Continua el debate en los EEUU a proposito de las medidas propuestas por el presidente Obama para controlar la espiral de costos de en las universidades de los EEUU.
College Officials Welcome Obama’s Focus on Higher-Education Costs, but Raise Some Concerns
By Goldie Blumenstyk, The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2012
Ann Arbor, Mich.
President Obama chose a spiffy new indoor football field at the University of Michigan here on Friday to kick off a broad campaign for college affordability, calling higher education “an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.”
Blending the personal with the political—and playfully responding to shouts of support from the audience—Mr. Obama made clear that the college-cost themes in this 35-minute speech would set the tone for a continuing national discussion that will be central not only in his administration’s coming budget fight with Congress but also as he campaigns around the country for re-election.
With a message that prompted cheers and praise here—but already critiques from other college and political leaders around the country, including one president who called it “political theater at its worst”—Mr. Obama challenged states to spend more on higher education, describing cuts by Michigan and 39 other states as “the largest factor in tuition increases over at public colleges over the past decade.”
He urged students to pressure Congress to keep the interest rate on federal student loans from doubling in July. “That would not be good for you,” he noted with exaggerated directness, drawing laughs and applause from the crowd of more than 3,000, most of whom had camped out for hours in the cold a day earlier to get tickets.
And he warned that colleges themselves need to do more to cut costs and not assume they can “just jack up tuition every single year.” Government “can’t just keep on subsidizing skyrocketing tuition,” said Mr. Obama.
“We should push colleges to do better,” said Mr. Obama, as he briefly touched on forthcoming proposals to overhaul the way billions of dollars in federal aid to colleges and students is awarded. “We should hold them accountable if they don’t.”
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who accompanied the president here and spent time with reporters and local television stations before the speech, said the public sees higher education as unaffordable, and “that’s simply unacceptable.”
That anxiety was clearly reflected in the crowd that made its way through the dark and slushy streets to hear what the president had to say on Friday. “I have a daughter coming here next fall, and I want to know how we’re going to afford it,” said Annie Hiltner, an Ann Arbor resident waiting as the line of students and other locals filed past metal detectors.
Inside, as rock music from Bruce Springsteen and U2 played through the speakers, interrupted now and then by the live blasts of the Fight Song by Michigan pep band, Danielle Wiliams, a sophomore from Eastern Michigan University, said college costs and student-loan debt loom large for her and most of her friends. A reporter for the student paper at Eastern Michigan, Ms. Williams said many of her classmates aren’t Obama supporters but they appreciate his push to keep higher education affordable. “It’s too important to worry about political divisions because it’s our future,” she said.
Beth Dobias, an Ann Arbor resident who lives here “because it’s cool” and works at the university, said she was glad to hear Mr. Obama talk about creating more opportunities for people who need retraining. “My uncle’s in that boat right now,” she said. he was an engineer at Chrysler but is now learning welding.
In the budget President Obama will release next month, the administration will ask Congress to change the criteria under which funds from three federal aid programs known as “campus-based aid” are awarded. (The government has more say over the allocation of money to those programs, which are used primarily by public and nonprofit colleges, than it does for larger student-aid programs such as Pell grants and the primary student-loan program.)
Details on the new formula are still being refined, but a document released by the White House on Friday said it would reward institutions that admit and graduate a relatively higher proportion of low-income students, demonstrate that their students complete college and find employment, and set “responsible tuition” policies.
“It’s not just about access, it’s about completion,” said Mr. Duncan, emphasizing the formula would recognize affordability and “net tuition” when calculating aid awards to colleges. “If they are providing great financial aid and they serve more Pell students,” that’s good, he said.
Mixed Reactions
Mary Sue Coleman, the university’s president, said the plan shows that the administration understands “the complexity” of issues, including the role of states and the need for universities to curtail costs. “I’m so happy that he’s brought this to a national conversation,” said Ms. Coleman. She watched the speech alongside students from her campus and several nearby institutions, standing behind Mr. Obama beneath a banner with the slogan he introduced during his State of the Union speech, “An America Built to Last.”
Her enthusiasm was not universally held.
While many higher-education leaders said they were grateful for the president’s attention, they were wary of many specifics: The American Council on Education’s Molly Corbett Broad raised concern that proposed changes to the aid formula would “move decision-making in higher education from college campuses to Washington, D.C.”
