The Department Of Education: Destroying Wealth By The Billions

From Big Government:

The Education Department: Destroying Wealth By The Billionsby Lawrence Meyers


Any American who wants the opportunity for a college education, or a degree that can help provide gainful employment, should be outraged at the Obama Administration’s back-room dealings to kill for-profit schools. Obama supporters themselves should be asking how restricting financial aid to people, just because they want to go to a for-profit school, reflects the ideals they voted for…and that Obama promised would become easier.







Brian Darling’s excellent article, “For-Profit Education Under Assault“, exposes the details of this insidious plot.



There is, however, another aspect of this story — continued wealth destruction by the Administration.



The DOE’s plan to kill for-profit education is to restrict financial aid to students, as Mr. Darling described. Therefore, enrollment will fall. If enrollment falls, for-profit schools have less revenue, which means they have to cut services.



What services? Teachers.



Voilá, these people get tossed onto the unemployment lines.



Hey, that’s okay! Maybe they can get jobs in the public schools, which would require them to join the Teacher’s Union, and pay their dues into a union that is bankrupting the country state-by-state.





The other angle, however, is that many of these for-profit schools are public companies. Companies like Education Management Corporation, DeVry Inc., Apollo Group, Career Education Corporation, Bridgepoint Education, and ITT Educational Services, are all traded on the stock exchange. Well over $15 billion of market value has been wiped out in these companies due to the fear that the DOE’s pointless Draconian measures will be implemented.



For those of you who believe that only “rich” people own stock, think again. Almost half of American households own equities. Several thousand own the stocks of these particular companies.



That this Administration is needlessly destroying wealth isn’t surprising. Most of its policies are geared toward this, in the name of “fairness”. Yet Obama supporters should be screaming bloody murder. For all their talk about how there is no middle class anymore, and how one can’t pull oneself up by their bootstraps if they have no bootstraps, the DOE’s regulations will prevent these very same people from achieving the success that they have allegedly been denied!



This shouldn’t be surprising, either. Every time government needlessly interferes in a sector, people are left worse off.