We’ve talked a lot about Obama’s legacy. When it comes to education, he mostly flew under the radar. America’s primary education has fallen far out of its former place at the top since the turn of the century, but Obama has mostly skirted the blame. And while some changes have happened under his watch, it’s been one of the areas of least involvement.
Higher education is another story. Obama and his staff have been very active over the last four years, and their policies have brought the world’s leader of advanced degrees to the brink of total collapse. They’ve attacked college from every angle, and the result is frightening.
Understanding Obama’s role in higher education starts with a hard look at the money. In both of his campaigns, universities were 4 of the 10 biggest donors. The biggest contributor of all was the University of California, and the combined higher education funds made up the largest of the super PACs that supported Obama.
Those investments did not go unnoticed, and they helped Obama shape his stance on higher education policy for the entirety of his tenure. It’s the primary reason why he doubled down on legislation that made it easy for public universities to improve their profits at the fastest rate in history. Let’s get into some of the specifics.
Loans
We’ve talked about the college debt bubble before, and while it is not as significant as the previous housing bubble, it is still a major chunk of America’s private debt. While Obama has played a major role in the growth of this bubble, its origin predates him.
Like most of the current economic issues, this one begins with the Clintons. While they were busy setting up the failure of the housing markets by mandating banks to approve subprime loans, they also hit lenders for college loans.
Legislation followed the housing trend and made it substantially more difficult to decline a loan for college. The effect, just like in other markets, was two-fold. First, it increased the debt risks associated with school. Second, it caused a major spike in attendance. Anyone who understands supply and demand can see where this went, and tuition did in fact accelerate in price hikes.
With Obama, further legislation has expanded on this, and anyone who hasn’t flunked out of college at least twice is automatically approved for student loans. The trend has done more than make tuition more expensive, though. It has also raised the competitive bar on career-level jobs, and now almost every form of sustainable living requires a college degree.
This feedback loop further enhances enrollment, and the cycle grows more vicious. While this makes the economic damage clear, there is a far more sinister component to Obama’s role in higher education.
Title IX
Like many forms of legislation tied to civil rights, Title IX was built on the idea of fairness. In fact, as far as legislation goes, it’s pretty straightforward and harmless. It simply outlaws gender discrimination in schools. The problems tied to Title IX have come from an administration that wholeheartedly embraces abuse of this law. Under Obama, universities across the country have transformed into places that celebrate discrimination against men.
It has reached a point where universities are required to have more female students and female programs than male, rather than a fair share. Campuses in general have distorted the idea of fairness so much that now all male students are considered rapists, and it even goes so far that Ivy League colleges are mandating that RAs report any conversation between males about females as a breach of Title IX.
This was the foot in the door that activist groups have seized to essentially destroy the essence of higher education. Rather than building a framework for diverse minds to explore knowledge, empowered minority groups have taken control and instituted Orwellian systems that ban any dissenting conversations.
Just recently, one of the world’s leading climate scientists was run out of Georgia Tech for publishing data that contradicted the political agenda of global warming. In every university, the concepts of safe spaces and trigger warnings make it impossible to have honest discussions within academia. In education, diversity should be of the mind. Instead, it has been twisted to be an excuse to exclude opposing views.
While universities have leaned liberal for decades, the decaying modern form was cultivated under the Obama Administration. His aggressively progressive picks to run the Department of Education have pushed policy after policy to foster a hostile environment in our country’s universities, and unless the new administration can reign it in, it will undoubtedly set the country up for its final failure.
~ Conservative Zone
