Federal Match Makes College More Affordable for Scholarship Students

As 2007 drew to a close, four of the nation’s most selective colleges: Harvard, Duke, Swarthmore and Pomona, all announced plans to revamp their financial aid policies by replacing loans with grants. Other institutions, most notably Princeton and Columbia, had already implemented similar plans.

Harvard’s policy is novel; according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the university announced that families with incomes between $120,000 and $180,000 would be asked to contribute no more than 10 percent of their student’s total expenses for college, while the neediest families would pay nothing. Harvard will raise it’s student financial aid budget by $22 million to implement this policy. With a $35 billion endowment, highest in the nation, Harvard can afford to do it; the added monies for aid are just a drop in the bucket.

This is good news for anyone wishing to apply to Harvard; cost is less of a detriment to well-qualified candidates in upper middle class families. A $180,000 family income gets spread awfully thin when there’s more than one child in college and the family lives in a high-cost metro area. But if cost is less of a detriment to going to Harvard, than Harvard will become more selective, because the number of applications will surely rise.

This has a ripple effect, students apply to more colleges, so they’re sure they will be admitted somewhere; other institutions become more selective too. Few can afford to do what Harvard has done. Imagine the resentment in a household where a Harvard reject must attend their safety school—and must pay more than they would have paid to go to Harvard, even if the safety school is their state university.

It’s difficult to pity families in this predicament; the parents earn a good income and their child has not wanted for much, until this point. There are small tax credits; the Hope Tax Credit allows a deduction of $1,650 per student for the first two years of college, and the Life Long Learning Tax Credit may cover up to $2,000 of tuition for the remaining years. The cap on family income for these credits is $114,000.  

The relief is paltry when I consider that Rutgers, my home state university, costs $20,000 for tuition, fees, room and board for an in-state student. It’s reasonable to expect the entering freshmen and their parents to spend $100,000 for a bachelor’s degree after four years, and certainly after five.

Government loans can’t cover the total cost of a Rutgers degree; the maximum undergraduates may borrow ranges from $7,500 to $10,500—and that’s for a combination of interest-subsidized and unsubsidized loans. The maximum they may borrow for four years is $37,000; this principal is unlikely to rise as fast as Rutgers’ tuition.

The federal government allows borrowers to consolidate those loans and repay them over 20 years; our $37,000 borrower repays $295 a month.

Assuming they qualified; there are needs tests associated with these loans.

Assuming they have no other loans at higher interest rates; the interest on interest- subsidized loans is 6.8 percent, and 7.9 percent for unsubsidized loans. Lord help any college student or parent who pays more principal and interest on student loans; it’s not worth it.

So what’s a family to do, if federal loans can’t cover the difference between their resources and the total cost of college?

I guess they could hope their child gets into Harvard, or its kin.

Or they could hope that colleges loosen their purse strings; according to the National Association of College and University Business Administrators, the average institution spends only 4.6 percent of their endowment. The approach of Congress and the Bush Administration has been to slap colleges on the wrist and tell them to or loosen purse strings so that financial aid spending can be cut. The finger pointing is useless; the colleges have little to no incentive to cooperate.

The way I see it, we need an incentive to encourage schools to make more scholarship aid available, to encourage students and parents to become more financially prudent, and encourage students to do their best in the classroom. Grades are still important interview selection criteria; recruiters ask career centers to filter resumes by GPA before they see them.

Therefore, I propose a new incentive called the Federal Scholarship Match.

It works like this: for every dollar, up to $7,500, earned through an academic or service scholarship, the federal government would match it, up to the total cost of tuition, fees, room and board. This would not preclude a student from receiving other assistance; if the match doesn’t meet the total financial need, the student can receive loans or other aid.

Thus, for example, a bright student who receives a $3,000 scholarship to Rutgers (from any source other than the federal government: private, state, the school) would receive an additional $3,000. If he received a full-tuition ($8,500 today) scholarship, he’d receive an additional $7,500 in federal match, so he and his family would be responsible for the balance, or $4,000.

The family with the six-figure income could pay the $4,000 out of their pocket—or the student could earn it through employment.

I can just see the head spins and eye rolls in some quarters of the higher education community; this proposal redefines the idea of need-based aid. This is what I’d hear: The match puts the needs of the brightest, regardless of income, over the truly needy. It would also reduce the number of full-ride scholarships offered out of college coffers because the government would chip in.

I disagree with the first point; if a student was motivated enough to earn a scholarship, they deserve the opportunity to go to college. They also deserve to stay, if they were motivated enough to maintain the grades to keep an academic award.

The second point is true, but colleges could offer an affordable education to more students. The matching program needs a catch: colleges must loosen their purse strings to qualify for the match and agree to aid more students.

In effect, the federal government would give every college the incentive to follow Harvard’s lead.

Who knows: a success match program could encourage Congress to offer young taxpayers a tax credit to help sustain it; thankful recipients could apply some of the money that they might be applying to student loan debt.

And they’d help future generations, including their children, pay for college.

An Honor Roll, Not a Watch List, for Colleges

Members of Congress on the House committee on education have come up with an absolute bonehead idea: to publish a “watch list” of schools that have increased tuition at rates higher than inflation.

I am surprised when members of the House speak of reigning in college costs with measures such as this, when they fail to do the same for health care. I am sure the list of hospitals that have raised charges beyond inflation would be longer than the number of bad-behaving colleges.

What will a watch list do? It will not put colleges and universities on-notice because Congress cannot regulate their business practice, but it will embarrass their presidents and possibly force them to submit paperwork or public testimony to explain their pricing decisions. If the federal government publicizes such a list, it may also scare prospective applicants away from institutions that need students, even if the school is in a position to offer considerable financial aid.

