Tag Archives: education

Defining “Return On Investment”

What is education, and why should we care? 

Well–as I have repeatedly argued–education is not job training. (Not that there is anything wrong with job training; it is obviously both useful and important.) Education, however, is a far more capacious concept. Familiarity with human history and with classic works of art and literature, appreciation of science and the scientific method, a basic understanding of the workings of government and the economy, the role played by the rule of law, and the ability to distinguish between logic and error–between fact and fantasy– are skills that dramatically  enhance an individual’s life and that not so incidentally make democratic regimes workable.

Which brings me to the utter idiocy of a proposal to defund college courses that don’t show a financial “return on investment.”

From a recent article in the Indianapolis Star, we learn that

An Indiana bill, written by a conservative think tank based in Florida, would deny grants and scholarships administered by the Indiana Commission for Higher Education to college degree programs that don’t provide a sufficient return on investment for graduates, just less than a year after lawmakers forced colleges to eliminate or merge hundreds of degrees.

Senate Bill 161 is based off of a similar provision in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which blocks federal student loans and other aid from “low earning” degrees.

Words fail.

Proponents of this ridiculous measure rather obviously limit their definition of “education” to training programs that provide “real economic value.”  (Indiana’s Secretary of Education, Katie Jenner, has demonstrated her utter lack of qualification for that position by promoting the bill as “an accountability measure for schools.” )

Students whose major motive for continuing education is financial can easily find out which programs offer a monetary “return on investment.” Students and families that define “return” differently–who define it as an improved ability to understand and appreciate the world they live in– attend institutions of higher learning in order to explore the multiple gifts and lessons that previous generations have left them. For those students, the “return on investment” manifests itself in lifelong interest in the world they inhabit, and in increased understanding of –and ability to navigate– that world.

Ironically, even evaluating this proposal on its own terms shows how stupid it is.

Students who major in philosophy, the arts, or history may initially earn less than those taking courses tailored to the needs of current markets–but those essentially vocational education courses often turn out to provide considerably less financial security when market conditions change–which they do quite frequently. Meanwhile, a genuine education provides its recipients with an invaluable skill: the ability to learn, change and adapt to a rapidly changing world–including a rapidly evolving economic environment. 

This proposal isn’t the only indication that Indiana’s pathetic legislature is either unfamiliar with the concept of an education or actively hostile to it. Our legislative overlords either confuse education with job training, or they want to replace it with “Christian” indoctrination.

As the Indiana Citizen reports, among the bills filed for the 2026 legislative session were seven measures that would “incorporate Christian religious texts or beliefs commonly associated with Christian social teaching into public education and laws governing sex and gender — areas that have become recurring flashpoints at the Statehouse.”

Among the measures being advanced by Indiana’s culture warriors are bills mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms, bills allowing chaplains to serve in public schools, and measures that would reshape civics education to emphasize “traditional values” and to restrict how gender is defined or recognized under state law. 

The Indiana Citizen reminds readers that, during the 2025 session, more than 20 House lawmakers co-authored a House Resolution urging legislators to “humbly submit” their work to Jesus Christ and govern according to biblical principles. The resolution confirmed the results of an examination by the Arnolt Center for Investigative Journalism at Indiana University  that found Christian nationalist ideology significantly influencing Hoosier legislation. (Separation of Church and State? Evidently, only people with actual educations understand the operation of the First Amendment…)

Ironically, our legislature’s inability to understand the dimensions of an actual education is a major reason for our lackluster economic performance. Viable businesses locate in areas where they can access an educated workforce–people who have learned how to think and how to learn.

Employers aren’t looking for people trained in narrow skill-sets who’ve been taught to submit to Jesus. 

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Don’t Disregard The Good News

Virtually all of my conversations with friends and family these days eventually descend into “gloom and doom” focused on the state of our politics,  the erosion of American liberty and the effect of the administration’s insane policies on the country’s economic health. All of those reasons for despair–and more–are very real, and the need to be persistent in our fight to reclaim the American Idea is urgent, but we really shouldn’t let our obsession with the forces of repression and regression obscure the fact that there are also lots of good things happening.

Take, for example, some welcome news about the nation’s public schools. A recent study focused on the emergence of “community schools”–a movement that has shown great promise in both educational outcomes and community support. The introduction to the study explains what makes a public school a community school:

Community schools are public schools that use the community school approach to transform into a place where educators, local community members, families, and students work together to strengthen conditions for student learning and healthy development. They provide services and support to fit each community’s needs, guided by the people who know students best— families, teachers, and the students themselves. They often partner with outside organizations and local governments to support the entirety of a student’s well-being to ensure they are healthy, well-fed, safe, and in a better position to learn.

