President Obama says high tuition rates are slamming students and their parents.
WASHINGTON -- Warning that many young people are being priced out of college while others are going heavily in debt to afford tuition, President Barack Obama Thursday proposed linking some federal aid to schools that keep costs affordable and maintain solid graduation rates.
He also said states need to reverse the recent trend of reducing allocations to state colleges. In the past five years, state funding for higher education in Louisiana has been cut by nearly $700 million. Seventy percent of funding now comes from tuition and fees.
"The system's current trajectory is not sustainable," Obama said in a speech at the University of Buffalo. "And what that means is state legislatures are going to have to step up. They can't just keep cutting support for public colleges and universities.... Colleges are not going to be able to just keep on increasing tuition year after year, and then passing it on to students and families and taxpayers."
Obama said he wants to set up a rating system for colleges in 2015 that would include graduation rates, the average debt of graduates and percentage of low-income students. Eventually, he said, some federal financial aid would be tied to how well colleges scored in the rating system, though that would require approval of Congress.
In Louisiana, about 322,800 undergraduate students are enrolled in higher education institutions across the state according to the U.S. Department of Education. The average cost of attending a public college or university for students living on campus was $16,469 in Louisiana for the 2011-2012 school year, the department reported.
The Institute for College Access and Success said graduating seniors who borrowed to attend college in Louisiana left school with an average of $22,455 in debt.
Tulane University President Scott Cowen said that he shares many of the president's goals. But he said some of the Education Department's recent college scorecards created assessments that seemed so far removed from reality that Tulane officials couldn't even figure out the source of the data the agency used.
"I think everybody wants to increase accountability and affordability and to enhance the value of a college degree, lower student debt, mitigate tuition increases as much as we can," Cowen said. "I think they are all laudable goals."
But Cowen said "the devil is in the details" in terms of how the evaluation system is developed.
And while Cowen said he shared the president's desire to enhance technology and offer more online courses, for many courses, they can't measure up to the interaction between professor and student in a classroom.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said he hopes to work with Congress to develop an effective evaluation system for colleges.
"We're going to take some time and be really thoughtful on this," Duncan said. "It's not something we're going to do overnight. I'm going to travel the country; the President is going to be out talking to folks. You worry about perverse incentives or doing the wrong thing, so we're going to take our time on it."
Duncan said the key is measuring whether colleges are improving.
"So are graduation rates going up? Are they keeping down costs? Do young people have access to good jobs at the back end?" Duncan said. "And I want to know -- there are some universities that are improving every year, and that's fantastic. There are other places where the costs are going up far higher than the rate of inflation."
Duncan said the issue of raising college costs is a major concern of parents and their children.
"Virtually everywhere I go -- to the dry cleaners, to the grocery store, every airplane I'm on -- I have hardworking, middle-class parents coming up basically pleading for help, asking for help," he said. "And there's a growing sense that college is for the wealthy, for rich folks, and not for hardworking people who are doing the right thing every single day."
Over the last 30 years, college tuition at four-year colleges jumped 250 percent, according to the White House.
"Now, a typical family's income has only gone up 16 percent," Obama said. "So think about that -- tuition has gone up 250 percent; income gone up 16 percent. That's a big gap. "