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[Forums Moderator]

Congress has been laboring for nearly two years to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. The work has been dominated by debate over the size of Pell Grants and over policies on various loan programs. But key issues like nontraditional students' needs and aid for prisoners are missing in the debate, say four experts -- Hillary Rodham Clinton, David Mundel, Judson R. Shaver, and Frank X. Viggiano -- in this week's Chronicle Review. Are they right? Or is Congress right to ignore them? Read more...

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[shirley]

Congress should get out of the education business altogether. I am financing my daughter's college education. And I'm funding some prisoner's college education as well?  Give me a break.

(Note to forums moderator:  When you claim hillary clinton is an "expert", what do you offer for proof.  Or, are you letting your political bias rear its ugly head??)

[concerned]

To shirley...don't forget that society benefits from an educated population and not everyone can afford to send their children to school on their wallet. You are able to, fine, but don't deny others the ability through no fault of their own. Otherwise we will just have the principle of "them that's got, gets more".

And don't forget the fact that many universities will go bankrupt if they were depending only on those with the money to go.

And don't forget that if only those who have money go, then the values they will share will ensure that those who 'don't got" will always remain at the bottom of the pile.

I would have thought you would be more empathetic Shirley.

[James Ratcliff, Perf. Assoc.]

We in the higher education community would be well-advised not to take the posture of deciding or proclaiming whether Congress is right or wrong.  We already have a credibility gap with Congress where many members think of us as just another interest group lobbying for dollars.

In fact, we might better approach the question of what should be supported in the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act by thinking of student grants and student loans as forms of subsidy for college attendance.  Each makes certain types of students (commuter students, prisoners, etc.) more able to attend higher education, elevating the demand.  A recent study of rural community college students, for example, showed that 80 percent were receiving Pell Grants.  One would have to ask what would be the effective of loosing that subsidy, by changing the terms of grants and/or loans to exclude or limit financial aid to non-traditional and part-time students. Certainly the demand for higher education would drop and the effect on the institutions capacity to rely on tuition as a primary means of financial support would disappear. Thus, the elevated demand may stimulate or sustain higher prices.

As the price to the student (and his/her parents) goes up, the proportion of college-eligible students electing to borrow or pay for college goes down.  Already, colleges are seeing more students enroll part-time so they can work to afford college.  This, in turn, increases part-time enrollment and attrition (as part-time students are more likely to drop out and more likely to show diminished levels of performance in learning).  The internal costs to the institution increase as higher drop-out rates and lower levels of performance increase the need for more college recruiters and student support services.

I am not advocating that we abandon our commitment to non-traditional students or part-time students or even prisoners.  What is needed, however, is a concerted dialogue regarding the consequences of federal grant and loan policies on institutional practices as well as student learning.  Similarly, support for prisoners to enroll in college programs begs the larger question of the purpose of prison: punishment or personal reform and development. Far better that we lead that dialogue on such issues than to sit in judgment as to whether Congress is right or wrong about the provisions of the Higher Education Act reauthorization.

Jim Ratcliff, Performance Associates Consulting, www.HigherEdConsutlants.com, Pueblo West, COForums Moderator wrote:

> Congress has been laboring for nearly two years to
> reauthorize the Higher Education Act. The work has been
> dominated by debate over the size of Pell Grants and over
> policies on various loan programs. But key issues like
> nontraditional students' needs and aid for prisoners are
> missing in the debate, say four experts -- Hillary Rodham
> Clinton, David Mundel, Judson R. Shaver, and Frank X. Viggiano
> -- in this week's Chronicle Review. Are they right? Or
> is Congress right to ignore them?
> Read
> more...
>

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[Rod]

As a non-traditional student finishing graduate work, who has funded his own education through loans and limited academic merit scholarships, I never cease to be amazed at the willingness of some people in academe to spend other people's money.

