Walker: Hill's Plan Benefits Her Lib Pals, Not Students

[Don Dresden]

Scott Walker: Hillary's Education Plan Benefits Her Liberal Academic Friends, Not Students
Katie Pavlich | Aug 12, 2015



When it comes to education policy, Hillary Clinton has her sights set on Wisconsin Governor and GOP presidential candidate Scott Walker. 

During a campaign stop yesterday, Clinton accused Walker of wanting to "raise taxes on students" and "delighting in slashing education funding" after laying out her plan for education reform, which has been dubbed "The New College Compact."

Hillary Clinton has made her first direct dig into Scott Walker, the hardline conservative favourite for president who is now fading in Donald Trump’s shadow, as the Democratic frontrunner continued to condemn Republicans on the campaign trail.

The Wisconsin governor “seems to be delighting in slashing the investment in higher education in his state”, Clinton said during a town hall-style event in the early voting state of New Hampshire on Tuesday.

Clinton also accused the governor of “rejecting legislation” that would help Wisconsin students repay their loans.

“I don’t know why he wants to raise taxes on students, but that’s the result,” she told the crowd at River Valley Community College in Claremont.

Now, Walker is firing back by defending his record and attacking Clinton's new higher education plan, which will cost taxpayers $350 billion dollars in tax hikes.

"We've frozen tuition now four years in a row," Walker tells Townhall. "That's how you do things. You protect college students and their families from high cost of tuition."

"[Her plan] is done under the guise of helping students but in the end...is a way to put more money into the university system without addressing the very legitimate question about why is tuition going up so much?

"Why is the cost of a college education going up so much? And why is it becoming increasingly difficult to get a degree within a reasonable amount of time?" Walker continued. "Instead of addressing the real challenges, instead of making policies relevant to the real needs of students, pouring in more money has just driven up the cost and caused colleges and universities to be less and less relevant to what our students' needs are."

When asked if he believes Clinton's education plan is geared toward benefiting her liberal friends in academia, much like her other policies and record with the Clinton Foundation, Walker said "absolutely."

"For them, sadly more money from the federal government is really just an enticement for a lot of these colleges to up tuition, to charge more, to use that money historically to drive up costs. It's certainly good for a lot of their liberal friends in the university systems to spend more money but what we've seen over time is that tuition is going up, in some cases three to four times the rate of inflation," he said. 

Yesterday Walker tweeted the following in response to Clinton's attacks, reminding voters that while he's frozen tuition rates in Wisconsin over the past four years, Clinton has been charging public universities more than $225,000 to show up for a thirty minute speech.

"This is just typical of the left, pour more money into something without fixing the problem," Walker said. "She thinks if you're not pouring taxpayer money into things that that's the only way you solve problems. In the case of the federal government pouring more money into student loans without addressing the high cost of college in the first place only continues to exacerbate the problem," he said. 

[Dickie Billericay]

Walker should be nice to Hillary.  She's got to be the best Dimocrat candidate to run against.

Hillary then...



Hillary now...



Hillary coming soon...

[Armando Ramos]

Hillary definitely belongs in jail, but the fact is that her stupid socialist schemes will continue on without her just as Hillarycare morphed into Obamacare.  As this article states, the government must get out of the student loan business, just as it should get out of the healthcare business, the auto business, the insurance business, the education business, and every other place it has its big money-sucking nose stuck. 

Clinton Plan Would Make College Less Affordable
By The Editors
August 13, 2015, 6:27 am

In keeping up with fellow Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, Hillary Clinton introduced a package of proposals Monday that she claims will improve college affordability. Like her rivals’ plans, Clinton’s proposal calls for vast government spending and intervention — $350 billion over 10 years — and just like those other schemes, it is likely to make the problem even worse.

Her plan would devote more than half the money to increasing state higher education funding, particularly through grants to states that guarantee “no-loan” tuition at community colleges and public universities. A third of the money would subsidize refinancing of student loans at lower rates.

The problem is real. There are now 40 million Americans with student loans totaling $1.2 trillion — second only to mortgages as a household liability. It is estimated that nearly 20 percent of that money will never be repaid.

But throwing more taxpayer money at the problem is only exacerbating it. A recent Federal Reserve Bank of New York study found, for example, that increases to federal student loan and Pell Grant programs have resulted in “a sizable pass-through effect on tuition of about 65 percent.” In other words, every $3 increase in student aid funding leads to a $2 increase in tuition.

“While one would expect this expansion to improve recipients’ welfare … the subsidized loan expansion possibly resulted in lower welfare because of the sizable and offsetting tuition effect,” the study concluded.
As economist Richard Vedder wrote in 2012, the enrollment inflation spawned by ever-increasing federal student aid programs has “contributed to a dumbing down of higher education and to declining standards” and “added to the growing disconnect between labor market realities and student job expectations, creating armies of college graduates who are bartenders, taxi drivers, etc.”

