Jimmy Carter: A Decent Man, a Damaging Education Policy

As I have written elsewhere Jimmy Carter had many redeeming personal qualities often lacking in today’s American political leadership. But his policies also did a good deal of harm, most notably in higher education.

Two developments of the Carter years have had lasting harmful effects. First, under Carter, the federal student loan programs began to explode. This not only led to much higher costs for students—negating alleged increased student college accessibility—but had such unintended effects as the rise in a costly and harmful university administrative bloat that has crowded out emphasis of the key functions of universities: the discovery and dissemination of knowledge. Second, he gave us the federal Department of Education, one of the most pernicious administrative bureaucracies that humans ever devised over the many millennia of human existence.

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In 1978, Carter signed a Middle-Income Student Assistance Act, proclaiming, “An additional 1.5 million students from middle-income families will be eligible for the Basic Grants program.He called it “similar to the G.I. Bill as a landmark in the Federal commitment to aid families with college students.” Previously limited to generally low-income students, the new law provided some assistance to students from families with incomes of nearly $100,000 annually—comfortably above the median family income—in today’s deflated dollars.

The tragedy, of course, was the students were not the true beneficiaries but rather others, notably the rent-seeking staff of universities, who used the big boost in student aid to aggressively raise tuition fees over the next four decades, making college less, rather than more affordable, for millions.

Moreover, the student aid programs had a number of other deficiencies that reduced the quality of American higher education. For example, academic excellence was not rewarded, and poor students actually often received more aid—because they were in school more years—than exceptionally able ones.

The creation of the U.S. Department of Education was even opposed by some of the most respected Democratic leaders, notably Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a first-rate scholar and former Harvard professor. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post editorialized against it. The Times noted that “school and college authorities have a hard enough job without a full-time cabinet agency delving deeper into their business.”  The bill barely got out of committee in the House of Representatives—on a 20 to 19 vote—with seven Democrats voting against it. It even failed to get a majority of 218 in the full house, but passed anyway because of a few members not voting.

Why did the legislation pass?

Predominantly because Carter, in 1976, had promised the nation’s most potent teachers union, the National Education Association (NEA), that he would support it. In short, this excretable legislation was a payoff to a major campaign contributor despite widespread opposition from many senior leaders in his own party and even prominent representatives of the liberal press. But to Carter, a deal was a deal—he had promised the NEA he would promote their pet project to the long-term detriment of the American people.

Is American education in general in better shape than in 1980?

No. And what about the universities? America achieved global supremacy in higher education well before the ED even existed. Even moderately reform-oriented Republican Secretaries of the ED did little. I know this personally, as I was a member of the very prominent Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education in the first decade of this century, whose accomplishments, at best, were exceedingly modest.

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As I have recounted elsewhere, I got to know Jimmy Carter somewhat personally, and I found him to be a fine, decent man with many qualities often not found in abundance among today’s political leaders. I would probably feel better buying a used car from Carter than from, say, Barack Obama or Donald Trump.

Carter was not a liar, a womanizer, nor a thief. He believed in God and taught others to do so. But that did not make him a great president of the United States, especially not for higher education. Yet, showing respect for an honorable man is not inconsistent with wanting to rid ourselves of that part of his legacy that has harmed Americans in general and students in particular.

Image of President Jimmy Carter by City of Boston Archives from West Roxbury, United States on Wikimedia Commons