FIPSE, Failure, Fraud

The United States of America spends something like $400 billion per year on post-secondary education. That's a lot of money. Yet we don't know as much about the higher education sector as we could, or should. While Clemson has justifiably taken heat for cynically manipulating the class size component of the U.S. News rankings, few people have noted that there's actually very little evidence about the impact of class size on learning in college, one way or another. The class size literature in K-12 education is exponentially richer, despite the fact that class size varies much more in higher ed.

Fixing this problem is a perfect role for the federal government, which sponsors high-level research in health, the sciences and elsewhere. And indeed the U.S. Department of Education has long maintained a Fund for the Improvement of Post-secondary Education (FIPSE), which is gets roughly $130 million per year -- not exactly NIH or DARPA money, but enough to sponsor some solid research. Once upon a time, that's exactly what it did -- applicants were subject to a rigorous review process and the imprimatur of an award often helped raise matching funds from foundations and elsewhere.

But as InsideHigherEd reports, there will be no FIPSE competition this year, because Congress has sucked up nearly all of the money for pork projects. This works about they way you'd expect: Some of the money probably goes for worthwhile purposes. Some of it, like $238,000 for "technology upgrades, including purchase of equipment" at Troy University, is probably better than burying the money in a hole in the ground but wouldn't exactly rise to the top of a rigorous review process.

And then you have people like Robert D. Felner, former dean of education at the University of Louisville, who allegedly($) took $694,000 earmarked for "Support and Continuous Improvement on No Child Left Behind in Kentucky" and promptly funneled it into a shell non-profit think tank run by a buddy who then disbursed the money between them. At least, that's what the federal indictment for mail fraud, money laundering and tax evasion says. Felner--who, incredibly, was about to leave for new gig as chancellor at UW-Parkside before his arrest--appears to have been comfortably operating as a con man within academia for most of his career.

This is what happens with pork. The U.S. Department was exercising minimal oversight because, hey, it's not really their project, is it? They'd rather decide how to disburse FIPSE money but Congress won't let them. There are are hundreds of FIPSE earmarks--how much sense does it make to spend lots of time and effort monitoring the purchase of new laptops at Troy University or what have you? But Congress--in this case, Representative Anne M. Northrup (R-Kentucky), who wangled the money--isn't set up to monitor grants. Nor do they have any incentive to root out corruption and incompetence for their own earmarks--that would just expose the underlying selfishness and disregard for the public interest that pork represents. Colleges, meanwhile, are culpable as they've increasingly decided to play the game along with everyone else by hiring special pork lobbyists etc. etc.