with an awards booklet from the previous admin on my desk where so many DEIA awards were given out… something that has little to do with our actual mandate work. It just makes me wonder who we are appealing to.
Things have gone so weird so quickly in our politics and culture. It’s like a contest of showing off for social media or something.
I agree with the criticisms but disagree with the solution.
We do need national standards and testing. We do need education research. States have proven time and time again that left to their own decides they will just keep lowering standards and passing people that can't read and write.
Communists colonize whatever social organizations and entities they can infiltrate and co-opt them for their mission of bringing about their prophesied utopia. (Only slightly glib with this take.)
So tangentially related question: Does anyone have any clue what's gonna happen to repayment of student loans like my wife's that are stuck in SAVE plan legal hell? This is still gonna be stuck in court for a while. I assume it's probably dead at some point, but what then? The administration has to move all those loans to some other repayment plan some how? Which one? How's that gonna work? Is this all gonna be held up for as long as the courts have it? Or is there something else in the works? I assume the Trump people probably would like to kill it even if somehow it withstands the legal process. Is there plausibly gonna be some DoE intervention that moots the legal fight? Is the any chance of these loans getting paid again before like 2027? This is no way to run a railroad and our ability to budget for the future is a giant mess.
Trump is trying to kill the SLRP for Federal workers, because they don’t want ideological enemies to get loan forgiveness.
The failure of the Biden admin to genuinely work at untangling the student loan quagmire instead of merely taking legally dubious, partisan inflected, executive actions is gonna look real stupid real quick I suspect.
I think you are discounting how stupid it looked when he was trying to appease the unappeasable.
What they actually did was the worst kind of middle ground where it managed to be:
1. Bad politics
2. Utterly ineffectual
3. Institutionally harmful
All at the same time. Basically anything else from making it a congressional priority, to doing nothing, to simply lawlessly deleting every student loan record would have only hit 2 of those at most.
Governing by committee while trying to appease every activist group really has been failing Democrats.
Why am I not surprised you find a way to blame Biden?
This is definitely a problem older than Biden that he definitely ran on addressing and then handled incredibly stupidly in a manner highly representative of systemic failure of the Dems to be a viable party. I highlight these failures because I would really desperately appreciate a effective opposition right now.
I think you’re placing too much blame on the Biden administration. The SAVE income driven repayment plan meant basically no one would be burdened by student loan payments. While it has since been blocked by the courts, it uses the same statutory language as other plans that had been in place for many years. In short, SAVE seemed to be an effective solution on clear legal footing.
Also how this will affect everyone paying federal student loans - whether you think federal student loans are good or not, there are still millions of us in repayment who rely on the payment portal functioning and people to answer questions…
Refinance to a private 30-year loan for a low-ish payment? Probably lower than the standard repayment plans they're going to try and force everyone onto. Added "benefit" is you can bankruptcy out of the refinanced private loan.
I'm pretty sure there's at least one legally sound, statutorily mandated IBR plan that forgives balances after 20 or 25 years I think. I doubt it makes sense to lock into a 3rd party loan that seems guaranteed to persist regardless of future political remedies.