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The administration of federal student aid is a highly complex and bureaucratic job thanks to a great deal of program complexity and regulation. Financial aid offices are often overwhelmed with the tasks involved in that administrative process, with staff finding that little time for anything else remains at the end of the day. Unfortunately, simply following the rules and norms associated with financial aid administration is demonstrably insufficient when it comes to meeting the needs of today's students.  With a far greater number of students entering higher education without the support of college-educated parents, and facing more significant financial constraints (and higher college costs), an effective financial aid office must do more than distribute financial aid and apply rules and regulations.  To ensure that the aid dollars are spent in a cost-effective manner, aid offices must also be part of a cross-campus effort focused on student retention . Everyone who works on ...

Since when did an effort to ensure that students receive a high-quality affordable education in exchange for their financial aid become unconstitutional micromanagement of colleges and universities ? This is where the rubber hits the road, folks. Where the needs of a particularly elite form of academia comes into conflict with the average student's right to an affordable public education. And apparently it's about to get ugly.  Don't believe the hype. President Obama is not attacking faculty, he is not seeking to destroy public colleges and universities which are the workhorses of higher education, and for pete's sake he is not proposing a pseudo-NCLB for higher education. The President's main goal is simple:  After decades of hoping that students could hold institutions of higher education and states responsible for providing a high-quality, affordable college experience that leads to degrees, he's calling the nation's attention to the fact that the market...

Ben Castleman and Bridget Long of Harvard University just issued a terrific new paper on the impacts of a Florida need-based grant distributed to students across the state.  Using a rigorous regression-discontinuity design, the authors make several contributions to the study of the impacts of financial aid by tacking a couple of of tough questions: Does need-based aid promote college completion? Who benefits most from need-based aid? Is it the highest-achievers to whom merit aid is often targeted? They find that YES, need-based aid (without any performance criteria) produces strong and statistically significant impacts on credits earned and degree completion.  Specifically the authors find that $1,000 more of grant eligibility increased the probability of staying continuously enrolled through the spring semester of students' freshman year by 3.3 percentage points, increased the cumulative number of credits students completed after four years by 2.3 credits, and increased the...

Just a few years ago, we the people of UW-Madison were hearing quite a bit about the flagship university of another state -- the University of Virginia.  Our Chancellor at the time, Biddy Martin, is from Virginia, and lauded UVA's efforts to gain autonomy from the state while also increasing affordability through its "Access UVA" program. I vehemently and repeatedly disagreed with Martin's assessment of UVA and its "successes" at the time, but to little avail.  She managed to convince most of the university that a semi-divorce from the state would allow for financial flexibilities that would help to make college more affordable. While some of her plans were thwarted by the rest of Wisconsin, she got the vote of the Faculty Senate and to this day, many students and faculty speak of her efforts as if they made UW-Madison more affordable. In point of fact, they did not, and today even the poster child she commended-- UVA-- fell to pieces. Access UVA will no lo...

I often receive email from students who've learned of my interest in the contemporary college experience and want to provide a window into their own.  Recently I heard from a man who initially enrolled at UW-Madison in 2007 and subsequently took an educational pathway that is increasingly normal.  His efforts to find ways to learn new things and make college affordable are notable, and he challenges us to think about the ways in which traditional forms of higher education align with today's students.  With his permission I'm sharing a letter he wrote, and at his request, I am identifying the author.  The following essay is by James Kasombo, who will be re-entering Madison this fall.  ' Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability .'             Upon graduating from high school in the top five percent of my class, being ushered into the university's honors program, and finding a who...

Today's Journal Sentinel has an excellent chart illustrating how the challenge of paying for college in Wisconsin has changed over time The only problem is that neither the chart or the accompanying article addresses the likely assumption of many readers : students who can't pay these costs, even by working, are "held harmless" through financial aid.  For that reason, many say, we should simply raise tuition further and invest that additional revenue in financial aid distributed to the neediest students. To evaluate that claim, let's take a look at the "net price" of attending UW-Madison and UW-comprehensives-- the cost paid by the poorest students after taking into account all grant/scholarship aid provided to offset the sticket price.   At UW-Madison, for the upcoming year 2013-2014, that amount is $13,635.00 for Pell recipients with no expected family contribution.   As you can see in the chart above, that means students from families typically earn...

Once in awhile people ask me how I can continue to call myself an education optimist when the "new normal" is so grim.  They ask, "why do you continue tilting at windmills instead of being pragmatic and accepting the situation?" The answer is simple: acceptance is unnecessary and defeat is not an option.  I challenge the status quo for the sake of students. Today, I want to say Take that, windmill! The University of Wisconsin System just ceded to the demands of students across the State and agreed to cap a tuition increase at no more than 2% for the coming year and eliminate the waiting list for the Wisconsin Higher Education Grant.  This is a stunning reversal, as President Kevin Reilly had been lobbying against students, insisting that no cap was necessary. What happened?  Well, as I have long insisted, the issue is not entirely about a lack of state funding being provided to higher education but how administrators are spending   it.   When the ...

