Higher Education

Be sure to check out this op-ed on Yahoo Finance regarding Senator Warren's proposal to cut interest rates on federal student loans.

This Ed Money Watch post has a rundown of all of the pending proposals, including the one sponsored by House Republicans that will be up for a vote next week.

A clear divide has emerged in the debate over the interest rates on federal student loans. In one camp are House and Senate Republicans, along with President Obama; in the other are the congressional Democrats. But before explaining what makes those camps different, a quick refresher on the interest rate issue is in order.

Undergraduates are currently charged two different fixed interest rates: 3.4 percent on Subsidized Stafford loans and 6.8 percent on Unsubsidized Stafford loans. Loans issued on or after July 1, 2013, though, will carry the 6.8 percent rate. (That policy has its roots in a 2006 Democratic congressional campaign and you can read the history here.) The rates are different for graduate students and parents of undergraduates, and were never subject to the expiring policy. The two-rate policy on undergraduate loans was originally set to expire last year, but President Obama called for extending it for one year. Congress went along with that at a $6 billion cost.

Unfortunately, the interest rates on federal student loans are just numbers Congress made up (seriously). And in debating the expiring two-rate policy last year, lawmakers never tried to come up with a more rational approach. Instead, they just extended the made-up numbers. We criticized that approach and offered an alternative last year.

What a difference a year makes.

A real debate about student loan policy is now underway in Congress. House Republicans (Kline), Senate Republicans (Coburn), and President Obama have all put forth proposals to peg student loan interest rates to the rates on U.S. Treasury notes. While their proposals are all slightly different, these lawmakers have put forth proposal that would be permanent, fiscally sustainable, keep rates well below market rates for all borrowers, and ensure that those interest rates reflect economic conditions.

So here is where the divide in the debate emerges. Other lawmakers – House and Senate Democrats mainly – have proposed either gimmicky solutions, wildly expensive ideas, or a two-year extension of the made-up rates. A side-by-side table is available here. 

• Rep. Courtney suggests a two-year extension of current policy.

• Senator Warren would set the rate at 0.75 percent, but only for undergraduates and only for Subsidized Stafford loans, and only for one year. The cost would be close to $12 billion, by our estimates.  Senator Warren claims her proposal has something to do with an emergency lending program at the Federal Reserve, which is really just a rhetorical gimmick that has no practical effect.

• Senator Reed introduced a bill that requires the Department of Education to set the rates at the “cost” of the program, and let borrowers with outstanding loans refinance to those rates. That would drop rates to about 2% by our estimates (official cost estimates understate the cost of the program, so the rates would be artificially low).  Even though the program would operate at “cost,” the reduced interest payments compared to current law would actually show up in the budget as increasing the deficit (i.e. as a cost) of about $175 billion over the next 10 years according to numbers released by the Congressional Budget Office yesterday. That is before factoring in the refinancing component, which could easily top $50 billion in costs.

We’ve received a lot of inquiries about the merits of all of these proposals. Obviously, the shortcomings of the congressional Democrats’ proposals need no further explanation. The president’s and the House and Senate Republicans’ proposals, on the other hand, are all a huge improvement over current policy – and a huge improvement over what lawmakers were discussing last year. None would be a step backwards.

That said, the House proposal gives borrowers the most options and protections – floating interest rates with the option to take a fixed rate and an interest rate cap – but those options and protections mean the proposal has a lot of moving pieces that will require a lot of explaining. It will also confuse borrowers, some of whom will inevitably make a bad choice on when to lock in their interest rate. The president’s proposal needlessly charges undergraduates two different interest rates just to score political points. The Senate Republican bill, on the other hand, has no complicated options and no moving pieces, or gimmicks to score political points.

Those should be guiding principles as Congress and the president work to finalize a bill by July 1.

Yesterday, the New America Foundation's Education Policy Program released "Undermining Pell: How Colleges Compete for Wealthy Students and Leave the Low-Income Behind." Author Stephen Burd reveals a full-fledged "financial aid arms-race" between private colleges and universities, and a burgeoning one among publics as well. Schools adopt a "high-tuition, high-aid” model that allows them to attract wealthy and high-achieving students to boost their rankings with significant amounts of merit aid – money that could have instead been directed to need-based aid for low-income students. That means that the neediest students are left with an impossibly high tuition bill.

Burd uses data, many of which are available through our Federal Education Budget Project database, on Pell Grant enrollment and net price for the lowest-income students at thousands of individual colleges. The analysis shows that hundreds of public and private non-profit colleges expect the neediest students to pay an annual amount that is equal to or even more than their families' entire yearly earnings. As a result, these students are left with little choice but to take on heavy debt loads or to behave in ways that are demonstrated to reduce the likelihood of earning their degrees, such as working full-time while enrolled or dropping out until they can afford to return. Only a few dozen exclusive colleges meet the full financial need of the lowest-income students they enroll. Nearly two-thirds of the private institutions analyzed charge students from the lowest-income families, those making $30,000 or less annually, a net price of over $15,000 a year.

