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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...

Let me tell you, it's an incredible experience to chair a university committee for multiple years, work very hard to serve at the request of your university, produce a thoughtful report with that committee, and then have the Provost of your institution attack it in the media without ever bothering to even speak with you about it. Welcome to UW-Madison and the passive-aggressive machinations of Provost Paul DeLuca. UW-Madison has serious problems when it comes to state relations and this Provost has a lot to do with that.  Time and again he has treated the Wisconsin public, its reporters, and its legislators as if they aren't smart enough to merit straight talk about hard issues.  Instead he smirks, waves his hands, and says he doesn't know what all the fuss is about. He dismisses any critique of the university as uninformed, offers "explanations" without any factual basis, and looks away when anyone asks a hard question. I've witnessed this time and again ove...

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 ...

This morning, I testified before the United State's Senate HELP committee on the topic of college affordability. My written testimony can be found here .  The text of my oral testimony follows, and I have added a q&a to respond to several questions I expect to receive.  I welcome your feedback. TESTIMONY Good morning, Chairman Harkin, Senator Alexander, and Members of the Committee. Thank you all for this opportunity. There’s never been a more important time to address the issue of college affordability.  College is now the main road to a stable, secure life, and in this age of global knowledge markets, it is college-educated workers who will be the main driver of the U.S.’s prosperity. But the research evidence is clear:  most families and students find the high cost of college attendance unbearable, and it’s affecting their choices about whether to attend college, where to go, and even whether or not to finish the degrees and certificates they start. As access ...

It seems UW-Madison's system of shared governance may be a new act for Chancellor Rebecca Blank to learn.   An interview conducted with journalists today shows her on the record weighing in on both tuition strategies and the composition of the student body . A word to the wise:  This year the University Committee charged two committees to work on these exact issues.  The tuition committee has been meeting and working hard all year long -- hiking out-of-state tuition and differentiating tuition further by school or college are strategies that come with significant potential consequences.   Reciprocity with Minnesota is costing the university a great deal of money and ending it should not be dismissed out of hand .  Regardless, these are not choices made simply by the chancellor, but by the shared governance system.  In addition, the Committee on Undergraduate Recruitment, Admissions, and Financial Aid was tasked with developing a profile of the ideal freshma...

As expected, the UW Regents moved forward Friday, approving the proposal from the UW-Madison Administration to raise the cap on out-of-state enrollment even though it hadn't been vetted through proper shared governance channels.  The cap was moved from 25% to 27.5%, rather than to 30% as requested. In typical style, everyone involved acted like this represented the wise, informed choice arrived at through careful decision-making. Of course, we have real choices given the "new normal," a context so normalized at this point that the vast majority of our campus intellectuals can't even see that "normal" is a political agenda. But as I constantly work to help my students understand, there is always  a choice. And the lack of careful thought being paid by the state and its universities to this particular choice could easily come at the expense of Wisconsin residents. Sure, there are other options.  Let's consider the range of possibilities. Assumptions 1. Unl...

Yet another policy brief highlights what realists know:   Wisconsin policymakers are presiding over poor policy decisions that threaten to undermine taxpayers' decades-long investment in the state's human capital. Far from saving our children from lifetimes of debt, those on the neoliberal Left and the conservative Right advocating for either "freeing" state universities from the limitations of state funding in pursuit of market models, or diminishing state spending in a time of austerity, are accomplishing the same goal:  driving up the costs of college attendance and reducing the overall educational attainment of our state's workers. Forty years ago our grandparents elected officials who invested $14 per $1000 of personal income in higher education.  Today, we elect jokers who put in just $5.  What happened? Figure courtesy of Tom Mortenson, Postsecondary Education Opportunity Let's admit it: we aren't leaders anymore, we're laggards. Yes, Wisconsin ...

The following is a guest post by Bob Samuels , President of the University Council - AFT and a lecturer at UCLA. It is cross-posted from his blog , where you should go to find all of the original hyperlinks. I highly recommend also reading his November entry in the Huffington Post on why public higher education should be free . The UC Regents meeting had a little of everything this week: UCR students came up with a new way to fund the university, a long list of new salary increases was released, UCSF asked to quit the system, a retired professor was fired, protesters disrupted the meeting, Regents met behind closed doors, and police attacked protesters who were using books as shields. What does it all mean? Perhaps, it all adds up to the demise of the modern Western social contract. Without being too dramatic, we are seeing an attempt to resist the destruction of the central institutions of modernity: the university, the public commons, and the welfare state. Although it was once take...

Hot off the presses, recent news that has me scratching my head, or otherwise up in arms... (1) Raising tuition in expensive cities in the midst of an economic crisis. Yep, that's what CUNY thinks is the right thing to do. Hat tip to Tom Hilliard, who pointed me to this incredible inane comment from a CUNY administrator: "What's really driving some of the issues here is the concern about debt and debt upon graduation, and our students as a whole take out little debt, for obvious reasons. The tuition's affordable for those who can pay." Um, yeah. (2) The White House wades into the quagmire of university admissions, promoting creative thinking on how to achieve diversity . In one sense, just in time, since it sure looks like the Supreme Court is going to end the use of race in admissions by June. On the other hand, I wish the Administration would issue some cautions about how criteria like first-generation status and high school attended are hardly clean prox...

Central to debates over the New Badger Partnership is the question of whether additional flexibilities that make it possible to raise tuition are desirable. Evidence can and must be used to make these decisions. A robust, evidence-based debate on our campus is obviously needed but to date has not occurred. Instead, to many of us outside Bascom it seems as though administrators have mostly relied on the input of a few economists and some other folks who work in higher education but are not scholars of higher education. It also seems like seeking advice from those mostly likely to agree with you. (Please--correct me if I'm wrong--very happy to be corrected with evidence on this point.) It would be wonderful to see a more thorough review of existing evidence and the development of an evaluation plan that will assess positive and negative impacts of any new policy in ways that allow for the identification of policy effects-- not correlations. (Let's be clear: comparing enrollme...

Once upon a time, college students could pay their tuition with a mix of family support, financial aid, and perhaps a little work. Today, family support and aid are woefully inadequate for a broad swath of undergraduates, and full-time work is common. Is working while in college truly necessary? Are the earnings used for academic expenses related to postsecondary education, or are they frittered away on life's pleasures? Since a handful of studies indicate a negative association between working long hours and rates of degree completion, these questions have taken on broader significance. Unfortunately, few studies track students' income and expenditures in systematic ways. To better understand spending patterns, and attempt to tease out the reasons for those patterns, one would ideally have longitudinal data collected for a large sample of students, and complemented by in-depth interviews with a sub-sample of students to delve more deeply into the reasons underlying decisio...