Free? Valueless

As he panders for the youth vote, Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders promises free tuition at public colleges and universities because, he says, "a college degree is the new high school diploma." Rival Hillary Clinton supports President Barack Obama's plan to make community college tuition-free -- that is, publicly funded. Beware, America: Imagine how expensive college tuition will be if Democrats somehow manage to make more of it "free." As for value, if Sanders has his way, you can expect the college degree to be the new high school diploma.

On the other side of the aisle, GOP presidential hopefuls rarely talk about "college affordability." The issue is not on front-runner Donald Trump's main issues pages. Ditto for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Ohio Gov. John Kasich suggests that one way to make college more affordable is by encouraging "more students to earn college credit while completing their high school courses" to give them a "jump on their college careers" and a break financially. Republicans wisely are pushing personal fiscal responsibility as the main answer to rising tuition and fees.

Who's going to pay for all this? Everyone. Richard Vedder of Ohio University's Center for College Affordability and Productivity co-wrote a pamphlet for The Heartland Institute on higher education reform in 2011, which explored how federal grants and student loans have driven up the cost of college. His report showed the cost of a four-year degree had more than doubled in inflation-adjusted dollars from 1975. College graduates aren't more literate; they have a lower level of reading comprehension than those who graduated a decade earlier. Also, many grads are underemployed. According to federal statistics, 13 percent of American parking lot attendants and 14 percent of hotel clerks have a bachelor's degree or better.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/04/28/is_college_too_pricey_wait_till_its_free_130419.html

How To Help the Rich by "sticking it to the rich"

We have been having a very strange debate about income inequality in the United States for the past several years, one focused almost exclusively on the status of the hated “1 percent” or super-rich segments within it. From an economic point of view, this is deeply stupid: If Lloyd Blankfein takes a $100,000-a-year pay cut next year, that isn’t going to translate into two $50,000-a-year jobs for dropouts from P.S. 154 in the Bronx. But from a political point of view, concentrating on the 1 percent makes a great deal of sense to progressives: It is not, after all, conservative-dominated institutions run by Republican-affiliated unions that have failed the poor, the black, and the brown in practically every city in the United States.

The Left’s answer to the challenge of targeting our expenditures toward those Americans who most need them is to subsidize another round of loans, which will pass through Little Moonbeam on their way to her $150,000-a-year women’s-studies professor and the university’s $800,000-a-year president. That’ll show those rich people!
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/423937/student-loan-scandal

RealClearPolicy - New Evidence Raises Doubts on Preschool for All

By way of background, I'm a developmental psychologist by training and spent the majority of my career designing and evaluating programs intended to enhance the cognitive development of young children. For instance, I directed a national Head Start Quality Research Center; created a program, Dialogic Reading (which is a widely used and effective intervention for enhancing the language development and book knowledge of young children from low-income families); and authored an assessment tool, the Get Ready to Read Screen, that has become a staple of early intervention program evaluation. My point is that I care about early childhood education and believe it is important -- as witnessed by how I spent my professional life for 30 years.

My career since 2001 has largely been about advancing evidence-based education, which is the endeavor of collecting and using the best possible evidence to support policy and practice in education. Since the president's state of the union address, I've been writing that the evidence is decidedly mixed on the impact of the type of preschool investments the president has called for and that we now see in the legislation introduced in Congress. It may seem in the pieces I've written that I'm wearing only my evidence-based education hat. But in fact if you're an advocate of strengthening early childhood programs, as I am, you also need to pay careful attention to the evidence -- all of it. Poor children deserve effective programs, not just programs that are well-intentioned.

http://www.realclearpolicy.com/blog/2013/11/20/new_evidence_raises_doubts_on_obamas_preschool_for_all_742.html
Should you be able to take people's money at gunpoint and give it to an industry without proof that the desired effect will take place?

In the Future, Who Will Need Teachers?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203400604578075080640810820.html?mod=e2tw

A groundswell of change on the way.