The researchers included a number of examples of community schools that have improved student educational outcomes, increased attendance, improved peer/adult relationships and attitudes toward school, and reduced racial and economic achievement gaps. They estimated that for every dollar invested in a community school, the community received $15 back in improved economic performance and well-being, and they offered a collection of stories about community schools that are transforming the way they function and demonstrating progress on a wide variety of outcome measures.

It isn’t only education. The Trump administration may deny the reality of climate change and be intent on enriching fossil fuel companies, but environmental engineers and scientists around the world are announcing breakthroughs every day.

For example, concern about climate change requires significant attention to construction materials. (The concrete and steel industries together are responsible for as much as 15% of global C02 emissions.) But there has been real progress in this area.

Researchers in Australia have created cement from the hundreds of thousands of tons of glass that is no longer being processed in a failing recycling system. They report that the resulting cement is cheaper, stronger and lighter than traditional cement and delivers functional insulation, fire-resistance and a lower emissions threshold. Other researchers are using brown seaweed to create unfired clay bricks as an alternative to conventional fired bricks and concrete blocks, and Swiss researchers are also moving cement-bonded wood products into the realm of weight-bearing wood-based concrete. There are several others.

There’s also good news in the effort to electrify air travel. One solar-powered around-the-world-flight already took place in 2016. And although replacing larger fossil-fuel powered airplanes probably won’t be a reality until at least 2050, there are already electrified short-range planes built for a small number of passengers.

A really exciting innovation is solar glass– windows and doors that can provide electric power to homes and buildings. Researchers at the University of Michigan have invented a solar glass for windows, doors, skylights and other building-related glass applications.

There’s much, much more. We humans continue to demonstrate real brilliance in solving our more technical and environmental problems. I wonder what it would take to apply that brilliance to our political and social life.

That said, even on the political front, there’s encouraging news. The national resistance is growing, and in Indiana, where we’re all too aware of the problems created by one-party rule, an emerging phenomenon is a sign that MAGA can’t take residents of Red states for granted.  Indiana has seen a surge in independent candidacies, and those Independents are winning more often than many people realize—52% of those who made the ballot in 2023–24 were successful.

Nearly half of Indiana’s voters identify as independent, and a growing number of Republicans are repelled by Republican candidates who are increasingly MAGA and Christian Nationalist zealots. (Too many of them still can’t bring themselves to vote for a Democrat, but evidently they will vote for an Independent.)

I’m actually going to meet some of these officials and hear why they chose to run as Independents. A group called Independent Indiana is hosting a panel discussion Monday night in Indianapolis, and I plan to attend.

We need to cling to those rays of sunshine in our dark times…..

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And The Hits Keep Coming..

If there is any consistent theme that runs through the Trump administration’s “governance,” it is antipathy to science and education. RFK, Jr. presides over a truly horrifying assault on medical science;  Trump’s torrent of Executive Orders has hobbled government’s ability to deal with climate change (which MAGA denies)…the list goes on.

And then there’s the Right’s persistent, vicious war on education. Theirs is a movement that is trying–with some terrifying successes–to take America back to the Dark Ages. That effort isn’t new–the now decades-old effort to privatize education, to evade the First Amendment’s Separation of Church and State and destroy public education by sending students and tax dollars to religious schools– has recently been joined by an all-out assault on the nation’s universities.

It isn’t just Trump’s assault on elite institutions like Columbia and Harvard. As a recent report from The New Republic documents, among the other obscenities in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” are measures that amount to “an extinction-level event” for the nation’s universities. As the article warns, “If you think the last few months have been bad for Harvard, brace yourself—the “big, beautiful bill” is coming, and with it, a new dimension of destruction.”

While it’s mostly gone unremarked upon in the mainstream media, institutions of higher learning across the country are about to be pummeled by the looming reconciliation bill, which may portend an extinction event for higher education as we know it. The bill weaponizes working-class families’ reliance on debt to finance their college dreams with such intensity that not only will it push millions to the financial brink, it will push them out of higher education altogether.

As the report makes clear, the fallout from these provisions will be monumental. The effect will be to deprive the schools that manage to survive of working- and middle-class families. A college education will once again be within reach of  only the wealthy.

As the article notes, millions of people already consider a university education “to be a costly endeavor that is irrelevant to their everyday life.” That reality would suggest that we should remake higher education into a much more accessible endeavor– that legislators should recognize that improving the educational level of a population translates directly into social and fiscal health. But–consistent with the rest of a bill that honest labelling would title “Protecting Plutocracy”–the legislation would do the opposite. “It will cement the stereotype of higher education as an elite institution into an ironclad reality.”

