Life
Obama to Colleges, universities: Keep tuition costs down or risk reduction of federal dollars
American’s higher education system has long been the backbone of much of the nation’s success, and there’s no doubt that a college degree is valuable. It’s now projected that students with a bachelor’s degree will earn a million more dollars over their lifetime than students with only a high school diploma, Education Secretary Arne Duncan says.
But Obama’s statement to Congress jolted the higher education establishment, which believes that college isn’t just to create foot soldiers for industry and that the use of measured outcomes would hurt the humanities, meaning fewer students will turn to Shakespeare and instead study engineering, said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University. The community has already been reeling over an earlier administration decision to require career college programs, many of which are at for-profit institutions, to better prepare students for “gainful employment” or risk losing federal aid.
“It’s the notion that the …federal government will begin to say we want to know what we’re paying for and we want to make sure that people don’t pay for education programs that take them nowhere, especially if the program is supposed to get them a job, we want it to get them a job, Carnevale said.
Some fear that Obama might want to apply the “gainful employment” standards to traditional four-year degree programs. Robert Moran, director of federal relations at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, said reporting requires time and resources, and it’s even more difficult to gauge the success of a graduate with an English degree than someone with a very specific career certificate.
Duncan said in an interview he doesn’t see a big need to go in that direction now, although he does think it’s important to track factors such as graduation rates and tuition costs. He said he tracked his graduates while serving as chief executive officer of the Chicago Public Schools and noticed that some universities were graduating them at rates of 75 percent or more, while others were graduating them at a small fraction of that.
“Colleges aren’t too dissimilar to high schools. Some have done a great job building cultures around completion and obtainment and some haven’t,” Duncan said.
Historically, policy conversations have centered on getting students into college. Duncan said graduating is just as important.
“To be real clear, I think that’s been the problem with federal policy in the past is 100 percent has been focused on the front end on inputs, that’s clearly important, but that’s the starting point. That gets you in the game. The goal isn’t to get to the game, the goal is to get to the finish line,” Duncan said.