Individuals guilty of abrogating the pubilc trust through criminal acts have no right to confiscated tax dollars for educational purposes, cable TV, and unrestricted access to any kind of literature they want. The only reason some people try to justify paying for a convicted felon's education with statistics announcing how beneficial education is in lowering recidivism is the desire and need to cover up failed social programs. These failed programs have undercut the single best (research proven) means of lowering prison populations - the stable, two-parent family - by lowering the possibility that one will commit a crime and be sentenced to prison in the first place. If a person never goes the prison the first time, they don't have to worry about the second do they?

Paying for convicted felon's education is not an act of compassion - if it were, the people advocating for it would be bearing the cost themselves. It is not compassion when you are spending someone else's money. Further, it is not the best way to benefit society - supporting the traditional family and its values is more useful over the long term.

And Shirley is right - Hillary is no expert.

Have a nice day.

[Jane Doe/Public Univ.]

As a first generation college student, I will admit the higher education *process* was anything but easy. Perhaps I was just idealistic in thinking that working hard in school and in college would benefit me later in life.

Clearly I went about it all wrong. Instead of working my way through, I should have:

1) Dropped out of high school - (I can always get a GED or *equivalent* at a more convenient time, and on the taxpayer's dollar)

2) Work? Why work when I can claim no income and increase my chances of *free* money. I mean, why should I work 2-3 jobs to pay for college just to supplement my fellow student's education with my taxes, yet I receive nothing?

3) Free money for the incarcerated? I guess rather than *work* I should have merely robbed banks, or worse to assure better odds of *free* money for school.

Please. What kind of message does THAT agenda send? Not the one I support. Sorry, Hillary.

[Randy (unemployed educator)]

On the four sections:

1. a.  What about the divorced fathers of two
     year olds who are burdened with the
     additional expenses of that circumstance?
     Do we need additional means which allow
     young married woman to escape the
     seemingly unpopular concept of housewife
     and homemaker?

    b.  The entire concept of educational planning
     seems to me to be "How much money can
     we pump into institutions that diseminate
     only ideas approved by an increasing power
     elite?"   Having recently entered the educational
     arena, I have discerned that schools and universities
     are primarily intensely political environments
     concerned mostly with self-perpetuation and "bureau-
     cratic" expansion.   Academic freedom (in a
     conservative sense) becomes threatened by external
     forces.

2.  Can "fair marketing practices" be assured?

3.  Re-establish aid for prisoners?  How about
     restoring GI Bill veterans educational benefits
     to those, like myself,  who were unable to fully
     use those they "earned"?   The social and
     economic ravages of the1970's caused many
     veterans to be unable to use benifits within
     required time periods.

4.  My son needs something like this.  As a fact, though,
     this financial assistance may keep some from working
     to help earn money for their family's struggling
     household.

The macro-economic impact, social implications, and
ethical considerations of thoughts along these lines
should be considered.

[Jennifer, NRL]

Some points I find useful in this debate.

1.   I do not think it is appropriate to think about Pell grants and loan programs (to x y or z) as charity in the pure sense or even as marketing tools for colleges and universities. I think it is useful for everyone to think of them as American business investments. Afterall, the American workforce is the hardest working and in my opinion most productive in the World. By investing in the education of members of our society who have not achieved or embraced (by choice or circumstance) self-sufficiency, I believe that we will get a substantial return on our monetary investment in real dollars. This is just good business sense- not charity, in my view.
2.   None if the senators mentioned would qualify as an “expert” in the field of higher education policy. Serious attention and research into the matter in addition to well-documented scholarship in the field would be required before I consider *anyone* an expert in higher education economics/policy. I plan to read "Going Broke by Degree"http://www.aei.org/news/newsID.20800,filter./news_detail.asp by Professor Richard Vedder, distinguished professor of economics at Ohio U to get the low-down on higher education economics and policy reform and *not* congressional reports or senators’ websites.
3.    I believe a lot (not all) of the financial higher education problems associated with the non-traditional students (i.e. single mothers, or folks who have to return to college after having families and certainly prisoners) stems originally from the dismally inadequate American public school system. If we do not fix this problem, we are always going to be dealing with the symptoms- which includes folks who dropped out or failed to get the appropriate counseling on how to grasp the American dream- and then have to perform damage control on their lives later on.

