In the cold, dark months after the election, when higher education leaders knew something bad was coming, but not yet exactly what, they referred to the year-old congressional hearings the way people name infamous terrorist attacks: the month, the day, and no further explanation necessary. On December 5 (2023), three Ivy Plus presidents walked into a congressional hearing to answer questions about anti-Semitism, protest, and free speech. Only one walked out with her job intact. The long tradition of bipartisan deference to elite higher education authority had been shattered. The pieces are still crackling and crumbling today. 

It wasn’t a complete surprise. Ron DeSantis’s plan for rising above national political rivals had involved a combination of suspiciously engineered cowboy boots and the remaking of a defenseless public liberal arts college in his image. Did this do anything to make college more effective, or affordable? Of course not. The point, as always, was projecting strength as dominance through transgression. While DeSantis lost the presidential primary to the Sith Lord of the form, he taught other Republicans that government deference to public university independence was just one more eminently breakable norm. 

This came as a new generation of right-wing leaders were doing the one thing that all elected politicians—regardless of talent, temperament, and ideology—tend to be good at: noticing who votes for them, and who doesn’t. The electorate was reorganizing itself around higher education, creating a deep well of working-class people without college degrees ready to cross over to the MAGA tribe. The Biden administration’s wildly expensive student loan forgiveness agenda, which was smart in some ways and not in others, made college feel less like bi-partisan economic opportunity for all and more like a fat payoff to a key Democratic voting bloc. 

After Trump’s reelection, the Hill staffers and think tank dudes had a look in their eyes. The debt relief gravy train was over. All the DEI nonsense was through. The elite colleges and universities needed to be punished. Sure, that’s where most of them went to college themselves—all the more reason! They remembered the condescension, the superiority, that time they weren’t invited to the … er, that is, the arrogance! It was time to bring higher education to heel. 

Which fit right into the emerging authoritarian revolutionary Gramsci-as-explained-by-ChatGPT wing of the movement full of guys like Chris Rufo, who turned the parlor trick of announcing his devious plans on Twitter ahead of time into roughly 17 deferential profiles in The New York Times, where he explained that, since a full great replacement strategy of converting the liberal academy into a conservative indoctrination machine was logistically impossible, the best alternative was to “adjust the formula of finances from the federal government to the universities in a way that puts them in an existential terror.”

“Adjust the formula” turned out to be a genteel way of describing the Trump administration’s campaign of all-out warfare against what were until five minutes ago considered to be irreplaceable jewels in the tarnished crown of American global leadership, our world-class research universities. 

The National Endowment for the Humanities has been gutted. The administration has proudly announced billions of dollars in cuts to research on energy, health, defense, agriculture, and more. Despite an obsession with trade deficits, the move to cut off the flow of international students would decimate one of America’s most successful export industries, costing colleges in blue states and red billions more. The Republican-passed budget reconciliation bill killed the federal Grad PLUS loan program, eliminating a major source of revenue for students getting advanced degrees. 

As for “existential terror,” there is simply no precedent in American history for the way Trump has turned the full force of the federal government against elite universities. The parallels with Trump man crush Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine strategy are striking: a surprise despite months of clear warning signs only because people couldn’t bring themselves to believe anyone could be so evil; an utter disregard for the law; a bumbling overconfidence that instantly turned to outrage at the first signs of resistance; a decent long-term chance of success nonetheless because there’s no power like the executive leadership of a nuclear state enabled by a servile legislative branch; and massive damage to infrastructure and human potential that will be felt for decades to come. 

Trump’s minions come in different flavors. Some, like OMB Director Russell Vought, brought insider savvy to the mission of tearing down the federal government and starving children in other countries to death. The administration’s early move to illegally cut the overhead costs on federal research grants bespoke Vought-like cunning. Normal people don’t know that “overhead” includes building and maintaining the laboratory the research is conducted in. Others clearly benefited from the most powerful affirmative action preference in American society: appointing fantastically unqualified people to positions of government power based solely on their MAGA bona fides. This, presumably, is what led to the administration forcing a high-stakes legal confrontation with Harvard by accidentally hitting “send” on the wrong email. 

In the early days of Trump’s war on the academy, higher education leaders like Wesleyan University president Michael Roth distinguished themselves by standing up and denouncing the administration’s actions as authoritarian, anti-democratic, and un-American. As the months went by and one outrage piled upon the next, the list of brave college presidents was … still mostly just Michael Roth, as many leaders chose the path of least resistance, to tyranny. In normal times, colleges compete with one another for students, faculty, grants, and prestige. They’re not practiced in solidarity and collective action. 

The exceptions, like Princeton president Chris Eisgruber, were generally long established in their roles. Universities run by some combination of an interim leader and a board of directors have fared much worse. Public university boards are often filled with politically connected donors and loyal alumni, while private boards favor hedge fund wealth. A good president knows how to balance the core scholarly values of the faculty with the tendency of board members to lean toward safety, money, and political power. A university being run behind the scenes right now by Bob, Class of ’98, who founded a successful tech firm and likes to tailgate, is in serious trouble. 

Columbia University, which is on a second acting president after its last permanent leader resigned barely a year into the job in 2024, has been desperately trying to wave the white flag to the White House, which responded to each of the university’s various innovations in surrendering with even more punishments and demands. Trump’s message to higher learning is “Submit, or we will ruin you—but we’re going to ruin you regardless.” As if to prove the point, in late July, Brown and Columbia agreed to pay the Trump administration hundreds of millions of dollars in fines while also submitting to unprecedented White House control over their admissions, hiring, and academic practices. After giving in, university leaders insisted that they had preserved their dignity and independence, which is like believing that the gangster who just made you sign a business deal with a gun pointed at your head will definitely act legally and in good faith the next time around. 

The massive cuts to university-based research are example number 10 kazillion that material self-interest is a spent force in politics. Everything is culture war now. Billions of dollars in science funding are in jeopardy at research universities in red states, surely resulting in losses of jobs and billions in long-term economic activity. Yet too many of their leaders are silent and their politicians are complicit, or enthusiastic. The University of Virginia has long been one of the nation’s great public universities. Then Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin appointed a Trump-friendly university board. Now UVA is a place where presidents are subjected to ritual humiliation for the crime of trying to make a historically elitist institution a little better at serving students of color, in living memory of massive resistance to racial integration. 

Trump’s assault on college increasingly looks like his long-term vision for America in microcosm: dissidents black-bagged by masked government agents; critical government funding bled dry; values like racial justice and religious tolerance perverted and weaponized on behalf of a white, “Christian” power structure; public institutions degraded and diminished except for their capacity to impose ideological control. 

Much mainstream commentary has conceded that, yes, Trump’s actions are blatantly illegal and, granted, will destroy American research supremacy that took a century to build, but, also, didn’t higher education have it coming? Because of the, you know, woke DEI, and so forth? 

Look. The Washington Monthly bows to no one in arguing that higher education is in need of serious reform. Almost every article we’ve published in 20 years of college guides makes the case that some part of the system is falling short. The whole point of our college rankings is to shift attention away from the wealthy, prestigious, exclusive universities that suck up all the oxygen in the mainstream media and often fall short of their obligations to the public good—the very same universities that Trump is going after now. Campus speech is a complicated issue, and not everyone has gotten it right. The professoriate is definitely more liberal than society at large, and serious people have tried to figure out why. 

But the idea that Trump’s jihad against the academy is somehow the natural downstream result of shifting public opinion against radicalized higher education is simply incorrect. The typical college experience involves taking a marketing class taught by an underpaid adjunct with completely normal political views, not being subject to Marxist indoctrination. Colleges remain among the most trusted institutions in a time when trust is in short supply. 

More importantly, a basic responsibility of being an adult human being is seeing the distinction between “things people say on social media that really get my goat” and “things that actually matter to real people in the real world.” It’s understanding that “we should make this better” is the opposite of “we should blow this to smithereens.” Very often, the enemy of your enemy is not your friend. He’s a terrible person you should not associate with or support in any way. 

Trump’s war on American higher education is an attempt to destroy a great and good system of higher learning and replace it with a smaller, weaker set of institutions that offer little more than low-cost job training and state-sponsored propaganda. There are no silver linings here, no painful but necessary corrections, no opportunities for something newer and better to rise from the ashes. There are just ashes, piling up by the day.

The post Higher Education: What Trump Hath Wrought appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This article is from a cover package of essays entitled Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself. Find the full series here.

In late 2023, then candidate Donald Trump released a series of internet videos outlining his agenda for education. Mixed into his typical stew of bald-faced lies and racial denialism, alongside plans to abolish the U.S. Department of Education and privatize public schools, was something that, coming from Trump, should be cause for genuine surprise: a sensible policy idea. 

Trump proposed creating a new, free, online university called the American Academy, which would offer high-quality courses in an array of subjects ranging from ancient history to accounting to training in the skilled trades. The American Academy would accept transfer credits from other colleges and universities and offer the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree, increasing access to higher education and creating new price competition in the college market to help tamp down rising tuition prices and spiraling student debt.

Information technology really does hold the potential to make college more affordable and accessible—so much so that I devoted a whole book to the subject in 2015. As I wrote for CNN that year, George Washington himself called for creating a “National University” in his final annual address to Congress. He even left money to build it in his last will and testament. Technology creates the opportunity to realize Washington’s dream at a national scale.

We shouldn’t have much faith that the onetime proprietor of the fraudulent Trump University will do a good job getting this new university built, if he builds it at all. But the idea is a step toward solving the crisis of affordability and access that plagues higher education—a problem that Democrats have been unable to systematically address. President Joe Biden spent most of his four years in office focused on lifting the burden of student debt, a worthy goal but only a treatment of symptoms, not the underlying problem. 

Many undergraduates, particularly first-generation and academically underprepared students, need the personal touch that brick-and-mortar colleges provide. They also need that education to be affordable and of high quality, a promise on which our dysfunctional and inequitable system often doesn’t deliver. Today, top-tier colleges are swimming in money while the lesser-known institutions most students attend are starved for funds. Credits often don’t transfer, good teaching isn’t rewarded, and students are recruited with deceptive prices that often leave them with unmanageable debt. 

What’s needed, in short, is transformational reform. In the summer of 2020, I proposed such a plan in these pages—a plan that would rework the federal government’s financing of higher education from top to bottom. Key aspects of it were reflected in the Biden administration’s proposal to make community college free. But that same summer, other forces were at work, and would turn the administration’s focus in a different direction. 

Over the past decade, college affordability has moved to the forefront of the Democratic domestic policy agenda, mostly through the combination of expansive “free college” and mass student loan forgiveness policies championed by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other members of the progressive left. When Biden won the Democratic nomination in 2020, he consolidated party support by signing on to a version of the loan forgiveness plan. He also included a robust free community college plan in his “Build Back Better” agenda, along with expanded child care, family leave, and much else. Unfortunately, only half of that platform survived. 

Thanks to changing economic circumstances and the whims of a couple of centrist Democrats in the Senate, Biden was forced to abandon the community college plan. Instead of addressing the root causes of unaffordable tuition and high debt, Biden was left to try fixing the problem after the fact by using a 2003 federal law that gives broad authority to “waive or modify” student loan provisions in a time of national emergency, which the COVID-19 pandemic definitely was. Biden’s plan was to forgive $10,000 from nearly all federal loans, and $20,000 for loans held by low-income students. But the Supreme Court abandoned its textualist pretenses and struck down the program based on the “major questions doctrine,” an alleged legal principle that the Court’s six-member Republican majority made up out of whole cloth the year before. 

This is where things started going off the rails.