Rather than trapping students with false promises of job prospects, subsidized loans and a mountain of debt that millions of them will never be able to repay, the government should get out of the loan business and let students base their decisions on market forces and private and nonprofit aid. We should have learned this lesson from the housing crisis.

[Martin Eisenstadt]

Why College Tuition is Out of Sight: The Federal Government
John C. Goodman | Aug 15, 2015

Our health care system and our system of higher education have a lot more in common than you might think. As I explained in a previous column at Forbes, in both systems a third-party payer pays a good portion of the bill, leaving consumers and producers with perverse incentives to take advantage of it. The financing of both systems is dysfunctional. There is much waste and inefficiency. And low-income families are the least well served.

Here is what I wrote two years ago:

We spend about twice as much as other developed countries as a fraction of national output. Yet our results are mediocre. Public and private spending is growing much faster than our income ? putting us on a course that is clearly unsustainable. It appears we are buying quantity instead of value. Outcomes vary wildly from state to state. And programs that target the poor seem to be backfiring instead.

I asked readers to guess whether I was writing about health care or higher education? I could have been writing about either.

Loyal readers already know that health care spending was proceeding moderately until the advent of Medicare and Medicaid. Amy Finkelstein showed that in the first ten years Medicare had no impact on the health of the elderly. And fifty years after the fact, we are still arguing about whether Medicaid affects the health of the poor. Yet this massive infusion of federal spending fueled health care inflation that has been barreling along ever since. The same thing appears to have happened in education. According to economist Richard Vedder, the explosion in college costs began about the same time as the cost explosion in health care ? with the Higher Education Act of 1965.

Vedder was the first economist to demonstrate that federal tuition loans were fueling spiraling tuition costs and his work was largely ignored. But a new study by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York finds that Vedder was right all along. As summarized in the Wall Street Journal:

The New York Fed study found that for every new dollar a college receives in Direct Subsidized Loans, a school raises its price by 65 cents. For every dollar in Pell Grants, a college raises tuition by 55 cents. This is one reason tuition has outpaced inflation every year for decades, while the average borrower now finishes college owing more than $28,000.

Writing in The New York Times, Eduardo Porter says:

The United States shares two dubious distinctions. It has the most expensive higher education in the world: $26,000 a year, on average. And the college graduation rates of America’s young are growing at nearly the slowest pace in the industrial world, the third from the bottom among 30 nations tracked by the O.E.C.D.

What about helping students from low income families? Porter writes:

It’s not just that many colleges and universities are bleeding taxpayers. The government’s overall strategy to subsidize higher education is failing at its core task: providing less privileged Americans with a real shot at a college degree. Alarmingly, it is burdening low-income students with risks they cannot bear and steering them into low-quality educations…

Low-income students in the United States often end up with the short straw: no degree, no job and a bundle of debt that they must pay anyway.

In addition, middle income families who try to save for their children’s college expenses have a rude surprise. When the income tax law is combined with the typical rules for college aid, these families face a marginal tax rate in excess of 100 percent! That is, when they save an additional dollar they lose more than a dollar in higher taxes and reduced financial aid.

A study by Claudia Goldin of Harvard and Stephanie Riegg Cellini of George Washington University finds that for-profit schools that get federal subsidies charge, on the average, 78 percent more than for-profit institutions that are not eligible for aid. The price difference is almost identical to the value of the subsidy. (For-profits, by the way, get about one-quarter of all federal subsidies.)

Meanwhile, colleges and universities are doing just what hospitals do to capture more federal dollars. They are competing on amenities. Water parks, climbing walls, elaborate dorms and dining facilities – these are all part of the modern college experience – which is increasingly a social and recreational experience rather than an academic one.

So what’s the solution? Hillary Clinton has weighed in with a proposal, summarized in the Wall Street Journal:

[T]he Clinton plan aspires to convert loans into grants. The proposal would allow all borrowers to enroll in income-based repayment programs such as the federal Pay As You Earn, which caps loan payments at 10% of discretionary income and forgives the balance after 20 years—10 if you work in intentionally vague “public service” fields. This encourages students to earn less—and sends you, taxpayer, the billion-dollar bar tab….

To pay for it, Mrs. Clinton says she’ll close “tax loopholes and expenditures on the most fortunate.” This idea is getting a workout since it seems to be the way she’s paying for every other new spending proposal too.

My proposal for higher education is similar to what I’ve recommended for health care: a fixed sum voucher. (More details here.) I would also allow students to put future earnings up as collateral for college loans. For example, a lender might be entitled to 10 percent of post-degree earnings for a period of time. More details on that in a future post.

[dlandersson]

There's already a higher ed program that many want to pretend does not exist.

Enlist in any of the branches of the US military (ROTC, army, navy, air force, marine, coast guard, etc., active, reserve, national guard) and the Fed Govt will pay for your higher education plus you get to "give back".