Jennifer

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[common sense]

Someone recently asked "If the government gave everyone $5,000 to buy a new car, what do you think would happen to the price of new cars?"  (Answer: they would all go up by $5,000).

Has anyone thought that these pell grants are a strong contributing factor to the double digit increases in tuition?

And by the way, if hillary's expertise in higher education more than her expertise in putting together health care plans??

[Reality Check]

Has anyone thought that these pell grants are a strong contributing factor to the double digit increases in tuition?



Common Sense is, of course, correct.  If the government didn't mindlessly pony up every single year because of equally mindless campaign posturing, tuition increases would immediately all but cease.  Let market competition regulate the schools. The reason the schools are in such utter disarray is because they are sheltered from normal accountability mechanisms that would make them efficient, effective, and profitable institutions.  It has long been high time for that taxpayer-funded waste, abuse, and decadence to end.

[Real Reality Check]

Schools aren't meant to be businesses.  Most colleges (exclduding for profit corporations like the University of Phoenix) are not interested in making a profit.  The purpose of the college is to educate students (and/or contribute to academic research) not make money.

Tuition (at state schools) is rising really fast because of a number of factors;
1. States have been cutting funding to colleges.  At the same time donations to colleges have not been increasing to amake up the difference.  Thus tuition has to be raised in order to keep the college running.

2. Inflation increases costs for supplies such as paper, electrical costs, etc.

3. A lot of schools and donors are apparently more interested in funding athletics than education itself.  If the athletic department at a school is losing money because it can't fund itself (either through donations or ticket sales) then the money to make up for the loss has to come from somewhere.

4. Maintenance of the college campus.  This includes things like having to remove asbestos from buildings, having to periodically update science labs so they have the newest (and generally expensive) equipment, renovating older buildings for new uses and getting rid of older buildings that are falling apart.

If problems 1 and 3 were fixed, I think a lot of the tuition cost issues would be eliminated and tuition costs would rise more gradually with inflation.

As to stopping Pell Grants, the whole point of Pell Grants is to give skilled students the opportunity to go to college.  If you're from a low income or lower middle class family that can't afford tuition (even if you brough current tuition levels down by half) then you need some sort of assistance to get into college.  Pell Grants give people who are capable of college level work but unable to afford tuition the opportunity to go to college. I do not see why this is a problem.

[David Evans]

Dear Common and Reality,

Pell Grants go to a small minority of students; I expect reasoned (as opposed to ideological) economic analysis of the way Pell Grants are distrubuted would reveal very little correlation between them and the cost of college, particularly since they haven't increased much (neither have student loan limits and some other financial aid mechanisms) for a significant amount of time.  Pell Grants may increase the cost of college on average slightly, but it would maybe be $100/year, certainly not $5,000.

Moreover, the same research would almost certainly reveal that a large portion of Pell Grant recipients are at public, 2-year colleges, which generally have the lowest tuition (and have had the smallest increases) in the country.  In my state, for instance, tuition at two-year colleges is just a little over $2,000/year, which is, by any measure, an absurd bargain.

And the idea that colleges and universities are inefficient is ideologically driven and based on ignorance.  Indeed, it is quite possible to do some version of the job colleges do more cheaply, but it's a labor-intensive thing, education, and it's very difficult to advance the productivity of unmediated labor.  Adding things like technology and distance learning on the whole INCREASES rather than decreasing costs, because the ostensible gains in efficiency are burned off by the increases in overhead--maintaining servers, ensuring functioning video equipment, properly equipping and maintaining classrooms, and so on.  Institutions such as the University of Phoenix deliver efficiency by providing a least-common-denominator product, maintaining virtually no physical presence in the world, and imposing uniformity on their "content" so that it can be taught by trained rather than educated providers.  

