PARIS — Remember last December? In Madison, college students were slogging through snow and exams and attending "ugly Christmas sweater" parties. In Washington, Congress and the Bush administration were changing student-loan rules, cutting $12.7 billion from federal student-loan programs over the next five years.

Yes, while students transitioned from all-nighters to eggnog, the government drastically sliced the amount of financial aid available to them, and now only very low-income students or those entering specific fields — fields such as engineering, science or the study of critical languages — stand to receive government loans.

In other words, the U.S. government only cares about providing higher education to people of interest to the Department of Defense. If you're into music, finance, history or psychology, don't expect too much from your FAFSA.

The government is sending students a Spartan message by putting such a heavy emphasis on security. In ancient Sparta, the whole community focused solely on military defense, leaving no time for the intellectual and athletic pursuits of Athens. The United States has recently been willing to cut funds from many social programs but not from the military. Military spending is never criticized under the illusion that every defense dollar is well spent.

Yet the United States spends significantly more money on defense than other developed nations. In limiting financial aid to those pursuing defense-related fields, the U.S. government further reveals its obsession with military defense. This approach echoes Soviet-style social planning, educated electorate be damned.

Are America's democratic allies making similar changes during the current international War on Terror? While in Paris this month, I tracked down a professor who could comment on French student aid.

Over espresso in the Latin Quarter, Didier Aubert, an assistant professor at the Parisian Nouvelle Sorbonne, described the basics.

Attending a public university in France, Aubert explained, costs about $360 annually, as the French government picks up the tab for most university expenses. The government provides both need- and merit-based scholarships to students who would otherwise have to balance schoolwork with full-time jobs. Scholarship money in France mainly covers living expenses, not tuition.

Most of the students attending the Sorbonne Nouvelle, a public university, are from middle-class to low-income families living in the outskirts of Paris. Wealthier students from the city typically either pass exams to enter the grandes écoles — a kind of French Ivy League — or attend private universities.

While this system is certainly imperfect, it nevertheless reveals a government willing to spend money to educate a large percentage of its population — and not just in fields that benefit the military. In fact, a student's field of study is irrelevant to the financial-aid application form.

Other countries also provide financial aid independently of students' specializations. Le Figaro admiringly reported that in Sweden, the majority of college students pay for their own educations through a combination of scholarships (35 percent) and government aid (65 percent). Loans are based on an individual student's income; upon finishing their studies, Swedish students begin paying back their loans at a rate of 5 percent of their first salary. While students with lower-income first jobs often struggle to pay back their loans, the Swedish system overall succeeds at including anyone interested in pursuing higher education.

It's in the best interests of any republic to have a well-educated population composed of a wide variety of people in a range of professions. Limiting scholarship money to students in defense-related fields is shortsighted and backward. If so many American students can no longer afford higher education, how will the United States compete in a global economy?

Other countries have flawed financial-aid systems as well, but with this latest move, the military-obsessed U.S. government is truly out of step with the educational priorities of developed countries.

Cynthia Martens ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in Italian and European studies.