Remember the Obama administration official who said judging colleges was like “rating a blender“? Not so, says Reason, because “unlike blenders, colleges obstruct efforts to test their performance”:
Uncle Sam hands out $150 billion in financial aid to universities every year—about twice as much as all the states combined. Yet, notes State University of New York-Albany’s Ben Wildavsky, colleges resist independent, national, standardized testing that would allow lawmakers to judge what exactly this aid is accomplishing—and give parents the information to determine the educational bang they are getting for their buck.
The administration’s proposed “scorecard” includes what’s known as a loan forgiveness provision:
Currently, “new borrowers” who obtained their first federal student loan after 2007 are eligible to signup for something called the “Pay As You Earn” program. This program caps their loan repayment at 10 percent of their income for 20 years after which the remainder is written off. … In other words, students take loans according to their needs, and repay them according to their ability and hit taxpayers for the rest. The president wants to expand this socialist prescription to all students who receive federal loans.
Even Sallie Mae, the government’s student-debt manager, acknowledges that costs are skyrocketing — up “27 percent beyond inflation over the last five years” — in part because “parents are picking up an ever smaller share of their kids’ college costs and the government (and other) grants ever more,” Reason says.
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