If this is efficiency, anyone who understands and values education wouldn't want it.

The corporatization of the university (what lies, inevitably, behind calls for efficiency and accountability) is a failed analogy because educating people is simply not the same thing as building cars. Steel is always steel, and rubber is always rubber, but each student is an individual person with particular needs, talents, and goals.  Also, given the outstanding, ethical, motivational success of American business (let's start with Enron and move to leaking abandoned factories in the rust belt, pollution, acid rain, displaced workers, outsourcing, the collapse of pensions, other accounting scandals, not to mention the hemorraging loss of American industrial and technological dominance in the years since WWII), why would we want to apply that model to higher education, which still is, clearly and demonstrably, the best in the world?

[Reality Check]

No one is advocating  the "corporatization" of anything: obviously the schools are already corporations (check your legal definition!)  that are directly dependant on taxes for support. This has been the case for decades. We are talking about basic economic common sense, nothing more.  There is nothing about any school that magically exempts it from fiscal responsibility, and there is nothing in your posts that rebuts the basic reality that if the state keeps throwing money at schools because of mindless political pressure, the schools will merely jack up their prices because they know the state will keep paying, no matter what they do. Again, they are and long have been corporations that also enjoy massive state support.  Let them take responsibility for themselves, like any other corporation.  There si no realistic possibility of reforming higher education until basic accountability mechanisms are allowed to work in that professional context.

[Dr. Pelham Mead, Mt.St. Vincen]

I agree that the two year bebate must come to an end. The Title V grant expired in Sept 2004 and 35 colleges were unable to reapply due to a stupid two year layover policy that should have been dropped. This two year layover threatens to hurt the interest in Hispanic Serving Institutions in applying for this 160 page grant.
Something needs to be done to get the Higher Ed. bill passed this year.

[David Evans]

Dear Reality,

Of COURSE I know what a "corporation" is and that schools and colleges are corporations in a technical sense.  When I use the term "corporatization," I mean it in terms of implementing the (demonstrably not working) modes of accountability of the so-called "corporate world."

What kinds of accountability are you talking about?  I'm a department chair; I spend at least half my time filling out state-mandated reports, evaluations, accreditation and assessment materials, and that sort of thing.  I spend several hours each week administering my (too-small) budget.  I spend many many hours each year stretching the part-time faculty budget and figuring out how to accommodate the maximum number of students with the best amount of educational excellence.  (It's like an x-graph with the two lines crossing someplace in the middle--I try hard to hit that point.)

And as for states throwing money at universities, where, precisely, have you been?  In Georgia, where I teach, the state has CUT more than 15% from the University System budget since 9/11.  At the University of Virginia, where I went to graduate school, state support now totals about 8% of the University's budget, down from about 40% less than 20 years ago.  The California State University system, where my mother taught from 1959-1985, receives less in constant dollars per student now than it did in the sixties.  

Let me repeat what Real Reality Check said:  Tuition at public universities is going up quickly because states are abrogating their historic commitment to funding higher education.  In theory I don't have a problem with asking those who can pay for their educations to do so (making tuition a kind of user fee).  But in Georgia, for instance, we're not allowed to use state funds for scholarship support--thus we can't "cost shift" the way private schools do by raising our tuition and then using that revenue to discount for lower-income students.  The HOPE scholarship complicates this all even more, but that's another story.

Also, take a look at health insurance costs, costs for new or greatly expanded programs (such as counseling for our apparently ever-more-fragile students), radically increased utility costs (in Georgia, natural gas is 100% more expensive than it was last year, which makes heating one's buildings rather difficult), tremendous increases in liability exposure, and faculty and staff salaries that have not begun to keep up with inflation for a large number of years and you have a recipe for fiscal catastrophe.

In short, Mr/Ms Reality, you don't know what you're talking about.  Public universities have absurdly large accountability burdens already.  What, specifically, would you propose?  5/5 teaching loads, 40 students in intro composition courses, 500 in science lectures, etc.?  No thanks.