Many private colleges have small endowments, making it extremely difficult for them to provide adequate support to those students with the greatest need. According to the report, the poorest schools are often the ones that enroll the largest share of federal Pell Grant recipients, but they charge these students high net prices because of their own limited resources. At the same time, many of these institutions provide deep tuition discounts to wealthier students to attract those high-achieving students to the school.

This is not just a question of institutional wealth, though. Some of the country's most prosperous private colleges are, in fact, the stingiest with need-based aid. These institutions tend to use their institutional financial aid as a competitive tool to reel in the top – and the most affluent – students to help them climb the U.S. News & World Report rankings and maximize their revenue.

We created an interactive graphic that groups institutions into four categories based on whether they charge low-income students a high or low tuition and whether they enroll a high or low percentage of Pell recipients. We also used data from the Department of Education, FEBP, and The Chronicle of Higher Education to determine the number of endowment dollars available per student.

We can see from this graphic, for instance, that Washington & Lee University enrolls a very low proportion of Pell students (eight percent) and charges the lowest-income students over $14,000 a year in tuition after Pell Grants and financial aid. That’s an average tuition bill of over half of a family’s total income. What's worse is that Washington & Lee has a relatively large endowment of around $450,000 per student. 

While the problem is not as extreme among public universities, it is rapidly getting worse. As more states cut funding for their higher education systems, public colleges are increasingly adopting the enrollment management tactics of their private college counterparts - to the detriment of low-income and working-class students alike.

In many states, public institutions are following the same high-tuition, high-aid model – and in some cases, including in Pennsylvania and South Carolina, the neediest students are facing net prices more than double what they are charged in low-tuition states such as North Carolina. At Penn State University, for example, in-state students attending the university's flagship campus in University Park pay about $16,000 in tuition and fees annually, which is double the average tuition charged at all national public four-year colleges and universities examined in his paper. Despite the fact that Penn State spends nearly $14 million a year on institutional aid, its lowest-income in-state students pay an average net price of nearly $17,000, the fifth-highest of any public institution this report examines. In other words, Penn State's neediest students do not appear to be getting any discount relative to other students at all. At the same time, about 6 percent of the school's first-time freshmen received an average of $3,800 in so-called "merit aid" in 2010-11.

Schools like Penn State seem to be using their pricing autonomy to gain an advantage as they fiercely compete for the students they most desire: the "best and brightest" students - and the wealthiest. These actions fly in the face of national goals to increase access to higher education and help more students earn high-quality degrees.

Over the past several decades, a powerful enrollment management industry has emerged to show colleges how they can use their institutional aid strategically in the pursuit of high-achieving and affluent students. And worse yet, there is compelling evidence to suggest that many schools are engaged in an elaborate shell game: using Pell Grants, the primary source of federal aid for low-income students, to supplant institutional aid they would have provided to financially needy students otherwise, and then shifting these funds to help recruit wealthier students. This is one reason that, even after historic increases in Pell Grant funding, the college-going gap between low-income students and their wealthier counterparts remains as wide as ever.

Last week, the New America Foundation’s Education Policy Program published an issue brief on the recently completed (and two months late) fiscal year 2013 budget, with an early analysis of how the 2014 budget process is likely to affect education programs. One careful reader noticed that the explanation about sequestration failed to mention two lesser-known education programs: the TEACH Grants and Iraq-Afghanistan Service Grant programs.

The former provides tuition aid to prospective teachers, but it converts to a loan if the student fails to complete four years of teaching to high-needs students after graduation. The latter provides tuition aid to the children of military parents who died during military service after September 11. Both programs are affected by across-the-board spending cuts implemented last year.

Although sequestration was meant to apply uniformly to most education programs, slicing evenly program by program, there were some exceptions. Pell Grants, as we’ve reported, were exempt, and student loans were subject only to a fee increase to reduce costs. And it appears that cuts will be larger for TEACH Grant and the Iraq-Afghanistan Service Grant than for other programs.

How much larger will the cuts be?

Recall that in accordance with the Budget Control Act of 2011, the failure of an appointed “supercommittee” to find $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years triggered the execution of across-the-board spending cuts in mid-fiscal year 2013. The final size of the cuts was 5.0 percent cut for education programs funded through appropriations, and 5.1 percent for those funded on the so-called mandatory side of the budget. (Both TEACH Grants and Iraq-Afghanistan Service Grants are considered mandatory funding.)

