Yesterday Sen. Tom Harkin (D‑IA), Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, released his magnum opus on for-profit colleges, the culmination of two years of excoriating, browbeating, shaming, and generally demagoguing that fast-growing but relatively small sector of American higher education. His report is everything you’d expect from a crusade characterized by an almost complete unwillingness to address the central role of the federal government in creating pervasive rot not just in for-profit higher education, but the entire Ivory Tower.

The for-profit college sector is certainly raking in lots of cash and producing very little for it, with big revenues but very low completion rates. It’s probably not as bad as Harkin would have us believe—I’ve chronicled much of the exaggeration and misrepresentation that has punctuated his attack—but there’s little question that lots of students drag heaps of taxpayer dough into for-profit schools and get little of value for it.

The thing is, that happens across higher education, including the profit-taking.

As I’ve cited ad nauseum, completion rates throughout higher education are abominable. Looking at first-time, full-time students—an imperfect sample, yes, but the best we’ve got—the top completion rate is for bachelor’s students at private not-for-profit schools. But that’s only 65.4 percent completing within six years. The worst is at public two-year institutions—community colleges—which see only 20.4 percent finish their programs within 150 percent of normal time. That’s just one-in-five!

Surprisingly, Harkin’s report mentions the atrocious completion rates at community colleges. But only very briefly, and mainly to assert that “the cost of for-profit programs makes those programs more risky for students and Federal taxpayers.” That proviso is technically correct, but as misleading as much of the behavior for which Harkin condemns for-profit schools. Community colleges are cheaper to students in large part because they get direct taxpayer subsidies, and while those don’t come mainly from Washington they do come from taxpayers, just at the state and local level. In the 2009-10 school year, state and local appropriations to community colleges totaled $5,412 per pupil. Meanwhile, public four-year schools—with six-year graduation rates of just 56 percent—received almost $8,000 per student in federal, state, and local appropriations. And, of course, all “not-for-profit” schools get favored tax status, paying no taxes on most of their revenue and benefiting from tax deductible largess of donors.

But don’t think those schools aren’t profiting. Harkin’s report blows off the possibility that putatively not-for-profit schools make profits simply by stating that “by definition” such schools “do not retain any revenue as profit.” But as Vance Fried illustrated in his 2011 policy analysis, most public and not-for-profit private colleges make thousands of dollars per-undergraduate beyond the cost of educating them. They just use the money to reward the people in the school, or to pay for things that often make the school more bloated, instead of distributing the profits to investors.

Putting the for-profit sector in the context of all of higher education, it’s clear the witch hunt has been on. But there’s also been major scapegoating: by enabling students to pay for school with other people’s money, and with almost no regard for their ability to do college work, it is federal student aid that largely causes the rot in higher ed, quashing both school and student incentives to economize, and student incentives to think critically about consuming higher ed. By demonizing institutions that dare admittedly make profits, politicians like Sen. Harkin shift the blame from where it belongs—themselves—to those who do what the politicians want: “educate” people regardless of their ability. It’s exactly like housing: the politicians demand that everyone be able to buy a home, condemn anyone who might fail to furnish the uncreditworthy with mortgages, then blame the lenders when things go horribly wrong. They seem to want the votes—their profits—but no blame when things go south.

Sen. Harkin, the fault for what ails not just for-profit higher education, but the entire Ivory Tower, sits largely with you and your colleagues. Please quit shifting blame and do what must be done: phase out student aid and make all schools earn their money.

Today is the 100th anniversary of Milton Friedman’s birth and wonderful pieces have appeared all over the Web to commemorate the occasion. I particularly like Stephen Moore’s editorial in the Wall Street Journal, and economist Bryan Caplan’s brief but thoughtful blog post.

To add to the celebration, we’ve put together a brief interview with Bob Chitester, producer of Milton’s “Free to Choose” documentary series, and provided a link to the site where you can watch the whole thing for free. I’ve also added a few thoughts of my own on Milton’s impact on the school choice movement, and the high standards he set in his life and work.

Last week I testified before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that deals with education. The topic was sequestration, and my case was, frankly, overwhelming, showing that education spending has ballooned for decades while achievement for 17-year-olds — our schools’ “final products” — hasn’t budged.

At least I thought it was overwhelming. But apparently a Huffington Post reporter was underwhelmed by it and wrote the following:

Some lobbyists in the education reform camp note that U.S. education spending has skyrocketed, while test scores have stagnated. Neal McCluskey — an expert witness who serves as associate director for the Cato Institute’s education center — took this line, but a recent report from the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy shows that education spending has actually not grown at all as a share of the gross domestic product.

