Senator Ben Sasse has authored a book that is virtually non-political nor policy-related. Instead, the Nebraska Republican’s first book, The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis — and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance, is about how adolescents are raised incorrectly and how to reverse the coddling trend.
Catching up with him on his book tour, I asked him about the government’s role in a vicious cycle of burdensome student loans, which only incentivizes colleges to increase their tuition and may prevent students from leaving the nest after graduation.
Sasse said to Red Alert Politics, “I do think that one of the reasons that tuition continues to grow in America without demonstrable higher-quality, lower-cost alternatives out there is because we view so many things as simply pushed-aside policy questions.”
The Senator connected the model of higher education to that of health care and said the functions in both American sectors need to be thoroughly fixed.
“I’ll simply say it’s not by accident American health care and American education are two of the least impressive segments of the US economy,” he said. “They’re both dominated by third-party payment. That third-party payment is primarily governmental. That means that you disempower the student, taxpayer-consumer, and the patient-taxpayer-consumer citizen.”
“And both of them are similar in that the actual experience of really great education and really great healthcare is ultimately about the system and the culture and the continuity of care,” he added. “It’s not primarily about the rock-star professor on the stage or the rock-star surgeon in the operating room.”
Sasse said, “It’s a lot more about nursing and about the hand-offs of care after surgery. It’s a lot more about the community and the culture that’s built at an institution, a school or a college, than just about the one great professor. Some of why we don’t get that systemic culture is because we think we can fix it by having different governmental levers decreed on the input side.”
“And so I do think that the way we fund higher education doesn’t have enough pull variable to it and has way too much push.”
Sasse’s book was released more than a week ago and is available in hardcover or electronically.
