The most effective way to fix the universities is to eliminate all federal student loan guarantees. That would immediately defund all the grievance studies departments. No private lender in their right mind would lend a student money towards such a degree.
Another measure might continue the guarantees, but make them dischargeable in bankruptcy, with the university on the hook ahead of the federal government.
It is also important to stop the government subsidizing science. Those subsidies have two effects:
* They attract marginal researchers who gin up marginal fields, which attracts marginal students whose only real goal is that four year sheepskin.
* Bureaucrats decide which marginal subjects have the least chance of embarrassing their echo chambers.
But it's as hard a sell as free trade. Too many cronies yell "national security" and "doesn't support vital social goals". Stopping student loans is easier, probably still impossible.
I think there is a more serious problem. With one organization controlling most of the subsidies, that organization can push scientific conclusions they approve of, create an orthodoxy.
Did you read President Eisenhower’s farewell address? Scholars love to quote him about the military industrial complex. They don’t like to talk about the corruption of science.
Never read the whole thing. I probably have read the MIC section.
One of my biggest pet complaints about government is that it defines itself, its own limits. I only learned recently that the Supreme Court "confirmed" the common law judge-made judicial immunity in 1967, invented qualified immunity for all government employees the same year, and invented prosecutorial immunity in 1976. I had thought they dated back centuries.
Perhaps, but it hadn't been necessary for 180 years, and they preferred the backdoor amendment process of redefining words to correcting the law enforcement abuses.
"The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.'
Perhaps we will get really lucky and the Department of Education will be eliminated lock stock and barrel along with all the federal money going anywhere through it. Doing so might be a huge inroad to returning the USA to federalism instead of the ham-fisted central government we have today, which began on steroids in 1913.
Why not do what Sweden does? Collect tax money for K-12 schools but give it to parents in the form of vouchers. The public schools would shape up quickly if they had real competition. Interestingly, in Sweden, not exactly a right wing country, the teachers supported the switch to vouchers. Unlike our unionized teachers they put the kids first.
It seems only natural that teachers would support a move away from monopsony. I think that very few Swedes would agree with the assessment that public schools have shaped up since 1992, however.
I think #3 is most likely. In Canada, we don't have a federal department of education. The federal government does administer student loans and gives grants to the provinces sometimes. Mostly for post-secondary education. But that's about it. There's no federal common core or anything.
BBC agrees with you on #3, I agree with you on that it was just rhetoric. That said I'm curious how you envision #5 working with home schooling, do parents just get an equivalent check?
Speaking of BBC, one thing that immensely bothers me with each passing year is the number of foreign MSM that is overly focused on US domestic policy* without even an inking of comparing said policies to their own domestic on the same effectively demonizing the US for what often is an actual policy more in line with what they want than their own domestic policy. From immigration to speech to abortion to most things the US has a more liberal policy than most of the EU and EU adjacent nations.
Like hey BBC, what exactly is the UK's DOE equivalent and policy? Is there a UK wide DOE? Is it divested to the municipalities, kingdoms, or shires? How do Brits homeschool? charter school? Etc. Like I get the BBC wants to dump on Trump but rather than malign the DOE thing, how about inform us what the UK looks like and how it's education policy is superior.
* Speaking of which, where are all the non-US speaking voices period, the Sowell, Friedman, Bordeaux, GMU, etc of the UK, Australia, etc. I get I would miss the Algerian Arnold Kling as he is probably writing in French or likewise the Russ Roberts of Cambodia but I never sought out US voices and yet 99.9% of them are. Does the rest of the world not engage in political discourse around economics or liberal policies?
Parents get an equivalent check and there is some mechanism to make sure they are educating their kids. Monitoring the inputs to home schooling would be hard but monitoring the output is easier. The parent can only cash the check if, at the end of the year, the kid tests on some basic measures of education, such as reading, as well as the 25th percentile of public school kids that age, or something along those lines.
Testing seems an easy an obvious solution, but I don't trust bureaucrats, especially government ones, to not twist the testing into social engineering nudges.
I hadn't thought of it before, but maybe one solution would be to let the parents choose any test from the last 50 or 100 years. The basic three Rs don't change, and it would at least provide a lot of room for different political agendas.
That's why I both specified "basic measures of education, such as reading" and "as well as the 25th percentile of public school kids that age." The second should make it hard, even with an elastic definition of the first, to use the requirement for social engineering. Parents can, if necessary, tell the kid "the answer they want on the text is X and here is why it isn't true."
