Department of Education Delivers Much Needed Lesson in Responsibility

How crazy have things gotten? This week’s news reveals the madness. And it underscores how common sense and fiscal responsibility are viewed with abject scorn by the Left and their acolytes.

The U.S. Department of Education taught us some lessons: lessons in responsibility, the law, and common sense, while pointing out how the Left fosters an entitlement culture and embraces crazy with the tenacity of a toddler holding her lollipop. The pendulum has swung so far to the left among Democrats, legacy media, and academia that any attempt to reset things is met with shrieks, protests, and an avalanche of social media rants.

The latest “outrage” among the entitlement class, and those they are teaching to feel entitled: The Department of Education has issued new guidelines for taxpayer-backed, subsidized student loans. No longer will the DOE allow every student loan with no regard to a student’s major.

In short, if, based on government analysis, a college student wants to major in a subject that likely doesn’t lead to employment, that student will not be entitled to a taxpayer-subsidized, taxpayer-guaranteed student loan. The days of taxpayers subsidizing majors in pop culture, Dungeons & Dragons, and feminist poetry of the angry poets of Greenwich Village are over.

One can apply to any college he or she wants. Declare any major he or she wants. But if you want American taxpayers to help you meet the cost, there has to be a reasonable belief in success — a return on investment. If the student is committed to studying a major not on the list, he or she has many options: work to pay tuition, ask parents or grandparents for help, go to a bank and apply for a traditional loan, go to a cheaper university or a community college, or delay college until it can be afforded.

These are things that rational, responsible people do every day and have done for years, even centuries. Or set up a GoFundMe and plead your case.

Since when have we decided that everyone is entitled to attend whatever college he or she is admitted to, at a cost of $70,000 to $100,000 a year, whether or not there is a plan to pay for it? Or that someone is entitled to major in transgender art and we, as taxpayers, “have to” help foot the bill? Enough!

The sense of entitlement to other people’s money, euphemistically called “government money,” is equally incomprehensible. Moreover, the Left has purposefully trained generations of Americans to hold a fanatical belief that they are entitled to OPM for almost anything, including any college, for any major they wish.

This includes rants about “canceling” up to $1 trillion in student debt. In reality, that means taxpayer-backed college loans freely taken out by people attending the college of their choice, with the major of their choice, and living a lifestyle of their choice after graduation should be dumped on the rest of us: retirees, the unemployed, people paying off their own loans, people facing their own budget challenges, and even those who chose not to go to college because they couldn’t afford it.

Hell no.

If you want to use college to muse about your “oppression,” “find yourself,” or avoid growing up, find another way to pay. The days of taxpayers subsidizing, guaranteeing, and enabling the payment of thousands and thousands of dollars in student loans and debt to study things that all but guarantee unemployment or underemployment are over.

Or “Big Ed” could slash prices, since colleges have been raising them faster than the rate of inflation for decades. Some universities are now charging more than $100,000 a year.

This long-overdue policy change by the DOE is rooted in common sense, responsibility to both taxpayers and would-be students, and teaches students a lesson in life.

Not surprisingly, left-wing activists, socialists, “Big Ed,” patronizing Democratic politicians, and the usual suspects in legacy media are up in arms. They foster this sense of entitlement and actually benefit from having angry twenty-somethings. Then they sell them Democratic politicians and left-wing, socialist policies.

Speaking of entitlement and raging against common sense, true fairness, and responsibility, the DOE made a second common-sense decision: upholding the law.

The Department issued guidelines reinstating the plain meaning of Title IX. Women’s sports are for women. Period. Complying with the law means that women’s sports are to be treated comparably to men’s sports, and that women’s sports are defined as sports played by biological women. Full stop.

Here, too, the shouting about meanness, fascism, and even discrimination is loud, angry, and repeated on television and social media.

The Left, built on emotions, feelings, and what they want the world to look like at any given moment, subject to change weeks or months later, finds the Constitution and actual laws to be impediments. Impediments that need to be ignored, defied, or replaced.

Moreover, anyone who disagrees is not only wrong; they’re immoral. Enough.

The DOE took two lawful, common-sense steps to protect taxpayers’ wallets and our daughters. The added bonus was that it took two steps away from entitlement and crazy.

Quite the lesson: Entitlement vs. Common Sense.

There will be a test on November 3.

Guy Ciarrocchi writes for Broad + Liberty and RealClear Pennsylvania. A senior fellow with the Commonwealth Foundation, follow Guy at @PhilaFreedomGuy.