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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30030 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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"Ben Miller, who was most recently the principal deputy under secretary at the US Department of Education during the Biden-Harris Administration" explains "What the Department of Education actually does"

It includes a claim that it's the "most efficient" Department:

The Department of Education sends vast sums of money out the door to states, districts, schools, and institutions of higher education quite efficiently. For every dollar the Department gets from Congressional appropriations, it spends about 3.4 cents to make that money flow, enforce the law, and ensure someone picks up the phone when one of the tens of millions of student loan borrowers needs help.^1 Moreover, Congress appropriates the money for these salaries and expenses separately from the money used for grant programs — spending less money on personnel will not increase the dollars flowing outside the building.

1 Around 35 percent of the salaries and expenses money goes directly to paying student loan servicers, so the spending rate on Department of Education staff is even lower.

The conclusion gets to a question I think is important, albeit in a more biased way than I'd like:

Those clamoring to shutter the Department of Education have always played coy with exactly what they mean.

Sometimes, they’ve meant taking the same functions and moving them elsewhere, like having the US Department of the Treasury take over the federal student loan portfolio. That proposal raises a lot of questions, such as would Treasury actually want to absorb such a massive and complicated portfolio? Would everything done in Federal Student Aid be moved or only pieces? And would the part of the Department of Education that writes rules governing the aid programs now be binding a different federal agency?

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.

The Department’s signature programs establish a national goal: that regardless of who you are or where you come from, our nation’s public schools will serve you and educate you to a standard of excellence. Aspirations like this have driven our country’s prosperity for decades and have allowed millions of people with disabilities to live as full and productive members of a society that in the not too distant past shunned them.

The Department of Education doesn’t tell states, districts, schools, colleges, or any other institutions how they have to educate anyone. But it has always insisted that they try.

What policy goal is advanced by "reforming" or eliminating the Department of Education? How could other departments/agencies better fulfill statutory requirements? (Any given hobby-horse "Title _" requirement would still exist.) I can make an anti-war on drugs argument for reforming the DEA or an anti-gun control argument for reforming the BATFE, but that DoE is - so far as I know - infamous only for the "Dear Colleague" letter makes me think that they're relatively good about apolitically applying statutes and that attempts to politicize the Department got adequate (relative to other departments) attention.

The Department’s signature programs establish a national goal: that regardless of who you are or where you come from, our nation’s public schools will serve you and educate you to a standard of excellence

And according to many conservatives they have failed to deliver on that goal. America is not known for its excellent public education. Which is a reason to be nuked. Don't spend good money after the bad. If the endgame is illiterate population at least have smaller federal deficit. You can also say that US education system has too many administrators.

The education level of the population won't remain the same after funding is cut, it will get worse, even if it's already bad. That's the same fallacy that many people indulged in with Covid: the numbers don't remain the same when you change the policy that affects those numbers.

Why would you expect that? I wouldn't necessarily. I would expect it to stay about the same, since the core teachers, the children, and the states they live in will remain the same

I don't understand how you can expect the quality of a service to remain the same when a substantial portion of the funding for that service is cut. It seems like a fully generalizable statement that more funding=on average better service. We can quibble about how much funding results in how much improvement in quality for various services, but the principle holds. If police budgets are cut, police service gets worse. Ditto for healthcare, research, customer service, education, and basically everything else.

Looking at the Department of Education in particular: the Office of Federal Student Aid provides 120.8 billion in funding (grants, loans, etc.) for postsecondary education. It seems like a safe assumption that there are, very conservatively, thousands of university and college students who depend on this aid to attend their school at all. This seems like a very straightforward example of a way in which gutting the Department will have a negative effect on the education level of the population at large.

Perhaps you're only discussing the education of minors? Still, in that case the OESE seems to provide a huge amount of programs which top up funds to improve local and state schools. You can see a list here: https://www.ed.gov/about/ed-offices/oese/offices-programs-by-office

Is your position that none of these programs have any impact on the education level of the population at all? Or are you assuming that when the Department is gutted similar funding will flow to the states to spend under their own discretion? Unless that is your assumption, then the teachers and schools will not remain the same because they won't have the same budget. If that is your assumption, then we simply disagree on how calculated/planned out this gutting and refunding will be. There are huge costs associated with recreating programs from scratch.

Dear Lord man.

It seems like a fully generalizable statement that more funding=on average better service

You can find dozens of graphs showing how much we spend on education vs the results we get. The relationship is almost the inverse of what you've said here.

Do you truly have no qualms with the explosion of over-"educated" people being churned out of universities? The outright fraud at community colleges where dropouts keep their grant money?

I understand the naive desire to have everyone go to college. It's an extremely fun part of life. Stupid people with worthless degrees being there to party with is part of it.

But the cost disease the fed government has wrought on every single stage of education is staggering. The music has to stop here. It's too obvious and too simple to fix, unlike problems such as healthcare.

You are making exactly the same mistake that I called out before. I believe the graphs say what you say and that is not good evidence. America spends more than most other countries and gets worse results. That does not imply that we would get better results by suddenly spending less in line with other countries, that doesn't follow at all. Other countries have a huge amount of other variables going into education that you cannot replicate by simply matching them on price.