It is long past time to make college free, and thankfully the Atlantic writer Jordan Weissman just laid out the case very nicel y. Jordan points out that the money invested in our financial aid system could instead be invested in appropriations to public colleges and universities to drive down costs.  Yes, aid to private colleges would end. Oh well!  Why do we pay for private colleges when we don't pay for private high schools? (Well, we are starting too but we should stop.)  And yes, we need to cover costs of attendance for the poorest students too and we can do that by charging very low tuition to rich kids to give to poor kids (for whom tuition is free)-- and that's a progressive tuition structure rather than this incredibly deceptive price discounting scheme we now have in place. As I've been pointing out in talks around the country on the subject "When America Goes to College ," our current system of affordability was developed at a time when the college-goin...

Step 1:  Build an enormous and expansive set of opportunities for higher education and tell everyone that a college education is necessary for economic and social security in America-- but refrain from working towards public consensus on providing a free higher education for all. Step 2: Create the illusion of access with a program of financial aid distribution that isn't backed with a real entitlement program tied to college costs. Step 3: Do nothing to stem the behavior of bad actors and those who encourage them. Allow colleges and universities to raise prices and engage in rankings wars based on flawed metrics that distort the market.  Fail to require states to maintain their effort to ensuring affordability.  Allow, even encourage, private business to step into the gaps. Step 4: Allow the value of need-based aid to decline while redirecting aid towards politically popular programs benefitting the non-needy. Step 5: Refrain from fundamental reforms addressing the core ...

The Faculty Senate at UW-Madison is a very quiet place.  We meet monthly for about two hours and while the agenda is packed, hardly anyone asks questions or makes impassioned speeches (present company excluded, of course). But on one issue, you can count on professors to speak up: athletics. More specifically, the money paid to coaches and staff on campus invokes more vehemence and animosity from my colleagues than any other issue I've seen brought to the forefront. I suspect the same is true at other schools.  For it's fairly uniformly the case that salaries in athletics are far higher than those in academics and rise much, much faster. But of course, you might say. And how silly, Sara, to doubt that this is not only a good thing, but a smart thing!  For as we all know, athletics brings money and needed attention to universities, generates revenue that benefits the entire institution, and more than pays for itself. In fact, people who care about financial aid ought to b...

Cross-posted from the original over at the Chronicle of Higher Education.  “There’s no such thing as free money,” Joanne, a middle-aged African-American mother of two sitting across the table from me declared. “But for me, getting this college degree depends on whether I have enough money to afford it.” Solving the problem of college affordability lies at the heart of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s $3.3 million Reimagining Aid Delivery & Design project, which has spurred a series of reports covered weekly in the news this year. While the reports run the gamut of possible suggestions, from tying aid to students’ academic backgrounds to replacing the Pell Grant with a federal-state matching grant, they all have a similar refrain: Whatever the solution, it must be cheaper—it simply isn’t possible to request any additional spending. Similarly, when I visit Washington policy makers and talk about the needs of the Pell Grant recipients I’ve been studying for th...

The field of financial aid research is rapidly growing and expanding, which is a really good thing since the reliability and validity of evidence on effects pales in comparison to the magnitude of the national investment in aid.  Policymakers shoot me emails almost daily, asking "how can this be?" Well, it's expensive  and difficult  to rigorously examine the impacts of expensive, complicated programs. Financial support for aid research is often difficult to come by; seemingly because at least to some foundations and other funders, "we know it all" about aid already and need to move on. Expert researchers like Sue Dynarski and Judith Scott-Clayton know better than this, and bother to continue studying financial aid and write comprehensive reviews of existing studies on the topic for the rest of us.  I've relied on Dynarski's work continuously since my career began, and continue to be amazed at her ability to conduct incisive, beautifully executed work ye...

A recent survey conducted by Inside Higher Ed may provide some insights into the sorting mechanism that today's version of higher education is known for.   How does higher education perpetuate inequality?  Let's take a look at the admissions practices of our most accessible, affordable, bachelor's-degree granting institutions-- America's public universities. Admissions officers at public universities reported: Distributing at least some financial aid as a reward, rather than focusing their limited budgets on helping the neediest students afford college. Fully 31% (nearly as many as the private universities) said they are increasing their effort to distribute such "merit" aid, which studies have shown flows disproportionately to advantaged students whose propensities to graduate college are already very high.  There's very little return on investment for such spending and yet 44% of these folks said merit aid was a "good use" of institutional re...