Should taxpayers fund any and every choice in school and/or major?

[SteveFoerster]

It's true that Hillsdale in particular has done an exceptional job with fundraising for their endowment, but the schools I mentioned do not manage financial aid for their students by dipping into their endowments. I heard the President of Grove City College give a presentation about their financial aid model a few months before the pandemic, and it's more like they have a rolling financial aid fund where students who have graduated pay back what they used so that money is available to the next cohort of students. One of the major financial companies oversees it and handles all the bureaucracy. He explained that the model is replicable.

As for Charles Koch, I'm not particularly interested in having a conversation about him, especially when his activities in higher education aren't relevant to the argument I'm making. I'm not talking about the market-based ideology that drove those schools to find a non-federal financial aid model, I'm talking about the non-federal financial aid model. Moreover, I'm not only talking about that specific model. It's merely an example that there are ways of doing this other than the current one.

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Freeloader couldn't have said it better.

As you probably saw, I just responded to that objection.

The DEAC schools that don't participate in Title IV funding generally have abysmal graduation rates, and they receive government funds from various military assistance programs. With these payment plans, you are going into debt. If your balance is not paid by the time you finish your program, they will withhold your transcripts. While these payments plans technically don't come with interest, students who are on payment plans usually pay a higher tuition price. Granted, these types of DEAC schools tend to be cheap, but their extremely low graduation rates paired with limited transferability of credits doesn't make them an appealing model for other schools. If you're going to go to a dirt cheap school with a low graduation rate, you might as well go to a community college. At least you can transfer those credits.

 
I actually do expect that if things happened the way I describe that a lot more people would go to community colleges, and that more states would do what Tennessee has done and make tuition publicly financed, at least for a lot of people.

I also wasn't making an argument against military tuition assistance, which I don't believe is part of Title IV.

State licensure is often awarded with the stipulation that the institution eventually earn accreditation. If the federal government were to stop regulating accreditors and offering financial aid that is tied to accreditation, I would expect states to follow CHEA's recognition of accreditors or to create their own accreditation bodies. Some states already use CHEA, and more states used to have their own accreditation bodies.

They might. I expect if they were going to do that they'd just develop tiered systems like California used to have. Considering that we still talk about how innovative some of the schools that arose under that system were, on balance that seems like a plus.