Perhaps 25th percentile is a little too generous. 10 years ago an article was written indicating that literacy rates had not changed in the prior 10 years (https://www.lb7.uscourts.gov/documents/14-3613URL2Illiteracy.pdf) If that is still close to being correct, about 19 percent of high school graduates can't read, and I would guess this percentage goes up if you eliminate private school results. So 25th percentile seems like too low a bar. Perhaps the voucher amount could be on a sliding scale based on level of performance. But Chartertopia states a better criticism--do you really want government determining the agenda for the educational bar for home schooling? Even allowing parents their choice of prior academic standards denies them the ability to home school their children with the curricula they deem important. For example, in the future, learning math beyond algebra and learning to write essays may not be particularly useful, and learning social skills may be more important.
I figure the present system is poor enough so you can teach enough of what they teach to pass the test and still have lots of time to teach what you want to teach.
I subscribed to Ground News a year or so ago, hoping it would live up to its claim of diverse news sources. Most of their diversity turned out to be different sites regurgitating the same news feeds.
I used to subscribe to The Economist for the same reason, and I remember once taking a taxi and being able to talk with the driver about Nigerian political events and corruption. It was incredibly refreshing, and that one experience justified the year's subscription. But they started going goofy, writing more opinion pieces and telling readers how they should think, and I haven't read an issue in 10 years at least.
I would pay a good amount for world news reports again.
It seems like things are cheaper when they are not government funded. Theory would predict that and it’s what we see in practice. Obviously it’s a rhetorical losing proposition, but What is the steelman argument for funding education at the federal level ?
Considering states already operate the schools, it seems like something the state would do a superior job at, at minimum
The unstated real objective of federal funding is leverage for federal oversight and control. Same as the highway trust fund telling states to set a national speed limit and drunk driving BAC.
Grover Norquist (2001): “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
Once a program, regulatory regime, bureau, agency, or department has been sufficiently weakened to drag it off to its doom, failure to kill the miscreant is political malpractice of the highest order. After its escape from the bathtub, the fugitive can be expected to quickly grow bigger, meaner, more powerful, with enhanced operational scope, less oversight, and greater funding than ever before, and will be supported by every political grifter and ne'er-do-well able to belly up to the bar to slurp their fill at the public trough. If there's no money to be sent, there's no need to account for it, and thus no staff needed to perform a non-existent function.
If Trump's push to rein in government overreach is effective, it'll appear in headcount. If it's B.S. or simply a temporary tactical retreat by the Beast, headcount will be unaffected and the bathtub will be as dry as DOGE is toothless.
I'm more or less part of the Trump supporters' community and I disagree partly with you on Project 2025. The Project was put together by the Heritage Foundation and its views are neocon. There is some overlap with Trump, but they are radically different on foreign policy and war. Trump is aggressive when it comes to tariffs and sometimes sanctions, but he is very anti-war, to the extent that he will back us out of Ukraine and, if he can, leave NATO. Which is probably why he keeps getting shot at. The deep state can't stand a president who won't fight endless wars.
If Education is controlled in some way by the federal government, then the left will gain more from that than Trump. Trump can completely eliminate his own ability to influence K-12 education and still greatly benefit conservative voices in education - likely far more than trying to target improvements using his authority through the DOE (even if the bureaucrats in the DOE don't sabotage his efforts). At the very least, the next time a Democrat is in power and can use the DOE, they will almost certainly reverse everything Trump would try to do.
Eliminating a power center of his opponents is a good strategy.
David or anyone else - Suppose that you were to submit suggestions for improvements to the Constitution. What would your suggestions with respect to the Constitutionality of government funded education be? Any suggestions for improving the First Amendment?
As I read the Constitution, for the federal government to fund schooling is already unconstitutional, since it isn't among the powers given to the federal government.
One improvement I would argue for is freedom of encryption, which has elements of the first and second amendments. See my arguments from my debate with Ed Meese:
Thank you. That was a great debate. 1997 was a long time ago. Maybe it's time for an update to this debate, even if to polish the old text and repost or re-enact.
If you've been following this debate and the technologies, which I assume you have, better than me anyway, where are we at with freedom of encryption? What kind of wording would you want to see in the Constitution for such an amendment? You said in the debate that the private sector would win: "in the long-term it will not prove politically practical to prevent this set of developments." So, how does an amendment help if in the long run your side wins? Does it get you a win sooner?
Fascinating debate. I can't believe Meese actually believed cops and courts were as honest and honorable as he said. I've met some people like that who think government actors can do no wrong, and they baffle me, but I don't think Meese was that naive. He also couldn't have believed legislation could actually limit the export of uniquely strong encryption, but did he really think pretending to be naive would convince anybody? I remember having vaguely similar arguments with people about keys, I think someone had compared it to all mechanical locks had to escrow copies of their keys with police, and people couldn't see the resemblance and still thought the Clipper chip and RSA key escrowing sounded reasonable.
