Massive waste in Dept of ED

Agreed, tho I dont agree with the "we" part.

 

Which makes your comment even funnier, because I have been a Republican all my life, and continue to be one, I'm just not one of you brainwashed MAGA's, and I don't support a criminal dictator leader. But you do you, believe everything the Orange SkidMark says, and jump whenever he tells you to..

 

I know the focus will be on all the DEI stuff, but DOE serves several actually important functions that are going to be a shit show after all of this.

I don't expect our resident conservatives to understand though.

 

What I’ve noticed is that details matter little, as long as a sound bite can “own a Lib,” there is victory. Regardless of what is won or lost in real world impact.

 

The Department of Education has been a money pitt every since Carter created it.

This will end up as a good example of less = more (better government with less spending).

 

School vouchers will be fantastic. Defund the current schools which are disasters to begin with, remove the tax base for the rich people who can go to better schools already.

 

Based on what?

 

There was a time when I never understood how a for-profit voucher program, that didn’t provide transportation, school lunches, provide services to needy and disabled children, no sports or other student activities, and lower quality educators, some without degrees or a criminal background check could turn a profit. Then I realized I answered my own question.

Parents are led to believe their children will be getting a prep school education at a vine covered institution with learned educators, only to find out it’s nothing more than a refurbished 7/11 in an abandoned strip mall taught by someone who just passed their GED exam. Oh and voucher students won’t be required to show student progress because they’re not required to take statewide exams.

 

Redundancy, federal bureaucracy and overreach by special interest... One small example is the obscene cost and minimal effect of implicit bias training.

 

I haven’t seen a single plan on what comes next so I don’t know what you can base that on. If you think the states can administer financial aid more efficiently than the federal government then lol at you. You’ll have 50 states with 50 different rules. It’ll be chaos.

 

No... Was it chaos before 1979?

I'd say there's been more chaos since the department was created.

 

Okay let’s break that down:
Federal bureaucracy and overreach by special interests?

You’ve just described state legislatures, textbook companies, and parents.

Redundancy? You think education is no longer useful?

re·dun·dant
/rəˈdənd(ə)nt/
adjective

1. not or no longer needed or useful;

 

While it wasn't "chaos" there were a number of problems the programs, most notably that the loans weren't guaranteed. Financial aid as we know of it came to exist in 1965, but you didn't see a lot of growth in people using them until the 70s, because it wasn't until the mid-1970's that states started to guarantee some of the loans. Then in 1978, they eliminated the income requirement for student loans.

The problem now though is the size and scope. The loan portfolio is 1.8 trillion, and you have roughly 17.5 million people per year requesting federal financial aid, WAY WAY WAY more than in the 1970s. That is a shitload of people. Thankfully, over the years, they developed the FAFSA, and although it's not perfect, they have had 2,000 staff working in DOE to support it and a whole group of student financial aid experts have been trained around the country in higher education to provide guidance to students applying for financial aid. So the system has been working - although there are certainly needs for reform with about 40% of people behind on their payments, but that is a separate regulatory issue.

So now, not only are they cutting staff in FAFSA by 40%, they are proposing, at least initially, to move it to the US Small Business Administration (oh which by the way just cut 43% of their 6500 staff). This is a unit that has NEVER administered student loans. So they have no idea on policy or managing FAFSA.

You are basically going to disrupt an entire ecosystem. FAFSA made some changes a couple of years ago, within the existing system, and the changes causes massive problems throughout all of higher education. So to think this move won't be HUGELY disruptive is a pipe dream.

Also - not that you would understand, but they basically closed NCES - the National Center for Education Statistics, which universities use for program planning. So now programs won't be able to quickly access national data to determine student trends in different programs. So when an academic leader asks, hey, do we need a new computer science program, they won't have any data to compare to.

There are a ton of little things we could pick on here, but the fact is, at least in higher education, the system was working fine, and now the whole thing is being doused in gasoline and lit on fire with absolutely no strategic thought as to what could go wrong in the short, medium, or long term.

 

My employee's wife fits that bill. Polk County drop out, took her 3 attempts to pass her GED, now teaching 6th graders at a private school in Melbourne. Their son, a recent graduate of the same school, barely qualified to be a burger flipper, also now teaching at the same school, making $15/hr. Can't make this stuff up.

 

I have zero doubt there are hundreds of very well-intentioned and diligent workers at FSA, but the student loan/tuition pyramid scheme isn’t the answer either. The truth is, there exists no pretty way to unwind this monstrosity. Yes, of course, it will suck for all the unfortunate ones who have careers staked there. But let’s be honest. It’s not as though they haven’t been warned for years. Like anyone else who chooses to work in a fundamentally flawed industry, there will be the inevitable pain, unfortunately.

 

Dude I am in no way worried about the federal employees, people get fired every day, it is what it is - i am worried about the millions of people who are repaying student loans the millions of others who apply for student aid each year and need that aid dearly to attend school. Tens of millions of people could be effected over the next several years because of this kind of disruption. Without careful planning, this could be a huge disaster for A LOT of people.