Washington Monthly - September/October 2021 - 21

Progressives also need to take higher education funding
justice seriously. The present distribution of public dollars reflects
deep structural racism. As a rule, the more students of
color are enrolled in a college, the less money it receives from
all sources. Six states are under Department of Justice supervision
because of systemic discrimination against historically
Black colleges and universities, including chronic underfunding.
In addition to generous, targeted tuition affordability and
loan forgiveness policies, progressives should make the underlying
structural inequality of higher education a major priority.
Biden says he has a proposal for this. To some extent, he
does. The American Families Plan, first introduced in April
2021 and now making its way through Congress, would make
community college free as part of the biggest new federal
investment in higher education in a generation. Biden's focus
on community colleges makes sense; these are the institutions
that have been historically underfunded, and where
most of the students in greatest need enroll. Key members
of Congress have proposed doubling the Pell Grant, which
would direct tens of billions of new dollars to low- and middleincome
undergraduates. Biden has called for an additional
$62 billion to help students not just enroll in college, but
also graduate. Regulators in the Department of Education
are working to reverse Betsy DeVos's permissive treatment
of for-profit schools.
Yet for all its expense and ambition, the Biden plan leaves
too much of the existing inequitable and unregulated system
in place. For decades, states have had free rein to pull money
out of public colleges and universities and replace it with
federally guaranteed student loans. State funding schemes
that give minority-serving institutions less money are treated
as regrettable but immovable historical legacies, not policy
choices that can be unmade. There's a real danger that a wave
of new federal money would be diverted from its intended recipients
through budgetary shell games and political favoritism.
We need much stronger federal laws and regulation of
state spending and tuition policy to prevent this. (One alternative
is giving a standard federal subsidy to any college, twoor
four-year, public or private nonprofit, that agrees to make
tuition free.)
Colleges also need to be accountable for helping students
prepare for careers. Democrats have spent the past decade
struggling to regulate the for-profit college industry, and with
good reason. But most job-focused programs are in public and
nonprofit colleges, and nobody is even trying to hold them
similarly accountable. A recent Third Way report found more
than 500 accredited colleges where low-income students make
less money than the average high school graduate 10 years after
they initially enrolled. Fifty-seven percent were for-profit
colleges, reflecting consistent poor outcomes in that sector.
But most of the rest were public colleges and universities.
The Department of Education now publishes programlevel
earnings information, so students can, in theory, avoid
schools that do little more than take their borrowed money
and hand them a worthless diploma or certificate in exchange.
But there is no evidence that we can improve higher education
quality through a pure consumer-information-based approach.
Students and parents believe the promise implicit in
being granted government loans to attend a governmentapproved
school-that the government is paying attention
to higher education quality. The government should really do
that, and only lend students money to attend programs that
help them pay their loans back. This policy should also be applied
to the lucrative graduate school sector, particularly the
wholly unregulated market for master's degrees, which are intensely
financed by loans and heavily marketed as the gateway
to high-paying careers. The more new federal money flows
into the system, the higher the consumer protection guardrails
need to be.
These policies aren't a substitute for bringing tuition
prices down and ameliorating the student debt crisis. Instead,
they're the second half of the equation-college needs to be
both affordable and good. The amount of new money currently
being proposed for higher learning is historic. It would be
an enormous missed opportunity to spend that much and do
little to change the underlying structures that keep too many
students down.
Thankfully, there are models that states and communities
can adopt. A growing number of programs have proved
to be very effective in helping economically and academically
at-risk students earn degrees. The City University of New
York's ASAP initiative, for example, offers full-time community
college students free tuition, transportation, books, and advisers,
among other wraparound supports, Participants have
three-year graduation rates that are more than double their
non-ASAP peers.
Yet these models have not been quickly or widely adopted.
In part that's because the colleges that serve those students
are strapped for money. But it's also because the current
model of funding and regulating colleges provides no incentives
to do so. Colleges are paid for enrolling students, not educating
or graduating them. Students who enroll in national
service programs are more likely to graduate (see Paul Glastris,
" Free College if You Serve, " page 22)-but service, too, is
often a minor priority for status-obsessed schools.
Would an " affordable and good " strategy that combines
tuition and debt relief with funding fairness and accountability
totally overhaul the prestige dynamics underlying different
professions? No, it would not. White-collar managers will
continue to have higher status than mechanics. Social class
goes deep. What it would do is put different parts of the education
and labor markets on more equal footings. It would
treat people fairly who help our society prosper in different
ways. It would help higher education live up to the promise
that it makes more often than it keeps: to be a place that
opens up opportunity for everyone, regardless of where they
come from or where they decide to go.
Kevin Carey used his Not a Job Major to become a manager in Washington,
D.C.
Washington Monthly 21
Washington Monthly - September/October 2021

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