JD Vance on Education

Student loan forgiveness is a windfall for the rich

Vance Tweeted: "Forgiving student debt is a massive windfall to the rich, to the college educated, and most of all to the corrupt university administrators of America. No bailouts for a corrupt system. Republicans must fight this with every ounce of our energy and power." [Twitter, @JDVance1, 4/27/22]

Vouchers partly overcome residence-based school segregation

Give parents money for early ed, instead of Head Start

Free tuition sounds great; but vocational training better

Restrict campus protests and encampments

He's co-sponsored Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee's Restoring the First Amendment and Right to Peaceful Civil Disobedience Act of 2023, which would repeal a 1994 law that buffers patients from harassment by protesters outside clinics. Vance's Consequences for Climate Vandals Act would double the maximum penalty for property damage from protests at the National Gallery of Art from five to 10 years in prison.

Needs to be a political solution to problem of universities

Climate is changing; solution is nuclear power

Climate Change: Should climate change be a top priority? Tax or limit the output of greenhouse gases, or support renewable energy?
• Tim Ryan (D): Yes. "The threat of global climate change is one of the most critical issues facing our nation." Voted for infrastructure bill offering Ohioans "historic investments in cleaner, more convenient transportation."
• J.D. Vance (R): Mostly no. "Certainly the climate is changing. I think the big question is, how much is man causing it?" If people were serious about addressing climate change, they should turn to nuclear power.

No money for critical race theory & radical gender ideology

Poor families recognize college as the way out

Manual labor was honorable work, but it was [our parents'] generations work--we had to do something different. To move up was to move on. That required going to college.

And yet there was no sense that failing to achieve higher education would bring shame or any other consequences. The message wasn't explicit; teachers didn't tell us that we were too stupid or poor to make it. Nevertheless, it was all around us, like the air we breathed: No one in our families had gone to college; older friends and siblings were perfectly content to stay in Middletown, regardless of their career prospects; we knew no one at a prestigious out-of-state school; and everyone knew at least one young adult who was underemployed or didn't have a job at all.

Uneducated people trust talent more than hard work

It's not like parents and teachers never mention hard work. These attitudes lurk below the surface, less in what people say than in how they act.

The reasons poor people aren't working as much as others are complicated, and it's too easy to blame the problem on laziness. For many, part-time work is all they have access to. But whatever the reasons, the rhetoric of hard work conflicts with reality. The kids in Middletown absorb that conflict and struggle with it.

Some schools are unfairly funded, but deal with moral issues

A: Stop pretending that every problem is a structural problem, something imposed on the poor from the outside. I see a significant failure on the Left to understand how these problems develop. They see rising divorce rates as the natural consequence of economic stress. Undoubtedly, that's partially true. Some of these family problems run far deeper. They see school problems as the consequence of too little money (despite the fact that the per pupil spend in many districts is quite high), and ignore that, as a teacher once told me, "They want us to be shepherds to these kids, but they ignore that many of them are raised by wolves." Again, they're not all wrong: certainly some schools are unfairly funded. But there's this weird refusal to deal with the poor as moral agents in their own right. In some cases, the best public policy can do is help people make better choices, or expose them to better influences through better family policy.