CT Blue

Obama is proposing a plan to help students pay for college. What could go wrong?

A draft of the proposal, obtained by The New York Times and likely to cause some consternation among colleges, shows a plan to rate colleges before the 2015 school year based on measures like tuition, graduation rates, debt and earnings of graduates, and the percentage of lower-income students who attend. The ratings would compare colleges against their peer institutions. If the plan can win Congressional approval, the idea is to base federal financial aid to students attending the colleges partly on those rankings.

(via Obama’s Plan Aims to Lower Cost of College – NYTimes.com)

It might be a good idea if, before this sort of thing is proposed, the proposers ask themselves the following question:

How would I subvert this system had I a mind to do so?

Some observations off the top of my head: There will be regulators determining the details of the ranking system and scoring the schools. Like many regulators nowadays they are quite likely to come from the industry they are regulating and will fully intend to return. Nowadays even some purportedly non-profit universities (think NYU) are more interested in the bottom line than education. Enough said on that score. That’s just the first objection that occurs.

I’ve seen some proposals to fix the system lately, and the one that strikes me as the most efficacious and least likely to be open to abuse is quite simple: make attendance at state universities free for anyone who can gain admittance. The estimate of the cost that I saw was $30 billion a year; chickenfeed compared to the size of our economy. This is hardly a radical idea; there was a time when higher ed was free in California and practically free everywhere else. It even went beyond the college level. When I went to UConn law school in-state tuition was, if memory serves, $300.00 per semester. It may have been $600. Either way, a bargain. Now it’s $20,500.00 per year in-state and $42,500.00 out of state. Inflation doesn’t come near to explaining the increase.

Free tuition at public universities would keep down costs at private universities and colleges as well, else the laws of economics have been repealed. It’s basically the equivalent of the public option in health care that Obama dismissed early on in order to enrich the insurance companies, except in the case of education, we know it works, because it worked until the states withdrew money from their university systems, which essentially destroyed the public option in university education.

It is widely acknowledged that a college degree is a prerequisite for almost any job in the national economy, except maybe flipping burgers. There was a time when a high school degree would suffice, and, at least until recently, it was universally accepted that everyone was entitled to a free high school education. We should pat ourselves on the back for the fact that we have now developed an economy that demands even more education, and fork over the pittance required to provide that education. Simple solutions are often the best.

But, you might say, it’s highly unlikely that the Republican Congress would agree to this very obvious and salutary solution to this national problem. That is absolutely true, just as it is true that the Republican Congress will never pass Obama’s proposal, for the simple reason that it is Obama’s proposal. At this point the most Obama can hope to do is shape the debate, and the approach he’s taken is one that casts the debate in what, until recently, would have been considered a Republican mold. If the president were to advocate for free college, the idea would be validated, it would have to be discussed, and it’s obviously quite attractive for debt saddled students and their parents. It might not happen now, but it might just happen later. If the idea is never broached, it will never happen. Conservatives have gotten their way by playing the long game, and it’s time for us to take the same approach.