The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act on Thursday on a largely party-line vote. While most of the attention has been focused on the dramatic overhaul of the federal student-loan program and large new investments in Pell Grants, community colleges, and early-childhood education, there are some additional provisions that deserve scrutiny, particularly the proposed Access and Completion Innovation Fund. I'm a big supporter of the idea, but I think the specific provisions need some work, and one amendment that went through yesterday took the bill in the wrong direction. Basically, it's a bid by private colleges to get public funding while avoiding public obligations. The language reads as follows:

PARTICIPATION OF PRIVATE, NONPROFIT INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER EDUCATION

     (a) VOLUNTARY PARTICIPATION.--A private, non-profit institution of...

The Brookings Institution held an event Wednesday afternoon focused on the new book Crossing the Finish Line. It was a good discussion; Bill Bowen in particular did a great job of describing the book's findings. In addition to the under-match/over-match/affirmative action stuff that I wrote about last week, there were also important findings about the relationship between college costs and graduation rates. In short: there is one, but only for low-income students. As the net price of college increases for low-income students along the horizontal axis on the chart above, their graduation rate declines. In the book, the authors note that "Our estimate is that an increase in annual net price of $1,000 is associated with a decline of 3 percentage points in the four-year graduation rate for students in the lowest income group."

For well-off students, it's a different story:

For the...

Myles Brand, president of the NCAA and former president of Indiana University, died yesterday, too young, at the age of 67. An able scholar and administrator, Brand was best known for his confrontation with legendary IU basketball coach Bobby Knight in the late 1990s. I was working in Indiana government then and met both men, briefly, during their time of discontent.

Knight is bigger than he seems on television, a consequence of being surrounded by giant basketball players who strain the borders of the screen. He also has a palpable charisma, almost shockingly so, and within a few seconds of meeting him you understand how a man with his intelligence and drive could harness that presence to mentor and cajole generations of young men to 902 career victories and three national championships. You also understand how devastating those energies could be if misdirected in anger and frustration...

The Treasury Department released its much-anticipated report on Section 529 Savings Plans today. As I've written previously, 529 plans have been a tremendous public policy disaster over the last year, resulting in tens of thousands of families losing large chunks of their college savings funds just as their kids were headed to college. The report puts a number on that loss: $25-billion, which is more than the total amount of money the government spends on Pell grants every year. And that likely understates the investment loss, since it represents the total change in asset values from Q4 2007 to Q4 2008 and presumably net contributions to 529 plans exceeded withdrawls.

The report has little to say about this, other than recommending that families strongly consider "age-based" plans that shift assets from equitites to conservative fixed-income securities as students approach college age. ...

Crossing the Finish Line, the new book from former Princeton president William Bowen, former Macalaster College president Michael McPherson, and Matthew Chingos, is getting a lot of coverage today. (The Chronicle here, the Times here). I haven't read it yet (no review copy, ahem), but it looks very interesting. The authors tracked 94,000 students who entered 21 flagship public universities in the fall of 1999. They found major differences in graduation rates among different student groups, with minority students less likely to finish on time. This is consistent with other research.

Bowen and McPherson have also come out swinging against the so-called "mismatch" theory of why affirmative action is supposed to be bad for minority students. The mismatch theory states that student are ill-served by attending a college that is more academically challenging than they would otherwise have...

I haven't read This Republic of Suffering but everyone seems to think it's very good and that Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust is an exceptional scholar. So perhaps she's just out of her element in the short essay form and that explains the incoherence of this piece in yesterday's New York Times Book Review, where Faust argues that ... well, I'm not sure what she's arguing. It reads like she sat down for a couple of hours with a stack of recent higher education critiques and decided to just name-check them all on the way to a series of generalized questions and observations. This in particular is bothersome:

As the world indulged in a bubble of false prosperity and excessive materialism, should universities -- in their research, teaching and writing -- have made greater efforts to expose the patterns of risk and denial? Should universities have presented a firmer counterweight to...

The modern university is a conglomerate. It performs a huge variety of duties and functions, serving a wide range of constituencies. Because most universities are nonprofit, they tend not to account for money in a way that ties revenues to expenditures within each function. Rather, they raise money from a variety of sources -- tuition, the government, donations, fees for service, investment earnings, etc. -- and spend money on a variety of things -- education, research, scholarship, musuems, hospitals, sports, administration, and so on and so forth.

Revenues and expenditures are often only loosely connected, and there's a great deal of internal cross-subsidization between things that make money and things that don't. How much is unclear -- most university budgeting and accounting systems aren't even designed to answer that question. But on some basic level, cross-subsidization is...

The release of this year's U.S. News college rankings has produced the usual meaningless attention to Princeton and Harvard jousting for the top spot despite the gnat-sized statistical differences between them. I'm on record with deep concerns about the way U.S. News creates strong incentives for institutions to act counter to public and student interests. The peer survey, which comprises 25 percent of each institution's score, is clearly biased toward age-old institutions and thus feeds the mistaken and damaging idea that true excellence in higher education takes decades or longer to achieve. When it comes to the teaching and learning mission, I think that's obviously untrue--indeed, being drenched in tradition might just as easily make it harder for institutions to adapt to changing developments in pedagogy, technology, and the nature of the modern college student. 

That said, the...

Back from CNBC, where I went this afternoon to talk about 529 college savings plans. The whole process is pretty strange. You arrive, get sent to makeup, sit in the green room, and are then ushered into a completely dark room with a chair and a fake library-type backdrop. You've got a hidden earpiece on so you can hear the host, and there's a monitor in front of you to watch. But the hosts are somewhere else (New York?), the other guy is somewhere else, and there's a two-second delay between what you say and what you see on the monitor. It's tricky to watch yourself on TV live-minus-two-seconds, listen, and speak at the same time. My first thought as the segment began was "I look tired and sullen! I need to open my eyes wider and smile more!" Here's the clip:

I guess it went OK. It's the first time I've done TV in the CNBC "everyone talking at once" format. ...

Starting yesterday morning, and continuing for the rest of the day, The New York Times ran this headline on the front page of its Web site: "In Study, Most Graduates’ Debt Load Is Manageable." This phrase quickly multiplied across the Internet, as Times stories tend to do. The study, published by the College Board, was based on an analysis of data from the 2007-08 National Postsecondary Student Aid Survey (NPSAS).

The quantitative analysis in the study is perfectly accurate, which I know because my colleague Erin Dillon and I published an analysis of exactly the same data over a month ago. Among the findings of the College Board report (and ours): a larger percentage of students are borrowing, compared to the last NPSAS, which was conducted in 2003-04. The typical amount of debt (they looked at the median while we looked at the average, but the trends are similar) increased as well, even ...