Coverage of 'Bennett 2.0'

Our good friend George Leef offers his perspective on the report CCAP released last month “Introducing Bennett Hypothesis 2.0,” by Andrew Gillen. In his piece, Leef looks to several different lines of evidence and argues that federal financial aid programs have had two particularly perverse (and interwoven) unintended consequences: an increase in tuition prices (due to widely available federal aid dollars) and a decrease in student achievement (because often those aid dollars have no connection t

o actual academic achievement). In closing, Leef muses,

The virtues of the old education system [prior to federal intervention in financial aid] were undermined by easy federal money in exactly the same way easy federal money undermined the housing finance system. Now we have far more students going to college, spending a lot more on it, but many learn little or nothing. Instead of getting the imagined benefit of a more educated population, we have only managed to create an enormously bloated higher education sector that graduates many people with lower levels of knowledge and skill than used to be expected of high school students.