Posted on 03/13/2018 6:41:30 AM PDT by Twotone
Most efforts to reform state universities have ended in failure. Texas regent Wallace Hall was almost impeached when he tried to investigate political clout used to get favored students into the University of Texas. An innovative voucher plan in Colorado was quashed by political forces. The governing board of the University of Virginia was forced to reverse course when it carried out its legal right to terminate the sitting president.
There’s better news in North Carolina, however. Slowly, sporadically, and facing strong opposition, the Republican-backed legislature is taming the 16-campus University of North Carolina system.
In 2012, Republicans obtained majorities in both houses and the executive mansion (the latter for just four years). Since then, the legislature has curbed the left-wing politics of its flagship campus, UNC-Chapel Hill, bolstered free speech and students’ due process, welcomed an online college, and even cut tuition at three campuses.
Part of the strategy has been to elect reform-minded members of the UNC Board of Governors while also reducing its numbers from an unwieldy 32 voting members to 24.
In 2015, spurred by the legislature, the UNC Board closed the Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity on the Chapel Hill law school campus. The center was created as a waystation for John Edwards, the 2004 Democratic vice-presidential candidate, who needed a place to re-launch his career (which then fizzled due to a personal scandal). Led by Gene Nichol, the center had become a mouthpiece for left-wing causes, with little academic work being done, according to the board.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Universities are definitely in trouble. Poiltical correctness has all but destroyed free inquiry into truth. Costs have skyrocketed. More and more students are unprepared for college-level academic work. Non-academic administration is top-heavy and riddled with makework centers and clinics. The college degree is no longer the currency it used to be and men are more and more subjected to harassment by the majority females there for “mansplaining”, “manspreading” “toxic masculinity” and being “unwoke”. The top administrators are acting like Pajama Boy. Students are resegregating themselves. Why should a decent, ambitious man or woman want to go into debt to put up with this and more?
Suggestion: Loans and scholarships for STEM manors only.
Majors
I think that is too narrowly focused; there are other career paths that are good, and there are too many idiots who try STEM and drop out who should not have been given loans. To solve both problems, just having all federal loans reviewed by actuaries who honestly assess loan risk based on all available information like for any other loan-- the student, their family, the desired major / school and likelihood of future earnings. If a student has performed poorly, has poor credit history, and is going into a major that is not likely to produce a sustainable wage, then they can only borrow up to $x.
It is sad that returning to sanity is such a temporary revolution.
Alternate suggestion: make student loans dischargable in bankruptcy again, and make the college co-sign the loan. If their graduates don’t get jobs, the college gets to eat the cost of educating them.
Suddenly, colleges will have an incentive to NOT give loans to students who are unqualified, and to eliminate majors which do not result in employment.
I like it.
Great news!
Defund the Left!
The uber lib University of Texas has been up to its eyebrows in corruption for decades.
Thought this was about either Colorado, Washington, Oregon, or California; a state with legal pot?
This is more tinkering with details. The fundamental problem is having government involved in the education business. Seperation of School and State is the ultimate solution.
“It is sad that returning to sanity is such a temporary revolution.”
And controversial!
Just to clarify, colleges don’t make the loans to students, that is done by the US Department of Education through the William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan program. If you want student loans reigned in, Uncle Sam is going to have to do it.
Just to clarify, what I said was "and make the college co-sign the loan". As in, change the loan issuance procedure so that no loan gets issued unless the college co-signs.
Perhaps no loans get issued that way. It's better than taxpayers being on the hook for over $1 trillion in student loan debt
Hallelujah! Common sense has returned to NC.
UNC may have Professor Mike Adams, UNC–Wilimington, to thank for much of this. And it only took him 20 years of online ridicule of UNC’s femnazi, PC culture and a 7-year lawsuit to gain tenure denied because he is a Christian and a conservative.
You have it backwards. It is the huge government contracts awarded to universities that have enabled the past several Democrat administrations to advance a progressive political agenda in the universities, including schools of education that, in turn, supply our marxist teachers to grade schools. The NC government is trying to free the students from Federal tyranny. But to truly separate government from education would require denying Federal research grants in medicine, physics, chemistry, engineering, etc. for the benefit of society at large and the defense of our country. It's a conundrum.
The real problem is the the government has been interpreting "separation of church and state" to mean that government can impose itself on society and change social behavior to suit governmentatl aims. This is the great usurpation that has turned this nation inside out and has enabled marxist tyranny, emating from the universities and their schools of law and journalism. State after state, for just one example, voted through legislatures or referenda against gay marriage, by overwhelming majorities. Yet a single judge in the Federal courts of every state where this happened declared the will of the people unconstitutional. The destruction of society, family, marriage, decency, churches, morality and now constitutional freedoms, has been incrementally accomplished from the Federal bench since the 1940s.
Ping!
If your intent is to end student loans, this will do it.
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