Kevin already has his reactions to last night’s State of the Union up here, but here are a couple of other observations about the parts of the speech with a bearing on higher education.
Help for Borrowers
As expected, President Obama proposed improvements to the income-based repayment program (IBR) that will cap monthly payments at 10 [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'College Costs'
Additional SOTU Thoughts
Deep Libertarian Confusion
Writing for Positive Liberty, libertarian D. A. Ridgely critiques “That Old College Lie,” an article I recently wrote for Democracy arguing that the key to holding down college costs in the long run is to increase transparency in the higher education market. Says Ridgely:
I think Carey has a point regarding the data resulting from various [...]
Why There’s No Such Thing as a Three-Year Free Lunch
The latest Newsweek cover story is titled, “The Three Year Solution: How the Reinvention of Higher Education Benefits Parents, Students, and Schools,” by Senator (and former University of Tennessee president) Lamar Alexander. Like the discussion of three-year bachelor’s degrees generally, the article is at best shallow and at worst deeply confused.
The article begins with the [...]
Bending the Cost Curve in Health Care (and Education)
The Atlantic has a fine piece by David Goldhill this month looking at health care costs. There are numerous parallels between Goldhill’s points on out-of-control health care costs and, mainly higher, education.
First, government efforts to control costs have failed. Goldhill explains that the frequent attention on prices ignores costs. There’s a difference. Prices are something [...]
Only a Sucker Pays Sticker Price
Colleges and universities across the country have been increasingly pursuing a strategy of high-cost, high-financial aid. “Don’t worry about our sticker price!” they argue, “because we’re just extorting the maximum dolllar from families that can pay in order to subsidize families that can’t.” Besides the fact that this is not, in fact, what they’re doing [...]
The Libertarian’s Dilemma, Cont’d
Last week I wrote that the problem of runaway college spending presents libertarians with something of a dilemma, because, “the best way to bend down the long-term higher education cost curve and thus reduce government spending is to increase government regulation in the form of mandatory reporting [of information about institutional performance].”
Unsurprisingly, Neal McCluskey of [...]
Nowhere To Go But Up
Readers who don’t live in the DC metropolitan area may not know that, in addition to numerous national private universities like Georgetown, George Washington, Howard, Catholic, and American, we the perenially disenfranchised residents of the nation’s capital also have jurisdiction over a single public institution, the University of the District of Columbia. Formed some thirty [...]
Wealth Disparities
Kevin writes below about the headline from the report released yesterday by the Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs–that students are paying more for college, but not getting more (and in some cases getting less). But another important finding from the Delta Project’s report is the large and growing wealth disparity between private research universities and [...]
Report: College Students, Professors Getting Raw Deal
Everyone knows that college is getting more expensive, but it’s easy to get lost in the vagueness of that general knowledge and lose track of exactly how expensive, how that rate of change is changing, and (in particular) where all those additional dollars go. Fortunately the good people at the Delta Cost Project have taken [...]
Improving the Higher Ed Market
One of the frustrating thing about working on higher education policy issues is that DC is pretty much a one-issue town: all anyone cares about is costs. From the average politician’s perspective, our higher education system is fantastic with one exception: it costs too much, and costs more every year. This is reflected in the [...]
Nixon Returns
Congress is currently working on a new version of the federal Higher Education Act, and the issue of rising college costs is predictably front-and-center. As Scott Jaschik reports today at InsideHigherEd, politicians on both sides of the aisle seem to like the idea of a federal “watch list” comprised of those colleges and universities that [...]
No Conspiracy To See Here
I went to the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) annual meeting over the weekend, to present a paper on a panel focused on college classification, rankings, and peer grouping. Afterwards I was chatting in the lobby of the Louisville Marriot with a nice fellow who worked for an academic publishing house. We [...]
Student Loans Are Not Financial Aid
A couple of weeks ago, my colleague Erin Dillon wrote a short policy brief about student loan default rates, pointing out that they’re far higher than commonly-reported government statistics indicate, particularly for student of color, students who borrow a lot of money, and students who go into careers that don’t pay very much. As college [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/11/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on the rising costs of education in The Economist.
03/10/10 | Chad Aldeman's False Fronts paper is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on Federal Family Education Loan defaults on The Huffington Post.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on loan origination on the Firedog Lake blog.
03/07/10 | Kevin Carey calls for a Race to the Top in higher education in a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.