The American Association of Community Colleges said a change to the formula would be welcome but worried about the “extraordinary difficulty” of developing measures of student outcomes in way that was fair to community colleges.
The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, the largest private-college group, said the answer to the affordability problem “is not going to come from more federal controls on colleges or states.” The association’s president, David L. Warren, also criticized the idea of “telling families to judge the value of an education by the amount young graduates earn in the first few years after they graduate,” one of the same arguments raised by the for-profit college industry over a controversial new regulation introduced last year, the gainful-employment rule.
Sterner attacks came from some university presidents, including the University of Washington’s Michael K. Young, who invoked Jeremy Bentham’s famous “nonesense on stilts” invective in decrying the ideas as political theater, according to the Associated Press.
Peter Mc Pherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, however, said the ideas deserve a try, assuming the right metrics could be designed. “It’s important to focus on value and quality,” he said. He’d like to see Mr. Obama take the idea further, extending the criteria even to other major aid programs, which promote access to college. “We think it’s time to move to access plus completion” he said.
Along with changes to the formula for distributing campus-based aid, the administration will ask Congress to authorize a big increase in Perkins Loans, to $8-million from the current level of $1-billion—money that would eventually be repaid to the federal treasury.
Secretary Duncan said the administration also recognizes that state budgets are squeezed but that states have a responsibility to commit more money to higher education, too. “Budgets are not just numbers,” he said. “Budgets reflect our values.”
To encourage states to develop systemic programs to improve affordability and higher rates of college completion, the administration is also proposing a new $1-billion higher-education competition, modeled after a the Race to the Top competition it offered to states for public-school reforms.
On a much smaller scale, the administration will propose a separate $55-million competition for public and private colleges, and nonprofit organizations for new strategies that get more students to attend college and improve teaching and learning. Mr. Duncan said Mr. Obama has seen “some amazing leadership” on cost containment from the presidents he met with recently at the White House, and others, including here at Michigan. “We want to make that the norm rather than the exception.”
Cost cutting is nothing new to officials here. Michigan now ranks 39th in state support for higher education, down from 10th a decade ago. At this institution, a fact sheet the university provided to reporters at the speech said state support fell from $359-million to $268-million, with state money now covering only about 17 percent of the general budget. The university has also been cutting millions from its budget with energy savings and new approaches to health-insurance.
Yet even as this campus represents the challenges of promoting access in the face of state cuts, Ms. Coleman says those actions are no substitute for public investment. “Can we cut ourselves to excellence? No,” she said, minutes after Mr. Obama had departed. But she said she thinks Mr. Obama understands that. “He’s being nuanced. He understands it’s not one size fits all.”
Like many big research universities, Michigan continues to add programs and facilities that add to costs—like the newly opened Flume Room in the handsomely renovated eco-friendly Dana Hall, where scientists can model the water flows of the Huron River, and at the law school, where students want international experiences. That’s “not fluff,” said the dean, Evan H. Caminker, reflecting on the cost condundrum as he grabbed a snack at the Michigan Union cafe Friday afternoon. “That’s not a climbing wall.”
(University officials were quick to note that the three-year-old, $26-million Al Glick Fieldhouse where Mr. Obama spoke on Friday—part of what allows the university to claim “more indoor practice space than any college or professional football team in the world”—was financed with funds from athletics budgets, as are the facility’s operating costs.)
The dean, speaking from the same building where John F. Kennedy proposed the creation of the Peace Corps in October 1960, said he believed the president’s decision to make a major speech here about college costs could be a significant milestone, even if the partisanship and gridlock in Washington keep the ideas from getting through Congress.
Presidents, he noted, can have a great capacity to shape public opinion, as Mr. Obama did with the auto-industry bailout. “He went out there and sold an idea,” said Mr. Caminker.

Aid Experts and Officials Question President’s College-Affordability Plans
By Beckie Supiano, The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2012
So far, the outlines of the college-affordability proposals first mentioned in President Obama’s State of the Union address last week have raised as many questions as they have answered.
“We still don’t have all the details, right?” said Cynthia A. Littlefield, director of federal relations at the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. “The devil’s in the details.”
That sentiment was repeated by a number of college administrators and financial-aid experts, many of whom expressed surprise about at least some aspects of the plan.
The president’s proposals, which would expand campus-based federal aid and link it to college affordability, create a “Race to the Top” program for higher education, and require colleges to disclose more consumer information, were outlined in his speech on Friday at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and in a news release from the White House.
