For years, we've been spending more and more on education, we have lotteries that pay more to education, we don't dare touch the education budget because that would harm children...

...so (a) how come education is so awful and (b) where does all the money go?

Apart from teacher's retirement and benefits, it goes to "diversitycrats" according to Michael Barone:

College and university administrators have been happy to scoop up all the money by rapidly raising tuitions and fees. Higher-ed expenses have been rising much more rapidly than inflation for three decades.

And what has the money been spent on? Some of it presumably goes to professors in the hard sciences and the great scholars who have made American universities the best in the world. Well and good.

But many university administrators have other priorities. The University of California system has been raising tuitions and cutting departments. But, reports John Leo in the invaluable Minding the Campus blog, its San Diego campus found the money to create a new post of "vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion."

That's in addition to what the Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald calls its "already massive diversity apparatus." It takes Mac Donald 103 words just to list the titles of UCSD's diversitycrats.

The money for the new vice chancellorship could have supported two of the three cancer researchers that the campus lost to Rice University in Houston, a private school that apparently takes the strange view that hard science is more important than diversity facilitators.

This doesn't just happen on the Left Coast. The University of North Carolina at Wilmington saved some money by lumping together two science departments and raised spending on its five diversity-multicultural offices.

But, to quote George W. Bush, is our students learning? Not very much, concludes the California Association of Scholars in its 87-page study of the University of California system.

Students aren't required to study American history or Western civilization. But they're subjected to a lot of political indoctrination by leftist activists. "Far too many" have not learned to write effectively to read "a reasonably complex book."

"In recent years, study after study has found that a college education no longer does what it once did and should do," the report concludes. "Students are being asked to pay considerably more and get considerably less."

What's more important for America? Being able to solve quadratic equations or feeling that just the right number of transexuals are being admitted into your college?