When I used to teach Decision Theory, I always stressed the need for "post audits" to test the quality of our decisions. If this is not done, how would you know if your methods were produced good decisions or not? It would be like driving "blind". Have you seen a "post audit" of our student loan program? No! If we were to "post audit" the program, we might get the same results as when Head Start was "post audited". Head Start was found to be worthless. Let me give you a few facts.
SAT scores hit their peak at about 1965 and the number of engineering graduates hit their peak in about 1985. It was about 1985 that student loans started to become a significant factor. Now let's look at the changes that have taken place. We have more kids going to college. That is a fact, but at the same time we have fewer numbers of engineers and other technical graduates. So, what did we get for our money? We got fewer engineering and technical graduates and far far more degrees in things like Political Science and other "fluff" majors. I have pointed out in the past that there is no economic demand for the many more degrees that we paid for with our tax money thru student loans. So, what did we get? We got a bunch of older kids who have degrees and debit for degrees that are worthless. We and our kids wasted our hard earned money and years of their productive lives going to college. We and they would have been better off by not going to college and not spending our hard earned tax money. The bottom line is that they should have learned more in high school in the first place and use that education to earn a living.
I blogged in the past that many of our kids who earned these worthless degrees are now mad at the world because they can not earn a living or pay back their debits. Many are now moving back in with their parents. This is what student loans got us. Don't like what you are seeing?
Another thing that I used to point out in my Decision Theory classes was that there is always a best side to error on when it comes to a decision. The question is, "should I shoot high or low?" Should I go for more student loans or fewer? Which alternative could I recover from with the least damage if it turned out to be wrong? In the case of student loans, would we have been better off passing out more or fewer student loans? If the program bombs out, as it has done, if we had put in less money we would now be bettor off. If we had put too little, we could always put in more. This is my basic position on all government programs. Do less because if it turns out to be great, we can always spend more later. If the program is worthless, we can never get our money back nor can we cancel any damage that it causes. This is the situation with student loans. We did more damage than good. Don't think so? Look at the facts or look in the mirror.
The student loan program caused tuition to go up for students who did not get student loans. Since many of our kids took worthless fluff majors, our colleges hired liberal fluff professors who now dominate our colleges. To allow more students into our colleges so they could spend their student loan money, we had to dumb down the classes. This meant that classes that used to have high standards had to also be lowered. It is even worse. Most students and professors in the more difficult technical areas are born in some foreign country. In some majors, it runs as high as 90%. I thought that we needed more medical doctors, but now we can only graduate 40% of the need from our kids who were born here. Why didn't our kids go into the medical and technical majors? Isn't that what we wanted the student loan money used for? What we go is a bunch of kids with fluff degrees and a big debit, plus a college and university system that will take years to repair.
Does this look something like what government intervention into the housing market did? Interesting isn't it? The problem is now, how do we fix it.
