Federal Direct Lending Will Make College Students Government Clients

A reply to Lawrence Auster's blog post: ObamaCare as you rightly point out is a life and death issue.  That means that the efforts to pass it necessarily overshadow everything else.  The Democrats, knowing that, are using the “reconciliation” as cover to pass some other dubious and politically unpopular legislation.  They are stuffing Obama’s takeover of higher education into it as well.  What ObamaCare is to medicine, Obama Loans are to college.  They will consolidate federal control of higher education finance in the Department of Education.  Obama wants this as part of his plan to double college enrollments by 2020 (from 18 million to 36 million) and make the United States the nation with the largest percentage of college-degreed citizens in the world.  Right now, the nation that holds that enviable position is Russia, with 55 percent.  This level of higher education has made Russia the powerhouse of innovation and productivity we see today, hasn’t it?  Why would it work out any differently for us?  Showering the country in empty credentials awarded to tens of millions of young people who have neither the talent nor the motivation to succeed at a real college education won’t improve the economy, as Obama promises.  It will, however, create a huge cohort of government clients. That’s how the Obama loans (called “Direct Lending”) come into it.  Anyone who wishes to attend college and needs to borrow money to do so will have only one choice:  borrow from the Department of Education.  DOE will choose who gets the loans, how much, and under what terms.  Voila!  The great majority of college students are instantly long-term government clients who will spend the first decades of their working lives paying down their debt to Obama Loans. The new program also locks into place the position of the federal government as chief patron to almost all colleges and universities except the super-rich (e.g. Harvard, Yale, Princeton) and the handful of scrappy we-take-no-government –funds exceptions (e.g. Hillsdale and Grove City).  Anyone who thinks the government will not make use of this leverage to impose its own priorities on what is taught, who teaches, and how colleges manage themselves, must not have heard of Title IX, the DOE Office of Civil Rights, and the host of previous infringements on the academy that grew up under the much weaker federally-guaranteed student loans program. This development has come up so suddenly—just last week!—that few people outside higher education have awoken to the danger.  What danger would that be?  Just as ObamaCare threatens to destroy high quality health care in America by reducing medical services to sub-mediocrity for all but the elite, Obama Ed threatens to destroy higher education by making it the intellectual equivalent of today’s high schools.  College for everyone regardless of ability is college for no one. Part of the Obama Loan program is to take the “savings” (currently estimated at $67 billion over 11 years) from eliminating fees to private lenders and recycle the money as grants to low-income students and favored colleges.  So the government program will have the additional angle of forcing the students who borrow from the government to pay for the educations of others who will be spared the borrowing. I have written about this twice at “Obama-Care Meets Obama-Ed” and “Obama Loans, Who Collects?”