One of my stranger assignments as a member of the Spellings Commission was to co-chair, with Rich Vedder, the Affordability Task Force. Here truly was a punishment to fit the crime, since I had already made clear that I was finding the Commission’s discussion of affordability both linguistically confusing and politically risky.

To begin with, the argument that an American college education was becoming more unaffordable rested on the assumption that students and families were still expected to pay for college out of current earnings and savings. In fact, a college education had long since become something that one purchased over time, most often at interest rates that were sufficiently attractive that even families that could afford to pay their “parental contribution” out of pocket chose instead to borrow. Savvy middle-class families had long since discovered that it was smarter to take out a PLUS loan while investing their savings at a more attractive interest rate. Only families culturally or ideologically adverse to debt were missing out on this modest opportunity at arbitrage. Students with demonstrated need substantial enough to qualify for a Pell Grant were also able to secure long-term financing at advantageous (i.e., subsidized) rates. The average indebtedness of students upon graduation from college was less than $20,000 — roughly the price of a low-end new car. Students and their families who wanted a more upscale product took on more debt, but again debt that was in line with their other longer-term purchases.

A second mistake made by those who pushed the affordability agenda was to apply an absolute standard to the problem. If a college education cost more than X, then by definition it was unaffordable even though students and their families continued to purchase it in ever-greater numbers. Had the affordability lobby chosen instead to ask higher education’s potential customers whether a college education remained affordable, a much different argument would have resulted.

I know, because we did just that in the fall of 2004 at the behest of the Rendell administration in Pennsylvania. As part of a general review of the state of higher education in Pennsylvania, The Learning Alliance commissioned a survey of young adults across the Commonwealth focusing on their attitudes toward higher education in general and its costs in particular. The survey was designed and administered by Berwood Yost of the Floyd Institute for Public Policy at Franklin and Marshall College, in collaboration with his colleague, Terry Madonna, the Director of the Keystone Poll, the standard benchmark for political polling in Pennsylvania.

What the survey found attests to the confusions that had already become an integral part of the affordability discussion. Eighty-six percent of the sample agreed with the statement “Regardless of the cost, tuition at Pennsylvania’s public universities is a worthwhile investment.” Just 9 percent disagreed. Sixty-three percent agreed with the statement “The cost to get an education at one of Pennsylvania’s public universities is affordable.” Twenty-five percent disagreed, and 12 percent said they didn’t know.

Yost and Madonna summed up their findings as follows: “The responses of young adults who wanted to attend college, but who did not, do not suggest that cost is a problem for a large majority of young adults. Cost (33 percent) was the most frequently mentioned problem among those who planned to attend college but did not; however, they mentioned many other reasons, too. Starting families (23 percent), having a job that did not require a degree (10 percent), a lack of motivation (8 percent), and planning to attend at a later time (5 percent) were other reasons that interested students never attended college. When these responses are calculated to reflect the total sample, it turns out that fewer than one in 20 (4 percent) of 18 to 30-year-olds in Pennsylvania did not attend a higher education institution because of concerns about cost, which is nearly the same proportion (3 percent) who did not attend because they were starting families.”

My own reading of the same data says the number of young people being excluded from higher education in Pennsylvania because it cost too could be as high as 8 percent. Two characteristics of this excluded population are worth noting. First, the respondents who said that costs were a primary reason for not attending college were more likely to report much higher tuitions for both public community colleges and state universities than those institutions actually charged. Second, they were twice as likely to be African-American or Hispanic or come from the largely rural part of the state.

Make no mistake — 8 percent is a substantial number. Its import, however, lies in telling us that making a higher education more affordable requires very targeted investments designed to assist the 8 percent who need immediate help rather than the 92 percent for whom a college education is expensive but still affordable.