Not All Education Programs Must Be Funded Always

This morning I was emailing some fellow members of the vast left-wing media / academic / think tank conspiracy to put all citizens under the yoke of a unified North American socialist dystopia–or, possibly, fellow bootlicks to the neoliberal power structure, it’s hard to keep track–and someone argued that the Obama administration can’t credibly criticize its Republican opponents for cutting education because it has now proposed to cut education by scaling back growth in the Pell grant program.

I disagree. If people talk about the budget in a way that identifies certain very broad categories of expenditure like “education” as inherently virtuous and all Obama proposals to cut programs within that category as, by definition, a betrayal of the progressive cause, we’re basically doomed to waste large amounts of scarce public resources forever. And in the future when there’s no money to support some vital new cause, this will be one of the reasons why.

To be sure, there are a lot of legitimate arguments for the summer Pell grant program. (David Leonhardt’s provides a good summary here.) A growing percentage of students aren’t following the traditional fall / spring academic calendar and they are disproportionately working, adult, part-time and others who are most in need of financial assistance. Perhaps there are ways to modernize the program while keeping costs in check.

But there’s no escaping that the estimated cost of the summer Pell add-on in 2013–$5 billion–is more than the entire cost of the program 20 years ago. Pell didn’t pass $10 billion until 2002. It didn’t pass $20 billion until last year. As Andy Rotherham notes, an unreformed Pell program will top $40 billion, or nearly 10 percent of the entire domestic discretionary budget. At some point, Pell uber alles just isn’t a credible position to support. Even those with an expansive attitude toward federal education spending–hey, that’s me–need to respect the challenges of balancing revenues and expenditures.

The same is true for the interest rate subsidy for graduate students, also on the chopping block. Few people get graduate degrees in the grand scheme of things and those who do are among the richest members of society. People borrowing $100,000 to attend a tony law school shouldn’t get government subsidies. So, too, with the bevy of small education programs that the Obama administration has, like its predecessor, proposed eliminating or consolidating. If you’re in favor of education spending you should be against wasteful education spending, because there’s only so much education money to spend.