The arrogance of President Obama and his Administration know no bounds. A recent example being a comment by the director of the White House Policy Council, Cecelia Muñoz, as quoted in Monday’s New York Times. The article, “Colleges Rattled as Obama Seeks Rating System,” dealt with a rating system the Obama Administration is designing for the nation’s 7000 colleges and universities that receive a total of $150 billion each year in federal loans and grants.
The problems the Administration cited as an excuse for another government bureaucracy are real: tuitions are rising at rates that exceed inflation, graduation rates have been declining, student debt is a growing concern and the job market sucks. All of these problems have at their source the incompetent hand of government. Assigning another government bureaucracy to fix the problem is akin to putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.
The article in the Times mentioned that many college presidents have taken umbrage with the idea that Washington is dictating a mandate that directly affects them. The president of a Virginia university is quoted: “This is a take-it-or-leave-it approach.” Ms. Muñoz countered that Mr. Obama had no patience for anyone who attempted to block the effort. “This is happening,” is the way she so imperiously put it.
Ignoring any feelings of schadenfreude at the squirming of college presidents who otherwise are so blindly liberal, it is the chutzpah of those like Ms. Muñoz and Jamienne Studley that is so disconcerting. The latter, a deputy under-secretary at the Department of Education flippantly announced that rating colleges would be “like rating a blender,” a curious but telling analogy, as blenders produce a uniform product from a variety of sources, while a university expects to produce thousands of products, differentiated by hundreds of fields of studies. While we blame these supercilious remarks on the individuals making them, they reflect the Administration.
Easy availability of student loans has allowed colleges to raise prices at a more rapid rate than free markets would have permitted. Pressure to increase funding for qualified students from low-income families has meant that those who can pay full freight must pay more. It has meant that only those in the top one percent of incomes can afford to pay full tuition. Many colleges have become bloated with administrative staffs that have grown more quickly than instructional staffs.