It’s time to wrap up the election talk. I’ve already covered our final three contestants (McCain, Obama, and Clinton) in this year’s Election 2008. Mike Huckabee is still hanging around, but we’ve already talked about him. Mitt Romney dropped out. In Massachusetts, he came up with a scholarship to reward the top 25% of students in Massachusetts, but if that would have translated nationally, we’ll never know. The libertarian, statist maverick, Ron Paul, has a few solutions. Predominantly, he wants to end all Federal government influence in the education system. The only kind of influence he wants from the U.S. government is to offer tax rebates to parents to help them afford college. He also wants to abolish the Department of Education (DOE). He too decries wasteful subsidies like the Democratic candidates, although the democrats would funnel that money back into the DOE instead of eighty-sixing the whole thing.

The Democratic front-runners and the probable Republican candidate all agree on the need to increase Pell grants and redirect subsidy money from private banks to the DOE’s programs. So, I guess that’s what we may expect from whoever becomes president of the United States. There’s no doubt that the Democrat candidates have much broader higher education plans, and in my opinion Obama’s thoroughness and practical solutions are probably the best. Clinton is just a little too ambiguous in a number of her proposals for my comfort. The one question, which usually goes unanswered during election season—is how it will be funded.

But I’m hopeful for higher education after reading through everything and seeing the candidates that have come forward. Certainly, McCain isn’t focused on higher education, but his general principles seem to be going in the right direction. Let’s just hope that things do go in the right direction once someone takes office. We just have too much at stake for higher education to be forgotten after the campaigns are over.