<p>Given that the US Government is still paying farm subsidies for farmers, while paying incentives for corn based ethanol production while at the same time complaining about the cost of fuel and food- you are probably right. The Government almost never kills a program no matter how little justification remains for the original program. As the country goes broke though- you might consider that programs that can’t support themselves definitively on their own merits are going to have some problems and nobody has actually provided much justification here other than the “same old blah blah” as you put it. Could be my crystal ball is cloudy, but if you are trotting out 1930s era arguments to justify this in 2008- I think that you are sailing into shoal waters. Mr Connaughton clearly saw something of this when he stopped approving waivers allowing shore based employment to satisfy graduates obligations, because if that continued it was like putting bullets into the guns of your critics- (of which by the way I am not- but I’m also a skeptic of the “because we always have” reason for doing things).
I’m glad to hear that engineers are passing at 91% first time around.</p>