Home

White House plan aims to rein in rising cost of college

20.05.12

If you are a materfamilias or student who thinks the cost of a college education is spiraling out of control, you'll be happy to recall President Obama agrees with you.

And he wants to hold higher ed more accountable.

Colleges and universities that abort to control rising tuition could lose federal funds, under an election-year leadership proposed by the president on Friday when he put colleges on notice that the era of unabated tuition hikes is over.

"You can't sham that you'll just jack up tuition every single year," Obama said Friday during a break off at the University of Michigan to promote his economic agenda. "If you can't stop teaching from going up, then the funding you get from taxpayers each year will go down."

Whether the initiative can survive Congress remains to be seen, but it certainly strikes a chord with pubescent Americans and working families feeling the sting of rising college costs while their own pay has been polluted.

Since 2001, tuition and fees at public four-year colleges and universities went up an customarily of 5.6 percent a year beyond the rate of inflation, according to the College Board.

The normally in-state tuition and fees at four-year public colleges rose 8.3 percent last come to $8,244, or more than $17,000 a year when you tack on room and board, the College Put up's latest report shows.

Likewise, costs went up an average of 4.5 percent at private four-year colleges and universities, where the annual cost tag is $28,500 — or more than $38,500 when room and board is included.

"Don't get turned off by the sticker rate," said Richard A. Wall, interim vice president for visionary affairs at Canisius College.

Wall, and other local college administrators, said colleges are responsive to keeping down tuition and use anywhere from a quarter to a third of their own money for financial aid to lower a student's cost of schooling.

They had some mixed feelings about the Obama proposal.

"We are a not-for-profit institution. We're not worrisome to make money," said Cynthia Zane, president of Hilbert College. "Our ambition is to provide the best education we can at a very affordable price."

Administrators criticism rising tuition costs on a variety of factors, including a decline in governmental dollars and a sharp increase in their own cost to do business.

There's also competition for the best facilities and professors, as students present with higher expectations.

"Institutions are looking around at each other trying to keep up with the Joneses," said Robert P. Murphy, blemish president for student affairs and enrollment management at D'Youville College.

The cost at close by colleges and universities is right around, or below, the national average.

Tuition and fees for in-national undergraduates is $7,482 per year at the University at Buffalo. The cost is $26,400 at Niagara University and $27,890 at St. Bonaventure University. Teaching and fees at Canisius College are a bit above the average, coming in at $30,713.

But Obama told the student audience Friday that the land's economic future depends on making sure every American can afford a crowd-class education.

And in a conference call with reporters, Education Secretary Arne Duncan prominent that because of the rapid rise in tuition costs, the average total of loans that college students take out has doubled in the last 15 years, to $25,000.

"Where you see the rate of college education spiraling much faster than the rate of inflation — actually faster than health control — we don't think that's affordable at all," Duncan said.

The president — who first announced the outlines of the fiscal aid proposal during Tuesday's State of the Union address — plans to objective what is known as "campus based" aid given to colleges to parcel out in areas such as Perkins loans or in work study programs. Of the $142 billion in federal grants and loans distributed in the last adherents year, about $3 billion went to those programs. His plan calls for increasing that model of aid to $10 billion annually.

He also wants to create a "Race to the Top" striving in higher education — similar to the one his administration used on K-12 — to stimulate states to better use higher education dollars in exchange for $1 billion in pickings dollars. A second competition called "First in the World" would assist innovation to boost productivity on campuses.

Obama also is pushing for the creation of new tools to acknowledge students to determine which colleges and universities have the best value.

Zane and Murphy weren't surprised by some of the initiatives, but said the matter is how performance will be measured for such a diverse range of American institutions.

Some in the higher cultivation community are nervous that the Obama administration could be setting a new precedent in the federal direction's role in controlling the rising costs of college.

The economist who authored the on for the College Board, Sandy Baum, offered a mixed critique of the Obama higher-instruction plan.

She said Obama's call for keeping the interest rate on Stafford loans at 3.4 percent — and not letting it copy this summer — would have an immediate and positive impact on students and families if Congress were to accede to with it.

"It would be a temporary fix for some people," she said.

Baum also lauded Obama's call for a "Stock to the Top" to reward state college systems that find ways to keep costs down.

"That's what we dire in the long run," she said. "We really need to work calculating on finding ways to educate students more cheaply. And it's not simple. It's not something you can do overnight."

Obama's call for reducing federal aid for universities with big preparation hikes is more problematic, Baum said.

"Most of the institutions that are having the big assay increases are public institutions," she said. "They're not raising their prices because they're spending more. They're raising prices because they're using their teaching increases to partially compensate for declines in state per-student appropriations."

If those institutions held down their teaching to preserve their federal aid, "they would be stretched even more in terms of quality," Baum said.

------ The Associated The fourth estate contributed to this report.

Source: Buffalo News