This existential assault on higher education is not inadvertent–not an unanticipated consequence of fiscal legislation. It is entirely consistent with the goals of Project 2025 and the far-Right anti-intellectual MAGA figures who have already decimated much of Florida’s higher education landscape. The article includes a quotation from influential conservative activist Christopher Rufo, confirming the desired results. “Reforming the student loan programs could put the whole university sector into a significant recession” and state of “existential terror.”

And just in case American voters return a sane occupant to the Oval Office, the bill removes the power of a future President to cancel federal student loans.

While details are still being negotiated between the obtuse and vicious GOP members of the House and Senate, if the measure passes in anything like its current form,  eight million student debtors will see their monthly payments spike from $0 to over $400.

Dentists and doctors who choose to work in low-paying community health care centers will no longer be eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness programs, dramatically reducing the number of health care providers in communities that are already underserved. The bill even comes after the long-standing, Republican-approved federal student loan repayment plans, which allow borrowers to discharge their debts after a certain number of years of regular payments.

The House version cuts Pell Grants and increases the course load required for part-time students to access aid. People with  jobs or family responsibilities will find it nearly impossible to comply. And House Republicans want colleges and universities to pay back unpaid federal loans extended to “high risk” students–a move designed to penalize institutions that serve low-income students who are more likely to default, turning “the working-class kid studying to become a social worker, artist, or a physician into a liability to her university.”

None of this is accidental.

A recent Heritage Foundation report recommends terminating higher education “subsidies” in order to “increase the married birthrate.” In plain English, it’s an effort to reduce women’s access to higher education–an access that has facilitated women’s growing civic and economic equality. MAGA wants more babies and fewer women in the workforce.

The “Big Beautiful Bill” is a MAGA wet dream.

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NO NO NO

The Trump Administration may be the pre-eminent example of lunacy in government, but the current super-majority in Indiana’s legislature–aided and abetted by our MAGA Governor and his merry band of White Christian Nationalists–are no less impervious to logic, evidence and sound policy. 

A report from Indiana Public Media focuses on one example. It begins:

A measure meant to better align education in Indiana to the state’s workforce needs is headed to the governor’s desk. It received wide support from Senate lawmakers despite lingering concerns about its effect on colleges, universities and employers.

SB 448 requires the Commission for Higher Education to approve all degrees and programs offered by public colleges and universities every 10 years. It also says those schools must assess and consider their staffing needs when reviewing tenured professors.

Sen. Greg Taylor (D-Indianapolis) said he is concerned programs could be cut if they aren’t considered valuable to the state’s employment needs. Additionally, he expressed concern that requiring faculty tenure reviews to take specific staffing needs for approved degrees or programs into account could be detrimental to other areas of study.

“It can get really dangerous for us to start providing this type of, I don’t know, nose under the tent ideology,” he said.

Taylor has identified the two major flaws in this state over-reach. I’ve repeatedly posted about the first– lawmakers’ refusal to understand what education is, and why it is not job training. Our public schools and universities have two vitally important tasks:  giving the nation’s children and youth the intellectual tools and skills they will need, not just to negotiate the economic world they will inhabit, but the tools to lead richer, more fulfilled and considered lives; and equipping them with what I have termed “civic literacy”–enabling them to discharge the responsibilities of citizenship.

Education includes things like art, music, literature and philosophy. Presumably, those studies are unnecessary “frills” when the job of the schools is simply to produce worker bees. 

But SB 448 not only confuses education with job training, it mimics Trump’s efforts to dictate what can and cannot be taught in the nation’s universities, to control and micro-manage institutions of higher education and to “purge” those institutions of ideas with which our overlords disagree.

The American Association of Colleges and Universities has issued a response to these efforts. It began:

As leaders of America’s colleges, universities, and scholarly societies, we speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education. We are open to constructive reform and do not oppose legitimate government oversight. However, we must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses.

The statement notes that the nation’s colleges and universities are diverse. There are “research universities and community colleges; comprehensive universities and liberal arts colleges; public institutions and private ones; freestanding and multi-site campuses.”  Different schools are designed for different students. In order for these institutions to function properly, they must have the

freedom to determine, on academic grounds, whom to admit and what is taught, how, and by whom. Our colleges and universities share a commitment to serve as centers of open inquiry where, in their pursuit of truth, faculty, students, and staff are free to exchange ideas and opinions across a full range of viewpoints without fear of retribution, censorship, or deportation.

I encourage you to click through and read the entire statement, which was signed by dozens of university presidents. I doubt it will move the culture warriors in Washington or the Indiana Statehouse, who shrink from “open inquiry” and want to turn our educational institutions into factories spitting out those obedient worker bees. These are limited individuals who view genuine intellectual engagement and inquiry with fear and disdain. 