Aside from the odious implication that I am either a lobbyist or take my cues from them, the big problem with this rebuttal is that it is flat-out wrong. Open the link to the CEP report, go to page 35, and there you will see that the share of GDP taken by elementary and secondary education in fact grew between 1999 and 2009, from 4.4 percent to 4.6 percent.

Perhaps the writer thinks a 0.2 percentage point uptick isn’t big enough to constitute growth. If so, she should really take a look at the Digest of Education Statistics table that furnished the GDP data. It reveals just how big a spending increase that seemingly dinky rise was, a function of GDP starting very large and growing substantially. Indeed, there was an increase of over $237 billion, or a 57 percent ballooning, with spending rising from $413 billion in 1999 to $650 billion in 2009!

Those are current dollars so we should really adjust for inflation. Doing that moves the 1999 figure to $531 billion, but that still means there was a real increase of $119 billion, or a 22 percent move. That’s no growth by no means.

To her credit, the Huff Po reporter included one piece of context that’s crucial when discussing cuts to federal education spending, context that belies the irresponsible rhetoric of people like Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who said sequestration would “jeopardize our nation’s ability to develop and support an educated, skilled workforce that can compete in the global economy.”

Surely to justify such doomsaying cuts would have to be very large — perhaps 10 or 20 percent — right?

Nope. As Sen. Shelby (R‑AL) rightly noted at the hearing — and the Huff Po reported — the 7.8 percent cut to federal education programs likely under sequestration would only translate into about a 0.84 percent cut in total education spending. Why? Because the Feds — though spending far too much on education — still only supply about 10.8 percent of the total. Most funding comes from state and local governments.

When you look honestly at the numbers there really is no question: Sequestration should fully include education.

The nation’s biggest subprime student lender–your federal government!—has just called out private “subprime” lenders.

This morning the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and U.S. Department of Education released a report examining private student loans. It concludes that private lenders were out of control, just like all of Wall Street, before the “Great Recession” hit, a fact largely evidenced by high default rates. It was, the report argues, a part of the overall subprime lending debacle and it hurt innocent students.

“Subprime-style lending went to college and now students are paying the price,” said U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan in a release accompanying the report.

What’s the report’s solution to the problem? Push people into federal loans to the maximum extent possible. After all, those loans have low, taxpayer-backed interest rates; generous repayment terms, including speedy forgiveness for anyone going into “public service”; and essentially no requirement that borrowers offer evidence of creditworthiness.

Wait—essentially no evidence of creditworthiness? Isn’t that subprime lending in its very purest form? Indeed it is, which is perhaps why the report offers no comparison of default rates on private and federal loans.

Basically, the report is pushing for even greater subprime lending, only with taxpayers on the hook rather than voluntary investors.

The report tries to further portray the fate of private lending as part of an exclusively Wall Street-driven recession by arguing that a big drop in private lending between the 2007-08 and 2008-09 academic years was entirely the result of private lenders suffering from the collapse of credit markets. No doubt that had a significant role, but the report somehow manages to not discuss numerous changes to federal law in the 2007–2010 time frame that pushed private lenders out of the way, including:

• The College Cost Reduction and Access Act (2007), which set federal subsidized-loan interest rates on their halving path from 6.8 percent to the current 3.4 percent.
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  The Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act (2008), which increased unsubsidized loan maximums, reduced eligiblity criteria for PLUS loans (the only loans requiring some demonstration of creditworthiness), and offered federal money when guaranteed lending participants couldn’t get it through capital markets.
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  The reauthorized Higher Education Act (2008), which increased Pell Grant maximums, authorized forgiveness of up to $10,000 in debt for anyone working in an area of “national need,” and added new regulations for private lending.
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  The Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (2010), which ended federal guaranteed lending in favor of federal lending directly from the U.S. Treasury

Fully private lending probably was reined in thanks to the recession, which is a good thing, with private lenders taking less risk when it didn’t pay off. But it is no doubt also important that Washington enacted many laws that made it much harder for private lenders to compete. The fact is the Feds can subprime-lend without any major concern about losing big bucks. It’s only taxpayer money, after all, and there’s always more of that! Plus the political dividends are sizable, enabling politicians to heartily and repeatedly congratulate themselves for “making sure everyone can go to college!”

That gets us to the next critical point: In addition to reinforcing the utterly discredited notion that the recession was all the fault of “greedy Wall Street fat cats,” a report focusing on private lending is just a distraction from the 800-pound gorilla in higher education: the federal government. At their peak in 2007-08, private loan originations were less than one-third the size of federal loans, and about one-fifth the size of all federal aid. Today they are slightly more than one-20th the size of federal loans, and about one-30th the size of all federal aid.