College officials and student-aid experts were particularly curious to learn more about the proposal to tie campus-based aid—a small fraction of federal aid spending, which is dominated by Stafford Student Loans and the Pell Grant program—to tuition policy, value, and the enrollment and graduation of low-income students. The idea that some federal student aid would be based on holding down net tuition and/or tuition growth could be particularly troubling for public colleges, which have been increasing their price tags to help make up for cuts in state appropriations.
“I question whether there’s an understanding of why tuition goes up at public universities,” said Shirley A. Ort, associate provost and director of scholarships and student aid at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The link between tuition and state support is often lost on the public, she said.
Public universities have a responsibility to educate students who can’t afford to go elsewhere, said Sarah Bauder, assistant vice president for enrollment services and student financial aid at the University of Maryland at College Park, but that is hardly their only charge. Ms. Bauder’s university can only cut costs so far without limiting its ability to help fight Maryland’s brain drain, she said.
The campus-based aid programs—Federal Work-Study, Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, and Perkins Loans—are distributed to colleges based on a formula that favors original participants in the programs. It’s hardly a great system, said Sandy Baum, an independent higher-education-policy analyst who also blogs for The Chronicle.
Still, linking these programs to college affordability could be problematic, especially for public colleges and their students. Ultimately, a student could miss out on those federal financial-aid programs because she had the misfortune to live and attend college in a state where the higher-education system is raising prices to make up for budget cuts.
The amount of money at stake—the president’s plan suggests putting a total of $10-billion into campus-based aid annually—is not enough to change states’ budget priorities, Ms. Baum said.
Mark Kantrowitz, a student-aid expert who publishes the Web sites FinAid and Fastweb, agrees. This kind of incentive could have an influence, he said, “but there may be some colleges who have no choice but to opt out of it.” As public colleges try to patch up their budgets, extra aid in these programs pales in comparison with what they could bring in by increasing tuition.
Another proposal focused on reining in costs would create a $55-million pot of money to support individual colleges and nonprofit groups in efforts to improve productivity on campuses. That idea surprised Kathy Kurz, partner in Scannell & Kurz, a consulting firm specializing in enrollment management. “I find it very hard to believe colleges aren’t already working very hard on that,” she said.
The president’s plan also includes several proposals for bolstering specific aid programs. It suggests holding the interest rate on subsidized Stafford loans—scheduled to return to 6.8 percent this summer—to 3.4 percent. The plan also calls for doubling, over five years, the number of Work-Study jobs available, and making the American Opportunity Tax Credit, which gives a tax credit for some of the cost of tuition, permanent, among other expansions in aid.
Reactions to those proposals are mixed.
Ms. Ort said that holding down the interest rate would help borrowers repay their loans at a time when “the future just doesn’t look quite as bright right now for a lot of our graduates.”
Mr. Kantrowitz, on the other hand, said keeping the interest rate low would have little effect on the administration’s broader goals: “Nobody goes to college because they got a 3.4-percent interest rate,” he said, and “no one graduates from college because they got a 3.4-percent interest rate.”
Holding the interest rate down would be wonderful, said Diane Lambert Fleming, associate director of the office of scholarships and financial aid at Central Michigan University. The problem, she said, is that the interest rate typically helps pay for the Pell Grant program, and if push comes to shove, preserving Pell Grants is more important than reducing the cost of student borrowing. President Obama’s plan mentions increasing the maximum Pell Grant to $5,635, but the program, often seen as the highest financial-aid priority, has been increasingly expensive and difficult to pay for.
Ms. Ort also likes the idea of expanding Work-Study. “We see a real uptick in the number of students who want Work-Study jobs,” she said. Participating in the program not only helps students pay for college, she said, but can also boost their résumés and give them an edge in the job market later.
Work-Study is generally seen as a program in which everyone wins, said Ms. Kurz. Research shows working on campus can even help with student retention, she said. “That, in my mind, is one of the most important things that’s been proposed.”
But Ms. Baum disagreed. Doubling Work-Study jobs “sounds like a big thing, but it’s not,” she said. There isn’t enough evidence to show if the Work-Study program actually increases job opportunities for students, she said—and ultimately, the federal money subsidizes colleges, not students themselves.
Despite all the uncertainty about how the president’s proposals could play out, Ms. Ort found some encouragement in the way college was discussed in the State of the Union address. It was nice, she said, to hear higher education referred to as something worth investing in, not just as an expenditure.