A bill is making its way through the legislature in Trenton. On October 8 it was advanced out of the Assembly Higher Education Committee. The bill would make permanent the Community College Opportunity Grant (CCOG) program that has been piloted since the spring of 2019. The bill’s sponsors say that rising costs have put college out of reach for many students. They argue that the CCOG “closes the gap for middle and low-income students.”
The grant is known as a last-dollar grant, meaning that students must have already applied for all appropriate state and federal grants they may be eligible for. The CCOG then provides the remaining funds to cover tuition and approved fees. The sponsors say that the program has already proven itself a success. Their purpose with this bill is to take the pilot program and “enshrine it into state law so it may benefit future generations.”
The program falls under the rubric of a larger goal that has gained momentum in some circles, to make public higher education free by transforming it into a fully publicly supported endeavor. It is an idea that has percolated through the Democratic Party since Senator Bernie Sanders called for free college and the canceling of student debt in 2015.
A simplified version of the argument goes something like this. College is essential in modern America. It is the “ticket” to a middle-class life. Rising costs have put higher education beyond the reach of many low-income students. It has also saddled tens of millions of students with an accumulated $1.5 trillion dollars in debt from student loans. The country needs a college educated workforce to keep us competitive with other post-industrial economies. The solution is to increase the public obligation for education from K-12 to K-14 or even K-16.
Aside from what this might do to our richly diverse and world-envied system of private colleges and universities, the concept fails the most basic of tests. It does not address the problem it purports to solve. Programs like the CCOG do nothing to address the rising costs of higher education, they merely shift the burden of who pays those costs.
We have been warned repeatedly about the unintended consequences of putting more public funds at risk. We just don’t want to listen.
In 1987 Secretary of Education William Bennett took to the opinion pages of the New York Times to argue that increases in financial aid are met by increases in tuition, shifting the benefits of the new aid from the student to the higher education institutions. He hypothesized that more aid does nothing to increase college affordability.
Bennett was a conservative politician serving in the Reagan Administration and many on the left dismissed his arguments.
A less easily dismissed source for the argument of unintended consequences came from a staff report from the New York Federal Reserve. The analysis in that report showed that the average tuition and fee increase associated with an expansion of student financial aid is $0.65 on the dollar. The vast majority of the expanded aid went onto the coffers of the institutions in the form of higher prices.
The slippery slope of free college, begun here with attempts to make community colleges free to those with incomes below proscribed levels, could potentially result in the same steady increases in higher education spending, and by extension prices.
The problem of higher education costs, and by association affordability, will not be solved by avoiding the key issue, the cost structure of modern higher education. Ballooning service costs, larger administrative staffs, funds going into the competition for enrollments rather than actual instruction, all lead to growth in spending and prices.
Adding more public funds to meet these rising costs also ignores long-standing problems that have not been resolved even with regular tuition increases.
We have major problems of college readiness with evidence that around 60% of students entering community colleges are faced with remediation. Even in four-year, more selective environments, national figures show 37% of entering students taking an average of 2 remedial courses.
The Community College Research Center at Teacher’s College Columbia University did a study that showed ACCUPLACER, the most commonly used test for placing students entering community colleges, “severely misplaces 33% of entering community college students,” both by placing some in remediation who did not need it and by passing students on to college level credit courses who are truly unprepared.
We know from other studies that vocational certificates are associated with higher earnings in the workplace, but we undermine the attractiveness of such programs, vocalizing loudly about the need for a traditional college education. The largest major in state community colleges is “general studies,” hardly addressing skills valuable in the workplace.
Community colleges are seen as the affordable pathway to a four-year degree. Another CCRC study showed that 81% of students who enter a community college articulate a desire for a four-year degree. Yet only 33% of entering students successfully transfer to a four-year institution. Of those, 42% complete a bachelor’s degree in 6 years. The math works out to 14% of entering students achieving the four-year degree they aspired to.
Many problems need fixing and a strategy to accomplish this must be far more sophisticated than providing more public money for tuition.
We know little about the success rate of the pilot CCOG program. The argument has been made solely on the basis of access not outcomes. We know that the program has increased enrollments at community colleges that have been experiencing enrollment declines. That is a success for the institution, not a guarantee of success for the student.
The idea that we decry the out of control spending and price increases in higher education and then address the issue by adding more public money to the mix is not intuitively a good one.
We need a public discussion on the future of our tiered system of higher education, its intimate relationship to secondary education and the crucial role it should play in ensuring that employers have access to a strong, local and appropriately trained workforce.
State officials should not be so ready to hand over additional public funds until we know exactly what it is we are buying.
