See Thru Edu is a project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation
Thomas K. Lindsay, Ph.D., Editor in Chief and Director, Center for Higher Education, Texas Public Policy Foundation
Enrollment was dropping at the same time as federal and private grant aid was increasing and high school graduation rates were rising — two trends that higher education advocates hoped would boost college access for poor youth.
Absent the current, de facto federal lending monopoly, private lenders and students would have strong incentives to work together – both would stand to profit from a partnership. Having government supply aid, in contrast, largely invites rent-seeking, overconsumption, and rampant price inflation.
Subsidy rates tend to be highest at colleges where ticket sales and other revenue are the lowest — meaning that students who have the least interest in their college’s sports teams are often required to pay the most to support them.
The erosion of support for traditional higher education will accelerate trends already at work. Here are the most important ones.
Hopefully, in one place that people can spend about ten minutes reading, we have captured both what Washington has done in higher education, and has done to higher education.
Free tuition is one of those ideas that sounds good on the surface and makes a great sound bite, but fails to hold up upon closer inspection. Affordability is a must, how we get there matters as well.
Today, for-profits are still high on the blame list, but accreditors seem to be rising to meet them.
“The existing accrediting agencies aren’t being hard enough on the schools…They’re the ones that are supposed to sign off on the quality of the institutions. Clearly too many subpar ones are slipping through the cracks.”
Expecting accreditation to prevent students from wasting government grant and loan money on college programs that have minimal value was a blunder. We shouldn’t rely more on accreditation, I suggest that we no longer rely on it at all.
From a policy perspective, the biggest, most billowy red flag is that Rubio does not even mention eliminating, or at least substantially reducing, federal student aid. Heck, it appears he might expand it. But federal student aid is absolutely the primary problem in higher ed!
