I currently work for a university, and for some reason I'm lumped in with the accreditation and federal/state reporting people, even though that's really got nothing to do with me. There's a lot of chatter about what happens with accreditation if the DOE were to go away (I kinda doubt it does, but it might be massively scaled back....we'll see). Accreditation becomes the wild, wild west at that point, to some extent. Like, it already is a little bit ever since accreditation stopped being governed by regional entities and you could pick whoever you wanted. But with no DOE regulations, the possibility exists that some states say "We don't like your state's accrediting body, we don't recognize your degrees." How likely that is, or what it could lead to, I can't say.
The bigger conversation is around financial aid. A university such as ours relies very heavily on it. A lot of things could happen without the DOE, and a lot of them don't include financial aid going away. Again...it'd be a matter of exactly how things played out, and what the university's response/plan would be if things changed. I work in contact with the folks who would know, and everyone up as far as the provost and vice-president say we really have no idea what would happen.
That doesn't address the criticisms of the DOE, I know. I'm just pointing out that almost every action winds up having downstream repercussions that many don't know about, think about, or care about.
I'm maybe a bit of a contrarian on Education but here is my take:
Short version:
We should have a LOT less Govn't aid for college.
Long version:
Prior to WWII the percentage of the US workforce with a college degree was in the low single digits, here is
a link (I know nothing about statista and don't vouch for this but it came up in my google search).
Essentially, pre-WWII college was more-or-less restricted to rich white males*. Then, at the end of the war the US rapidly expanded college access:
- The requirement that you be rich was knocked down by the GI Bill and subsequent Govn't loans and aid.
- The requirement that you be white was knocked down by the Civil Rights movement.
- The requirement that you be male was knocked down by the Women's movement.
In about 20 and certainly less than 30 years (1945-1975) we went from a nation in which almost no one could go to college to a nation in which nearly everyone could go to college.
The US gained an enormous advantage from sending this large group of people to college and, ever since, various planners, politicians, academics, and bureaucrats have been trying to duplicate that success. The problem is that they can't. There aren't any more huge swaths of the population effectively prohibited from going to college that can be mined for talent. The only way to expand college attendance post-1975 has been to simply accept duller students. This simply DOES NOT WORK.
The current workforce is a little over 1/3 college educated. Per
wiki, as of 2018 the educational attainment of the US Population over 25 (listed first) and 25-30 (listed second) was:
- HS Diploma: 89.8%, 92.95%
- Some college: 61.28%, 66.34%
- Associate degree: 45.16%, 46.72%
- Bachelor's degree: 34.98%, 36.98%
- Masters degree: 13.04%, 9.01%
- Professional degree: 3.47%, 2.02%
- Doctorate: 2.03%, 1.12%
Here is where the waste (IMHO) comes in.
More than 60% of HS Graduates go to college. That is nearly double the percent who actually graduate from college. The other half are just wasting their time, their money, and in most cases, OUR money.
I have LONG been a proponent of vocational education. I'm far from the first person to point this out, but there is a "Yale or Jail" or "Harvard or Homelessness" false dichotomy in which most of our education establishment seems to think that everyone will either go to Harvard/Yale or wind up homeless/imprisoned. While this is obviously false and the individual cogs within the Education Industrial Complex KNOW that it is false, the machine rolls on acting as if it were completely true.
In my opinion, college is more-or-less a waste for anyone whose IQ isn't AT LEAST half a standard deviation above average. Average is 100 and standard deviation is 10-15 so what I am saying is that college is a waste for anyone with an IQ below about 105-108.
The thing that gets missed here is that people with IQ's of 95-105 are still reasonably smart folks. I've worked in a LOT of construction-related and maintenance fields. Trust me, you don't want a <85 IQ plumber or HVAC tech trying to fix your pipes or furnace. I'll also tell you that if I need an attorney, I know a dozen of them that are interested in additional work. If I need someone with a degree in Sociology or Art History I can just go to Starbucks and hire the guy or gal selling coffee. However, if I need someone who knows how to fix plumbing or HVAC systems it is tough to find one.
My point is that we NEED trained plumbers and HVAC technicians and a whole host of other skilled tradesmen (tradespeople).
People with an IQ in the range of say 95-105 (this is average) would be MUCH better served by going to tech school and learning to be plumbers or HVAC Techs or whatever than wasting time in a college they aren't really smart enough to benefit from and either failing out or getting some useless easy degree.
If you are smart enough to earn an engineering degree (like a lot of our posters here) then college is a MUCH better career path than Tech school but if you aren't at least above average then college is a waste of your time, your money, and OUR money.
All that is to say that, IMHO, we should have a LOT less Govn't aid for college.
*Above I stated that college was more-or-less restricted to rich white males pre-WWII. As a general rule this was true but there were a few exceptions:
Exceptions to the requirement that you be rich:
The Schools occasionally made exceptions for VERY smart poor kids. The problem was that in order to benefit from an exception here you had to be identified. In a world without much standardized testing this was difficult so a LOT of very smart poor kids got missed.
Exceptions to the requirement that you be white:
Even pre-WWII there were black colleges in the country. These are mostly now known as HBCU's. This exception was limited, however, in that the prime function was to provide preachers for black churches and, as a secondary function, these black colleges provided some black professionals to serve the black community. So this exception existed but the graduates rarely entered the general economy/workforce. Instead they mostly were restricted to serving the black community.
Exceptions to the requirement that you be male:
There were some women's colleges as well. There were basically two types. There were colleges that trained women for what were seen as "women's professions" such as teaching and nursing and there were "finishing schools". The finishing schools didn't teach women to be professionals, they were basically marriage factories usually attached to a male college. Thus, Radcliffe College was mostly in the business of teaching women how to be good wives for the men who graduated from Harvard.
