Public schools in Oregon closed three weeks early this year and the Michigan legislature may allow that state's school systems to operate four days a week. Across the land, the "budget crunch" is hitting education hard.
To mitigate the impact on primary-secondary schooling, some states are whacking their higher education budgets, reducing the subsidy to public universities and raising tuitions, thus transferring more of the cost to students, families, and providers of financial aid.
Meanwhile, the largest single such aid provider, Uncle Sam, is beginning the laborious process of reauthorizing the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA). At a May 13 hearing, House education committee chairman John Boehner cautioned colleges (and, implicitly, states) not to assume "that they can raise their prices until they are able to pay for what they need, and then rely on the federal government to step in and provide enough funding for every student to attend."
In fact, however, a strong case can be made for boosting public-college tuitions to reflect the true cost of attendance, then aiding students who need help with those fees. That rearrangement would level the higher education playing field between state colleges and private campuses. It would also concentrate public subsidies on those who need them rather than using the tax dollars of Detroit cab drivers to subsidize the children of Grosse Pointe stockbrokers enrolled in the University of Michigan. From the standpoint of both market efficiency and progressivity, that would be a good way to steer our policies.
Perhaps the cash crunch will cause some such steering to happen, but not because its wisdom has been widely accepted. Rather, it will occur in spite of outraged protests by higher education leaders who have made low tuition a sacred principle, the easier to fill some 15 million student slots on their campuses year after year.
It's common knowledge that, outside a few hundred selective schools, many of those slots get filled by any available warm body, regardless of academic prowess or preparation, that can muster the price of admission. So long as the price stays low, enormous numbers of people are available to enroll - even more so in a tight job market. Whether they will complete college is a matter best not investigated, nor is the question of what they'll learn after they matriculate. Those are things their institutions don't want to know too much about - and that they fiercely resist being probed by outsiders. They cite academic freedom and institutional differences as reasons why postsecondary education should not be held to account for its results in anything like the way K-12 education is in the era of No Child Left Behind. They fight all forms of external audit and assessment - a battle now raging in Florida, where the lay Board of Governors that oversees eleven state universities is considering a new higher-ed accountability system and campus presidents are having a hemorrhage.
It's barely possible that the forthcoming HEA reauthorization will take some action on this front. (A tiny step was taken last time around when ed schools were required to report their pass rates on state teacher exams.) Perhaps stirred by their own boldness in the name of K-12 accountability while wrestling with NCLB, a few members of Congress are murmuring about pressing for new forms of higher-ed accountability, too. Despite predictable apoplexy at One Dupont Circle, where college lobbyists hang out, astute observers of that sector know there's a problem. As Charles Miller, chairman of the University of Texas regents, said at the recent House hearing, "We don't know what's being taught and what's being learned." He went so far as to say that Congress might legitimately require colleges to provide a "data set" about their performance and acknowledged that better measures of student learning are needed, particularly for freshmen and sophomores. (My long-standing suggestion is to re-administer 12th grade NAEP exams to students at the end of their sophomore year to see whether they know any more than at the end of high school.)
Underlying all this is a painful truth: American education is so expensive in large measure because we pay for it twice. We send kids to high school to pick up the knowledge and skills they ought to have learned in elementary school. We send them to college to acquire a decent secondary education. And if we really need someone with a "higher" education, we're apt to look for people with postgraduate degrees.
How incredibly more efficient and economical it would be to get it right the first time - to expect people to have a proper elementary education by the conclusion of 8th grade, a serious secondary education by the end of 12th, and a bona fide college education by the time they collect their sheepskins.
In such a world - dream on, you say - fewer people would feel compelled to attend college because fewer employers would require college degrees, knowing that a high school diploma signified a full measure of knowledge, skills, and work habits. And if fewer people went to college, education wouldn't cost society as much, even though everyone would wind up knowing as much as (or more than) they do today. Better still, the savings might be used to improve teaching, invest in new technologies, make pre-school universal, and other education desiderata that we can't today afford because so many billions are needed for each level of the system to backfill what the previous level ought to have done.
Hold on to that thought as you observe the widening protests against high-stakes tests for high school exit - and the test-failure rates that trigger such protests. If K-12 education did it right the first time, many more young people would pass those tests. That they haven't yet passed (and in many states the passing score isn't very high) means someone needs to pay yet again to put them through the education process another time. How much better it would be for them - and the taxpayer - if they only had to do it once.
"Committee leaders launch effort to ensure accountability and quality in U.S. higher education," press release of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, May 13, 2003
