California Legislation Would Cut Cal Grants to Low-Performing Colleges

March 4, 2011, 12:48 pm

Students at California colleges with high loan-default and dropout rates would lose their state financial aid under a proposal approved by a state budget committee, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The proposal aims to save $124-million per year by trimming Cal Grants, one of the country’s most generous state student-aid programs. Lawmakers had originally intended to cut Cal Grants for students at for-profit colleges, but the new rules would apply to any college with a poor performance. To become law, the proposal still must be approved by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown.

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Prof_truthteller

Higher rates of grants historically have gone to colleges serving a higher porportion of poor, minority, less-prepared due to poor qulaity local high schools, and/or other less elite class students. Of course their dropout rates will be higher. I am leery of linking funding directly to results where the data can barely show a correlation let alone causation. We can probably thank the for profit lobbyists for this change. This will just push students into loans quicker as they exhaust grant opportunities faster.
chemistry_guy

In California, tuition at the Cal State Universities and the Community Colleges for in-state students can be amazingly low, on the order of $3K to $5k per year for a full course load. The bankrupt state picks up the rest, on the strength of the worthy notion that educating people does more to boost the economy than perhaps any other investments the people of California could make, to the benefit of all.

However, the opportunity cost of forgoing a (probably pretty crappy) job and income is so low that many people who really don’t have the makeup to thrive in college nonetheless make the ultimately foolish choice to go to school and fail at developmental math 4 times, never finish their programs, and end up costing the state a lot of money in subsidies in all forms, including, but not limited to, Cal Grants.

California is solvent in name only. Something drastic must be done, and this seems like a good step, however painful.

Sadly, though, it seems to me many capable students will be caught in this net.

It would be nice if the state could hold individual students accountable, but those who fail in their academic programs are certainly likely to default on their loans, so this needs to be done at the institutional level.
http://twitter.com/marmiedwards Marmie Edwards

Value of e-mail to track thoughts of poets and advance historical research. Look forward to future development.
http://twitter.com/K4arkive Krista Ferrante

Glad to see such a large player diving into email archiving
dan_roe

@adjunctivitis:twitter, that would be an appropriate application of the free market.

@chronicle-d02c17b414ca12120cd482490b49e254:disqus , so don’t give them 5 star hotels. College students don’t listen to their parents. But you’re paid in part to be a mentor and a steward of your discipline.

I agree that government should get out of student loans, though. Here’s an idea: if you want to see more money spent on education, spend your own money. But if you bet on a student who gets a useless degree, don’t come whining to me that I need to make good on their loan! And at some point you have to let this person discharge unpayable debt. What’s the old saying? a debt that cannot be paid won’t be paid? We’re a nation of laws that respect human dignity (well, we used to be), and just because a 20-something made a bad decision doesn’t mean that you get to make them into a lifelong debt slave. Federally guaranteed, non-dischargable education loans are the biggest subversion of the free market in history. I appreciate Vedder and Wood in the context of this blog and like a lot of what they have to say, but why don’t they “get it” when it comes to this issue? Again I ask, “what happened to mentorship in our universities?” For that matter, where’s the stewardship? Don’t just point fingers–you have a responsibility too.
kerchner

Admittedly my doctorate is in history, not mathematics, but shouldn’t the per student cost be $2,083? If the professor makes $75K a year and all of the other inputs are per semester, shouldn’t the salary input be his semester income also? $37,500 / 3 / 30 * 5 = $2,083.
unusedusername

The cost per student would be $2,083 per semester, or $4,167 per year.
graddirector

Well, there are clearly lots of real costs besides faculty salaries necessary to run a university and your calculation does not include the 30-50% premium over simple salary that needs to be paid for benefits. It also does not include the differentials built in since research intensive faculty seldom teach these many stand up classes. Mostly, this is due to so much of their work load instead being devoted to one on one student mentoring at the graduate level (at least this is true for STEM faculty at my institution). That said, I doubt anyone but the CFO of a university has any real idea where money flows in these organizations. I know that we (the faculty) would love to see much more budgetary transparency at our university. Some of the current budgetary pressures claimed by our administration are not credible to me or my colleagues at this point.
_perplexed_

I agree heartily, except for the bit about CFOs. I suspect that many neither quite know exactly where the money comes from (at public institutions in particular) or where it goes.