Just look at funding to study the Middle East.

Beginning Oct. 20, university Middle Eastern studies centers have co-organized a weekly “Gaza in Context” series.

The sessions accept the premise of Gaza’s alleged “structural subjugation and apartheid existence” caused by Israel’s “settler colonialism.” The most recent session on Nov. 20 recasts the Hamas-Israel war as a war on the “children of Gaza.”

The list of co-organizers has grown and now includes centers or programs at George Mason University, Georgetown, Rutgers, Harvard, Brown, Columbia, the University of Chicago, CUNY, University of Illinois Chicago, George Washington University, New York University, and others.

At least five of those universities have recent grants under the Department of Education’s National Resource Centers Program to promote study of the Middle East. The same five—Chicago, Columbia, NYU, Georgetown, and George Washington University—also have recent grants to give fellowships under the Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships Program.

It’s increasingly difficult to see how these federal programs are achieving their mission.

The law establishing international and foreign language education programs emphasized the importance of educating American experts in order to protect the “security, stability, and economic vitality of the United States.”

That goal does not seem to be in the mission statements of Middle East studies centers.

Meanwhile, as critics have long noted, many of the federally funded academic centers also receive funds from abroad. The centers often produce graduates who have more sympathy for foreign countries than for the United States.

National Association of Scholars analyst Neetu Arnold produced an extensive report, aptly named “Hijacked,” showing how centers at many universities have been funded by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or other Middle Eastern countries.

Critics of the Department of Education might have an uphill battle in abolishing the entire department. But while that goal should remain Plan A, an easy piece of the department to zero out is Title VI of the Higher Education Act, which funds international and foreign language education programs.

If members of Congress remain concerned about educating experts in foreign languages and cultures, they should remember that the government is already funding plenty of other ways to develop such experts. For example, the Department of Defense’s National Security Education Program serves some of international and foreign language education’s core purposes, and that agency is focused on national security.

But if members of Congress just cannot stomach ending a federal program, funding should at least be redirected away from universities whose centers work against American interests. Eligibility for the programs could be restricted to military academies, where we should be able to trust that students and graduates intend to serve and protect America.

I made several such recommendations in a report published earlier this year.

>>>READ THE REPORT: “Transforming Federal Foreign Language Programs to Serve U.S. Interests”

Higher education’s reputation is at a low point, particularly as university leaders, faculty members, and students demonstrate moral confusion at best and violent advocacy for terrorism at worst over the Hamas-Israel war.

And a new survey of employers shows that almost all of them deny that colleges are “graduating students with relevant skills that today’s business community needs.” Two out of five said that a college degree is irrelevant, while another two in five said a degree would make someone a less-attractive hire.

Now is a good time to listen to the public and stop funding university programs that prefer America’s antagonists to America and our friends.

Student loan cancellation is for now a vain hope for advocates who sought to transfer the debts of college-educated Americans to those taxpaying Americans who already paid their debts, earned their scholarships, or succeeded without going to college.

The scheme would have canceled $10,000 in student-loan debt for each borrower earning less than $125,000, up to $20,000 for each borrower under the income cutoff if that borrower received a Pell grant, or less than $250,000 if the borrower files taxes as married or as head of household.

Lindsey Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation, and I wrote in August 2022 that the plan suffered from several policy and legal infirmities. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.) Besides being unlawful, it was expensive, regressive, arbitrary, and fundamentally unjust, and it created a host of moral hazards including incentives for future tuition increases. The $600 billion in cancellation would have meant more than $2,000 in higher taxes per taxpayer.

Regarding the brazen unlawfulness of the scheme, the Supreme Court has pointed out that the U.S. Department of Education simply does not have the authority to cancel student debt on a massive scale using the authority it claimed to find in the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act. That’s what former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s general counsel, Reed Rubinstein, had already determined in January 2021.

But the current administration argued that the HEROES Act, which empowers the Secretary of Education to waive or amend student loan rules for affected parties due to emergencies such as a war or a natural disaster, so that they would not be worse off due to the emergency, could be extended to loan forgiveness across the entire country due to the pandemic emergency (which is now long past).

The Supreme Court disagreed.