During this session, Indiana’s terrible legislature has doubled down on its war on education. It has stolen even more critical funding from our public schools in order to increase a voucher program that all evidence shows does not improve educational outcomes, and is in reality a First Amendment “work-around” allowing public money to flow to religious schools. In a prior session, it passed a highly intrusive bill misleadingly described as an effort to protect “intellectual diversity” on state campuses–in reality, an effort to purge those campuses of perspectives of which our radical legislators disapprove.

Ironically, those Blue states governed by legislators who understand the difference between job training and education–and who support, rather than undermine, their universities’ missions–also have more robust economies.

Too bad Indiana’s “leaders” can’t connect those dots….

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They’re Still Coming For The Schools

While co-Presidents Trump and Musk absorb all the oxygen/attention, the Christian Nationalists have continued their long-term focus on the public schools. While Americans who understand the damage of the daily assaults on Separation of Powers and the Rule of Law are distracted, those “Christian soldiers” just keep marching on…

The Guardian recently published a report on that steady march by a product of Evangelical schooling.

The author began by relating his own education in what he termed “a sanctuary of faith, community and ‘true’ education,”  which he reported had left him disillusioned and bullied, and had set him on a “path of crushing financial insecurity that would haunt me for years.”

Twenty-five years later, Donald Trump and the Christian nationalist movement that put him in the White House (twice) are seeking to transform public education into something similar to what I was reared on, where science, history and even economics are taught through an evangelical conservative lens, while prayer and Bible reading are foundations of the curriculum.

As he notes, the efforts to transform education into fundamentalist Christian indoctrination takes two forms: injecting more Christian rhetoric and rituals into public school curriculum and the use of tax dollars to subsidize private religious schools via vouchers. As he also points out, each of these tactics is bolstering the education of America’s most privileged students, while downgrading services for children of low-income families.

Lest readers dismiss his concerns as overstatement, he provides evidence.

In Oklahoma, the state superintendent ordered his public schools to teach from the Christian holy book; he later sought to mandate all schools to air a video in which he prays for Trump. On his desk sat a black mug with the Latin phrase si vis pacem para bellum: “If you want peace, prepare for war.”

In June, Louisiana passed a law ordering all classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. And in Florida, Pam Bondi, now Trump’s attorney general, supported a constitutional amendment to allow state funding for religious schools before voters rejected it.

In 2022, a supreme court ruling allowed private religious schools to receive government funding. In response to this, LGBTQ+ advocates helped pass the Maine Human Rights Act in their state, protecting students and faculty from discrimination. Two Christian schools are suing the state for the ability to violate the new law while still receiving government funding. Separately, the supreme court has taken up a case addressing whether to allow taxpayer funds for religious charter schools, potentially leading to the first Christian public school in the US.

A Texas elementary school curriculum infuses Bible stories into language arts programs. And these efforts are not limited to Southern states. Iowa passed legislation granting taxpayer-funded “scholarships” to families who enroll their children in private schools, very much including Christian schools. Meanwhile, the Idaho Family Policy Center (IFPC), a Christian lobbying group, announced it was drafting a bill to would require Bible reading in all Idaho public schools. (The organization has also drafted legislation banning abortions and restricting transgender healthcare.)

These local efforts are currently being supercharged by the Trump/Musk administration. Trump has promised to “bring back prayer to our schools”, shut down the Department of Education and embrace “school choice”–measures that would fulfill a longstanding evangelical wishlist. Christian Nationalists insist that “government schools” brainwash children into “liberal atheists.” 

The Guardian essay recites the history of this effort to make America’s schools “godly” and–not so incidentally–keep them White. (The government’s denial of tax exemptions for segregated Christian schools–not Roe v. Wade– was what galvanized evangelicals and drove them into the GOP.)

Meanwhile, the Christian right doubled down on the creation of its own, independent education system, one that rejected evolution in favor of creationism, made students pledge allegiance to a Christian flag, and preached against environmental issues, LGBTQ+ rights and progressive policies.

The essay traced the author’s very painful emergence from the bubble he had inhabited, the fundamentalist education system in which “all knowledge and thought must bend itself to unarguable truth that the Bible is 100% factual in all matters.” As he notes, the “itchy curiosity of philosophy, the relentless questions of the scientific method, the skeptic probing of journalism, have no place in that world.”

That rejection of science, empiricism and inconvenient evidence is the “education” supported by the Trump/Musk Administration–not because either of these megalomaniacs are devout Christian fundamentalists, but because they know they owe their continued support to the fearful, racist, “faux Christian” voters who comprise the majority of the GOP base.

If successful, those Christian Warriors will take us back to the Dark Ages.

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