Should the Government Be Funding Private Schools? – Part I

With the constant focus on government spending, especially the education expenditures; why in the world are taxpayer dollars being used to support private institutions?

One of the chief complaints coming out of the Occupy Wall Street protests is the mountain of student debt young people are accumulating. In the case of the Federal Government, why would we provide federally funded financial aid, student loans, grants and scholarships, to students attending private colleges and universities? This makes absolutely no sense. People have been up in arms about subsidizing private businesses and the bail out of the Wall Street. Why are we subsidizing private schools, especially for profit institutions that are almost entirely revenue dependent on financial aid?

When I entered a public university in the early 1960s there was no federally funded financial aid. To attend school either families provided the funds, you sought out scholarships or if you couldn’t do it any other way, you worked and saved, paying for it yourself. At the time public secondary schools provided various education tracts. Typical were vocations arts, business and college preparatory tracts. Upon finishing high school those who graduated were prepared with the basic skills to either go out and gain employment or go onto post secondary institutions. Of course with time, needs changed and the nation prioritized the demand for college graduates to compete in pursuing technical degrees to generate the mathematicians, engineers and scientists to support the race for space and cold war weaponization. Over time business and vocation tracts suffered as did the humanities.

Whatever the national priority, I fully understand that it is in the best interest of the nation to have an educated population, but to fund private institutions seems counterintuitive. Federal public guaranteed funding of post secondary institutions was a program that came out of the 1960s War on Poverty. It was originally designed to help low income individuals of academic merit, with an opportunity to achieve a post secondary education. For many families, who had struggled in the previous generation just to achieve a high school diploma, a post secondary degree and the middle class were now in reach.

Rationally, if we are going to provide federal funding in any form, then it should be directed to public institutions only. State universities, colleges, community colleges, and technical schools have been the backbone of the U.S. post secondary system for nearly six decades. During the last two decades post secondary education funding has come under constant assault by the political right and deemed by many as an unnecessary expenditure of public resources. The removal of state funding has shifted more of the financial burden to students and families. Subsequently, tuition, books and living expenses have skyrocketed causing indebtedness beyond even credit card debt. There is no indication that this situation is going to change anytime soon; especially at a time when we have to generate educated people for a growing global challenge. Therefore, public funding needs to support public institutions.

However, this issue goes deeper than just post secondary education and I’ll address this in Part II of this series.