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About the Author
Bob Zemsky describes himself as being old and round enough to be mistaken for a pooh-bah. He was a member of the Spellings Commission and, as an author and researcher, has focused on making colleges and universities mission-centered and market-smart. He has focused on what globalism might really mean for higher education, on what technology has not accomplished, and how to make learning important to the higher education market. Bob currently serves as professor and chair of The Learning Alliance at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Marty Nemko, guest bloggerBob Zemsky
Recent Posts
Lessons From the Cost-Quality Curve | Comment [2]
Quality -- Reform's Fourth Horseman | Comment [4]
Access to Success | Comment [2]
Is Access Still the Question? | Comment [3]
Affordability: Devil in the Details | Comment [2]
Featured Articles By the Author
Have Student Loans Become Yesterday's Good News Gone Bad?
Two years ago I would have said that American higher education had a rational financing plan — one that was increasingly being emulated across Europe and Asia. Given that public treasuries could no longer afford to provide full subsidies to all learners in an age of massification, it made sense to instead provide equitable financing (a.k.a. student loans) which would allow benefiting students to pay for their higher educations over an extended period of time.
To be sure there were problems. Taking out loans only made sense if one earned a degree. The students who policy makers most wanted to help were often averse to loans, while financially better-off families understood that borrowing at favorable rates in an expanding economy was a form of arbitrage they could more than afford. The more-than-abundant supply of loans also allowed families to shop up and, not so surprisingly, allowed institutions to continue to increase prices faster than inflation. These concerns notwithstanding, however, the system was working.
Today it is harder to be as sanguine. The scandals involving financial aid officials — higher education’s own form of payola — have made clear there was too much loose change floating through the system. Rich institutions, seeking to protect the tax-free status of their endowments, have rushed to substitute grants for loans without ever thinking through what their actions might mean for the system as a whole. Institutions that cannot afford to match their largesse are caught in a bind. They are unable to offer the same financial aid packages as their richer competitors, and really unable to lower their prices without doing visible damage to the quality of the educations they provide.
What is clear, to me at least, is that unless the U.S. is prepared to return to a system in which less than a quarter of its young people enroll in college following their graduations from high school, somebody had better find a printing press somewhere.
Posted at 08:27:05 AM on March 25, 2008 | All postings by Bob ZemskyComments
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Untill the US decides to clean house, that is to say to get rid of the predatory proprietary schools and to hold schools accountable for the misrepresntations that many of them do, Higher education funding will be in trouble. As we speak there are over 2 millon students in default on their loans and more are comming due to the economic changes occuring in the USA as it switches from a national economy to a world wide economy.
Those students need help and debt relief and untill they get it, the funding for future student loans will be in jepoardy.
— VOPS · Mar 26, 02:00 PM · #
Okay the ideology from George Washington is “take care of yourself” instead of “depend on elites to care for you” the European delusion. So we get fabulously rich elites who care not a whit for the 1/6th to 1/5th of their own nation’s population who lacked parents, health, and education. It is easy to become fabulously wealthy when untaxed with care for all of one’s own national population as East Asians and Europeans note when viewing Americans on their estates. Uneducated students preyed upon by “lenders” and pseudo “schools” should, good old George believed “take care of themselves”. The 5 year old without father and with drugged mom, living on below minimum wage welfare, going to schools funded at one tenth or one fortieth the rate/salaries of surburban equivalents (in role), should “take care of themselves”. Nice idea but try doing it yourself from such circumstances some day.
— Richard Tabor Greene · Mar 27, 04:31 AM · #
Higher education needs to get cheaper. Not “more cost effective,” “enhanced return on investment,” or any other high-priced terminology. Just cheaper, as in “a lot less cost.” Never has information been so cheap and so accessible, except for higher education. I live near a campus that chronically cries poverty. It is very persuasive until one goes and looks at the construction, the vast sports arenas, and the costly amenities. Examining further, one can find that students are victims of their so-called student governments, whose members delight in using their power to approve higher student fees. For all you high priced leaders out there in higher education land, make higher education cheaper. A whole lot cheaper. Then maybe your graduates can start making more affordable American products.
— Marvin McConoughey · Mar 27, 08:00 AM · #
As costs has trended up, so has the rate of immediate transition from HS to college. It’s now about 70% in the US (an all-time high), and was 50% as recently as late 1970s-early 1980s. I doubt if this will fall to 25%. Data like this don’t really support the argument that we have an access/affordability problem.
— economist · Mar 27, 10:22 AM · #
If you don’t think that there is an affordablity problem your not seeing what’s happening on the ground.
At my major public research university the few maintenance people who are still working here are removing fluorescent light bulbs to save money. They’re cutting back on security guards. The institution has stopped faculty searches, students are unable to graduate on time because classes they need to take have been canceled. Tuition increases at the maximum amount allowed by law, every year.
And this isn’t because of the credit crunch, its because people forgot what that there are somethings that need to be supported by everyone, like roads and fire departments, higher education is a public good.
Today, my “state school” receives less than 20% of its funding from the state. We take contracts from DHS to datamine activists and invest in Haliburton.
Private lenders were a problem from the start, and just one component in the destruction of the public infrastructure that made any claim of equal opportunity in the country possible.
— Radical by Reason · Mar 28, 10:53 AM · #