" I can't believe Meese actually believed cops and courts were as honest and honorable as he said."
A related anecdote. When I was at U of C law school I coauthored an article arguing for a voucher system to provide lawyers for indigent felony defendants. One of my colleagues was Judge Posner. In the course of discussion of the article, he said that he thought innocents were almost never convicted of felonies. The convicted defendant wasn't necessarily guilty of the crime he was convicted for, but if not he was someone guilty of other crimes, because the police knew who the criminals were. Not assuming honesty so much as a commitment to doing their job of putting criminals in jail.
One of the practical reasons I don't like the death penalty is because Illinois governor George Ryan commuted all death row sentences, because more death row inmates had been exonerated due to police and prosecutor malfeasance than executed. I expect most of the exonerated ones were still pretty bad criminals, not honor students. But it still means the real criminals were unknown, and that kind of laziness bothers me.
As I recall, some (many? most?) fire departments used to require business owners to place a key and/or access code to their buildings in a secure(?) lockbox physically attached to the building to which only the fire department had access. Does anyone know if this system, akin to the one real estate agents widely use, is still in operation and, if so, how widespread is its practice?
Prof. Friedman - Beautiful post! Are 1-5 to be done through executive action, or congressional approval? If executive, would it be constitutional with the current Supreme Court?
Schooling is not an enumerated power! Thank you. We should turn up the volume on this fact.
The most effective way to fix the universities is to eliminate all federal student loan guarantees. That would immediately defund all the grievance studies departments. No private lender in their right mind would lend a student money towards such a degree.
Another measure might continue the guarantees, but make them dischargeable in bankruptcy, with the university on the hook ahead of the federal government.
It is also important to stop the government subsidizing science. Those subsidies have two effects:
* They attract marginal researchers who gin up marginal fields, which attracts marginal students whose only real goal is that four year sheepskin.
* Bureaucrats decide which marginal subjects have the least chance of embarrassing their echo chambers.
But it's as hard a sell as free trade. Too many cronies yell "national security" and "doesn't support vital social goals". Stopping student loans is easier, probably still impossible.
I think there is a more serious problem. With one organization controlling most of the subsidies, that organization can push scientific conclusions they approve of, create an orthodoxy.
Did you read President Eisenhower’s farewell address? Scholars love to quote him about the military industrial complex. They don’t like to talk about the corruption of science.
Never read the whole thing. I probably have read the MIC section.
One of my biggest pet complaints about government is that it defines itself, its own limits. I only learned recently that the Supreme Court "confirmed" the common law judge-made judicial immunity in 1967, invented qualified immunity for all government employees the same year, and invented prosecutorial immunity in 1976. I had thought they dated back centuries.
I do not like or trust government.
I suspect that the courts were trying to cope with lawfare against law enforcement.
You mean actually expecting law enforcement, and even the judiciary itself to follow the law? The horror! The horror!
Perhaps, but it hadn't been necessary for 180 years, and they preferred the backdoor amendment process of redefining words to correcting the law enforcement abuses.
Bureaucracies always protect their own.
> Perhaps, but it hadn't been necessary for 180 years
That's because for 180 years you didn't have pro-crime leftists engaging in lawfare to protect criminals.
It was a 10 minute speech. Here’s a link. The actual text begins under the heading “Transcript“.
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address
Relevant bit:
"The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.'
The whole speech is brilliant. There is political science gold in every paragraph. It is, in its way, as good as any of the Federalist Papers.
Perhaps we will get really lucky and the Department of Education will be eliminated lock stock and barrel along with all the federal money going anywhere through it. Doing so might be a huge inroad to returning the USA to federalism instead of the ham-fisted central government we have today, which began on steroids in 1913.
Why not do what Sweden does? Collect tax money for K-12 schools but give it to parents in the form of vouchers. The public schools would shape up quickly if they had real competition. Interestingly, in Sweden, not exactly a right wing country, the teachers supported the switch to vouchers. Unlike our unionized teachers they put the kids first.
Why not? Because Swedes are Swedes, although that is rapidly changing (as will the education system to "accommodate" the other-than-Swedish "Swedes").
Hint: madrassas will NOT be allowed to accept federal vouchers.
It seems only natural that teachers would support a move away from monopsony. I think that very few Swedes would agree with the assessment that public schools have shaped up since 1992, however.
