Here in Kentucky, we’re having exciting experiences with budgets and higher education. Mostly, I’ve been hearing about state schools facing-down pension and health costs, and laying off single-digit percents of their workforce in response, but it turns out the Federal Government can sneeze and do far more damage.

I read today of the case of St. Catharine College, an 85-year-old Dominican school just outside Louisville. The school was small (only 600 students) and, like almost every school in the United States, heavily dependent on subsidized student loans. The subsidies have strings, but they’re poorly defined. In 2011, St. Catharine started offering four-year programs (previously, I gather, they were offering only a liberal arts degree). There were no changes to their curriculum, just the opportunity for more specialization in a student’s choice of classes. The Department of Education reacted by cutting-off financial aid to students, on the grounds that the changes had not been approved. In 2014, the school pointed out that the DoE was wrong. The DoE acknowledged the error, and from 2015 to 2016, processed all the financial aid requests the school sent, as it should have for the past five years.