The Supreme Court has dealt a series of major blows to progressive causes in the past five years, on issues including abortion, affirmative action, environmental protection, and more. Activists have responded in a variety of ways, including grassroots organizing, political action, and calls to reform and expand the Court. 

What they haven’t done is send the same exact issues right back to the same six justices who just a minute ago created damaging legal precedent that could rule American law for decades to come. But this is what happened with student loans—the Biden administration doubled and tripled down, devoting its energy to a cause it knew was headed nowhere in hopes voters would see and reward the effort.

On cue, the Department of Education dared the federal courts to stop them by vastly expanding the generosity of an existing student loan forgiveness program, and then used the federal rulemaking process to conjure up a bunch of new ones out of thin air—even though, in its decision, the Supreme Court explicitly told the department it has no authority to do so. Even the SAVE loan forgiveness plan, which the Education Department based on existing statutory authority, was blocked by Republican state attorneys general filing lawsuits with federal judges eager to implement the Court’s radical new anti-regulatory doctrines.

By this point, it was more and more difficult for borrowers to understand how to pay back their loans, or which among the alphabet soup of forgiveness programs were real, tied up in court, or might never be implemented at all—especially since this was all happening at the same time that the pandemic pause on loan payments was winding down in its own complicated way. 

Yet this was the moment when the administration decided to release yet another forgiveness program, one that was more legally tenuous and logically indefensible than any that had come before. The new regulations were conveniently released just two weeks before this year’s presidential election, and were designed to forgive the student loans of anyone experiencing financial “hardship.” To determine whether someone qualifies, the Department of Education would predict ahead of time who is likely to someday default on their loan, based on 17 different factors, one of which is whether people are making regular payments on the debt. In other words, if you don’t want to pay your loan back, all you have to do is not pay your loan back. 

This is a kind of Alice in Wonderland version of loan policy. A private bank evaluates an application and doesn’t lend to people it thinks will default, or charges them a higher interest rate. The Education Department proposed a system where everyone gets a loan, no questions asked, at the same interest rate, and then the people who it thinks might default don’t have to pay their loans back at all. It would create huge incentives for people to make their credit worse. 

Because this system was apparently not weird and complicated enough, the department also proposed that borrowers whose loans are not automatically pre-forgiven could also receive a “holistic” review of their hardship, based on “circumstances.” How the department would manage to spend hundreds of millions of dollars it doesn’t have to hire vast legions of currently nonexistent “holistic” evaluators was left wholly unexplained. 

The hardship regulations are truly a descent into public policy madness. They represent the final logical collapse of a loan forgiveness movement that began with good intentions but wandered step by step into an ever-more-confusing thicket of policy ideas that amount to making higher education affordable by allowing colleges to charge whatever they want, loaning students vast amounts of taxpayer money to pay those prices, and then forgiving the loans in the most diabolically complicated way possible. The Trump administration is going to do the next Democratic president a favor by ripping out the hardship regulations, root and branch. The party should take the opportunity to return to sane ideas that address the underlying causes of college unaffordability. 

Trump’s American Academy is a good idea if done well. Democrats should support the plan if it’s implemented in good faith, but oppose anything that hints of propagandizing or for-profit exploitation. And even the best possible version of a national online university is no substitute for doing a much better job of supporting and regulating the public universities we already have. 

The bones of a better system are in the Biden free community college plan. As I argued in the Monthly four years ago, the plan should be expanded to include four-year public and private universities that have a mission of providing access to large numbers of first-generation and Pell Grant–eligible students. All of these institutions would be given the option of receiving direct federal subsidies in exchange for adopting a simple, transparent price schedule that charges zero tuition for low-to-moderate-income families and modest tuition to everyone else. The policy that many public universities used to have, in other words, before losing their way.

Colleges and universities that voluntarily choose to join this network would agree to meet basic standards of ensuring that students are able to succeed in their careers. They would also accept the credits of other institutions in the network, so students would be able to transfer or attend multiple institutions without wasting valuable money and time. If the federal subsidy were large enough—say, $10,000 per student—most of the participating institutions would have enough money to meet the tuition requirements and invest in raising faculty salaries, reducing class sizes, hiring more tenured professors, improving buildings and equipment, and providing students with the academic and social support services they need. 

This plan is sweeping, but it’s not entirely new. American higher education worked like this back in the 1960s and ’70s, before some states began cutting funding and many public universities chose to hike tuition in pursuit of prestige. Reworking the system would restore the promise of that era, where working- and middle-class Americans could attend state or regional college and receive a quality education at low cost. Those kinds of institutions would likely see increased funding under this program, but not at the expense of elite schools, which could simply choose not to participate. Harvard would remain Harvard, a hotbed of research, innovation, and ruling-class acculturation. Meanwhile, we would rebuild the pathway to opportunity whose state of disrepair has bred such resentment among the voters without a college education who supported Trump. 

Even in a time when political party identification is increasingly tied to college diplomas, reports of declining confidence in higher education are greatly exaggerated. Americans of all political stripes continue to place a high value on affordable colleges. Democrats need to learn from their student loan forgiveness misadventure and return to policies that work.

The post Free College for the Working Class appeared first on Washington Monthly.

A year ago, the nation was tantalizingly close to making college tuition-free for millions of students. The Biden administration’s ambitious domestic policy agenda included a free community college plan that bore a more-than-passing resemblance to ideas first proposed right here in the Washington Monthly. America’s fragmented and increasingly unaffordable higher education system would finally offer a zero-price public option to all. 

Sadly, it was not to be. Fifty Republicans and two Democrats in the U.S. Senate decided to stand athwart progress and reject the opportunity to improve child care, education, paid leave, and much more. The community college plan was among the first items to be jettisoned, in no small part because the wealthy private universities that dominate the D.C. higher education lobby conspicuously failed to endorse it, while also conducting a behind-the-scenes whisper campaign in Congress letting influential members know they’d be happy to see it fail. 

Not coincidentally, many of those legislative assassins routinely top the college rankings published annually by a last-century former newsmagazine that shall remain unnamed. When your status depends on rejecting as many applicants as possible while sitting on an enormous pile of money that accumulates earnings nearly tax-free, you tend to look down on efforts to redirect attention and public funding toward colleges that enroll and teach all kinds of people at a reasonable price. 

The resulting harm has been enormous, particularly as community college students struggle to reengage with their course work in the wake of devastating pandemic disruptions. As Jodie Kirshner writes in this issue (“The Memphis Post-COVID Community College Blues”), the combination of special interest pleading and ideological obstructionism that doomed the Biden plan came just as two-year colleges were bleeding enrollment, almost surely widening the income and educational attainment gaps that are increasingly pushing society apart. 

America needs a different definition of higher education excellence, one that empowers public institutions at the expense of elites, instead of the other way around. One that measures what colleges do for their country, instead of for themselves. That’s the philosophy behind the Washington Monthly’s annual college rankings. Instead of rating colleges by wealth, fame, and exclusivity, we prize social mobility, public service, and research. 

The other rankings elevate colleges for keeping low-income students out. Ours reward them for letting those students in, and then helping them graduate with degrees that lead to good jobs, without unmanageable debt. Instead of reputational surveys that mostly measure the vague and long-ago, we focus on hard numbers: research expenditures, faculty awards, and producing graduates who go on to earn PhDs. Instead of giving colleges credit for how often their alumni give back to their alma mater, we measure how often students give to their communities by volunteering, starting public service careers, and enrolling in the Peace Corps and ROTC. 

The result is a very different hierarchy of the great, the good, and the not-very-good-at-all. Because we value public purpose, our rankings are much more likely to recognize public universities—there are six state schools in our top 20, but just one in theirs. Florida International University, for example, ranks number 162 on the other list, mostly because it doesn’t limit enrollment to rich valedictorians, and it was founded in the second half of the 20th century, not the first half of the 17th. We rank FIU at number 32 because, in addition to solid contributions in service and research, it is very affordable and helps a large number of students eligible for Pell Grants start their lives and careers with a high-quality degree. Columbia University is number 2 on the other rankings—or was, before it was de-ranked after being caught in the kind of massive data fraud scandal our rankings are much less vulnerable to because we rely on official government data, not self-reported metrics that invite abuse. We already ranked Columbia significantly lower
because we see little to no evidence of its commitment to public service. 

There are also multiple University of California and California State campuses in the upper echelons of our rankings, the mark of a system that, despite financial ups and downs in recent decades, was built on a foundation of research excellence and affordability in a state that has long been a magnet for immigration and innovation. Rutgers University’s Newark campus stands out for enrolling an economically diverse undergraduate class that goes on to earn unusually high salaries in the labor market, and—probably not coincidentally—has an unusually high rate of paying back student loans. 

There are also some familiar names at the bottom of our national rankings. Hofstra University enjoys a solid reputation on the Eastern Seaboard—why, we’re not exactly sure. More than a third of its students fail to graduate within six years, and the net price of attendance for families earning below $75,000 is absurdly high. Hofstra has little to show in terms of research expenditures, science PhDs, or faculty awards. Service commitments are scant. We rank it number 434 out of 442 nationwide, down among a bevy of for-profit colleges and struggling schools. 

Berea College in Kentucky is a consistent standout on our list of best liberal arts colleges, showing that excellence and access for first-generation students can go hand in hand. Lafayette College in Pennsylvania gets a boost over more traditional elite schools by staying particularly attentive to how much it charges lower-income students and how successful its graduates are at managing their debt after earning degrees. The College of Saint Benedict in Minnesota has unusual graduation rate success, given the number of Pell-eligible students it enrolls, and sends many graduates into the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps as well as education and other public service careers. Unlike some elite colleges, it’s not a finishing school for future financial industry profiteers. 

We also rank nearly 900 master’s– and bachelor’s-granting institutions—many of them regional public universities that serve an enormous number of students and get little or no recognition from big-city newspapers that obsess over dinner parties in the Ivy League. Along with whatever the collective noun is for California State campuses (a grizzly of high performers are in our top 10), research-rich universities like Truman State in Missouri and SUNY Geneseo sit atop our master’s list. For-profit Academy of Art University in San Francisco, on the other hand, ranks number 601 (out of 603) because it charges low- to moderate-income students $32,000 per year and has been embroiled in so many scandals, fraud accusations, and government investigations that space limitations do not permit their full accounting here. 

Brigham Young University’s innovative Idaho campus cracks the top 10 on our bachelor’s campus ranking, scoring high on the number of undergraduates who go on to earn PhDs. Seventh-ranked Boricua College, which was founded by Puerto Ricans to provide a liberal arts education to Hispanic students in New York City, is an across-the-board standout on our measures of social mobility. It stands in contrast to DeVry University Fort Washington (number 250) or DeVry Columbus (253) or DeVry Iselin (255) in that respect.

There are scores of additional examples. Take some time to read James and Deborah Fallows’s reporting—“When Gown Embraces Town”, and “The (Student) Paper of Record,” respectively—about the new president of Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, a public research university that is stepping forward to run the local K–12 school system in a first-of-its-kind initiative at the same time that its student newspaper increasingly provides the kind of local journalism that is vanishing from midsized cities and towns. Or Laura Colarusso’s story (“Breaking the Cycle of Privilege”) about how Bunker Hill Community College in Massachusetts is helping students move into the kind of solid well-earning jobs that once formed the backbone of our eroding middle class. Bunker Hill is succeeding despite that the fact that, as Anne Kim demonstrates (“Train in Vain“), the federal government’s system for certifying job training programs is an antiquated, broken-down disaster, leaving unsuspecting students and the taxpayers who support them vulnerable to programs that are obsolete, inadequate, fraudulent, or all of the above. 

