New at Reason: Greg Beato on Higher Education Spending
When it comes to reforming Big College, give the federal government a C+. Throughout 2010, grade grubbers in Congress, the White House, the Department of Education, and the Government Accountability Office worked hard to investigate and regulate the booming for-profit college sector. Given that the approximately 2,000 for-profit colleges in the U.S. rely on federal aid for a huge portion of their revenues, such scrutiny is clearly warranted. But as Greg Beato notes, the $25 billion in federal grants and loans that flows to them each year represents just a fraction of the $113.3 billion the government made available to higher education as a whole in 2009–10. And not all of the $89 billion or so that non-profit institutions collected in federal aid went toward teaching the nation’s youth such career-enhancing skills as how to deconstruct soap operas from a Marxist perspective.