Obama takes tougher stance on higher education

KIMBERLY HEFLING

AP Edu­ca­tion Writer

WASHINGTON — Access to col­lege has been the dri­ving force in fed­eral higher edu­ca­tion pol­icy for decades. But the Obama admin­is­tra­tion is push­ing a fun­da­men­tal agenda shift that aggres­sively brings a new ques­tion into the debate: What are peo­ple get­ting for their money?

Stu­dents with loans are grad­u­at­ing on aver­age with more than $25,000 in debt. The fed­eral gov­ern­ment pours $140 bil­lion annu­ally into fed­eral grants and loans. Unem­ploy­ment remains high, yet there are pro­jected short­ages in many indus­tries with some high-tech com­pa­nies already com­plain­ing about a lack of highly trained workers.

Mean­while, lit­er­acy among col­lege stu­dents has declined in the last decade, accord­ing to a com­mis­sion con­vened dur­ing the George W. Bush admin­is­tra­tion that said Amer­i­can higher edu­ca­tion has become “increas­ingly risk-averse, at times self-satisfied, and unduly expen­sive.” About 40 per­cent of col­lege stu­dents at four-year schools aren’t grad­u­at­ing, and in two-year pro­grams, only about 40 per­cent of stu­dents grad­u­ate or trans­fer, accord­ing to the pol­icy and analy­sis group Col­lege Measures.

Col­lege drop-outs are expen­sive, and not just for the indi­vid­ual. About a fifth of full-time stu­dents who enroll at a com­mu­nity col­lege do not return for a sec­ond year, cost­ing tax­pay­ers hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars annu­ally, accord­ing to an analy­sis released last fall by the Amer­i­can Insti­tutes for Research.

There’s been a grow­ing debate over whether post-secondary schools should be more trans­par­ent about the cost of an edu­ca­tion and the suc­cess of grad­u­ates. Pres­i­dent Barack Obama has weighed in with a strong “yes.”

Dur­ing his State of the Union address, Obama put the higher edu­ca­tion on notice: “If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the fund­ing you get from tax­pay­ers will go down,” he said. “Higher edu­ca­tion can’t be a lux­ury— it’s an eco­nomic imper­a­tive that every fam­ily in Amer­ica should be able to afford.”

He wants to slightly reduce fed­eral aid for schools that don’t con­trol tuition costs and shift it to those that do. He also has pro­posed an $8 bil­lion pro­gram to train com­mu­nity col­lege stu­dents for high-growth indus­tries that would pro­vide finan­cial incen­tives to pro­grams that ensured their trainees find work. Both pro­pos­als need con­gres­sional approval.

At the same time, the admin­is­tra­tion is devel­op­ing both a “score­card” for use in com­par­ing school sta­tis­tics such as grad­u­a­tion rates as well as a “shop­ping sheet” stu­dents would receive from schools they applied to with esti­mates of how much debt they might grad­u­ate with and esti­mated future pay­ments on stu­dent loans.

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.

Obama isn’t the first pres­i­dent to encour­age dia­logue on mak­ing higher edu­ca­tion more afford­able and account­able. In addi­tion to con­ven­ing a com­mis­sion to study higher edu­ca­tion in Amer­ica, Bush’s admin­is­tra­tion issued grants to states to link tran­script data with other records to bet­ter track the suc­cess of grad­u­ates from pub­lic insti­tu­tions. The Obama admin­is­tra­tion has con­tin­ued the program.

But Obama is tak­ing the con­ver­sa­tion to another level. That doesn’t mean, how­ever, he’s aban­don­ing the issue of acces­si­bil­ity. His admin­is­tra­tion has expanded the avail­abil­ity of Pell grants, sup­ported a tax credit for tuition costs and is attempt­ing to make it eas­ier for some grad­u­ates to pay back loans.

Experts say some of the chal­lenges in higher edu­ca­tion result from too many stu­dents enter­ing the doors with­out basic math and Eng­lish skills. There’s also the ques­tion of how to mea­sure how effec­tive col­leges are and whether tuition increases are appro­pri­ate — espe­cially for pub­lic insti­tu­tions fac­ing dra­matic bud­get cuts.

Rep. Vir­ginia Foxx, R-N.C., the for­mer pres­i­dent of May­land Com­mu­nity Col­lege, said the issues raised by Obama are being addressed at the state and local level, where she said they should be han­dled, and that many schools are com­ing up with inno­v­a­tive ways to cut costs and to find ways to work with local indus­try. As an exam­ple, she recalled devel­op­ing, while a com­mu­nity col­lege pres­i­dent, a course in super­vi­sory train­ing after local indus­try sought it.

“All of these things the pres­i­dent talks about can be done at the local and state level, and are being done at the local and state level,” Foxx said. “It isn’t the role of gov­ern­ment to guar­an­tee some­body a good job after they grad­u­ate from col­lege or com­mu­nity college.”

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., takes a dif­fer­ent view.

“Right now, the infor­ma­tion about the poten­tial of var­i­ous careers, the track records of col­leges and the like is essen­tially strewn all over the coun­try­side,” said Wyden, who authored a bill on mak­ing col­lege costs more transparent.

He added, “I think stu­dents and their par­ents are now say­ing in addi­tion to acces­si­bil­ity, we want to wring the max­i­mum value out of every dol­lar we’re spend­ing on education.”

Posted by AP News on Feb 20 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.