The need in communities, particularly those with many Black and Latino students, is acute. Jamaal Abdul-Alim documents (“A Job and a College Degree Before You Graduate High School”) how the P-TECH program is helping high school students bank college credits toward associate’s degrees while earning competitive wages in local technology industries. College debt is an especially acute problem among Black borrowers. These programs help economically diverse students move into high-demand careers while making money instead of borrowing it. The obstacles in their way are many. Rob Wolfe exposes (“The Invisible College Barrier“) one of the hidden pitfalls preventing many first-generation students and students of color from entering high-paying jobs in business and tech: a second, secret set of admissions criteria that many universities impose after students have enrolled in school. 

Nowhere is the abuse of poor and working-class students more acute, and the potential to help them get ahead greater, than in vocational certificate programs—the kind provided by community colleges and for-profit trade schools. The Washington Monthly was the first to rank these programs, in 2018, and we do so again this year. Our hope is that highlighting the good ones and exposing the predatory ones will spur policy makers to better support the former and crack down on the latter, while helping students more safely navigate their futures.

All of these colleges, the best and the worst, are virtually absent from the complex of popular culture and elite media that mostly defines the way people understand higher education. That matters, because people won’t care about institutions they literally don’t know exist—or only perceive through the lens of socially acceptable class bigotry that continually structures our sense of deservedness in higher learning. So when the rare time comes to possibly advance the cause of social justice through new federal investment, the political weight needed to make it across the finish line simply isn’t there. 

The good news is that the essential logic of building a more egalitarian and student-focused higher education system remains strong. That’s why there was a free community college plan in the first place. The students and educators represented by the Washington Monthly college rankings are legion. It’s our privilege to open a window into their lives
every year.

The post Introduction: A Different Kind of College Ranking appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The post Learning While Black appeared first on Washington Monthly.

There was a room in my high school where they kept the chopped-up carcass of an old car. You could take the engine apart and put it back together, or slice pieces off the door with a saw that made orange sparks fly. It was a dirty, greasy place in a building where most of the kids wore tied-dyed Grateful Dead T-shirts or early J.Crew.

I rarely went there. Not because I didn’t like engines and sparks. I grew up watching my father, an electrical engineer by training, work with a soldering iron and a table saw in our garage. No, I stayed away—was, for all intents and purposes, kept away—because that wasn’t where people who were going to college were supposed to be. 

We lived in the prosperous suburbs of a decaying city in the postindustrial Northeast. The giant conglomerate my father worked for had stopped manufacturing things in town and built an R&D park nearby where they invented things that were manufactured somewhere else. The whole apparatus of local government, from municipal boundaries to tax rates to deployment of police, was built to funnel money into the suburban school system, where the children of the R&D park employees prepared to follow their parents into one of the good engineering schools or the Ivy League. Almost everyone was white. The room with the old car was for the few kids from the city who accidentally ended up on the wrong side of the school district line. 

In the decades that followed, America transformed itself into a continent-size version of my hometown. College graduates flourished while everyone else stagnated or fell behind. People were increasingly segregated by class, geography, and ideology. Higher education became a political fault line, particularly during the Trump years, when college-educated white suburbanites surged into the Democratic Party while white people without degrees ran toward the Republicans. 

This realignment, which is far from complete, leaves colleges and universities in a dangerous position. The strong bipartisan commitment to affordable public higher education is at risk if one party sees college as antithetical to its voters and beliefs. Democrats doing electoral math should be mindful that there are 60 million more voting-age white people without bachelor’s degrees than with them, and they are concentrated in states with disproportionate political power.

Most diagnoses of this shift are oddly indifferent to the structure of higher education itself. That’s a mistake. Many of the failures that led to our fractured political climate are rooted in biases set deep in the foundations of higher learning, which systematically discriminates against people who are most vulnerable to falling behind in the modern economy. We can build something better—but only if we’re honest about who benefits now, and what it will take to change. 

In the past five years, the political left has galvanized to make college free and forgive outstanding student loans. These are worthy goals. Twentieth-century middle-class prosperity was created, in part, with public colleges and universities that were once affordable but are no longer. It makes sense to restore that promise and help people who were financially injured by surging college prices. 

But free college and debt forgiveness by themselves leave much of the structural inequality of American higher education firmly intact. Take, for example, California’s widely emulated three-level higher education system. It gives $13,000 in state funding per undergraduate to students in the elite University of California system, which is disproportionately attended by children of the wealthy—kids who have been tracked since birth into prestigious programs. It gives out $8,000 to the less selective California State University campuses. It only gives $2,500 for undergrads at open-access community colleges, where most of the attendees are lower- and working-class students. Free college, then, could ultimately shell out far more money for rich kids than for the poor. (Many low-income community college students already pay no tuition at all.) It is like giving the people eating at Le Bernardin and Burger King the same voucher for a gratis meal. 

Private colleges don’t get direct state subsidies, so they make up for it with high prices. Sticker price tuition at the University of Southern California is more than $60,000. But that doesn’t mean no public money is involved. Endowment earnings are untaxed, and alumni get lucrative tax deductions for donations. Research universities often rake 60 percent or more off the top of federal grants for “overhead.” Add public funding and tuition together and you get a system that devotes vastly more resources to upper-class students pursuing bachelor’s and graduate degrees at selective four-year universities, public or private, than to students anywhere else. 

It’s not because elite four-year university courses inherently cost more. A technical film production course at Los Angeles City College requires expensive audio, video, and lighting equipment. A history class at UCLA requires a classroom and a historian. We give more money to privileged students because we think they deserve it more and the underprivileged deserve it less, and because the people who decide where the money goes are almost always themselves scions of the upper tier and want their children to be the same. We apply a veneer of so-called meritocracy to a system that is designed from the ground up to replicate power. 

Even within the elevated reaches of four-year colleges and universities, there are really two systems operating in parallel. One prepares people for jobs in fields like health care, teaching, accounting, engineering, and computer systems. While many of these students go on to master’s degrees and continue to learn on the job, they share the experience of having majored in subjects that match their careers. We’ll call these “Actual Job Majors.” 

Then there are the other people, the ones who take few if any courses that are designed to prepare them for a job, unless you define the job as “tenured professor in teaching this subject,” which, if you’ve been paying any attention to the state of the academic labor market, is pretty much the same as preparing for no job at all. We’ll call these “Not a Job Majors.” 

There are many examples, but the big four categories of Not a Job Majors are psychology, business, social science, and communications, which collectively grant more than 700,000 bachelor’s degrees per year. The math is pretty straightforward—there are more than three million people in the workforce with BAs in psychology, and only 192,000 psychologists. This category also includes the kinds of esoteric majors that politicians like to claim are wasting taxpayer dollars. But to a first order of approximation, these students don’t exist. They are hallucinations of anti-intellectual resentment. In 2019, more people graduated with a BA in business administration from Cal State Fullerton alone than got a BA in women’s studies, French literature, or linguistics from every college and university in America combined.

While we’re all familiar with the guy carrying $120,000 in loans for a liberal arts degree from NYU who struggles to make rent while freelancing in a Brooklyn co-op—mostly because he tweets a lot—the Not a Job Majors are, on average, doing fine. Often, more than fine! They’re the heart of the suburban upper-middle-class to lower-upper-class workforce, the car-buying single-family homeowners with 401(k)s, the people who rode out the pandemic from their converted home office. 

At American University, a wealthy private institution in Washington, D.C., more than 65 percent of undergraduates enroll in one of the big four Not a Job Majors. Many borrow significant sums to do so. They and their mostly well-off parents aren’t being irrational or self-destructive. They understand that American isn’t a job training place. Rather, it’s a means of class replication, a way station on the path to a certain kind of stability and prosperity. American degrees signify that bearers have been pre-sorted and selected, that they come from certain backgrounds and have been acculturated in certain ways. 

What jobs do they eventually get? The most common occupation of people with degrees in psychology, social science, communications, and business isn’t counselor, economist, writer, or entrepreneur. It is, in each case, “manager.” Part of a cadre of bosses 10 million strong. 

So let’s think about how all this looks to the very large number of people who did not fly on high-speed rails from the enclaves of college-educated wealth to a thriving post-collegiate career. 

Over the past several decades, these Americans have been caught in a deeply unenviable position. First, whole sections of the economy and labor market were hollowed out by a combination of neglect and deliberate policy choices. Private-sector unions disintegrated, wages stagnated, and stable jobs eroded, all in exchange for lower prices on consumer goods they still can’t afford. 

Then the vocational courses at the local high school started to disappear. Sometimes this was done with good intentions, to correct the notorious practice of keeping students of color off the college track and to open the path to higher education for all. But it had an effect: Federal funding for vocational education shrank along with the number of job-focused credits high schoolers took. There are now fewer clear pathways to fewer good jobs. 

They’re told: It’s okay! There’s a solution! I mean, probably not for you, to be honest, you’re just going to have to get by on $12.50 an hour until Social Security kicks in. But definitely for your kids. Just send them to college!

Except the elite colleges only accept one student a year from where you live (the valedictorian), so they can congratulate themselves on “regional diversity.” Even if you manage to be that student, you and your parents both have to borrow a mind-boggling sum of money to pay tuition. And ultimately succeeding in college means taking classes that your local high school doesn’t offer, because K–12 education in this country is chopped up into 13,500 districts that are mostly funded by a combination of state revenue and local property taxes, both of which are in short supply in places that don’t have many of the good white-collar jobs. 

If you can’t get in, you instead enroll in a college that, unlike the underfunded local community college, has a bunch of warm, friendly people on staff who quickly return your texts and phone calls and help you fill out all of the complicated federal financial aid forms. There are no waiting lists for enrollment and nobody hassles you about a missing high school transcript or not-so-great scores on the SAT. The program is starting up in just a few weeks, takes way less than four years to finish, and leads to a good job in a fast-paced, growing field. 

Except it doesn’t, because the “college” is a private equity–backed for-profit corporation that was engineered to harvest billions of federal financial aid dollars by defrauding students while easily evading a set of essentially nonexistent consumer protection regulations. Republican lawmakers don’t want to go after these schools because of generous campaign contributions, and Democrats can’t because new Department of Education rules get tied up in endless litigation. 

And even if you manage to stumble through the for-profit minefield unscathed and get all the way through to a real degree, which likely means navigating the Kafkaesque process of transferring credits from a community college to a four-year university, and enroll in an income-based loan repayment program that keeps debt payments affordable, and you’re lucky to not graduate into the teeth of recession caused by government mismanagement of Wall Street derivatives and/or infectious disease, and you emerge with an honest-to-goodness 40-hour-a-week gig with health benefits and vacation and a 401(k)—who’s really in charge? Where do most of the fruits of your labor go? Who’s your manager? Some guy with a Not a Job Major degree who was essentially promised the job at birth. 

You know what that sounds like? A racket. A cheap, knock-off version of opportunity. No one should be surprised that voters aren’t running into the arms of people who have nothing better to offer.

Here’s what they should offer instead. 

Education and training are a crucial part of most people’s path to stability and prosperity. The American economy needs many highly skilled workers to compete internationally. Colleges have a critical role to play in accomplishing these goals. All of these things are true. 

But education alone isn’t enough—not even close. Workers need power and leverage to demand better pay. In Washington State, for example, home health care workers who collectively bargain with the government make nearly $20 an hour plus health and retirement benefits. In Arkansas, people doing the same work make $9 an hour with no benefits. They don’t need a college-only agenda. They need strong labor laws, affordable child care, health insurance, and a robust minimum wage.

