Higher education: Focus on rising tuition ignores true college barriers

A central premise of President Barack Obama's plan for keeping college affordable is misdirected. The cost of tuition is not the primary impediment to college enrollment.
 
Feb. 27, 2012 - PRLog -- Reprinted from The Oregonian
Opinion Column by Jeffrey A. Summers
LINFIELD COLLEGE

While Oregon college students protest tuition increases, President Barack Obama is on the campaign trail heralding his plan for keeping college affordable. A central premise of the plan is that college enrollment can be increased by limiting increases in college tuition. A focus on tuition is misplaced. It is not the primary impediment to college enrollment. The emphasis should be placed instead on elevating our educational expectations for primary and secondary school students and simplifying the federal government's college financial aid process.

If tuition was the major impediment to college enrollment, we would not expect to see college tuition and enrollment rates rising robustly together, but that is exactly what we do see. Between 1997 and 2007, tuition charges nationally rose by 94 percent at public four-year colleges and by 22 percent at private, nonprofit four-year colleges. Yet over the same period, college enrollment increased by 38 percent, from 14.8 million to 20.4 million. This same pattern of tuition increases and rising enrollment has been observed in Oregon's public and private colleges.

The reason that tuition and enrollment rates are rising together is that tuition is being pulled up by an increasing demand for a college education. In other words, rising tuition is the result of rising enrollment, not an impediment to it. Enrollment is rising because a college education has proved to be an excellent long-term investment. A Brookings Institution study estimated that the average economic return to a bachelor's degree -- measured as the difference between the income premium accruing to a college education and its cost -- is 15 percent. What other investment offers that kind of economic return?

What are the true impediments to college enrollment? One likely culprit is the low educational expectations for primary and secondary education students. Recent articles in The Oregonian have chronicled the high absentee rates and low high school graduation rates in many of Oregon's public school systems. If students aren't going to school and aren't graduating, they will never strive for a college education, regardless of what that education costs.

The second culprit is the complexity of the federal government's college financial aid process. A Department of Education study found that this complexity limits students' abilities to access aid, especially for students from lower-income households. To rectify this, Robert Archibald and David Feldman -- in their excellent book "Why Does College Cost So Much?" -- advocate simplifying the aid process by turning government financial aid into an entitlement with a known economic value for all students.

This expensive but profound change would have two positive effects. First, it would signal the high value that society places on educational achievement, thereby helping to counteract the low educational expectations for today's primary and secondary education students. Second, it would enhance everyone's understanding about how much government financial aid is available and how much college really costs. Both changes would do more to increase college graduation rates than will a misplaced emphasis on tuition control.


Jeffrey A. Summers is an economics professor at Linfield College in Oregon.

www.linfield.edu

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