Just a quick note on the White House proposal for changes in federal aid policy tied to college tuition and “value”: apparently the devil is going to be in even finer details. The primary concern I have is about the phrasing of changed student aid formulas in the following:
Setting responsible tuition policy, offering relatively lower net tuition prices and/or restraining tuition growth.
Good: this is focused at the state level, where the cost-shifting from public funding to student payments affects the most students of low and moderate means.
Possibly bad:
- “Tuition growth” can lead to perverse outcomes if measured by proportional growth rather than dollar figures. Students and their families pay tuition in dollars, so that’s how it should be measured, or a community college that raises its tuition from $1000 for a full load in a year to $1050 will be measured as far worse than a private college that raises its tuition from $40,000 to $41,200. By percentage, that’s a 5% increase compared to 3%, but if you tell me that hiking tuition $50 is worse than hiking it $1,200, you’re nuts.
- Tuition is only a part of mandatory student costs, and mandatory cost is the relevant target. The average cost of books cannot be included at first (collecting the data on that would be extremely problematic), but it’s common at community colleges for a large text to cost more than tuition. At my institution, most first-year students have to live on campus. Our annual tuition and fees for a full load are under $6000; room and board is at least 50% more than that, the last time I checked.
I have no idea whether the White House or USDOE is thinking about these issues, but they will determine whether the “responsible tuition policy” will be meaningful to student lives.
What about at the institutional level?
Any more pressure in this direction will lead to even more abuses, cutting corners, hiring unqualified part-timers, etc., don’t you think? It’s straight forward Weberian analysis.