Other parts of the workforce would absolutely benefit from better education and credentials—but only if the job structure were changed to match. When my daughter turned three, she enrolled as a full-time student in the neighborhood public school. Her teacher had a bachelor’s degree, as all public school teachers do, with a specialization in early childhood education. The next year, the children moved to a classroom for four-year-olds, and then kindergarten a year later, always taught by a credentialed teacher. Same building, same profession. 

But that’s because Washington, D.C., chose to extend its public school system to include three- and four-year-olds, a policy President Biden has proposed expanding nationwide. Despite her college degree, my daughter’s pre-K–3 teacher wouldn’t have been able to get the same job in nearby Virginia or Maryland, because in those states, the job “pre-K–3 public school teacher” doesn’t exist. Instead, young children are left to the vagaries of the under-subsidized and under-regulated private child care market, where training, credentials, pay, safety, and learning are often in short supply. In the early childhood sector, and many others, education and jobs strategies only work if they work together. 

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 middle-income 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, two- or 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 program-level 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 government-approved 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.

The post The College Class Crisis appeared first on Washington Monthly.

There has never been a crisis in American higher education like the one we are facing today. While fall enrollment numbers are still in flux as colleges scramble to deal with an out-of-control pandemic, there is no question that all but the wealthiest institutions are facing deep financial pain and potential catastrophe. Even relatively conservative estimates like those published by the college financial planning firm Edmit suggest that, thanks to declining revenue and investment returns, one-third of all private colleges are now on track to run out of money within six years—a nearly 50 percent increase in estimates from 2019—and many are vulnerable to bankruptcy much sooner. Public universities, meanwhile, are about to be hammered by steep cuts in government funding, forcing them to raise prices, cut services, and turn away students, including millions of newly unemployed workers. 

The higher education system was weak before the coronavirus hit. Thanks to long-term enrollment declines, recent years have already seen a spate of small-college bankruptcies, each a minor tragedy of shocked students, heartsick alumni, and another town or city suddenly without a vital institution whose generational roots were somehow not deep enough. Many regional public universities had been steadily drained of vitality as state budget cuts accumulated, year after year. 

But COVID-19 has turbocharged all of these trends, with serious consequences for America’s most vulnerable. Low-income and first-generation students, immigrants, and people of color will be more likely to delay going to college or to drop out. Because colleges will charge more and families will have less, many more students will take out loans and, with diplomas or without, end up in default, widening economic inequality and the racial wealth gap. For many poorer communities, colleges have been like stubborn plants, protecting them from the erosion of globalization and economic disruption. When their schools close, it will further social decay. 

The need for college won’t go away, however, particularly with widespread unemployment. For-profit colleges backed by private equity will surge into the gap, using aggressive and deceptive marketing tactics to sign up naive students who will pay outsized tuition with no-questions-asked loans from the U.S. Department of Education. Much of that debt will never be repaid, ruining credit, wasting lives, and costing taxpayers billions. 

Many of these calamities can and should be mitigated in the short run by a sufficiently large federal rescue package. But even that will leave the system significantly worse than it was pre-pandemic: diminished, sclerotic, and vulnerable to the next unforeseen disaster. A fundamentally different policy architecture is needed for American higher education, and the best time to build it is now. This essay describes how that plan would work. 

The plan would change how the federal government supports colleges and universities, staving off immediate disaster, boosting resources for historically underfunded schools, and fundamentally realigning the financial incentives that drive many colleges to put money and status ahead of students. At the same time, the plan would usher in a new era of intercollegiate cooperation, transforming an archipelago of endangered, isolated institutions into a network of technology-enabled learning communities. 

Not all colleges would choose to participate in such a network, preserving the American tradition of diversity and independence in higher learning. But those outside the system would mostly be rich colleges that mostly serve rich students, and we would tax them in a way that helps pay for everyone else. 

The result would be a new higher education ecosystem that works for everyone, not just the chosen few. 

For a long time, the federal government did very little to fund higher learning. Until the mid-20th century, states paid the overwhelming majority of the costs for public colleges, students paid for private ones, and nobody paid that much. But after World War II, higher learning opened up to the masses as matriculation became a path to upward mobility for the burgeoning middle class, women entered the labor market, and the economy shifted toward white-collar work. The GI Bill set the precedent for the federal government’s market-oriented, voucher-based method for supporting higher education institutions: Give or lend students money, and let them decide where to spend it. 

This system, which persists to this day, has had its virtues. Collegiate learning and scholarship are complicated, sometimes esoteric, and not especially amenable to the kind of direct government regulation that often follows direct government subsidies. The market approach helped make American higher education uniquely large and diverse, encompassing thousands of institutions with different missions, philosophies, and student bodies. Nearly every existing college found a place in the new order. Elite research universities expanded spectacularly,
attracting money and talent from around the world. 

But the system rested on the strength of a few key assumptions that have steadily weakened over time. It presupposed that state governments would continue to sustain and expand public colleges and universities, as they had while building out regional public universities and community colleges in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. That turned out to be deeply mistaken. Some states, like California, New York, and North Carolina, invested in their public universities and kept tuition low. But others, like Pennsylvania, Colorado, and New Hampshire, were stingy, letting students and parents foot the bill. And in every economic downturn since the 1980s, states have disproportionately cut college and university budgets. 

The logic was always the same—unlike K–12 schools, prisons, and health care for the poor, higher education could raise prices to make up for lost revenue. So tuition increased during recessions to fill the budget gaps, backed by a federal loan program with bottomless reserves and no credit standards for borrowers. The process worked like a ratchet: When funding was restored during boom times, tuition never went back down. Adjusted for inflation, tuition prices at public four-year universities have almost tripled over the past 30 years. The post-2008 period has been especially harsh. Some states, mostly governed by Republicans, never restored lost funding. If Great Recession–era funding cuts are repeated over the next few years, 23 states will end up with systems that receive two dollars in tuition for every one dollar in state funding, a threshold beyond which the whole idea of being a “public university” is seriously in question. 

The system also assumed that an unregulated, consumer-driven free market for higher education would successfully match students with the institutions best prepared to serve them while imposing market discipline on quality and prices. But the higher education market does not work like the simple models freshmen are taught in Econ 101. Choosing an institution with which to have an intense multiyear relationship involving hundreds of people and countless unforeseeable future decisions is a lot more complicated than shopping for toothpaste at CVS. Undergraduates are inexperienced consumers by definition—few people return to college for another bachelor’s degree. Students and parents are highly susceptible to marketing and pressure tactics, rumor and innuendo, peer pressure, and vaguely defined reputation. The fact that colleges disclose little hard data about the quality of their courses doesn’t help. 

Colleges also do their best to make prices hard to understand. Car dealers are a cultural stereotype of caveat emptor sleaziness. Yet when you shop for a car, at least dealers are required to list various key features along with the price in a standard window sticker that is the same at every dealer. Colleges are subject to no such regulation. Instead, each adopts a different financial aid “award letter” format that is often a nightmare of deliberate obfuscation. A New America study of more than 500 award letters found that a third of colleges don’t even disclose how much they actually cost. Seventy percent combine grants and loans into a single measure of college “aid.” Many then tell students that their “net price”—tuition minus “aid”—is $0, even when it’s financed by tens of thousands of dollars in loans. All of this translates into congenital market failure, measured by the millions of Americans who drop out of college and default on their student loans. 

This system has obviously disadvantaged customers. Yet for decades, it worked just fine for schools. The economy continued to shift away from blue-collar labor toward jobs that require college degrees, stoking demand and expanding the pool of students to include more diverse consumers. Beginning in the late 1990s, the gigantic Millennial generation ensured that there were enough customers for everyone, and colleges were able to keep labor costs down by creating a constant oversupply of newly minted PhDs and then using the resulting power imbalance in the labor market to hire them as adjunct professors for wages low enough to qualify for food stamps. As a result, many colleges prospered. If you’re old enough to revisit a familiar college campus after a decade or two away, you will almost certainly be struck by how much bigger and nicer everything has become—even if the school isn’t famously wealthy. 

But in the long run, consumerization and privatization were a trap for most colleges. Like countless other dimensions of American society, the higher education sector became increasingly financialized and winner-takes-all. While upper-upper-tier institutions accumulated almost unimaginable amounts of new financial wealth and global brand prestige, many schools were swept into a race for status and students. After the Millennials finished school and the overall size of the college-going population declined, that race became less-than-zero sum. 

To make the numbers add up every year, some colleges, especially in the private nonprofit sector, spent millions on “enrollment management” consultants whose marketing tactics generated thousands of applications that were fed into the kind of sophisticated mathematical models that airlines use to generate ticket prices, with the goal of maximizing tuition revenue from each seat in the lecture hall. Can you imagine if you had to disgorge every detail of your earnings and assets before haggling with a seller who was legally allowed to lie to you about how much their product actually costs? If you’ve ever sent kids to college, you don’t have to imagine.

This complex price discrimination helped sustain creaky college finances for a while. But like all systems that rely on statistical analysis of the past, it was vulnerable to a future black swan event like a once-a-century pandemic. As the virus tanked the economy, it blew up state budgets and turned every classroom and frat house into a potential public health disaster. It also prompted our anti-immigrant president to move even more aggressively to keep out international students, who often prop up university budgets by paying full tuition. With less money from states, fewer Americans who are willing to attend school for fear of getting sick, and a smaller pool of international applicants, many colleges stand on the precipice. 

Many people already believe that the time has come to upend the old system. Outrage over the $1.6 trillion mountain of outstanding student debt helped fuel the Bernie Sanders “free college” movement that upended American electoral politics. The Sanders plan, and a similar proposal from Elizabeth Warren, would give states enough money to reduce undergraduate tuition at public colleges and universities to $0. The cost would be split between new federal grants and state matching funds. As part of the post-primary rapprochement between rival campaigns, Joe Biden has broadly endorsed the program. 

“Free college” is a well-motivated but poorly designed idea. Understanding why shows what to do instead. By giving each state enough money to bring public university tuition down to $0, “free college” would unjustly reward states that previously cut college funding and let tuition rise, while perversely penalizing states that did the right thing by spending more to keep tuition low. The stingy states, especially over the last decade, have largely been governed by Republicans. “Free college” is essentially a bailout for tax-cutting, government-hating right-wingers. And by requiring states to opt in and spend additional matching funds if they want to make college free, it would all but guarantee that some states opt out, as they did with the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. 

“Free college” would give far more money per student to wealthy elite public research universities that charge higher tuition and enroll many well-off students than to regional universities and open-access community colleges where tuition is already low. By excluding private nonprofits, it would leave out hundreds of schools that serve racially and economically diverse students, including many historically Black institutions. 

Finally, some people can and should pay for college. Higher education is both an essential public service that should be accessible to all and an expensive private good that is bought and sold for large amounts of money in the free market. Other things work this way, which is why many people believe affordable housing is a basic human right but few, if any, believe that all houses should be free. 

There’s a better way, one that would bring private nonprofit colleges into the fold, make higher learning affordable for everyone, and greatly improve the quality of education that students, especially the most vulnerable, receive. Here’s how it would work.

To start, the federal government should create a new program that provides a direct annual subsidy of $10,000 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student to any college, public or private nonprofit, that agrees to certain terms. It’s important, here, to distinguish tuition prices from tuition revenue. Colleges often provide scholarships and discounts that bring prices substantially below listed rates, and most students attend public institutions that charge much less than the eye-popping rates at some private colleges. As a result, the majority of undergraduates today attend a college where tuition revenue is less than $10,000 per FTE student. 

