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Notes -
What do you think will happen with regards to the department of education in the US depending on the results of the election?
For my part it seems like the left would just keep watering it down, more of the same etc. There doesn't seem to be any acknowledgment of issues over there.
I’m also not optimistic that the right will do much either though, republicans have tended to be very Ham fisted in the past with this sort of reform.
Anyone have interesting or different perspectives here?
Can someone steelman the value of the Department of Education?
What if we literally just removed it? I'm a little confused why the federal government is involved at all. And, if they are involved, then surely they deserve to be disbanded for the horrible failures in places like Chicago and Baltimore.
It depends on what you mean by "disbanding" the Department of Education. Its abolition has supposedly been a top priority of Republicans more or less from the day it was established, yet I think its nameplate budget and the implication that Federal bureaucrats are meddling in what is supposed to be a local concern create a perception of it that doesn't square with reality. So it largely means whether you're talking about a symbolic reorganization wherein the Department's functions are simply divided among other government agencies, or elimination of the actual programs the Department administers.
We can easily dismiss the first option, since it wouldn't result in any substantive changes other than the huge bill involved for administrative costs relating to the reorganization. At the very least, I'd need to see some sort of comprehensive study suggesting that the cost savings of such a reorganization would justify the cost of doing it. If we're talking about the second option, we need to look at what the Department actually does.
60% of the Department's budget is related to higher education assistance, split roughly evenly between direct loans and Pell Grants. I imagine we'd both agree that the student loan system in this country is fucked up and probably responsible for the massive cost increases schools have been experiencing for decades, but this isn't something we can just eliminate overnight. I've seen statistics that suggest Federal student loan and tuition assistance accounts for about 18% of revenue for 4-year public universities. At first glance, no institution can afford to lose 18% of revenue overnight. But it's actually more than this. The same statistics show that 28% of revenue comes from "sales and services". This theoretically includes everything from profits made from the bookstore to t-shirt sales, but the vast majority of this is revenue from university-associated hospitals. While this technically counts toward the entire institution's revenue, I'd imagine that hospital fees subsidize education about as much as tuition covers the costs of the hospital. In other words, these are functionally separate entities whose only real overlap is that the hospital is a teaching hospital for the medical school, so I'm keeping this separate. Doing that, Federal support now accounts for up to 25% of revenue. As I said earlier, I'm all in favor of forcing costs down, but a 25% across the board cut will likely result in the kind of emergency cost-cutting measures that are likely to throw the entire higher education system into crisis. Not to mention the fact that a lot of existing students will find themselves with debt from unfinished degrees they can't afford to complete. I'd prefer a system that makes eligibility for federal funding contingent on cost-control, but such a system would require more Federal oversight, not less. This, of course, doesn't even account for all the existing loans that the Department services.
Beyond that huge chunk of the budget, about 15% each goes to Title I grants and special education grants. Title I grants are grants to schools with low-income students to pay for remedial reading and math services. While this may give the impression that the funding goes to low-income school districts, pretty much every school qualifies for some level of targeted funding. Again, the result will be that these programs will be cut entirely or simply replaced by state or local funding, which may be difficult in some areas.
So now we're down to the 10% of the budget that accounts for miscellaneous items like compiling certain statistics, administrative costs, etc. I'm sure there's stuff here that can be cut, but eliminating an entire cabinet-level department in order to trim out a little fat seems like an inefficient way of doing things. Unless we're willing to make some serious changes to education funding and the student loan system in the United States, and talk of eliminating the Department of Education is nothing more than a buzzword that shows we're Serious About Doing Something, so long as that something doesn't actually do anything. If the goal is to eliminate student loans or remedial and special education funding entirely then that's the discussion we should be having, not some red-herring thing where eliminating a department will magically eliminate 200 billion dollars from the budget.
This is a general point that I'm not aiming at you in particular @Rov_Scam but I've noticed that people (on all sides) use "can't" to mean "shouldn't". The "can't" is hiding an unspoken "because X consequences will result". Sometimes this happens because X is literally unthinkable for the speaker, or because they consider it too obvious to need saying, or because they haven't thought their response through all the way. Sometimes (from professionals) it's a manipulative rhetorical tactic.
You actually elaborate more later, saying that we can't abolish the Department of Educator overnight because it would throw higher education into crisis, and strand students with unfinished degrees. But so many people don't. They say things like, we can't halt immigration, we can't withdraw from green treaty requirements, we can't ignore calls for reparations. I would urge people to write/demand the full argument whenever they find "can't" being used for something that isn't actually physically impossible. I think it encourages more rigorous thinking and more clear lines of debate.
It's not just in political discourse either....
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