Under the Constitution, the federal government’s responsibility for and authority to fund higher education is non-existent. Unfortunately, politicians long ago decided that putting the government into higher ed would be a good idea. It’s so lovely to be able to say, “I am pro-education. Just look how I have voted for bills that help students.”


But as always, government meddling has had unintended consequences. In today’s Martin Center article, Duke professor John Staddon writes about them. “The effects of this increased reliance on federal funds,” he writes, “are loss of autonomy, altered priorities, tuition fees that increase faster than inflation, and a monstrous growth in employees who are neither teachers nor researchers.”

In short, the gusher of federal money has had bad effects on higher education and for the nation.

Federal meddling began with a small and apparently innocuous loan program in the 1958 National Defense Education Act — Perkins loans. That was right after Sputnik and American politicians were playing on national fears that we were behind the Russians and needed more young people in college studying things to enable us to catch up. Perkins loans even included the sensible requirement that if students defaulted, the institution was on the hook.

Once the effusively pro-education LBJ got into the White House, however, things changed dramatically. With the passage of the 1965 Higher Education Act, the camel got its head and shoulders inside the tent. Enormous changes ensued.



Among those changes was a manic, costly pursuit of federal dollars for research: “All this extra money for institutions of higher ed,” Staddon writes, “has been accompanied by entrepreneurial expansion beyond the traditional core. In addition to a Biology Department, there must be a School of Environmental Science; in addition to departments of Economics, Political Economy and Sociology, a Business School and a School of Government; not to mention programs, schools, and institutes of media and communication ‘science.'”

Worse, though, was the impact on the relationship between students and the colleges they attended.

Staddon explains: “In a destructive turnabout, undergraduate students are now almost universally regarded as “customers” who, notoriously, are always right. They, in turn, no longer regard the university as a place to be respected with themselves as fortunate guests. Instead, as the hysterical Yale “co-ed of color” screamed at sociology professor Nicholas Christakis a couple of years ago: ‘This is my home and you came in here.’”

American colleges and universities sold their souls for a mess of federal pottage. We need to get the government out of higher ed, but that won’t happen soon.