College Quality

By Art Hauptman

Current arrangements for providing financial support to college students and their families in this country are not meeting many of the objectives for which they were intended. The Spellings Commission summed it up well in its final report: "The entire financial aid system - including federal, state, institutional, and private programs - is confusing, complex, inefficient, duplicative, and frequently does not direct aid to students who truly need it." As a result, the Commission and a number of other groups with wide ranging political agendas have recommended that "the entire student financial system be restructured". But what would that entail?

Since first established in the 1960s, the federal student aid programs of grants, loans, and work-study - in concert with state, institutional, and private efforts - have provided access to a postsecondary education for millions of Americans who otherwise might not have had enough funds to attend. More recently, federal tax offsets against current tuition expenses and tax-preferred incentives for college savings serve as an important source of financial relief for hard-pressed taxpayers from a range of incomes who worry that they will be unable to pay the constantly mounting bill for tuition and other expenses.

Colleges' reliance on adjuncts, or low-paid part-time instructors, to carry much of the teaching load at their institutions has long been one of higher education's dirty little secrets. College lobbyists are fighting to keep it that way, as they are opposing efforts by Congress to shine a little light on their adjunct hiring policies.

Both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate have approved Higher Education Act reauthorization bills that would require colleges to publicize to prospective students the number of adjuncts they employ. The American Council on Education and other college groups oppose these provisions, complaining that providing specific data on adjuncts would be burdensome for their institutions.

We're sensitive to higher ed concerns regarding reporting burden. But given the choice among doing nothing, government actively regulating the use of adjuncts, or reporting to students and families, we vote for sunshine. In fact, Higher Ed Watch would urge lawmakers to go even further and require colleges to provide greater detail to prospective students about the types of courses that adjuncts teach.

Adjunct Faculty and Student Retention

Last week, Higher Ed Watch published its annual "Academic Sweet Sixteen" bracket, which ranks the teams in the NCAA tournament based on their basketball team graduation rates. While it's important to consider how many players leave school with degrees in their hands, there's a significant flaw in the comparison. We have no way to determine whether players who graduated actually learned anything or obtained the skills necessary to enter the workforce.

As we discussed during the football season, there is no data on college quality for athletes and very little for college students in general. It's widely known that athletes often cluster in "jock majors," which provide them with classes that demand and teach very little. The goal of many big-time basketball teams is simply to keep their players academically eligible, not to give them an education that will be of value in the future.

But because there is no objective way to track the relative worth of athletes' degrees (and remember, this problems extends to all consumers of higher education), we have to rely on anecdotal evidence.