The first condition would be to adopt a uniform pricing system. (“Free college” is an exceptionally simple form of uniform prices, in that there aren’t any.) Anyone with a household income below $75,000 would pay nothing. From there, tuition would increase on a sliding scale and cap out at $10,000—roughly the average tuition price at public four-year universities—for households earning more than $250,000 per year. At public universities, prices would be the same for in- and out-of-state-students, eliminating the financial incentive for colleges to recruit wealthy students from far away at the expense of local taxpayers. The existing Pell Grant program would be maintained, providing lower-income students with additional funding to pay for books, housing, and living expenses. 

“Free college” would keep school funding levels roughly the same. In this plan, by contrast, the combination of tuition from the uniform price schedule and the annual federal subsidy would be more money than most public and nonprofit colleges receive in tuition today. For some, it would be much more. That’s a good thing. Colleges that currently charge low tuition—mostly low-cost community colleges and regional public universities—also tend to get less state financial support. These institutions have been shortchanged for decades by political neglect. They serve large numbers of working adults, students of color, first-generation collegians, and students with academic challenges. 

This plan would provide those colleges with a huge boost in new resources that could be used to improve facilities and laboratories, increase the number of course sections, reduce class sizes, improve faculty pay, and increase the number of full-time tenured professors. We know that less-selective colleges can make impressive gains in helping students learn and graduate—if they have the resources to do the job (see Jamaal Abdul-Alim, “Higher Ed’s Most Successful Failure,” for one example of a successful program). “Free college” would make college cheaper, but not better. For many students, better is what they most need.

For colleges closer to the break-even point between existing revenues and what they would receive under the new plan, there would still be many good reasons to participate. Transparent lower prices would make them more attractive in the market. Competition with neighboring states would give local legislatures incentives to provide their colleges and universities with enough money to participate. But because the plan allows individual colleges to opt in, no institution would be forced into a financial and regulatory arrangement not to its liking, preserving the long and worthwhile tradition of college autonomy. This plan would also avoid the Obamacare problem of putting governors in the position of saying yes or no to funding for the entire state. 

In a stroke, the plan would eliminate uncertainty, anxiety, and confusion for millions of students and parents struggling to pay for college. College would be cheaper or free for many, and it would be far easier to compare prices, since colleges would use the same tuition fee schedule and be required to use an identical format when describing other expenses like room and board. 

Including private nonprofit colleges in the plan would broaden the political coalition for reform and help preserve the distinct character and economic diversity of cities and towns that rely on local colleges, many with long faith traditions and expertise in serving Black, Hispanic, and other groups. For-profit colleges would not be eligible.

The plan would be expensive, in the tens of billions of dollars annually, depending on how many colleges opted in. But because students would have less need to borrow, the cost would be partly offset by less money spent on subsidized loan interest rates, fewer defaulted loans, and fewer loans forgiven at taxpayer expense. 

Colleges receiving the subsidy would be held accountable for baseline measures of quality and success. While the federal government can’t and shouldn’t judge how well a university teaches particular subjects like linguistics, anthropology, or chemical engineering, it can prevent abject failure. There’s no such thing as a good college where the vast majority of students drop out, can’t find jobs, or default on their loans. Colleges that consistently fail by these measures would be ineligible for government grants. 

The second major pillar of the plan would be a set of research investments and policy changes designed to connect all of the participating colleges into a network of learning- and student-focused institutions. It would begin with a simple but profound change in the way colleges relate to one another: credit transfer. Every college in the network would be required to accept credits from every other college in the network.

The existing college credit system is a disastrous remnant of the time when most students could only take classes from the single college they were admitted to. Today, assembling a degree from credits earned at multiple colleges is a nightmare of bureaucratic uncertainty. Millions of hours and dollars are lost every year when colleges routinely refuse to accept grades earned by students who earn credits from multiple institutions, a common occurrence for adult, part-time, and other “non-traditional” students who now make up the majority of undergraduates. Countless students end up borrowing and paying to take the same classes twice. Under this system, that wouldn’t be a problem. 

Individual institutions would retain the discretion to set standards for what courses count for academic majors, including, if they chose, a mandate that all courses that count to the student’s major be taken at the college granting the degree. Colleges and academic departments have different approaches to disciplinary learning, and that autonomy and diversity should be respected. The same would be true for colleges that maintain an authentic core curriculum—not a vague set of “Pick two from Column C” distribution requirements, but actual courses that all students are required to take. That said, most undergraduate credits are not earned in pursuit of majors or core curricula. For all other degree requirements, students in the network would enjoy complete credit reciprocity. 

Because nearly all colleges now offer online courses, this would give students the best of traditional in-person and online learning—the kind of intense socialization, peer and faculty relationships, and mentoring that in-person education provides, with the freedom to choose from among the best online courses offered by thousands of course catalogs nationwide. It would inspire colleges to improve their online technological tools and pedagogical skills. Since everyone in the network would use the uniform fee schedule, the cost would be the same. 

Over time, this would give colleges powerful incentives to cooperate and specialize. In the current cut-throat, status-driven market system, every college is an island. Even in the face of an existential threat in the form of global pandemic disaster, colleges are not working together. (If you won’t do something even though not doing it might literally kill you, you’re never going to do it.) This culture of extreme educational individuality is replicated at the course and instructor levels. A typical full-time professor may have dozens of colleagues at institutions around the world with whom she is in constant, ongoing communication and collaboration on scholarship and research. These powerful networks are stable even as scholars move among institutions. Yet when it comes to teaching, there is nothing similar. Every lecturer stands alone.

The combination of scaled-up credit reciprocity across a huge network serving millions of students would create strong incentives for colleges to pool their resources and offer outstanding versions of the high-volume courses commonly taken by many students. The price tag for a single luxury campus fitness center that has become table stakes for competing in the market for upper-middle-class students is far more than colleges currently spend on developing, say, a world-class sequence of undergraduate courses that could be used and adapted by many different colleges, in person and online.

The new system would also fundamentally change the terms of college competition. Instead of being trapped in a price-discounting and high-end-amenities arms race, colleges would have good reasons to create great courses that attract some of the millions of potential students within the network. College accreditors would serve as watchdogs to prevent unscrupulous schools from lowering standards to sell easy credits. 

Cooperation across the network would be bolstered by a large new investment in research and development. The federal government gives higher education $30 billion annually to conduct research in nearly every field of inquiry one can imagine, but very little on higher education itself. Every year, millions of students take hundreds of thousands of courses, almost none of which are subject to the kind of careful scientific inquiry that universities themselves specialize in conducting. This new research effort would take advantage of the size of the new college network to conduct ongoing research on best educational practices and promising innovations. 

The system would create its own kinds of competitive pressures—more centered on academic quality than the current market, but still intense enough that colleges would need to work hard to sustain enrollment. Some might choose to specialize in the academic disciplines where they have the most strength and depth. They would also build reputations for expertise in particular approaches to pedagogy. Students would choose to live in communities that fit their needs, faiths, backgrounds, and ideological affinities, while enjoying access to courses and peers nationwide. 

The end result would be a new network of affordable, well-resourced, deeply interconnected colleges and universities that combine the virtues of traditional higher education diversity and autonomy with consumer protection, information technology, and cutting-edge education practice. Instead of letting some colleges collapse into bankruptcy while the rest struggle and claw in a failed system of free market chaos and declining public support, some of the most vital and distinctly American institutions in our nation’s history would be repositioned for even greater success. 

Not all colleges would join the network. Some might prefer autonomy, as is their right. For others, the numbers simply wouldn’t add up. The annual subsidy and uniform price schedule would yield much less revenue than they receive in tuition today. For the most part, these are extremely wealthy universities that enroll mostly wealthy students—the Ivy-plus universities, fancy liberal arts colleges, and a relatively small number of elite public research universities. The winners who took all over the past 50 years. 

This plan would not, in other words, tear down the system of elite colleges and universities that currently serves to acculturate and accelerate the children of the ruling class. As long as people are allowed to be very rich, there will be places like this, just like there will always be mansions and expensive cars. And in fairness to Stanford, Yale, Duke, and other universities that sell status to the highest bidder through a thinly veiled system of bribes and legacy admissions preferences, these universities truly are some of the greatest centers of research and scholarship on the planet. They should keep being excellent at that, which helps all people, not just the privileged. 

This does not mean, however, that the public should continue subsidizing them in the same way. 

The “nonprofit” institutions most likely to opt out of the new network are the same universities that hold the lion’s share of all university endowment assets, totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. In 2017, Congress passed a small 1.4 percent excise tax on endowments larger than $500,000 per student. The higher education lobby, incensed, has been fighting to repeal it ever since.

But the real money isn’t in the taxes colleges don’t pay on their endowment earnings. It’s in the income taxes individuals don’t pay on their donations to colleges, which are effectively subsidized at nearly 40 percent for the wealthiest donors, and thus provide an incentive to donate much more. 

The cost of the new plan would be partly offset by eliminating the tax deductibility of any donations to colleges with an endowment greater than $200,000 per student. If colleges want to avoid the penalty, they can spend down their assets by making tuition cheaper for more students. There is no reason taxpayers should heavily subsidize millionaires who give money to billion-dollar institutions. 

The U.S. Department of Education should also impose much stricter borrowing standards on colleges for loans used for education outside of the network, including at for-profit colleges. The current loan system runs on autopilot—anyone can borrow to enroll in any program at any accredited college. The new system would put the burden of proof on colleges, and require them to share in the risk. Eligibility for federal loans would be restricted to individual college programs that consistently graduate students who are able to get good jobs and pay their loans back. If students default, the college would have to reimburse taxpayers for 50 percent of the loss. 

The existing higher education policy architecture has been in place for so long, it can be hard to imagine something fundamentally different. But while the ideals of learning and scholarship are eternal, the means by which we organize and pay for higher education have changed many times in the past. It’s time to change them again. 

Relying on state governments to ensure that colleges have enough money and on the free market to ensure that colleges are well run, while the federal government stands in the background passively lending students enormous sums of money that many will never pay back, has failed. That approach would have kept failing in the best of times and will be an unmitigated catastrophe in these, the worst of times. 

The moment has come to finally give all students, not just the elite few, a great, affordable college education, without life-shattering financial stress and anxiety. And it’s time for colleges to work together, rather than standing and dying alone.

The post How to Save Higher Education appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Four years ago, the for-profit Corinthian Colleges chain collapsed, leaving tens of thousands of students with onerous student loans and no degrees. Corinthian was one of the worst for-profit abusers, a fact that the Washington Monthly called out before almost anyone else.

The federal Higher Education Act has a provision meant to help such students. If you are defrauded by a college, then you can apply to the U.S. Department of Education to have your loans discharged. (It’s a safe bet that none of Corinthian’s marketing materials said “You are about to pay too much money for a low-quality program that does not lead to jobs as advertised, and also we are teetering on the edge of a bankruptcy that will leave you with credits no reputable college will accept.”)

Unfortunately, students who attended Corinthian and other exploitative imploding colleges experienced another kind of terrible luck: Donald Trump was elected president and named Betsy DeVos as his secretary of education. Ever since, DeVos has been trying her hardest to stop those loans from being discharged. This week, her efforts crossed the admittedly hazy line between heartless and absurd.

In what can only be staggering incompetence, wanton cruelty, or an especially Trumpian combination of the two, DeVos has made it mathematically impossible for defrauded students to get full debt relief. Ben Miller, vice president for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress, explains in detail, but here’s the short version:

DeVos has decided that defrauded students only deserve full loan relief if they’re making much less money than the average program graduate. Even before we get to the nonsensical math, this is terrible as a matter of principle. It’s like saying that if someone breaks into your house, steals half your money, and gets caught, they shouldn’t have to give your money back, because you still have some money.