In other words, private loans are but bit players in a student-aid show dominated by Washington. It is super-abundant federal aid, not private lending, that signficantly fuels tuition inflation, enables dreadful college completion rates, and fosters a glut of degree holders. Yet it’s those same federal lenders who dare scold private companies and warn us about their subprime failures.

Oh, the irony!

Listen to the media and you might think every American is scared silly about paying for college, and public aid is stretched micron thin to help just the neediest of students. A new report analyzing what and how Americans paid for higher education last year, however, puts the lie to that image.

How America Pays for College: 2012, from Sallie Mae and Ipsos Public Affairs, offers an interesting breakdown of who pays what and how for college, and furnishes some welcome contextual data. I’m not sure there is a unifying message in the numbers — other than people seem to be economizing a bit since the 2009-10 academic year — but some of the potential lessons are striking.

The first lesson is don’t believe that government aid is just for the poor. Families making $100,000 or more used federal loans, tax-incentivized savings programs, and federal, state, and school-based grants — which do not include scholarships — to cover 27 percent of their total cost of attendance.

Next, don’t get caught up in the overblown controversy over private student loans. It’s a diversion from the much bigger impact of government aid. Only 1 percent of the total cost of attendance last year was covered by private loans, versus 4 percent by federal Parent PLUS loans, 13 percent by other federal loans, 1 percent by federal work-study, and 16 percent by federal, state, or school-based grants. And don’t forget: much of the cost of public institutions is borne by taxpayers before the tuition bills even go out.

Perhaps most interesting, it appears that even though the sticker price of college has risen at astronomical rates, most people aren’t sufficiently concerned that they plan ahead for how they’ll pay. 50 percent of respondents either “somewhat” or “strongly” disagreed with the statement that “before my child/​I enrolled, our family created a plan for paying for all years of college.” Only 39 percent somewhat or strongly agreed with the statement.

What does this tell us? Potentially many things, but one might be that many people assume someone, no matter what, will ensure that they or their child will be able to go to college. Unfortunately, that “someone” often ends up being the American taxpayer.

In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, I argued that America has too many public school employees, and has wasted those employees’ talents on a mass scale. Jordan Weissmann, an associate editor with The Atlantic, disagrees, accusing me of running “roughshod over a lot of important nuance.” As it happens, no nuances were injured in the composition of my piece.

Let’s consider Mr. Weissmann’s cruelty-to-nuance claims in turn. First, he feels that I ignored “significant evidence that smaller classrooms do indeed improve student performance,” citing two sources. The first source is an unsigned web-page by the “Center for Public Education” that is so biased in its selective coverage as to not be worth serious consideration. The second is a scholarly paper by Alan Krueger, author of one of the two best-known literature reviews of the subject.

What Weissmann doesn’t mention is the work of Eric Hanushek, author of the other best known literature review on class size. Krueger contends that class size reduction is usually educationally beneficial and cost effective, Hanushek argues the contrary on both points. It’s easy to compare their evidence and arguments because both contributed at length to the book: The Class Size Debate, published by the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute. It is a testament to how comfortable Hanushek is with the strength of his case vis-à-vis Krueger’s that he links to a full .pdf of that book from his own web pages at Stanford University. I understand why. When Hanushek looked at the most methodologically sound estimates—those that measure changes in student performance over time instead of at just a single point in time—he found that 89% show either no statistically significant advantage or a significant negative effect to smaller classes. To arrive at his opposing conclusion, Krueger had to, among other things, overweight the lower quality studies.

Hanushek’s conclusion is also more consistent than Krueger’s with the national U.S. data. The average American classroom has gotten substantially smaller over the past 40 years (by about 7 students) but achievement at the end of high-school is essentially flat. The only way to counter this evidence is to claim—usually without systematic basis—that children must be so much more difficult to teach today that the gains we would have seen from smaller classes have been eclipsed by this reduced “teachability.” The only systematic study of “teachability” trends of which I am aware does not support that claim—finding net “teachability” to have been mostly flat over time, with some improvement in the past decade.

Hanushek’s conclusion has also been supported by new, large-scale research, published after his and Krueger’s reviews. Harvard researchers Antonio Wendland and Matthew Chingos reported in 2010 that Florida’s state-wide class size reduction had “no discernible impact upon student achievement,” but has so far cost the state roughly $28 billion.

Some journalists are aware of the evidence that smaller classes generally do not improve outcomes. Consider, for example, this bit of reporting from last December:

Think of the ingredients that make for a good school. Small classes. Well-educated teachers. Plenty of funding. Combine, mix well, then bake. Turns out, your recipe would be horribly wrong, at least according to a new working paper out of Harvard…. The study comes courtesy of economist Roland Fryer, an academic heavyweight who was handed a MacArthur Foundation “genius award” earlier this year…. Fryer found that class size, per-pupil spending, and the number of teachers with certifications or advanced degrees had nothing to do with student test scores in language and math.

