The New Normal. On September 13 WICHE President David Longanecker and three other higher education leaders testified during the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee’s hearing on improving college affordability. The committee, convened to get a better grasp of what’s happening in the states and chaired by Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, also heard from WICHE Commissioner Cam Preus, commissioner of Oregon’s Department of Community Colleges and Workforce Development; Muriel Howard, president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities; and John Morgan, chancellor of the Tennessee Board of Regents.   

Senator Harkin opened the hearing with a few well-chosen facts indicating how dramatically the responsibility for covering college costs has shifted among the three primary “partners”: students and their families, the states, and the federal government. This shift is reflected in the change in state spending on education as a share of the budget: currently, 11.5 percent on average, down from 14 percent 20 years ago. It can also be seen in the lower dollar amount states invest in higher ed as a proportion of personal earnings: an average of $6.12 for every thousand dollars of income now, compared to $8.75 in 1990. Not surprisingly, the burden students and their families carry when it comes to covering college costs has grown heavier: the tuition they pay now contributes 43 percent of overall higher education funding – nearly double what it was in 1986. 

As Harkin pointed out, “This model of shifting costs is neither sustainable nor desirable.” And it has occurred during a time when those costs haven’t just shifted: they’ve also skyrocketed. Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi, a former WICHE commissioner, relayed a comparison between college costs and the price of milk and gas, made at a July Senate Committee on Finance hearing on education by Lynn Munson, president and executive director of the advocacy group Common Core: if milk and gas had risen as fast as college prices since 1980, milk would be $22 a gallon today and gas $13. 

Longanecker, introduced by Colorado Senator Michael Bennett, gave a primer on U.S. initiatives to improve higher education affordability – a history that stretches back to the 1960s – and then discussed three types of policies states are employing to allow more students to afford college. Supply-side interventions, like performance funding and incentive funding, focus on changing institutional behavior; such initiatives are in place in California, Colorado, Oregon, South Dakota, and Washington. Demand-side interventions target student behavior, using financial aid to incentivize them to earn a degree in a timely manner or study economically essential fields; Washington’s new public/private partnership, designed to reward lower- and middle-income students who choose to major in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields, is an example. Yet other interventions combine supply- and demand-side tactics: Oregon’s shared responsibility plan, for instance, is a model for incorporating intentional partnership between students, families, philanthropy, institutions, and state and federal government to make college affordable and students successful. 

While many Western states are making smart use of such interventions, there remains much to do. “The unfinished agenda is for the various partners – students, families, institutions, and state and federal governments – to work more in sync to ensure that their various strategies blend well and assure affordability in a world of limited resources,” Longanecker testified. “The federal government could provide a major impetus for such a partnership if its major student financial assistance programs required a stronger partnership between federal and state governments and institutions. With limited resources at every level of government, it simply makes sense to assure that these partners, along with students and their families, work together as a team to win the higher education affordability game.” For more details, see Longanecker’s full presentation, “State Efforts to Assure Affordability in the New Normal.”

September 2012  | Share this on Twitter | Post this on Facebook