The approach is even worse in practice. In many cases, the average for-profit graduate doesn’t make much money to begin with—like, say, $20,000 a year. Because people who are defrauded by shady for-profit colleges still need things like food, shelter, and medicine. They tend to get jobs and earn money—but often, not much. That’s because their degrees are worthless, or non-existent.

At which point they run into this apparently obscure and difficult to comprehend concept called the minimum wage, and fall into the trap that Betsy DeVos has laid. If, after being defrauded, you work full-time at the minimum wage and earn the princely sum of $15,000 a year, DeVos says, “Look, that’s not that much less than $20,000, so NO FULL DEBT RELIEF FOR YOU.”

And it gets worse! In a powerful case for mandatory statistics education, DeVos and her crack team of advisers set the threshold for “much less than” as two standard deviations below the mean, which for some programs is … wait for it … a negative number.

As anyone who was not literally asleep or drunk during Stats 101 knows, not all distributions are normal. Some are distorted by factors like the minimum wage, or the fact that if people don’t make enough money for food, shelter, and medicine, they will die.

Earlier this week, the education committee in the House of Representatives brought DeVos to Capitol Hill to explain these policies. DeVos claimed that her formula is “scientifically proven,” because it involves statistics, which is not only wrong on its face–that’s not what “science” means—but further wrong as a matter of statistics, as Temple University professor Douglas Webber explains here. DeVos’s “scientific” approach includes an assertion that a difference in earnings is “statistically significant” if it’s two standards from the mean. Guess what? That’s wrong!

When Representative Lori Trahen called out DeVos on the minimum wage and negative number absurdities, DeVos simply, and falsely, denied it. Yet her staff then went back and rewrote the formula so that it does not technically produce a negative number but is otherwise, as a matter of mathematics, exactly the same. Ben Miller again explains. He had to fix one part of the Department of Education’s still-statistically-ridiculous formula, because it contained a basic arithmetic error.

But none of that matters, apparently, if your whole worldview is informed by an implacable hostility toward students who made the mistake of enrolling in a college that was fully approved by the federal government, and then had their hopes, dreams, and money stolen away.

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The post The Trump Administration Is Punishing Defrauded Students appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The carnival of corruption and deceit that is the Operation Varsity Blues college admissions scandal has created many windows onto the sorry state of American higher education, and of American society at large. How the rich and powerful, unsatisfied with the enormous and growing advantages of our winner-take-all society, bribed and cheated to take even more. How athletic coaches simply diverted graft money normally claimed by college “development” officials into their own pockets. How the market price of an elite admissions slot can reach upward of $6 million, based on what one wealthy Chinese family was willing to pay. 

But the core truth exposed by the FBI is even more disturbing. The sheer venality of the scandal is the inevitable consequence of a higher education system unmoored from any honest appraisal of how well colleges help students learn.

Finding and publicizing such information is one of the Washington Monthly College Guide’s prime directives. Over the last fifteen years, we’ve steadily added new data to our rankings of what colleges do for their country by promoting social mobility, research, and public service. That perspective, unlike the wealth- and status-obsessed rankings published by U.S. News & World Report, creates a very different definition of excellence. 

It’s not surprising, for example, that no B-list celebrities were arrested for bribing their children into Utah State University, our fourteenth-ranked national university: it already admits 89 percent of students who apply. We rank Utah State so high because it’s very good at helping low-income students graduate and get good jobs. It was not designed to exclude people, which is why it doesn’t even crack the top 200 at U.S. News. 

Nor did any venture capitalist financiers pay off a test proctor to wangle their progeny into Cedar Crest College of Pennsylvania, our fifth-ranked master’s-granting university, which does a great job of promoting civic engagement and sending its graduates into the Peace Corps and PhD programs. Few of its students appear to be partying on yachts during spring break or getting paid to promote branded products on Instagram. And we can be sure that nobody Photoshopped the head of their weakling spawn onto the body of a champion water polo player in order to fake their way into Berea College, which ranks fourth on our list of liberal arts colleges. Berea, which has a historical mission of serving first-generation students from Appalachia, doesn’t have a water polo team—or crew, or sailing, or fencing, or any of the other rich-people sports that upper-crust families have long used as the so-called “side door” into coveted schools. 

Instead, those families set their sights on the University of Southern California, which saw the greatest number of employees implicated by the cheating scandal and—perhaps not coincidentally!—has produced a remarkably diverse collection of lurid improprieties in recent years. There’s the former dean of the USC medical school, a then-practicing eye surgeon, who spent many of his hours holed up in hotel rooms smoking meth with a prostitute. And the dean of the social work school, who pioneered the creation of a debt-financed $110,000 online social work degree by splitting the profits with a for-profit tech company; raked in millions; and somehow managed to bankrupt the department anyway before being implicated in a shady financial transaction involving the son of a prominent local politician. And the $50 million settlement with a rival school for lies and misconduct in poaching a star Alzheimer’s researcher. And the campus gynecologist who stands accused of sexually abusing hundreds of students—crimes the university allegedly tried to cover up. 

These are the kinds of things that happen at an institution disconnected from authentic purpose, a place where the pursuit of money and celebrity becomes both means and ends. Because it’s hard to know how good the education is at a given university, college, or program, institutions with branding savvy and proximity to wealth, fame, and power can ride a self-reinforcing spiral of price and reputation all the way up near the top of the U.S. News list, where USC currently sits at number twenty-two, blocked from further ascension only by universities that figured out how to play the game first. It’s no wonder that people selling glitzy fantasies in Hollywood and Silicon Valley were attracted to USC. They saw themselves. 

We, however, see a university that, despite a $5.5 billion endowment, has a substandard commitment to public service. That’s the difference between selling a world-class university and being one.

All of the schools caught up in the cheating scandal participate, to varying degrees, in the corruption of the academic ideal. Just as you can’t cheat an honest man, you can’t bribe your way past the doorman of a side entrance that doesn’t exist. Elite universities in this day and age are trying to have everything: money and influence and power but also respect and deference and public support. Some very good books have been written about these kinds of temptations. They can be found on the shelves of university libraries and the syllabi of the better humanities courses, should administrators and board members care to look. 

Reorienting higher learning around an ethical and student-centered set of values won’t come quick or easy. It will start with some outside accountability for where students, especially undergraduates, truly rank on the list of institutional priorities. We’ll continue to play that role by shining a light on the many colleges and universities too busy helping diverse students improve their lives and careers to be caught up in the decadence of the self-proclaimed leaders in the field. 

These are highlights from this year’s Washington Monthly college rankings.

National Universities

Our list of top national universities is a mix of familiar elite schools and public universities that should receive more credit than they often do. There are a handful of top-flight private research universities, such as Stanford, Harvard, and Yale, with so much money that they’re able to provide generous financial aid to low-income students, help them graduate, and support leading research all at the same time. They deserve credit, but they’re also using a model that can’t be replicated or expanded at any scale. Together, Harvard and Yale own more than 10 percent of all the university endowment assets in America while enrolling about .15 percent of all college freshmen. 

Real improvement will mean following the example of institutions like Cal State–Fresno, our twenty-fourth-ranked national university, which enrolls an unusually large number of low-income and first-generation students and helps them graduate into good-paying jobs. For families that make less than $75,000, the school’s average net price is under $5,000. Or Rutgers University’s Newark campus, which has a very high graduation rate given its economically and academically diverse student body and produces graduates who are more likely than most to get good jobs and pay back their loans. 

Arizona State University has grown into a research powerhouse while keeping its admissions criteria open to a wide array of students. It also has succeeded in fostering very high student voting rates (see Daniel Block, “The Voting Wars Come to Campus“), pushing it near the top of our service rankings. 

There are also some familiar universities at the very bottom of our rankings. Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. is well known as an ardent supporter of President Trump and a generous patron of Miami-area hotel pool attendants. But Liberty’s graduation rate is eight percentage points lower than it ought to be, given the makeup of its student body, and outcomes for Pell Grant students are especially terrible. Yet Liberty charges students from households earning less than $75,000 per year a net price of over $24,000, one of the highest prices in the nation. That forces Liberty students to take on a lot of debt. Five years after leaving Liberty, only 50 percent of those students have paid back even $1 on the principal of their loans. Liberty conducts little or no research, awards no doctorates in science and engineering, and, despite its alleged mission of “sensitivity to the needs of others” and “social responsibility,” makes almost no discernible contributions to public service. We rank Liberty 387 out of 395.

Liberal Arts Colleges

Washington and Lee, our top-ranked liberal arts college, offers an unbeatable combination of inexpensive tuition and great job outcomes for graduates. Berea College is perennially a top five school on our rankings because it was designed for social mobility. Amherst College is a more traditional elite liberal arts school, but it enrolls a significantly larger percentage of Pell Grant students than its highly selective peers. 

Bryn Mawr spends more on funded research than any other liberal arts college and is among the very best in graduating women who go on to earn PhDs. Agnes Scott College in Georgia, another all-women’s school, is tops in sending alumni into the Peace Corps. College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts, stands out in helping graduates get good-paying jobs and pay their loans back. For a variety of reasons, women’s colleges and Jesuit schools tend to score highly on our criteria. 

Regional Campuses

Selective research universities and liberal arts colleges have historically received most of the rankings attention because they compete for students in a national market. But they enroll only a small fraction of undergraduates. Most college students instead attend a midsized regional public university or community college near home. Students, policymakers, and university trustees therefore need to know who their local leaders and laggards really are. That’s why we separately rank smaller institutions that primarily educate students seeking bachelor’s or master’s degrees and tend to draw from a regional applicant pool. 

SUNY Geneseo, our second-ranked master’s-granting institution, benefits from New York State’s continued investment in higher learning. While nearly all states enacted large cuts to university budgets after the Great Recession, a few, including New York and California, have restored almost all of the lost money, or even increased investment. Geneseo is second out of more than 500 master’s institutions on our service rankings. CUNY Baruch College also ranks high, with an eight-year graduation rate of 70 percent and, unusually, a higher success rate for Pell Grant students than others. Half of Baruch’s enrollment is composed of first-generation students, continuing CUNY’s historic role as a vector of upward mobility for immigrants to New York City, and the net price remains very low for middle- and lower-income families, at a little more than $4,000 per year. 

Trinity University, a private college with Presbyterian roots in San Antonio, can’t quite match public university prices, and graduates don’t earn a ton of money in the first few years out of school. But Trinity’s loan repayment rate of 92 percent is extraordinarily high, perhaps because of a strong career and academic focus, besting all other master’s institutions in sending graduates to doctoral programs. Goshen College, in Indiana, our second-ranked bachelor’s-granting institution, also has a Christian tradition. Forty percent of Goshen undergrads are first-generation students, making its 69 percent graduation rate impressively high. Like Trinity, Goshen also sends a strong cohort of graduates into doctoral programs and manages their financial aid so they can repay their loans. 

People generally don’t think of institutions like Goshen and Trinity as of a kind; they’re 1,300 miles apart and don’t play football against each other on weekends. But the schools are, in many ways, the face of what successful twenty-first-century higher education needs to look like: academically rigorous, demographically diverse, rooted in scholarly and ethical value systems that promote learning and engagement with the world. 

The challenge is to make that definition of excellence the standard in academia and public life. What we saw in bold letters this year, and have known for much longer, is that universities that chase the lure of fame and money instead will eventually come to bad ends. We’re glad to promote a different perspective: not what colleges do for themselves, but what they do for their country.

