Rethinking Federal Funding of Education

By: Frank Yunker

Date: 2025-04-01

How do you turn a good idea into a bad plan? That's easy. Involve the government.

Here's the good idea. Teach students how to use Geographic Information System software. A business student might benefit by mapping out traffic patterns or income by zip code. A criminal justice student might map out robberies by neighborhood or time of night. The idea was to have the GIS course offered to a variety of majors.

It wasn't my original idea, but when I heard about it I was intrigued. I researched some computer professionals. They thought one course would be enough. Very few folks did GIS mapping as a full time job, but some did think being able to use the software would be useful.

Enter the Federal government. NASA gave the college money to set up a program to offer a degree in Geographic Information Systems. Why NASA? Does it really matter? The "Citizens Against Government Waste" organization had that grant listed for almost 3 million dollars of pork-barrel legislation.

How can a college spend 3 million over several years when the stated goal was to develop a 2-year degree and a one-year certificate? Excellent question! Most programs that offer a degree and a certificate are created in-house, and the only cost is one teacher and perhaps a few thousand dollars for supplies. So. How do they write a grant to spend $3 million? Well, welcome to the built-in waste of the Federal government.

The yearly budget included salaries for the Director of the Center, an Education Specialist, a Technical Support Specialist and a Secretary. That was 4 full-time salaries. In the first year, they also needed a room full of computers and some specialized equipment. They bought boxes full of GPS hand-held devices. Most were barely used and those that were used never left the campus parking lot.

They bought an extra-wide printer that could print on rolled paper that was 3 feet wide and as long as you needed it to print. After the money ran out, I checked on the printer. The ink had dried up and gummed up any moving part. The printer was useless. They also bought a CDROM burner that could not only burn data to the CDROM but also burn an image onto the CD. I never saw that used.

The other way they spent the grant was by playing with the numbers. The college President at the time it began reduced her salary by 10% and then paid the 10% back from the grant for the position of "Project Administrator." Similar funding schemes for other employees, particularly the IT staff, meant that really the grant funding ended up shifting real money into the college pocketbook that would be spent on other pet projects.

The core of the program was 4 GIS courses. They were all technical in nature. The GIS staff wanted a geography course, but the Social Sciences division shot that down. Geography was their territory, though they had no such course.

So, the grant created 4 positions to administer one degree and one certificate. How busy were they? The net result of that $3 million over the 6 years of the program had been 13 graduates - 8 of them for one-year certificates. That quarter-million per graduate grant was a fiasco.

The goal was to make the program self-sustaining. One easy way to accomplish this would have been to get other majors to require a GIS course for graduation. The 4 full-timers did not even try to get any of their courses embedded in other curricula.

Ahh, but that would have required work. Convince other professors that their students could benefit by taking your course? Nah. The GIS teacher taught 2 classes a semester. Everybody else collected paychecks and the department collected plaques from the county chamber of commerce.

When the money ran out, the program closed and the 4 courses were deactivated. Case closed. Move on. Thanks for the 3 million reasons to doubt that the federal government belongs in education.