Recall, prior to 1979, Education was part of HEW, before being broken off into a separate department.
The most interesting question would be what happens to the guaranteed student loan program. Originally, the GSLs were guaranteed profit for banks, and a subsidy for for-profit trade schools. iirc, it was Big O that brought the lending in-house. How much of TI’s base cares about higher education? What would happen if the GSL program was terminated entirely? It wouldn’t be the Federal government’s problem, if state universities found themselves with a 50% (number picked from thin air for demonstration purposes) drop in enrollment. The second tier state universities in Michigan have already had a 30-40% drop in enrolment over the last ten years. I keep wondering when the (L&Ses) in Lansing will start shutting them down.
I’ve been thinking a bit about this one. Has anyone explained why having 51 Departments of Education is that much better than having 50 Departments of Education?
A few very simple answers (and certainly not the only ones) but because some states lack the economy and the revenue needed to fully educate their own citizens so we collect taxes from richer states to help educate poorer states.
We need an entity that can manage that activity. I would also say it is advisable that we have some level of national standards so that a student from Vicksburg Mississippi with a 3.0 has the same opportunity for a higher education as a student with a 3.0 from Palm Beach Florida.
Lastly, the Federal Student loan program, including Pell grants, is managed by the Dept of Ed. You can’t have a federal program to help people pay for college without it.
There are probably a dozen other things (and google is your friend) but those will get you started.
This sounds like a pretty strong argument to have ONE Department of Education instead of 51 of them! Since we’ve already allowed the Federal Government to grow so large, at this point, that might be the right thing to do.
So the states have no role in having their own education standards?!?
Have you research this topic, at all? Seriously.
Each state has their own dept of transportation. Each state has their own troops, their own police, their own courts, their own tax collection, their own health departments, should we nationalize all of that too in one big department?
Maybe. If we already insist on filtering “all” (okay, most) of the money through the Federal Government, and then using the existence of all that funding to “convince” the states to behave in certain ways, maybe it would be a lot more efficient to become one country under one government instead of 50 of them. Heck, we have plenty of people out there railing against the Electoral College system of having a non-proportional system of representatives alongside a proportional system. Maybe we should go whole hog and eliminate that whole outmoded system of having 50 separate states all constantly lobbying the Feds to send more and more money their way.
I have become convinced that you are being facetious. I have known you to be too smart and too astute to be responding on this topic in such a denser manner than any prior time I have seen you post.
There is simply no way a single federal agency could nationalized our entire education system and have it be more efficient. We need local control to make local decisions - even on things as simple as millages and expansions of existing school systems. That can’t be done nationally.
We need both, just like we need state DOT for local roads and federal DOT for federal roads - and a dozen plus other examples.
That was what “common core” was trying to do. We saw how that effort was demonized.
There has been speculation the loan program would be handed over to Treasury. But, when your base in the poorly educated, what do you care about enabling people of average means to be able to go to college?