At a meeting with college leaders this week, President Barack Obama was looking for ideas. Amid record budget deficits, can Washington actually do anything to help make American colleges less expensive and more productive?
Those related challenges are front and center for everyone from Occupy protesters to business leaders concerned about American competitiveness. And expert opinion on what Obama—or any president—can do about the problem varies, from very little to quite a lot.
Where you stand depends on where you think the cause lies—with inexorable economic forces that make it virtually inevitable college costs will rise faster than inflation, or with inefficiencies and shortcomings in higher education itself that government policy could help correct.
The administration does have one model of which it’s proud. That’s the $4.3 billion “Race to the Top” fund for K-12 education reform, which used a relatively small slice of stimulus dollars as a prize to nudge dozens of states competing for it into reforms like expanding charter schools and developing common standards. The structure also helped at least dilute, though not avoid, criticism that Washington was stepping on the states’ toes.
Could something comparable be in the works to push reform in higher education? Race to the Top started in 2009, when the administration was looking for smart ways to spend stimulus dollars. These days, new spending is out of the question.
Still, the federal government spent $50 billion in grants to college students last year and more than $100 billion in loans, not to mention the billions more in aid to states and research. That adds up to a lot of carrots. Participants in the White House meeting on Monday said there’s clear interest in better leveraging that money to encourage reforms at the state and institutional level—reforms like performance funding, giving students incentives to stay tightly on their academic track without taking extra courses, and redesigning the giant introductory classes where students often get lost and never recover.
“We put on the table the notion of having some sort of program, maybe modeled on Race to The Top, where could there be some incentive provided that states could compete for if they were willing to make certain policy changes,” said William “Brit” Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland. Other ideas discussed included ways to make sure financial aid is allocated to the neediest students, to encourage states not to cut higher education funding, and to encourage experiments already under way in many states, such as handing out government aid dollars as students meet benchmarks toward graduation, not just once they enroll.
