Nothing is more rewarding for a teacher than to see the metaphorical “light bulb” go off in a student’s eyes. Presumably, that is the same for all kinds of teaching environments.
However, sometimes kindling and fueling that fire costs a lot more money.
We didn’t need the president to announce his plan to “Make College More Affordable” to know what a large financial commitment it is. (See the “factsheet” at: http://goo.gl/dfc2Au.)
A recent U.S. Department of Agriculture estimate suggested that raising a child born in 2012 to age 17 would cost a middle income family more than $240,000 (in 2012 dollars) without college costs.
Add to this the “Trends in College Pricing” (available here: http://goo.gl/Q2C0Y9) stating that over the last decades “tuition and fees at private nonprofit four-year institutions rose by 167 percent” and it is clear that fewer kids who have the ability to go to college will be able to afford it.
The starting point of the president’s plan is commendable, namely that providing more transparency about which value a given college delivers per dollar would level the playing field between consumers and suppliers in the education market.
However, the idea of tying “financial aid to college performance, starting with publishing new college ratings before the 2015 school year” is fraught with pitfalls and the potential for unintended consequences.
After all, there is a reason the competitive college system in the U.S. is still the envy of the world.
As the 2012 Science and Engineering Indicators (http://goo.gl/xWfVwz) published by the National Science Foundation highlighted: “The United States remains the destination of the largest number of internationally mobile students (both undergraduate and graduate) of all countries,” receiving around one-fifth of international students worldwide.
It is not clear that relating federal aid to students to some arbitrary ranking would help the system improve. After all, over the last decade, it wasn’t rising costs but rather sharply deteriorating state appropriations at a time of record enrollment growth that led to tuition increases.
If one assumes (and outside academia people may be doubtful, but bear with me) that quality of education hasn’t suffered, then colleges have already delivered more for less over the last decade.
Also, states have implemented their own version of affordability plans by tying graduation rates and retention to state appropriations.
One reason why this is not popular with professors is, of course, that it doesn’t take into account the different starting points of students at various institutions. Some young people simply need more remedial classes than others.
Also, one unfair aspect of these schemes is that lower-tier schools only inconsistently or not at all get credit for students who transfer to flagship state universities after some years and graduate from there.
Moreover, a recently published study (http://goo.gl/jD4zWF) by two young researchers outlines a causal effect of “need-based grants on college access, persistence and graduation.” Cutting back grant size to such students based on which college they attend (perhaps because they are not very mobile due to financial constraints) doesn’t seem like a promising strategy.
Such concerns may doom the plan in Congress. Balancing financial access to and quality of college education is a difficult problem.
We have yet to see that “light bulb go off” in somebody’s head regarding how to solve it.
Dr. Michael Reksulak has taught economics and public finance in Georgia Southern University’s College of Business Administration. He can be contacted at MReksulak.SMN@gmail.com.