I think #3 is most likely. In Canada, we don't have a federal department of education. The federal government does administer student loans and gives grants to the provinces sometimes. Mostly for post-secondary education. But that's about it. There's no federal common core or anything.
BBC agrees with you on #3, I agree with you on that it was just rhetoric. That said I'm curious how you envision #5 working with home schooling, do parents just get an equivalent check?
Speaking of BBC, one thing that immensely bothers me with each passing year is the number of foreign MSM that is overly focused on US domestic policy* without even an inking of comparing said policies to their own domestic on the same effectively demonizing the US for what often is an actual policy more in line with what they want than their own domestic policy. From immigration to speech to abortion to most things the US has a more liberal policy than most of the EU and EU adjacent nations.
Like hey BBC, what exactly is the UK's DOE equivalent and policy? Is there a UK wide DOE? Is it divested to the municipalities, kingdoms, or shires? How do Brits homeschool? charter school? Etc. Like I get the BBC wants to dump on Trump but rather than malign the DOE thing, how about inform us what the UK looks like and how it's education policy is superior.
* Speaking of which, where are all the non-US speaking voices period, the Sowell, Friedman, Bordeaux, GMU, etc of the UK, Australia, etc. I get I would miss the Algerian Arnold Kling as he is probably writing in French or likewise the Russ Roberts of Cambodia but I never sought out US voices and yet 99.9% of them are. Does the rest of the world not engage in political discourse around economics or liberal policies?
Parents get an equivalent check and there is some mechanism to make sure they are educating their kids. Monitoring the inputs to home schooling would be hard but monitoring the output is easier. The parent can only cash the check if, at the end of the year, the kid tests on some basic measures of education, such as reading, as well as the 25th percentile of public school kids that age, or something along those lines.
Testing seems an easy an obvious solution, but I don't trust bureaucrats, especially government ones, to not twist the testing into social engineering nudges.
I hadn't thought of it before, but maybe one solution would be to let the parents choose any test from the last 50 or 100 years. The basic three Rs don't change, and it would at least provide a lot of room for different political agendas.
That's why I both specified "basic measures of education, such as reading" and "as well as the 25th percentile of public school kids that age." The second should make it hard, even with an elastic definition of the first, to use the requirement for social engineering. Parents can, if necessary, tell the kid "the answer they want on the text is X and here is why it isn't true."
Perhaps 25th percentile is a little too generous. 10 years ago an article was written indicating that literacy rates had not changed in the prior 10 years (https://www.lb7.uscourts.gov/documents/14-3613URL2Illiteracy.pdf) If that is still close to being correct, about 19 percent of high school graduates can't read, and I would guess this percentage goes up if you eliminate private school results. So 25th percentile seems like too low a bar. Perhaps the voucher amount could be on a sliding scale based on level of performance. But Chartertopia states a better criticism--do you really want government determining the agenda for the educational bar for home schooling? Even allowing parents their choice of prior academic standards denies them the ability to home school their children with the curricula they deem important. For example, in the future, learning math beyond algebra and learning to write essays may not be particularly useful, and learning social skills may be more important.
I figure the present system is poor enough so you can teach enough of what they teach to pass the test and still have lots of time to teach what you want to teach.
I subscribed to Ground News a year or so ago, hoping it would live up to its claim of diverse news sources. Most of their diversity turned out to be different sites regurgitating the same news feeds.
I used to subscribe to The Economist for the same reason, and I remember once taking a taxi and being able to talk with the driver about Nigerian political events and corruption. It was incredibly refreshing, and that one experience justified the year's subscription. But they started going goofy, writing more opinion pieces and telling readers how they should think, and I haven't read an issue in 10 years at least.
I would pay a good amount for world news reports again.
It seems like things are cheaper when they are not government funded. Theory would predict that and it’s what we see in practice. Obviously it’s a rhetorical losing proposition, but What is the steelman argument for funding education at the federal level ?
Considering states already operate the schools, it seems like something the state would do a superior job at, at minimum
The unstated real objective of federal funding is leverage for federal oversight and control. Same as the highway trust fund telling states to set a national speed limit and drunk driving BAC.
Grover Norquist (2001): “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
Once a program, regulatory regime, bureau, agency, or department has been sufficiently weakened to drag it off to its doom, failure to kill the miscreant is political malpractice of the highest order. After its escape from the bathtub, the fugitive can be expected to quickly grow bigger, meaner, more powerful, with enhanced operational scope, less oversight, and greater funding than ever before, and will be supported by every political grifter and ne'er-do-well able to belly up to the bar to slurp their fill at the public trough. If there's no money to be sent, there's no need to account for it, and thus no staff needed to perform a non-existent function.
