When I addressed the Indiana House Ways and Means Committee yesterday (speaking for all tax paying Hoosier citizens), I asked for a forensic audit of all universities in Indiana that receive our tax payer money. (I actually said "feduciary" audit, although, that would be true also.) Not a single person on the committee had any idea what any money that is used by the universities, billions and billions of dollars, goes to. This is true of the 1% increase and the original billions of dollars that are about to be given to the campuses.
I should add that the Commission of Higher Education in Indiana is of no help. It is a captured entity.
The Chair of the Committee, Representative Tim Brown, asked me about the problem of "micro-managing" the universities. I told him that I appreciated the hands off approach; but when there is so much abuse, waste, fraud, and incompetence established as fact in the universities; then it is the feduciary duty of the Indiana State Legislature to act.
The Indiana State Legislature must utlize the planned increase for higher education for an outside firm's forensic audit of any campus that receives Hoosier tax payer's funds. This is an approach that is in agreement by Republican and Democrat taxpayers in the Indiana. It is time that the Indiana House and Senate started responding.
The following is the statement President Obama made in his State of the Union Address on Wednesday:
"Now, even with better high schools, most young people will need some higher education. It’s a simple fact: the more education you have, the more likely you are to have a job and work your way into the middle class. But today, skyrocketing costs price way too many young people out of a higher education, or saddle them with unsustainable debt.
Through tax credits, grants, and better loans, we have made college more affordable for millions of students and families over the last few years. But taxpayers cannot continue to subsidize the soaring cost of higher education. Colleges must do their part to keep costs down, and it’s our job to make sure they do. Tonight, I ask Congress to change the Higher Education Act, so that affordability and value are included in determining which colleges receive certain types of federal aid. And tomorrow, my Administration will release a new “College Scorecard” that parents and students can use to compare schools based on a simple criteria: where you can get the most bang for your educational buck"
If the Indiana State Legislature does not want to have the Federal Government take over higher education, then it must take the initiative to find where all this money has gone and where the cuts need to be made. They cannot ask the same people, the administrators, who have caused this problem to solve it. That would be a joke -- and definitly bring the Feds in.