Note: A previous version of this article included inaccurate information about the number of Pell-grant eligible students who graduate from USC each year. The inaccurate information was submitted by USC itself to the U.S. Department of Education. 

The post A Different Kind of College Ranking appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In April, Senator Elizabeth Warren unveiled yet another ambitious policy proposal: a $1.25 trillion plan to make college more affordable. It includes canceling up to $50,000 in student loan debt for 95 percent of borrowers, billions of dollars for historically black colleges, and $100 billion in new money for the federal Pell Grant program.

Almost as an afterthought, Warren’s plan also includes a proposal to make tuition free at every public college and university in America. While light on details, Warren’s version of free college seems to be modeled after Senator Bernie Sanders’s. Sanders, of course, built his improbable 2016 primary campaign in part by igniting Millennial student debtors who were outraged by the broken promise of affordable higher education. Now, every serious Democratic contender will have to propose some version of free college—or, as Senator Amy Klobuchar and Mayor Pete Buttigieg did recently, explain why not. 

The broad case for free college is very strong. Many states have slashed public funding for higher learning, shifting the burden to students and parents. Private schools have hiked prices into the stratosphere in pursuit of status and fame. As real public university tuition tripled over the last three decades while middle-income wages stagnated, the federal government’s main response was to lend students ever-larger sums of money to make up the difference, with no control over how much colleges charged or whether the degrees were any good. It was a policy mistake of epic proportions, leaving the path to economic mobility badly narrowed and a generation of collegians saddled with unaffordable loans.

Fixing this blunder makes a lot of sense as a matter of both politics and policy. There’s just one problem: the Warren and Sanders free college plans are badly designed. The Sanders proposal would give states federal grants equal to two-thirds of the cost of bringing tuition at all public colleges and universities in the state down to zero, contingent on states matching with one-third of the necessary money. Warren’s plan is vague, but similar: the federal government would “partner with states to split the costs of tuition and fees.” Both, in other words, would force the federal government to make up the difference between the funding that states already provide and the funding necessary to make tuition free. This approach takes the vast disparities and injustices of the existing higher education funding system and permanently bakes them in place, punishing the states already doing the most to support students and rewarding the ones doing the least. 

If this version of free college becomes the Democratic consensus, the party could be headed for disaster: a 2020 victory followed by a policymaking collapse akin to the 1993 health care fiasco, hobbling the victor’s presidency and setting back reform for a generation. Fortunately, there is a better way. To understand why the Warren and Sanders plans don’t work, and how to improve them, we need look no further than the flagship public university in Sanders’s home state. 

The University of Vermont was founded in 1791 and sits on a lovely redbrick campus a short walk uphill from Lake Champlain. The surrounding city of Burlington, where Bernie Sanders began his career in government as mayor in 1981, has a low-key vibe, with streets full of restaurants and boutique clothing stores. Lately, the region has become a hub of small craft brewing companies. The fall foliage is beautiful, and skiing opportunities in the nearby Green Mountains abound. 

All of this makes UVM an attractive destination for out-of-state students, who make up nearly 80 percent of undergraduates. Those students pay well to attend. List-price tuition and fees for non-Vermonters start at almost $44,000 per year, more than many private colleges. On average, factoring in financial aid and in-state students, the university takes in nearly $25,000 per student in tuition, more than any other flagship public university in the nation.

This is one of the reasons why the state of Vermont spends relatively little of its own money on public colleges and universities. In 2017, the state allocated only $2,700 per student to higher education, less than half the national average of $7,640, and less than a third of neighboring New York. 

Less than two miles away, in neighboring Winooski, the Community College of Vermont takes in only $5,340 per student in tuition revenue—barely one-fifth of what flows to UVM. State budget policy makes the disparity even worse. The community college’s annual allotment of $1,500 per student is less than half what the university receives. 

In these two disparities—first, between Vermont’s stingy higher education funding and what other states provide; second, between the bounty that four-year universities receive and the pittance that goes to community colleges—we can see the fatal flaws of the Warren and Sanders free college plans. They take these huge inequities as a given, rewarding states that have done the least to finance higher learning and giving far more money to middle- and upper-income students who attend wealthier public universities. 

This approach benefits cheapskate states like Vermont, or Pennsylvania, which spends about $4,300 per student from the public treasury and leaves undergrads to pay an average of $11,400 a year in tuition. North Carolina, by contrast, spends more than double Pennsylvania—$10,400 per student—and only charges about $5,500 in tuition. Total spending in both states is fairly similar, but one sticks students with most of their college bill; the other does not.

For that exact reason, the Warren and Sanders plans would give Pennsylvania much more money than North Carolina to pay down tuition, since tuition in Pennsylvania is higher to begin with. That’s grossly unfair and a political nonstarter; members of Congress in states that more generously subsidize higher learning would rebel. The obvious alternative is to force Pennsylvania and other low spenders to come up with billions of dollars in additional matching funds right away—but that’s a choice the states would almost certainly decline, since the Sanders plan would allow states to opt out entirely (and a mandatory plan would be unlikely to survive a constitutional challenge). 

In addition to rewarding miserly states and penalizing generous ones, the Warren and Sanders plans would give much more money to four-year students than to two-year students, because four-year tuition is currently much more expensive. This is, frankly, the opposite of how good liberals and democratic socialists should think. Community college students are more likely to be immigrants, working parents, and first-generation collegians from low-income backgrounds. Why spend $25,000 on tuition for a UVM freshman with well-off parents and only $5,000 for a single mom working on her associate’s degree at night so she can get a better job?

These disparities also explain why another popular, more modest free college plan—free community college only—isn’t close to enough to solve the problem of affordable higher education.

To be clear, $0 tuition community college is, on its own, a perfectly good idea. Community college should be free. States including Tennessee already have similar initiatives under way. But many of these programs aren’t especially generous, because most community colleges are already inexpensive for everyone and “free,” or close to it, for low-income students who qualify for the maximum federal Pell Grant of $6,095. Meanwhile, “free tuition” still leaves those students with hefty bills for books and living expenses. (Warren’s plan, to her credit, includes $100 billion in new funding for the Pell Grant program for exactly this reason.)

Additionally, some states rely much more on community colleges than others. In Illinois, 62 percent of students who are enrolled in public institutions attend community college. In Michigan and Wisconsin, the proportion is only 32 percent. The latter states use relatively open-access four-year institutions to provide affordable higher education to students with diverse academic backgrounds. A policy that makes only community college free would put these states at an enormous disadvantage—and anger their elected representatives.

Both the parsimonious free community college approach and the much more ambitious and expensive Warren and Sanders strategies have other design flaws. They do little to make sure that college is not just free but also good. Neither have strong accountability measures to ensure that colleges give students a high-quality learning experience and help them graduate on time. 

The politics will also be tricky. Republicans will oppose free college on general principle, but that’s true of any legislation that involves spending more federal money to help people in need. The real political problem is that colleges will fight against free college—specifically, private colleges that are already struggling for financial survival and would get nothing from Sanders- and Warren-style plans. These schools have the ear of hundreds of members of Congress. Meanwhile, the elite universities whose graduates disproportionately populate the Washington, D.C., staffer and lobbying class don’t want more government money to keep prices low. They like being wealthy institutions that sell expensive services to rich people, and will oppose any plan with mandatory price controls and regulatory strings attached.

Any new federal free college plan should be guided by four principles. First, help students who need help the most. Second, reward states that invest their own money in higher education. Third, create incentives for colleges to cooperate with one another. Fourth, make sure that college is good as well as free. At the same time, such a plan needs to avoid the pitfalls of the Warren and Sanders approaches, which would reward the stingiest states and devote more money to the four-year students, who are, on average, less needy. 

There’s a way to achieve all these goals. It’s smarter, more politically viable, and, while still representing an enormous new federal investment in college affordability, less expensive. Here’s how it would work. 

It starts with cutting out the middleman. Instead of grants to states, the federal government should give grants directly to any public—or private nonprofit—college that agrees to join a national network of institutions dedicated to providing free, high-quality higher education. In exchange for charging zero tuition and fees for all students, in-state and out-of-state, participating colleges would receive a direct annual subsidy of $5,000 per full-time-equivalent undergraduate student. This funding would be in addition to the Pell Grant program. Pell-eligible students could use their grants tax-free to defray the costs of books and living expenses.

Five thousand dollars may not seem like much given news headlines about $70,000 college tuition and six-figure student loan burdens. But it’s actually enough money to make college tuition-free for millions of students nationwide, because most public universities and community colleges aren’t nearly that expensive, and many students get scholarships. 

Because colleges would receive a standard amount in exchange for setting tuition at zero, generous states like North Carolina would be rewarded. Public colleges in the Tar Heel State only take in $7,000 per student in tuition now, on average; many receive less. Elizabeth City State, a public historically black institution, currently takes in $3,500 per student in tuition. A grant of $5,000 per student would be enough not only to set tuition at $0, but also to invest another $1,500 per student in more professors and facilities. States that are less generous, by contrast, would have a powerful new incentive to invest in higher learning in order to bring colleges’ costs down to the point where $5,000 would cover their tuition needs. And because colleges and universities could join the network on an institution-by-institution basis, there is no state-level opt-out problem. 

Unlike the Warren and Sanders plans, this approach wouldn’t just make open-access colleges free. It would also make them better, by providing billions of dollars in new funding. But it shouldn’t stop there. To make sure college isn’t just free but is also good for the country, colleges that join the network should have to agree to certain conditions:

• Enroll a student body that is broadly economically representative of their state and region (as recently proposed by economists Caroline Hoxby of Stanford University and Sarah Turner of the University of Virginia).

• Graduate a reasonable percentage of students, as compared to peer institutions with similar missions and student profile.

• Accept credits earned at other colleges in the network, to facilitate transferring, which in turn promotes graduation and saves students money.

• Publish annual reports detailing how they assure the quality of their work preparing students to succeed in further education, citizenship, and careers.

No college would be forced to accept this bargain, and many would decline to do so. Most selective private schools are in the business of providing a very expensive service to mostly rich students, and would have neither the means nor the inclination to forgo that money and open their doors to a demographically representative undergraduate body. 

But many colleges would jump at the opportunity. By my calculations, using publicly available federal data, if every institution that currently takes in less than $5,000 per full-time student in tuition and fee revenue chose to join the network, the cost to the federal government would be $25 billion per year. This would be a huge new investment in affordable higher education, but at only one-third the cost of the Sanders plan. (Warren’s plan would average $125 billion annually, about half of which would finance debt cancellation.) 

At that level, the network would start with nearly 1,100 colleges and universities that currently charge less than $5,000 on average. They enroll the full-time equivalent of 4.9 million students and include 821 community colleges, 208 public four-year universities, and forty-eight private nonprofit colleges. (One of those private nonprofits is Berea College, which perennially tops the Washington Monthly’s liberal arts college rankings.) Another 176 schools, educating nearly a million additional students, charge more than $5,000 but less than $6,000, creating a powerful incentive to raise additional state and private money in order to drop tuition to zero and become eligible for new federal funds. Forty-one historically black colleges and universities would qualify. 

Not all students would have access to free tuition colleges at first. But this problem could be partly offset through online education. To be sure, fully online education is not, by itself, the solution to America’s college access problem. Research suggests it’s unwise to put academically at-risk low-income students in cheap fully online courses. But online learning is undeniably a valuable option for many people, especially nontraditional, working, and adult students who may want to combine in-person and online courses.

