New Study Says Legislators Trying to Control Rising College Costs Should Go Back to the Drawing Board
Reducing the cost of college to make it affordable for the masses has been a major platform for Congress in recent years, especially with those costs skyrocketing and far outpacing both inflation and increases in federal student financial aid. George Washington University, for example, has announced that its 2008 tuition will be $39,000—almost a $4,000 hike over its 2004 tuition rate—with total cost of attendance exceeding $50,000 annually, as reported in a recent Inside Higher Ed article by Doug Lederman (“Dubious Approach to Cost Containment,” July 19, 2007). In order to regulate soaring college costs like these, legislators have proposed a series of bills that would “in one way or another, punish colleges that raise their prices at more than twice the rate of inflation.” In introducing cost-control legislation last winter, Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon (D-Calif.) made it clear that affordability is not just an issue of federal aid: “With the federal investment in college student aid reaching record levels each and every year, the fact that costs continue to rise should make it clear that money alone is not the solution to the college cost crisis,” McKeon is quoted as saying in Lederman’s article. “Colleges and universities themselves must be held accountable for their role in increasing tuition and fees year in and year out.”
Sanctions Do Not Work
The challenge here is that the ways legislators have chosen to try to deal with the college cost containment issue may not be very effective, according to a recently released study. In this study, researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison “analyzed how public and private, non-religious four-year colleges and universities would have been affected by a system that imposed sanctions on institutions that raised their tuition by more than twice the rate of inflation over a three-year period, based on their tuition rates from 2004 to 2006.”
The study found that higher costing private institutions would be far less likely to be penalized by such sanctions than their lower tuition public counterparts, with 36 percent of public universities subject to penalties, versus 23 percent of private colleges. In essence, those colleges with the highest tuition rates would be least affected by current government sanctions, so there’s little to curtail the most outrageous rates that are already in place and still rising.
Proposed Senate and House Bills Seem an Ineffective Solution
While the proposed legislation is also aimed at “making more information available to the public about how colleges spend their money and how much they charge to students,” the sanctions the bills would ultimately rely on to help curb surges in tuition and other college costs, appear that they will do little, if anything, to actually contain these costs across the board. As Lederman points out, quoting Jocelyn L. Milner, director of the academic planning and analysis office at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and a co-author of the Madison study, “Sanctioning institutions based on the rate of increase doesn’t really get at the question of whether institutions’ tuitions are too high. If we want to make sure families have information about affordability, and we’re interested in cost containment, then this approach seems like a distraction.”
I’m encouraged that our politicians are at least looking for answers to the problem of rising tuition costs, even if we’re not quite yet on the right path. Perhaps solutions may come more readily at the state level, through other legislated means and incentives.
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Student Loan Girl