The second of my four horsemen of reform — the quest for an affordable higher education — is for me the most problematic. This much is clear, however: an American college education has become ever more expensive. Some would say, with fair justification, paying for a college education in this country is now obscenely expensive. But ever-higher prices in higher education are nothing new. For more than a half century the average price, even the average net price, of a year in college has been increasing faster than the underlying rate of inflation, except during the decade of the 1970s when the average prices colleges and universities charged merely kept pace with double-digit inflation.
Those who push the affordability agenda parse the problem differently, having concluded that an American higher education is either now or about to become unaffordable. As Measuring Up 2004 boldly declared, “The vast majority of states have failed to keep college affordable for most families.”
Not exactly. When something is unaffordable it means it won’t be purchased. Health insurance — and with it access to health care — is now truly unaffordable for a frighteningly large and growing number of American families. We know that to be the case because of the increasing number of American families who do not have health insurance. That seemingly is not the case for American higher education, given that in most years enrollments have continued to rise even as have the prices students are expected to pay.
Market researchers often talk about affordability in terms of the would-be customer’s “willingness to pay” for a specific product and that same customer’s “ability to pay.” Thus far most American families and most students have shown both an ability and a willingness to pay the prices colleges and universities charge. Indeed, most purchasers of higher education have, over the last decade, been shopping up, consistently choosing higher-priced over lower-priced options. The baccalaureate institutions that are hurting for enrollments are, for the most part, those with the lowest tuitions.
It is a curious conundrum. Take, for example, the case of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which Measuring Up awarded a C for affordability in 2000, a D in 2002, and an F in 2004. On the other hand, Pennsylvania earned an A in completion, meaning that Pennsylvania institutions do very well in terms of retention and their capacity to graduate students within six years of matriculation — and a B for participation, indicating that “compared with other states, the likelihood of Pennsylvania ninth-graders enrolling in college within four years is high.”
Sorting through this thicket is going to take a while — or at least my next several postings.