For the Iraq-Afghanistan Service Grant program, though, the reduction will be 10.0 percent. For the TEACH Grant, it will be 7.1 percent. Therefore, the maximum Iraq-Afghanistan Service Grant will drop from $5,645 (the program is meant to match the size of the maximum Pell Grant) to $5,081 next year. The maximum annual TEACH Grant drops from $4,000 to $3,716. Those reductions affect the first disbursement that occurs after March 1, 2013, which in most cases means the 2013-14 school year, and the reductions are effectively permanent, so they’ll remain at that lower level thereafter.

Why did sequestration impose larger reduction for these programs than for others? And why 10.0 percent for one and 7.1 percent for the other? The reasons remain unclear, and the U.S. Department of Education has not offered much explanation. Some media reports have suggested that the White House is working to limit the impact of sequestration by moving money around and restoring some funding under its budget authority – but thus far, there’s no word from the White House that such flexibility options were the case for these Department of Education programs. We’ll keep an eye out for a good explanation over the coming weeks and months.

And the confusion isn’t limited to these programs. The president’s fiscal year 2014 budget request, which usually includes spending levels for the prior two years, didn’t even incorporate final, post-sequester fiscal year 2013 spending into its budget tables, for the Department of Education or other agencies. So one thing is clear: The government still isn’t able to provide much evidence around sequestration’s implementation. In spite of anecdotal stories about children losing access to Head Start and special education and Title I services being cut across the country, there’s not yet a comprehensive understanding of how sequestration is affecting education programs.

For more on last year’s budget, check out our issue brief, Federal Education Budget Update: Fiscal Year 2013 Recap and Fiscal Year 2014 Early Analysis.

New America higher education experts Amy Laitinen and Rachel Fishman discuss policy reforms that could alter the higher education system for the better. Laitinen explains how to move past the credit hour and measure learning, not just seat time, and Fishman explores how public universities are collaborating on that and other issues to develop online courses. Fuzz Hogan hosts.

This blog post originally appeared on Higher Ed Watch, a blog fro

Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, of the famed Simpson-Bowles commission (officially the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform) that the Obama administration tapped to generate ideas to reduce federal budget deficits, are out with a new wide-ranging proposal. Titled A Bipartisan Path Forward to Securing America’s Future, the report was published by the Moment of Truth Project, which is itself affiliated with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an organization previously housed at New America.

The report includes higher education reforms that they say will create $35 billion in savings through 2023. These reforms mirror some of the ideas outlined earlier this year in the Education Policy Program’s report, Rebalancing Resources and Incentives in Federal Student Aid. Unlike the latest Moment of Truth Project report, though, the New America Foundation report argues that the savings these proposals generate should be reinvested fully in more effective and higher-quality postsecondary education aid. (The Path Forward proposal reinvests most, but not all of the savings into higher education aid.)

One way that Path Forward finds big savings is through eliminating the in-school interest rate subsidy, which defers accrued interest on the borrowers loans until after graduation. This is basically identical to New America’s proposal to eliminate Subsidized Stafford loans.

According to the Moment of Truth Project report, the subsidy is poorly targeted and that money can be better spent by funding the Pell Grant program. The authors argue that income-based repayment is a far better benefit to struggling borrowers, something we made the case for in Rebalancing Resources and Incentives. The deficit reduction report writes:

Another $15 to $20 billion could be generated through a number of more targeted changes such as adopting the President's proposal to reform Perkins loans, lowering Guaranty Agency Compensation Rehabilitation loans, repealing Grad PLUS loans, equalizing loans for dependent and independent students, creating a two-tiered income-based repayment system, and reducing or discontinuing funding for underperforming for-profit schools.

The authors go on to note that such reforms would fix the Pell Grant funding cliff, something we also accomplished in the Education Policy Program report. The authors further note that "by providing mandatory funding to cover much of the projected shortfall in the Pell Grant program, this option would limit the pressure on the Appropriations Committee" to make deep cuts in discretionary programs or to decrease the benefits Pell provides. In 2014, Congress was pleasantly surprised by a Congressional Budget Office estimate that showed a surplus had accumulated in the program over the past several years, permitting lawmakers to flat-fund the program at 2013 pre-sequester levels. Still, costs of the Pell program are expected to increase rapidly over the next several years, demanding a long-term solution.

The report also endorses a proposal first offered by the Education Policy Program’s Jason Delisle. Recently highlighted both in President Obama's fiscal year 2014 budget proposal and in a bill proposed by Republican Senators Coburn, Burr, and Alexander, the plan would interest rates on federal student loans to the rate of 10-year Treasury notes, plus a mark-up. As the commission notes, this addresses the interest rate problem more gradually than a bump from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent – and it would permanently resolve the annual debate over setting the rates by creating a long-term policy subject to the market, not lawmakers’ whims and political interests.