If Trump's push to rein in government overreach is effective, it'll appear in headcount. If it's B.S. or simply a temporary tactical retreat by the Beast, headcount will be unaffected and the bathtub will be as dry as DOGE is toothless.
I'm more or less part of the Trump supporters' community and I disagree partly with you on Project 2025. The Project was put together by the Heritage Foundation and its views are neocon. There is some overlap with Trump, but they are radically different on foreign policy and war. Trump is aggressive when it comes to tariffs and sometimes sanctions, but he is very anti-war, to the extent that he will back us out of Ukraine and, if he can, leave NATO. Which is probably why he keeps getting shot at. The deep state can't stand a president who won't fight endless wars.
If Education is controlled in some way by the federal government, then the left will gain more from that than Trump. Trump can completely eliminate his own ability to influence K-12 education and still greatly benefit conservative voices in education - likely far more than trying to target improvements using his authority through the DOE (even if the bureaucrats in the DOE don't sabotage his efforts). At the very least, the next time a Democrat is in power and can use the DOE, they will almost certainly reverse everything Trump would try to do.
Eliminating a power center of his opponents is a good strategy.
This is brilliant!
The possibilities listed in this post would be a really interesting thing to put on manifold markets or one of the other prediction markets.
Any thoughts on my idea for Elon Musk to fund a national competition for citizens to read, understand and improve the Constitution?
See here My Letter to Francis Fukuyama. https://substack.com/@scottgibb/p-151510114
Or this version written to Elon.
https://substack.com/@scottgibb/p-151602901
David or anyone else - Suppose that you were to submit suggestions for improvements to the Constitution. What would your suggestions with respect to the Constitutionality of government funded education be? Any suggestions for improving the First Amendment?
As I read the Constitution, for the federal government to fund schooling is already unconstitutional, since it isn't among the powers given to the federal government.
One improvement I would argue for is freedom of encryption, which has elements of the first and second amendments. See my arguments from my debate with Ed Meese:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030925021822/http://www.hoover.org/Main/uncommon/winter98/205.html
Thank you. That was a great debate. 1997 was a long time ago. Maybe it's time for an update to this debate, even if to polish the old text and repost or re-enact.
If you've been following this debate and the technologies, which I assume you have, better than me anyway, where are we at with freedom of encryption? What kind of wording would you want to see in the Constitution for such an amendment? You said in the debate that the private sector would win: "in the long-term it will not prove politically practical to prevent this set of developments." So, how does an amendment help if in the long run your side wins? Does it get you a win sooner?
Fascinating debate. I can't believe Meese actually believed cops and courts were as honest and honorable as he said. I've met some people like that who think government actors can do no wrong, and they baffle me, but I don't think Meese was that naive. He also couldn't have believed legislation could actually limit the export of uniquely strong encryption, but did he really think pretending to be naive would convince anybody? I remember having vaguely similar arguments with people about keys, I think someone had compared it to all mechanical locks had to escrow copies of their keys with police, and people couldn't see the resemblance and still thought the Clipper chip and RSA key escrowing sounded reasonable.
" I can't believe Meese actually believed cops and courts were as honest and honorable as he said."
A related anecdote. When I was at U of C law school I coauthored an article arguing for a voucher system to provide lawyers for indigent felony defendants. One of my colleagues was Judge Posner. In the course of discussion of the article, he said that he thought innocents were almost never convicted of felonies. The convicted defendant wasn't necessarily guilty of the crime he was convicted for, but if not he was someone guilty of other crimes, because the police knew who the criminals were. Not assuming honesty so much as a commitment to doing their job of putting criminals in jail.
One of the practical reasons I don't like the death penalty is because Illinois governor George Ryan commuted all death row sentences, because more death row inmates had been exonerated due to police and prosecutor malfeasance than executed. I expect most of the exonerated ones were still pretty bad criminals, not honor students. But it still means the real criminals were unknown, and that kind of laziness bothers me.
As I recall, some (many? most?) fire departments used to require business owners to place a key and/or access code to their buildings in a secure(?) lockbox physically attached to the building to which only the fire department had access. Does anyone know if this system, akin to the one real estate agents widely use, is still in operation and, if so, how widespread is its practice?
Prof. Friedman - Beautiful post! Are 1-5 to be done through executive action, or congressional approval? If executive, would it be constitutional with the current Supreme Court?
Schooling is not an enumerated power! Thank you. We should turn up the volume on this fact.
I don't know enough about how the court presently interprets the limits on executive action.