by James A. Bacon
Give President Obama a modicum of credit: He finally recognizes that there’s more to increasing the affordability of higher education than shoveling tens of billions of federal scholarships and loans at students. Someone also has to constrain the increasing tuitions. Yesterday, the president warned colleges and universities to cut costs or risk losing some of their federal aid.
Schools can’t just “jack up tuition every single year” and simply expect people to pay it, Obama said. “If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers every year will go down.”
It’s not clear from the wire story I’m quoting from whether or not Obama understands there is a direct causal effect between the stupendous increases in federally backed loans he advocates and the high tuition rate he dercies. Regardless, his warning to college presidents reflects a welcome change in thinking.
College and university officials are in an absolute tizzy, reports USA Today. On the one hand, I can’t blame them. The federal government excercises so much power in the higher-ed marketplace, that any reduction in access to federal money could prove devastating. On the other hand, I have zero sympathy. The higher ed lobby made its bed — now it’s time to sleep in it. Live by the subsidy, die by the subsidy.
In the meantime, a new study raises important issues about college persistence and graduation rates. In a National Bureau of Economic Research paper, “Gains and Gaps: Changing Inequality in U.S. College Entry and Completion,” Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski find that the gap in the rate at which upper- and lower-income Americans entered college increased significantly between 1979-82 and 1997-2000 and also the rate at which they graduated. What’s particularly interesting about the findings is that almost the entire increase in the college gap can be attributed to the outstanding performance of female students in the top income quartile.
Write the authors:
Sex differences in educational attainment, which were small or nonexistent thirty years ago, are now substantial, with women outpacing men in every income group. The female advantage in educational attainment is largest in the top quartile of the income distribution. These findings present a formidable challenge to standard explanations for rising inequality in educational attainment. Girls and boys are raised in the same families, attend the same elementary and secondary schools, and face the same college prices.
Also:
Differences in high school completion between children from low-income families and those from high-income families explain half of the gap in college entry. However, among those who enter college, children from low-income families are much less likely to get a degree. Inequality in college persistence, therefore, produces inequality in college completion, even if college-entry rates were equal (which they are not).
Bottom line: There are ill-understood cultural forces at work affecting the rate at which Americans enter and complete college. College financing programs that blindly shovel out money “so anyone who wants to go to college can” aren’t doing a lot of them any favors. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are borrowing vast sums in the expectation of completing their degrees and earning more in the job market, but end up dropping out. Thus, they get the debt but not the credential. Insofar as poor kids and minorities are less likely to graduate, they are more likely to be saddled with a financial burden that will dog them decades.
Obama has finally awakened to the impact of his easy-credit policies on the price of tuitions. Perhaps one day he’ll understand the impact on the poor and minorities.
