What the heck day is it? Tuesday! Happy Tuesday! Today’s post is by Stephen. Thanks, Stephen!
Ever wonder why all of the colleges and schools across the nation appear to have all of the sudden accepted, embraced, nay endorsed distance education rather than classroom interactions, or have you merely assumed that it is their innate fear of the Wuhan Flu or of interacting with humanity, particularly children?
Surely you do not believe in such coincidences?
As you well know as a portion of the trillions of dollars spent by the government in their efforts to support the very economy they are tanking by shutting down most of the businesses in the nation for fear of people catching the flu, Congress allocated funds to go to schools and students for the inconvenience, hardships, and increased costs caused by the various governments’ actions of shutting down such educational institutions.
As with all government help, it naturally comes with many strings attached. In fact, it comes with so many strings that it really is of little or no help at all to some of the people affected by the loss of their business.
The grants are fairly generous and based upon a school receiving Title IV funding, particularly Pell Grants, upon which student funding most colleges depend. First, the school is required to apply for the grant. For colleges and universities which depend and thrive upon a continuing stream of grant funding it is a fairly simple and routine process, however for many small trade schools which do not typically ask for or receive grants.
But, I mean really, if your business has been shut down by the government, you have plenty of time on your hands to jump through a few bureaucratic hoops.
So Congress appropriates money the nation does not have, well authorizes the borrowing of money the nation does not have, in order to redistribute it to cover the hardships the government itself has imposed and then turns over the administration and distribution of such allocated funds to the unnamed, unelected federal bureaucracy. What could go wrong?
As with every government program, strings start magically attaching to the magically produced money.
First, the money is allocated to the schools and published as to how much each school is expected to receive, it is said that the schools will have a fair amount of discretion as to how the money is to be allocated, simple enough.
The Department of Education determines that half of the money will go to the students and half of the money will go to the schools in an effort to compensate them for their losses and expenses associated with the Wuhan Flu.
Then the Dept. of Ed. States that all money going to the students has to be given out by the schools before they can apply for their half of the money.
They further determine that such money cannot be used to pay the debts of such students which those students might owe to the school, just to keep those nefarious educational institutions from misappropriating that money intended to aid and assist those students.
Why is this odd? Well, it is one of the most fundamental principles of property law, taught in the very first weeks of law school, Property 101, that if person A owes person B money, say $100, and person C owes person A money, say another $100, then if C pays B the $100 for A’s debt, then it is the same as if A had received the money from C and subsequently paid it to B, both debts are paid even if that was not what A had desired. The principle being that to pay a person’s debts is the same as having paid the person himself.
This is the principle upon which some of that “stimulus” money which was to go to certain individuals was redirected if they were in arrears in child support to such person as they owed the child support, thus paying their debt the same as if they had received the money directly.
The Rule of Law is to treat all persons equally, but to forbid a creditor school from applying fund of their debtor to their debt is not legally different than to take a child support debtor’s funds to apply towards their debt to the child support creditor. All creditors and debtors are not alike it seems.
Of course, the Dept. of Ed. adds other restrictions such as the person had to be eligible for federal money, so cash paying students who had not applied for assistance and students on the verge of flunking out are treated essentially as pariahs and do not receive assistance regardless of their costs.
Then we get to the other half of the allocated grant funds, as other strings come down from the government restricting how that money may be used.
Strangely, it cannot be used to compensate the school for lost revenues or lost profits due to the virus as the schools were initially lead to believe. This means that the losses suffered by the schools will not be compensated, which almost entirely falls upon the proprietary trade schools as the “lock-downs” occurred towards the end of the spring semester after the traditional colleges had already received their tuition, room and board monies for the semester.
In fact, many students were kicked out of their dorms by the universities even though they had already paid for meal plans and student housing and were left stranded, sometimes even struggling to get home. I mean eventually they may get compensated through the aforementioned grant for their inconvenience but at the time they were simply turned out by the educational institutions.
What, you may well ask, could that allocated, and potentially lucrative, grant money be spent upon by the schools who were enticed by the promise of federal compensation? Well, only such extra expenses as that institution incurs or chooses to spend in providing for distance education for those students affected by the Wuhan.
Which brings us to the crux of this post, the sudden enamoring of schools and colleges to “provide” for their students distance education rather than in-class education to see them through these troubling times.
Now you may begin to understand one aspect of the reluctance of schools to return to the traditional classroom settings. Without expenditures upon “distance education” they do not receive that grant money dangled before them by the federal government.
Schools want to spend that money setting up systems, processes, programs, and personnel to compete in the distance learning race with other schools to grab a bigger share of the educational dollars now while that move is being fully subsidized by the federal government. Many of them having already decided that teleconferencing classrooms and distance education were the wave of the future even before the government panicked over the flu.
On the Dept. of Ed.’s part, unlike the normal zero-base-line annual budgeting if this money is not spent during the fiscal year it does not affect their next year’s budget. Thus there is not the traditional incentive of spending all of the money allocated to them just to ensure that they get more next year.
Turning our attention back to those institutions which are more likely to be for-profit, privately owned businesses, the trade schools, we see that the very notion of “distance education” is essentially an anathema to their business model.
How does one teach someone to lay brick with a video if you cannot see the wall the student is constructing but by remote? How does one evaluate the quality of the souffle the aspiring chef prepared without the ability to smell and taste the product? How can a teacher check the evenness of a haircut from a barber or beautician remotely? And do we really want our truck drivers consulting how to videos while they are learning to drive an eighteen wheeler?
I suspect that most people have not really considered what is pushing institutions to want to educate by remote control, but as with all government programs, follow the money. See who is favored and who is harmed, other than the shortchanging of the students. (They aren’t important because they were not the ones paying the money anyway.) Are this consequences unintended, or are they by design?