A smart free college plan would expand the reach and quality of online higher education by allowing colleges in the network to create online programs that could be taken, for credit and free of charge, by students at any other college in the network, regardless of where they live. These students would count for enrollment when calculating the federal subsidy, creating strong incentives for colleges to develop high-quality programs that appeal to many students. Students, meanwhile, would have access to a wide array of online course offerings, organized in a common portal by the U.S. Department of Education, rather than relying on the online curriculum of any one institution. 

Overall, because many community colleges and open-access four-year universities currently make less than $5,000 per student in tuition revenue, the plan would focus federal resources on public institutions that have long suffered from underfunding and would help students who are most in need. The accountability provisions would ensure a baseline level of consumer protection, while giving colleges the freedom to develop different approaches to learning and maintain their unique identity. 

This approach to free college would give states an incentive to invest enough money in their higher education institutions to keep tuition free. It would restore the promise of affordable college that has eroded into rubble over the last generation. It would halt and reverse the spiral of undergraduate borrowing that is undermining economic opportunity and public trust in higher learning. It would be a signature achievement for the next president—if she gets the policies right.

This article has been updated.

The post What Sanders and Warren Get Wrong on Free College appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Thirteen years ago, the Washington Monthly set out to solve a problem. The higher education market was dominated by the U.S. News & World Report rankings, which reward wealth, fame, and exclusivity. College leaders responded to the temptation of better U.S. News scores by raising prices, chasing status, and marketing themselves to the children of privilege.

We thought the nation needed exactly the opposite: smart, well-run colleges that enrolled students from all walks of life and helped them earn a high-quality diploma at an affordable price. Colleges that instilled a sense of service and public obligation while producing groundbreaking research.

So we decided to do something about it and create our own ranking—not based on what colleges do for themselves, but on what they do for their country. After all, everyone benefits when colleges push the boundaries of scientific discovery and provide paths to opportunity for the next generation of low-income students. And everyone pays for college, through taxes and other forms of public support.

Today, the Washington Monthly rankings are often listed alongside (or above) U.S. News when colleges tout their national standing. We rate schools on three equally weighted criteria: social mobility, research, and public service. Instead of rewarding schools that reject 95 percent of applicants, we give high marks to colleges that enroll lots of low-income students and help them graduate and earn a good living without too much debt. We factor in pure research spending and the number of undergraduates who go on to earn PhDs. And we give extra weight to colleges that send their graduates out into the world to serve the community at large.

For most of our rankings history, policymakers followed our lead. Both the Bush and Obama administrations challenged the entrenched higher education lobby to disclose more information about student success. Innovative institutions began touting their ability to enroll bigger, more diverse classes and help them land good jobs after graduation.

Then Donald Trump was elected, and forward momentum at the federal level ground to a halt. In last year’s College Guide, we speculated about how bad a higher education secretary Betsy DeVos might turn out to be. She has somehow been even worse. Data gathering has stopped while DeVos and a collection of former for-profit college executives have begun ripping up Obama-era regulations designed to protect students from predatory schools.

The human cost of these actions will be enormous. But the higher education sector has an opportunity to push back, by taking a strong public stand against the Trump agenda, and by offering students a better deal than the boiler rooms full of telemarketers who are doubtless filling up now that DeVos has declared open season on vulnerable students.

There are plenty of examples to choose from: colleges and universities you’ve likely never heard of that do a fantastic job of opening their doors to a wide array of students and giving them a great twenty-first-century education. Indeed, that’s probably why you’ve never heard of them—because the lure of wealth, fame, and exclusivity is still a powerful force in defining higher education excellence.

We know colleges can do better. Here are some of the institutions leading the way.

National Universities

The upper echelon of the U.S. News ranking of national universities—big, research-focused institutions that draw students from around the country—is a who’s who of expensive private schools. Not a single public university makes their top twenty. Ours, by contrast, includes a range of great public schools, from research powerhouses in the University of California system to land-grant universities like Texas A&M to regional innovators like Utah State. These schools do more than just enroll enough low-income students to keep up appearances. At some, first-generation and needy students make up nearly half the freshman class.

To be sure, there are some familiar names on top of our list: Harvard, Stanford, MIT. This is a testament to the fact that you truly can have it all—if you already have it all. There is a tiny coterie of incredibly wealthy institutions whose multibillion-dollar endowments allow them to keep real tuition low for non-rich students while producing sky-high graduation rates and attracting star researchers. The problem is that this organizational model is neither replicable nor expandable. The really interesting universities are just a little farther down our list.

Augusta University doesn’t even get an individual ranking in U.S. News: it’s listed as “#231–#300,” in a seventy-way tie for last place. Yet in our rankings, it comes in at number 30. Augusta is a public research university in Georgia that enrolls an economically and racially diverse student body, nearly two-thirds of whom are women. With a focus on in-demand jobs in the health care sector, Augusta graduates earn far more money than our statistical models predict and pay their loans back at a much higher rate, all for an affordable net price of about $10,000 per year for families earning less than $75,000.

Michigan Technological University isn’t nearly as well known as the other public universities in that state that routinely compete for football and basketball championships. We rank it number 36 because it scores well on all three of our metrics, combining solid social mobility and research results with stellar public service numbers. In addition to sending an unusual number of students into ROTC and the Peace Corps, MTU got the highest possible score on our new “voting engagement” measure by participating in the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement, voluntarily publishing student voting rates, and releasing an action plan to improve civic engagement.

National Louis University, a private nonprofit university near Chicago, sits just outside our top fifty because it has a much higher graduation rate than our models predict given the large number of low-income students it enrolls. National Louis is also one of only a handful of universities with a higher graduation rate for students who are eligible for Pell Grants than for non-Pell students, another new measure we added this year.

Then there are the universities at the bottom of our rankings, many of which enjoy some measure of prestige or success in the national market. Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. regularly denounces federal involvement in higher education—except when it comes to filling his school’s bank account, which overflows with revenues from federal grant and loan programs. But while Liberty is happy to take money from Pell Grant students, it doesn’t seem to care much about helping them graduate. Liberty has one of the worst Pell/non-Pell graduation rate disparities in the nation. This is probably why, five years after leaving Liberty, barely half of students have paid back even a single dollar of principal on their student loans. Liberty also conducts scant funded research and sends a minimal number of students on to earn PhDs.

There are public universities in the lower reaches of our rankings—we’re looking at you, Eastern Michigan and the University of Kansas—along with a bunch of overpriced private universities pretending, too often successfully, that being good and being expensive are exactly the same. If you’re thinking about sending your kids to Drexel, Hofstra, or Marquette, think again.

Then there’s our third-lowest-ranked national school, Catholic University, in Washington, D.C. In 1900, Catholic was one of the fourteen original founders of the Association of American Universities. Nearly all the rest—including Harvard, Princeton, and Berkeley—are near the top of our rankings. Catholic’s service and research numbers are in the middle of the pack. It ranks near the bottom overall because its social mobility numbers are remarkably bad.

Only 13 percent of Catholic U students qualify for Pell Grants, and only 14 percent are first-generation undergrads, among the stingiest rates nationwide. But despite enrolling few low- and moderate-income students, it charges them a net price of nearly $32,000 per year, among the very highest. Catholic isn’t just indifferent to the idea of providing low-income students with an affordable college education. It appears to be openly hostile. God said he who oppresseth the poor reproacheth his Maker. We agree.

Liberal Arts Colleges

Berea College has become our perennial top-ranked liberal arts college because of its unique mission of providing a great free education to low-income and first-generation students in Kentucky and Appalachia, with a strong commitment to service. Washington and Lee, in Virginia, climbed up to the second spot this year with strong across-the-board graduation rates, very high earnings among alumni, and generous financial aid for low- and moderate-income students. Harvey Mudd College, in California, at number 3, sends more graduates into PhD programs than any other liberal arts school.

Women’s colleges often score well on our rankings, including high marks for Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, and Barnard. Salem College, in North Carolina, was originally founded as a girls’ school by the Moravian Church in 1772, making it the oldest women’s college in the South. More than half of Salem women receive Pell Grants, a much higher rate than our models predict given the school’s solid ACT scores. It also graduates Pell students at unusually high rates. Agnes Scott College in Georgia is yet another women’s school that outperforms on the Washington Monthly rankings, with admirable social mobility and research numbers and strong ongoing commitment to the Peace Corps.

Regional Campuses

While national universities and the upper echelon of liberal arts colleges tend to dominate the national sense of what higher education is and ought to be, most students go elsewhere. Regional campuses, which focus more on teaching and draw most of their students from nearby, are the workhorses of the four-year sector, enrolling tens of thousands of students who have jobs, families, homes off campus, or all of the above. Students like these, whom the government classifies as “nontraditional,” in fact make up the majority of America’s undergrads.

Just as University of California schools crowd the top of our national universities list, the California State University campuses at San Bernardino, Stanislaus, Bakersfield, and Los Angeles rank third, fourth, fifth, and sixth respectively on our ranking of master’s-granting universities. They are topped only by SUNY-Geneseo, a highly selective liberal arts school within the competitive and affordable SUNY system, and Evergreen State College, which will be our number 1 master’s campus as long as it continues to have stellar social mobility and service numbers while producing alumnae like Kathleen Hanna and two of the founding members of the rock band Sleater-Kinney.

Our bottom-ranked master’s institution, all the way down at number 695, is South University’s online campus. Although located in Georgia, South University is actually named for John T. South, who bought the unaccredited Draughon’s Practical Business College in 1974 and rode a wave of federal student loan money to modest fame and great fortune, christening his college after himself—and prompting a lawsuit from the actual University of the South—before selling it for $50 million to the notorious for-profit operator EDMC, which further expanded into the online gold rush in the 2000s, producing student outcomes so terrible that it fell into hot water with its accreditor. EDMC was ultimately saved when the school was in turn bought by a Pentecostal “nonprofit” called the Dream Center Foundation, using a loan partially financed by the chair of the foundation itself, thus relieving it of for-profit oversight. South University Online has a six-year graduation rate of 2 percent for Pell and non-Pell students alike. It conducts no research and provides no service, and nearly three-quarters of its former students can’t pay down their loans.

What’s Next?

Although Betsy DeVos made her bones as a pro-privatization K–12 education reformer, her lasting legacy, if any, will likely be in higher education. She and her team of industry executives have aggressively moved to gut regulations that stand between the people who operate institutions like South University and enormous piles of student and taxpayer money. And when students are inevitably defrauded, DeVos is working hard to make it nearly impossible for their crushing student loan balances to be forgiven.

A malign side effect of the DeVos deregulatory agenda will be a reduction in the flow of useful information. Regulations require data. The earnings numbers we use in our social mobility rankings, for example, come from an agreement between the Department of Education and the IRS to generate the information needed to hold for-profit colleges accountable for whether program graduates make enough money to pay back their loans. If those regulations are erased, as DeVos is explicitly planning, the need for supporting data disappears. Even in this corner of the public policy universe, the Trump administration’s prostration to the desires of big business is making the world a worse place to be. (DeVos has proposed to disclose new information about how much graduates of individual programs within colleges earn, a good idea that originated during the Obama administration. But following through on that pledge would involve a commitment to the public good that has so far been lacking.)

The good news is that traditions and mechanisms for creating better information aren’t erased so easily. The data spigot is a lot easier to turn back on once it has been built in the first place. There’s a growing appetite among students and policymakers for authentic information about college quality—not the number of treadmills in the student athletic center or the size of the football stadium, but real data about how colleges prepare people for life, citizenship, and careers. The Washington Monthly rankings are part of a larger project to fundamentally change the way people understand higher learning. It began long before Trump was inflicted on the American body politic, and it will continue long after he’s gone.

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