In fact, schools that poured in more resources actually got worse results.

Who is the astute journalist who wrote these words and from whom Jordan Weissmann could learn a few lessons? You guessed it… it was Jordan Weissmann, writing just seven months ago. How soon we forget.

Next, Weissmann claims that “dropout rates, for instance, have fallen by almost half since the 1970s.” Presumably he is unaware that this statement and the table he cites in support of it do not reflect reality. The “dropout rates” published in that NCES table are statistical fabrications of the nation’s education bureaucrats, looking to placate the public with the help of the remarkably credulous education media. You needn’t take my word for it. That is the finding of the left-leaning, Nobel-prize-winning, cited-by-President-Obama-with-approbation economist James Heckman. Heckman’s 2007 study, with Paul LaFontaine, is still the definitive work on the subject (though it was not the first to report the truth). Here is what Heckman and LaFontaine established through a painstaking analysis of the nation’s graduation data:

(a) the true high school graduation rate is substantially lower than the official rate issued by the National Center for Educational Statistics [the one cited by Weissmann]; (b) it has been declining over the past 40 years; (c) majority/​minority graduation rate differentials are substantial and have not converged over the past 35 years; (d) the decline in high school graduation rates occurs among native populations and is not solely a consequence of increasing proportions of immigrants and minorities in American society;

They also note that the post-NCLB uptick in graduation rates probably does not imply a genuine improvement in educational outcomes:

NCLB gives schools strong incentives to raise graduation rates by any means possible. When monitoring was implemented in 2002, minority retention [a.k.a. “flunking”] dropped sharply and graduation rates turned upward, especially for minority groups. A similar pattern is observed following the publication of A Nation at Risk. Whether these represent real gains or are an indication of schools cheating the system in the face of political pressure remains an open question for future research, although the timing suggests strategic behavior [i.e., “cheating”].

The italics and the text in square brackets in the above quotations are mine.

The fact that public school systems report falsely rosy “dropout rates” is not a secret. Anyone who spends 60 seconds on Google will discover it. It’s even been reported in such popular media outlets as… Mr. Weissmann’s employer, The Atlantic. That page on the Atlantic’s website actually links to the very same Heckman and LaFontaine study I link to above. Heck, it’s even been mentioned in The New York Times (though they’ve managed to protect their most die-hard readers from cognitive dissonance by restricting coverage of these findings to David Brooks’ column).

Weissmann wraps up his blog post with a foray into the art of mind-reading:

I doubt Coulson truly believes we really have too many teachers in this country. He hints at so much in his last paragraph, writing, “While America may have too many teachers, the greater problem is that our state schools have squandered their talents on a mass scale.” Why the hedge? My guess is….

Kudos to any readers who correctly predicted that both Mr. Weissmann’s belief and his guess were wrong. The reason that I can make no certain statement about the ideal size of the U.S. education labor force is that no one can predict the allocation of human and capital resources that will occur in future in a free market. That said, there is reason to expect fewer teachers will be required under market conditions since our public school monopolies have been on a hiring spree 11 times faster than enrollment growth for forty years. Moreover, on-line learning and educational software options are only getting better and more numerous, and this should lessen demand for classroom teachers. Against those forces we have to consider that families may choose to invest some of the resulting savings from employing fewer classroom teachers in one-on-one tutoring, which is generally accepted as highly effective if, at present, too expensive to be much used.

One thing I can say with some certainty, based on the world-wide research literature comparing different sorts of school systems within countries, is that whatever particular allocation of teachers and capital resources the market arrives at will be more efficient than the gross, unproductive staffing bloat that has been perpetrated by state schooling. And, as I explained in that linked study, the existing small niche of non-profit private schools in the United States does not constitute a free education marketplace. A further explanation of the difference, should anyone find it necessary, can be found in this piece by economist John Merrifield.

To quickly correct some of Weissmann’s remaining errors: I am on record as not faulting teachers’ unions as the cause of our nation’s education woes. Their predations (e.g., contributing to the system’s demonstrably unproductive employment bloat) are a symptom, not the disease. And while some public school teachers are obviously overpaid, others have been equally obviously underpaid. The problem with public school teachers’ salaries at present is that they are allocated based on time-served and credentials (neither of which is consistently related to student achievement) rather than performance. Markets tend to compensate employees based on performance and so this problem, too, will likely be solved by liberalizing America’s education sector through programs like K‑12 education tax credits.

This is probably all the time I will have to debunk the various flawed criticisms that were offered in response to my WSJ piece, so I thank Mr. Weissmann for conveniently collecting most of them in one place.