The (Lack of) Spending In Education

Alessandro Pioltelli ’26

Education is, in my opinion, the most crucial thing that a country needs to achieve any sort of success and positive change- socially, economically, and politically. An education gives someone the opportunity to hear from a multitude of different and unique perspectives and stories, opening them up to differing opinions and ideas, making them more sympathetical and understanding. Besides this, getting an education is practically useful too. You don’t just learn how to work with other people, but how to learn, period. Because you’re given a new lens to look at the world critically, and through a variety of different social, economic, and political contexts, you are able to bring new and innovative ideas to the table. Simply put, an education makes people more likely to achieve success, be happy, and positively contribute to their city and country. Clearly a tool this powerful and useful would be given considerable funding by the government, especially in the richest country on Earth?

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. As many of you already know, education in the United States is wildly underfunded and has been for quite some time. It’s in even more dire straits with the Trump administration, whose rich donors know that keeping people uneducated keeps them voting red and from questioning the very flawed capitalist and democratic systems that allow them to exist and wield this much influence. But just how little of our country’s budget is being spent on education? Lucky for us, there’s a tool to view just that, which is the official government website to view this data, known as USASpending. With their Spending Explorer tool, we can break down the US Government’s spending by ‘Budget Function’, as they call it, and see just how much (or rather how little) our country spends on education.

Out of the 10.3 trillion dollars that the government spent in 2025, approximately 221.5 billion dollars, or only 2.1% of the total budget, was spent on ‘Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services’. This 2% figure is even more pitiful especially when you consider that 13.7% of the budget, or 1.4 trillion dollars, was spent on National Defense (but with the recent renaming of the Secretary of Defense to the Secretary of War, it might be more apt to call it ‘war spending’). Keep in mind that our defense budget is higher than the budgets of every other country in the world combined, and has been for decades.

But going back to education spending, it becomes even more clear just how little is spent on improving it when you dig even deeper into how it’s actually spent. Of the 221 billion allocated to education, 58.3% of that, or 129.2 billion, was used on higher education, meaning colleges, universities, and trade schools. But this isn’t quite right, as out of that money, 52.6% was spent on the ‘Federal Direct Student Loan Program’, and 39% on ‘Student Financial Assistance’, essentially just Pell Grants (67.9 billion and 50.4 billion). Almost 92% of the money being spent on higher education isn’t being spent on its direct improvement, but on the financial aid to help students even attend their dream college. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I think we can all agree that it’s not ideal. But it gets even worse when you calculate the percentage of the total education budget money spent on this financial aid, which is, drumrolls please, 53%. Half of all the money spent by the federal government for education is poured into allowing high schoolers to go to college, and not, say, improving the college experience or college application system.

This is a horribly flawed system, and although colleges lowering their yearly tuition would definitely help with this, the best way to resolve this issue is for the government to simply increase its spending on education, probably by decreasing the spending from other areas, like the aforementioned spending on Defense. This would also benefit the other areas of the education budget I didn’t cover, like elementary and secondary school spending (which is just a term for middle and high school). That spending is primarily made up of grants to specific states and their education departments. Increasing the education budget means bigger grants for those departments and their states, more financial aid for soon to be college students, but most importantly, more money being spent on actually improving the education system and educational experience here in the U.S. Under this administration, this isn’t even wishful thinking and is more a utopian vision than anything else, but I hope that if this country’s government ever gets back on track (under a new administration, make no mistake) it will finally recognize the true power of an education and put its money where its mouth is.