Government should stop funding colleges and universities simply on the basis of butts in seats. Instead, it should reward high performance and the preparation of graduates for good-paying jobs.
Or so say President Barack Obama and his top education officials, although they didn’t use the specific phrase “butts in seats.” That was North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, during an interview nearly a year ago with talk show host and former U.S. Secretary of Education Bill Bennett. Left-wing commentators spent weeks excoriating McCrory for daring to suggest that taxpayer subsidies for higher education shouldn’t simply be doled out without regard to measurable results.
The resulting media-concocted scandal was really about politics, not policy. McCrory has committed his share of operational and messaging errors in his first year as governor, no question. But he was also subjected to a barrage of personal ridicule, outright misrepresentation, and incompetent or dishonest media coverage without precedent in modern North Carolina politics.
Take higher education reform. Most serious policymakers of both parties actually agree with McCrory about it and are acting on their belief. They realize that mediocre graduation rates, disappointing employment prospects for many who do graduate, and soaring student-loan debts reflect real problems in the higher education sector, not talking points borrowed from some fictional Republican war on learning.
In response to McCrory’s radio interview, for example, University of North Carolina President Tom Ross — a longtime Democratic pol and former head of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, which funds much of the North Carolina Left — said that the system was already in the process of revamping its funding formula away from headcounts (butts in seats) and toward measures of operational efficiency and student success.
The Obama administration is currently pushing a reform agenda based on evaluating thousands of colleges and universities on the basis of outcomes. According to a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the ratings will take into account whether a college welcomes needy students, helps students graduate on time, and “prepares them for good-paying jobs.”
Why, the president and his aides must loathe the humanities and hate college professors, just like Pat McCrory does!
To base government funding on measurable outcomes is not to dictate what researchers will research, teachers will teach, and students will study. If your life goal is to work in an art museum, make your living as a working artist, or simply to learn to appreciate great works of art, by all means go off to college and major in art. The same goes for majoring in philosophy, literature, the classics, or many other fascinating subjects. But you shouldn’t expect to have your choice massively subsidized by taxpayers. (None of which is to say that students should be permitted to graduate from state universities without a solid grounding in the arts and humanities, regardless of their majors. Unfortunately, the current general-college curriculum falls far short of that on many campuses.)
You don’t have to like President Obama’s proposal to abandon the butts-in-seats financing system of the past. Perhaps the administration’s performance measures will prove impossible to gather and implement in practice. But if you are an honest commentator, you can’t blast McCrory for favoring the same thing, because he is a Republican, but give Obama (and Tom Ross and others) a pass because they are Democrats.
That would be like alleging that North Carolina Republicans have raised sales taxes on low-income households to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy, even though North Carolina Republicans actually lowered North Carolina’s sales tax burden by about $1 billion after years of state and local sales-tax hikes by North Carolina Democrats.
Surely no editorialist would do anything so patently dishonest.
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Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.