Unless you are positing some actual, specific mechanism through which education will somehow improve when it's less invested in, then I don't understand your argument.

Any qualms I may have were not the point of this argument, which was to determine whether gutting the DOE would result in a lower education level for the population. You have argued that the current education level is unnecessary, which is tangential to my point and something I'm agnostic on.

I think the disagreement here is that YFR and others see the spending-versus-results conundrum as a matter of cost disease/"the dose makes the poison," where the cost-benefit ratio is so miserable that no increase in spending can be stomached, whereas you seem to see the problem as a "more dakka" one, where we could actually do better if we just invested more.

  1. Congress can still redistribute directly to the states if they want to, and probably will.

  2. Student loans are already a horrible mess, and the DOE and federal government hasn't done anything to sort it out, so it's probably best we have less of them, not more. I went to community college, followed by an inexpensive state college. If those colleges don't have enough money to function in some states, the federal government can redistribute directly to them. Private scholarships are probably useful and good.

  3. I work in a school, and have seem hat kinds of programs the money goes towards. They are mostly not what I would want. The DOE's priorities are not only the same priorities as most children and parents, but not even the same as most teachers. Not even the teachers of superfluous subjects.

  1. There will likely be a pretty ugly transition period between programs being gutted and the states spinning up their own versions of some of these programs, if they manage to sucessfully do it at all. It would be simpler to prune specific programs carefully rather than gutting the whole department and starting from scratch.

  2. I'm not really understanding your point here, it doesn't sound like it makes that much of a difference to me? If the money amounts are the same and going to the same places, why do we need to make a change at all?

  3. Respectfully, I don't agree that some programs being wasteful on an anecdotal scale necessitates gutting a department which oversees a huge amount of programs. Fine, the programs you saw were bad and a waste of money. What about all the other ones? And further to your point, what reason is there to believe that the DOE has wildly out of whack incentives from teachers/students/parents but the states do not? Why not fund it at the municipal level?

There are often problems that are made worse with more money.

There are generalizable circumstances that cause this to happen, and those circumstances often apply to government organizations but not exclusively to them.

  1. Principal agent problems. The money is being spent by an agent on behalf of someone else, and either due to conflicts of interest or lack of knowledge the money is spent in a way that actively harms the principal.
  2. Information gaps. The consumer and producer are not easily able to judge what is good spending vs bad spending in terms of solving the problem. This can cause money to be spent on costly or ineffective signalling items.
  3. Crowding out good money. A working market with a working and functioning incentive system can be thrown off by injections of cash from a misaligned actor. Producers go chasing the extra cash while not caring as much about the original consumer. And consumers do less research than they would if it was their own money being spent. This happens in medical insurance all the time.

I think student loans are actively harmful to many of the people involved.

I'd fix them by making them dischargeable in bankruptcies and making the university partially responsible for the debt in such cases. I'd leave parents off the loan. I'd maybe see them changed to loans where a percentage of post college income is owed. Right now they suffer from all of the above problems.

I appreciate your response and recognize that these are issues that plausibly arise from more funding from non market parties.

I won't debate your points as I agree they are likely the case in some respects, I will only quibble on the point that none of these issues imply that stopping this funding would improve or leave the same the education level of the population. We might be spending money inefficiently, we might be issuing loans in a way that is net financial negative for some students, and we may be throwing off the private market of education, but those are all things you can do while still raising the education level of the population, and indeed goals like that are why we as a society trust the government and not the market for some things.

At this point, it becomes about how much extra money you want to spend for how much education, which is a much harder question, so I'll leave it there.

Higher levels of education is only good if education is mostly capital formation. But if it is mostly signalling then it is doubly wasteful to subsidize it. From personal experience I'm inclined to think of it as mostly signalling, the econ literature apparently agrees with me.

Can you point me to the evidence you're referencing? My impression of the stats was that higher level education at college/university has a quite large lifelong earnings benefit.

i suppose this could still be just signalling that gets them into a higher earning network of like-minded signallers, but if we are trying to change this economic framework we would somehow have to also disincentive businesses from hiring based on this signalling. And that does not seem like an easy ask to me.

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I'd fix them by making them dischargeable in bankruptcies and making the university partially responsible for the debt in such cases. I'd leave parents off the loan. I'd maybe see them changed to loans where a percentage of post college income is owed.

Effectively making the university co-sign the loans seems like a good idea; there are numerous practical problems (e.g. if the student voluntarily drops out or transfers, who is responsible?) but in general it seems OK. But making them a percentage of post-college income owed is giving universities a way to capture nearly all the value of the education, and it worsens the problem of lucrative degree programs subsidizing financially worthless ones.

If the college is going to reap the benefits of a lucrative degree program it might be incentivized to encourage them more.

A college that graduates a bunch of engineers that can go on to make 6 figure salaries is going to be better off than a college that creates a bunch of underemployed barristas.

With the way student loans currently work the university is getting the price of tuition and on campus amenities, and those costs are similar between different degrees. But the cost of teaching the more lucrative degrees is often more expensive, usually because professors that teach it have the option of better private industry jobs, so they command higher salaries at the university.

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