In the Education Policy Program paper Rebalancing Resources and Incentives in Federal Student Aid, we recommend nearly all of these fixes as part of a larger reform to make federal student aid more equitable and rational. And we did this in a budget-neutral way – that is, we used savings found in some programs to increase funding for other programs, or to create completely new ones. While the new Simpson-Bowles report would use some of the savings to fund the looming Pell Grant program shortfall, the authors would also redirect a portion of the savings to deficit reduction.

Our proposal included a broad array of reform proposals, covering loans, grants, tax expenditures, transparency, and other federal aid issues, and it is meant to be seen as an entire package, not a menu of options, because each component of aid affects the others. We stand by that belief, but we are pleased to see other groups arrive at the same conclusions that we did in reforming the federal student aid system: Policymakers can better spend the significant resources they have already committed to federal student aid programs to benefit students, taxpayers, and other education stakeholders.

The president’s fiscal year 2014 budget request includes a proposal for setting interest rates on newly issued federal student loans. The fact that the president excluded a cap in his proposal (as did the New America Foundation) has rankled student aid advocates. We’ve argued that the new income-based repayment (IBR) program that became available last year for students who began borrowing after October 1, 2007 ensures that a borrower’s monthly loan payments are capped – which therefore makes it a more generous benefit than an interest rate cap.

Read the rest of this post on Ed Money Watch.

For more than 100 years, the time-based credit hour has been the currency of higher education. Originally created to calculate eligibility for Andrew Carnegie’s free faculty pension system, the credit hour evolved to become much more. Entire systems have been built around and upon the time-based credit hour, including the economic lifeblood of many colleges and universities—federal financial aid. But today, the U.S. Department of Education approved Southern New Hampshire University’s (SNHU) College for America (CfA) to be the first program in the country to receive federal financial aid based on “direct assessment” of student learning, rather than the credit hour. This move from the federal government could signal a new era for higher education—one in which we value and pay for learning rather than time.

Southern New Hampshire University, a small, private liberal arts institution, is familiar with pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Over a decade ago, it added a three-year competency-based bachelor’s degree to its regular course offerings. Rather than squeeze four years of “time” into three years through summer and weekend classes, the faculty identified the core competencies students should have upon graduation and then wove those competencies into every course and assignment. By looking at the program holistically, rather than just as a combination of courses, the school was able to eliminate redundancies in the curriculum and focus on what students were expected to learn and do.

In a hearing before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce this week, Terry Hartle of the American Council on Education (the higher education lobby) hinted that his association has had a major change of heart on income-based repayment for federal student loans. Or so it seems. 

At issue was a proposal by Rep. Tom Petri (R-WI) that would move the entire loan program to an income-based repayment system administered through employer payroll withholding. Borrowers would make payments at 15 percent of their discretionary income and there would be no loan forgiveness. Instead, total accrued interest would be capped at 50 percent of what a student borrows. Those terms are far less generous than the plan the Obama administration proposed in 2010 and enacted late last year, called Pay As You Earn or Income-Based Repayment. Under that plan, borrowers pay 10 percent of their incomes, 33 percent less per month than the Petri plan, and have their debt forgiven after 10 or 20 years.

Mr. Hartle told the Committee that the Petri proposal “could become an incentive to over-borrowing,” an outcome that he said, “no one wants.” If the Petri proposal more or less rolls back the Obama administration’s Pay As You Earn and Income-Based Repayment plans and replaces them with something that requires borrowers to pay more and for longer, one wonders what the American Council on Education’s position is on the Obama administration plan, which is in current law and available to nearly all new borrowers going forward.

Does Mr. Hartle believe the plan available now for recent borrowers encourages over-borrowing too? If so, that would be a new position for the American Council on Education.

When the president laid out the details of his Pay As You Earn plan in 2010, the American Council on Education rushed to send the White House a letter (available here). The Council’s letter expresses no concern about incentives for over-borrowing, despite the fact that the president’s program is far more likely to encourage over-borrowing (as outlined in this New America Foundation paper) than the Petri proposal because its terms are so much more generous for borrowers, mainly graduate students. The letter is a straight-up endorsement of the president’s proposal to “expand” benefits under Income-Based Repayment.

What explains the inconsistency in ACE’s “strong support” for the Obama administration’s plan and its cautionary warnings about over-borrowing under the Petri plan? (Maybe their position has evolved since they endorsed the Obama administration plan in 2010, and the group does in fact have concerns about it now.) It is unfortunate that the Committee didn’t think to ask Mr. Hartle to explain that glaring inconsistency.

Disclosure: The author worked for Rep. Petri from 2000 to 2005.