“The major questions doctrine,” as the plaintiff in an early case not before the Court noted in September 2022, “requires a clear authorization by Congress of such an economically and politically significant action, which is lacking here. … Without a valid source of authority, the Secretary [of Education] ‘literally has no power to act’” (quoting a different case).

Congress did not put a massive loan bailout in the HEROES Act.

That September 2022 case never made it to the Supreme Court because as soon as it was filed, the Department of Education changed the parameters of the bailout scheme to prevent the plaintiff from having standing. It kept changing the rules to try to stay out of court.

But two cases survived. In one case, several states argued that they would uffer financial harm. That gave Missouri, for example, standing to sue. In the other case, in Texas, the plaintiffs got standing by claiming the public was not given a chance to comment on the cancellation scheme.

The Court decided that Missouri did have standing and that the Department of Education exceeded its authority.

Although that’s the end of student loan “forgiveness,” the Department of Education has hatched another student loan scheme that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Massive changes to income-based repayment will make college free for substantial numbers of borrowers by cutting in half their payment amounts, cutting in half their time to loan cancellation, and dramatically raising the amount of exempted income.

Will any plaintiffs have standing against this new scheme once the final regulations are released? Time will tell.

Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.

The scheme will cause a massive inflow of loans into the new system and cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.

Income-based repayment is affordable by definition. Currently, borrowers pay about 10% of their discretionary income over about 20 years, and whatever’s left—including all accrued interest—is forgiven.

Such a plan should be reserved only for people who have no other way to pay a larger amount, because it keeps them from defaulting and therefore maximizes loan payments in an affordable way.

But the new rules dramatically change the calculus:

• Payments are generally cut in half from 10% to 5% of income.
• The number of payments is generally cut in half from 20 years to 10 years.
• Income under which payments are $0 is raised from 150% to 225% of the poverty line.
• All payments, including “payments” of $0, trigger cancellation of that month’s interest.

In other words, borrowers will get more than 75% off of their total payments.

Which borrowers will choose that option? Almost everyone.

The Department of Education argues, arbitrarily, that there should be “greater parity between graduate and undergraduate borrowers, in terms of their incentives to choose an [income-driven repayment] plan.” Since graduate borrowers generally owe twice as much money ($41,000 vs. $20,000), they benefit much more from such a plan.

The department’s solution is to take graduate debt as the norm—which is the opposite of reality—and make undergraduate debt operate similarly.

As a result, the department estimates that the point at which this scheme breaks even—the point at which income is too high for even a 5% payment to benefit a borrower—is $75,500 for undergraduate borrowers.

Putting that in context, “An income of $75,500 for ages 22 to 25 ranks at the 98.21” percentile, according to the Personal Finance Data calculator. And 225% of the poverty line—$30,600—is at the 78th percentile for ages 22-25, so a huge majority of borrowers will pay nothing.

That means only about the top 2% of young earners are likely to stick with their current loan-repayment plan. Everybody else will take the payment cuts. The department could easily—but appears not to—admit that this will happen.

Who’s paying the bill for 98% of tens of millions of borrowers to get this windfall? America’s 100 million taxpayers, of course, yet again.

With this latest forgiveness scheme, the Education Department transfers hundreds of billions of dollars to college-educated people at the expense of taxpaying blue-collar workers and those who already met their responsibilities and paid their debts.

Think of it this way: For every $100 billion of debt forgiveness or payment reductions, that’s another $1,000 out of each taxpayer’s pocket.

Furthermore, it is well documented that colleges raise tuition when loans are made easier and more lenient.

That’s basic economics: Consumers can afford to pay more, so producers charge more for their unique products. For example, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, each dollar of federal loan subsidy has led to 60 cents of tuition increases.

The Department of Education’s moves over the past two years are just extending an unsustainable cycle we’ll never escape until Congress fundamentally overhauls student loans, such as by returning them to the private market.

It should not seem counterintuitive to observe that if the government stops throwing trillions of dollars into higher education tuition, tuition will stop rising at unsustainable rates.

Colleges might then finally have to stop the administrative bloat that enables many of them to have dozens, if not hundreds, of administrators who divide and alienate students from each other in the name of diversity.

The Department of Education can’t make college free, but it’s making strides in bringing socialism to higher education. Congress shouldn’t stand for that.

Article cross-posted from The Daily Signal.