There is a case to be made for going much further to return the federal government to what the Founders intended, to pare it once more back to its proper constitutional boundaries. This will go beyond trimming the fat; it will involve cutting the imperial colossus our federal government has become down to the bone and then paring away some of the bone to boot.

In this sixth installment, let's talk about higher education.

One way of addressing the exploding national debt and fostering independence – and less reliance on government – is to improve our education system from top to bottom, improve the useful skills of the population, and reduce their reliance on handouts. People equipped to promote their own self-interests, to be valuable to employers or able to start their own enterprises, are less reliant on Washington, and less likely to vote for promises of free stuff – which is killing the federal budget. 

Reducing government is reliant on having an independent, productive citizenry that doesn't think they need an ever-expanding, intrusive government. Education can be the key to that. At present, it isn't; at present, our universities are failing our younger generations by teaching pure corral litter too much of the time. That's changing, slowly, but we need to accelerate the change.

See Related: Huge Warning for Woke: Americans' Confidence in Colleges Is Cratering

In the last segment, we mentioned the fact that not all children need to go to college. In this segment, let's talk about the ones that do.

Higher education is a system that is going through a catharsis. The rise of online education has the potential to forever change the college experience, reducing the importance of traditional brick-and-mortar schools and allowing new models in which classes are taught not by full-time academics but by professionals who have real-world careers in the subjects they teach. In the meantime, our college/university system is not performing as it should. There are several ways we could improve the system, and quickly:

Institute a broad reform of degree programs. It borders on fraud for institutions of higher learning to offer useless degrees. "Minority Women's Studies," "Ethnic Studies" and so forth produce graduates fit only to do one of two things: Remain in academia and perpetuate the fraud, or pursue a career that involves repeatedly asking "Do you want fries with that?" Working against such a reform (among other things) is the fact that a college or university charges the same tuition for a nonsense degree as for a degree in the hard sciences, engineering, or business, and the latter degrees are certainly more expensive to teach. There is a financial fix to that, one that requires only a small action by the government; more on that in a moment. Meanwhile, there are some things we can do:

Continue the decentralization of higher education begun by the rise of online universities. New online models such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) as described in a 2013 paper by the libertarian Cato Institute not only provide alternatives to traditional universities, but they also:

1: Provide cross-border opportunities to students in other parts of the world while eliminating the need for student visas. This also serves to eliminate the need for extensive travel, housing costs, and so forth for students who would otherwise have to attend a college or university in another city or state.

2: Reduce the overall cost of higher education, perhaps dramatically so, by eliminating much of the overhead costs.

3: Reduce, if not eliminate, the presence of the federal government in higher education. Not only is there no constitutional provision for the federal government to be involved in higher education - and I remind you that the Tenth Amendment specifically prohibits the federal government from engaging in any activity not specifically allowed - such involvement has proved to be wasteful and counter-productive. Online universities require much less, and whatever involvement there must be, while we draw the system into a new form, we should let the states and private institutions handle college-level education. This is what was done throughout most of our nation's history.

This is key: Likewise, the federal government should be removed from the financial aid process. Again, commercial lending institutions, states, and private foundations could deliver financial assistance and counsel more efficiently, and it has been shown that an excess of easy financial aid serves to drive tuition costs up; this comes as no surprise to anyone who has studied economics, but apparently it is quite a surprise to the federal government. One step, though, is essential: Make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy and make every institution of higher education a co-signer on any student loan. This will eliminate the proliferation of "Ethnic Underwater Dog-Polishing Studies" degrees and other such horse squeeze at a stroke. If young skulls full of mush take a horse squeeze degree and can't find employment, their alma mater is on the fiscal hook.

See Related: Universities Are Terminating Gender Studies Departments, but Are They Truly Going Away?

Colleges and universities are tasked with producing a product. Their customers are the students and the student's parents. The product should be a literate, functional adult with skills that are marketable in the private sector; the system must produce a graduate who can offer value to an employer. The more productive a citizen is, the less reliant that citizen is on government. The less reliant a citizen is on the government, the less government is needed - or desired.

In recent years we have seen the Biden administration's illegal attempts to simply erase student loan debt, and the concomitant protests for and against that came with those efforts. One can still routinely see signs demanding forgiveness of student debt and elimination of tuition – I remember seeing at least one protestor demand that "knowledge should be free."

Read: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V

Well, knowledge is free - you can get all you want at your local public library or your computer keyboard - but a college or university cannot be free. Educators and administrative personnel have to be paid. Buildings cost money, as do maintenance and utilities for same. But colleges and universities have an important task: To produce graduates capable of taking a productive place in society. How we pay for that product will go a long way toward making sure the goal is actually attained.

At present, the universities aren't doing a very good job. This is something a transformational president like Donald Trump may well be able to push through.