This is one scenario where it is better for Congress to butt-out. State governments are already taking their own steps to regulate tuition increases for the institutions that are under their control. The voters, including parents and students, have a stronger voice with their state government than they do with the federal government. Placing state-supported schools on a watch list would serve to show that some states have less commitment to higher education than other states. I doubt that any member of Congress wants to embarrass the governor of the state they reside.

Private institutions, like public ones, can prepare parents and students by publishing their annual tuition rates (670 have already agreed to do this, thanks to the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities) and they can make their own decisions. This is one time that parents do not need Congress to be a nanny for them.

However, Congress should do the opposite, which is also something it is good at: rewarding the good schools, irrespective of their tuition charges.

Therefore, I have an alternate proposal. Congress should create an “honor roll” of colleges—the colleges that do the best at retaining and graduating their students. In a previous piece, I wrote that approximately 260 four-year colleges have retained 85 percent of their freshman class and graduated 65 percent of their entering first-year classes within six years. There is a good mix of schools to set an example for the rest.

It makes far more sense to recognize the most successful schools and use them to help their peers. While colleges have varied missions, their primary task is to help their students receive degrees. Every college wants to do that better, and every college president already knows that some schools do that better.

The honor roll could be more than a list; it could be an exchange of ideas to help schools get better. Unlike other markets, college presidents do not want their competition to fail; it is an embarrassment to all schools when a single one closes. The success of a college not only depends on its ability to manage student costs, but also the academics, student services and physical plant. The honor roll could also be a motivational tool with college employees; they do not receive the same incentives as private sector workers.

A public honor roll would also be noticed by employers. They want to recruit the best and the brightest; not all of them go to the schools that are considered prestigious today. However, inclusion on the honor roll elevates the prestige of many institutions for a very positive accomplishment. The honor can only help their students in their job search; it certainly cannot hurt.

Even better, Congress might not need to fund the honor roll after a year or two. The same corporations that support intercollegiate athletics or aggressively hire entry-level employees can be drawn in to support a national honor society based on student achievement, or maybe one of the ranking sources would like to make the investment. There are no scholarships or stipends attached, only the costs of ceremony and publicity.

Are there negatives? Yes. Schools might be tempted to fudge graduation rates or let students slide in order to be included on a list, but then, the honor roll would be important enough to be worth the effort—including all of the paper work that might otherwise be expended on a watch list.

Colleges Make Web-Based Response to College Rankings

Americans love rankings; educated consumers want to know what’s the best on the market for autos, electronics, airline services, and hotels among other things. Educated businesspeople take high rankings seriously, loudly shouting independent praises through their advertising.

But college administrators dislike rankings. I understand some of the reasons why; it’s almost impossible to compare dissimilar schools and the formulas and methodologies are considered non-scholarly by academics. College presidents have said that peer assessment means little when their peers base their judgments on the past perceptions of their schools.

This year, according to U.S. News and World Report, a record low 51 percent of college presidents completed their reputational survey in which they rank their peer institutions. Eight years ago, more than two-thirds completed it. This peer assessment represents 25 percent of a school’s overall ranking. I could guess that the rankings would be less valid as more schools refuse to share information, as well as reliable statistics with the magazine.

However, you can’t keep a good journalistic team down. U.S. News and World Report has been collecting and compiling this information for 24 years. Data collection and compilation for these rankings have been refined nine times, partly in response to institutional concerns. They have plenty of incentive; the America’s Best Colleges issue and print guide are hot selling magazines. They would not be hot-sellers if they didn’t try to be ahead of the curve and become more statistically valid.

Like it or not, these rankings are not going away. Not as long as colleges advertise high rankings as if they’re a “good housekeeping seal” of approval. All educational institutions K-12, colleges and universities are operating in an era where parents and policy makers desire greater accountability and more statistical measures. Even if U.S. News quit publishing America’s Best Colleges, another source would step up in its place. College and university presidents should consider themselves fortunate if Congress does not support that source.

One association, The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) launched their own Web-based tool called U-CAN, which stands for University and College Accountability Network. U-CAN is a nationwide effort to provide consumer information to parents and students, including financial statistics, about privately supported institutions.

NAICU claims that U-CAN is not a reaction to published rankings; according to public content on their site, U-CAN was created in response to public demand for comparable, concise, relevant, and easily accessible information. But I scrolled down and noticed that NAICU acknowledges that if “consumers, Congress, and the administration decide that the information on U-CAN is self-serving and of little value, the likely alternative is new federal reporting mandates.”

So, NAICU is behaving much like a business association of firms in the same industry; let’s try to regulate ourselves before the government steps in. U-CAN is NAICU’s attempt at self-regulation. As someone who has been in the education site business, I was curious to see how U-CAN worked. I played with U-CAN, much like a parent or student would.

Here’s what I liked about U-CAN:

+ It’s free and there’s no need to register. If I were a student, I do not become part of a junk-mail database to schools that are of no interest to me.

+ Navigation is clear and simple—if your heart is already set on a very small number of private schools.

+ U-CAN has statistics that I cannot find in other published sources, specifically the tuition history, four-year and five-year graduation rates, diversity indices, student indebtedness, a price breakdown for tuition and fees, average net tuition charge (after grants in aid), residence life and direct access to campus safety information.

Some of this information is available on other sites, but not as easily searchable; in the case of U.S. News, you have to pay a fee for premium access to obtain more detail beyond the top schools on their lists.

U-CAN is comprehensive, and makes it an admirable effort; it is considerable work to secure cooperation from so many schools (approximately 450, as I write this piece), let alone organize the data in a user-friendly format.

U-CAN is useful, but less than perfect, for considering private colleges.

The first problem is unmemorable domain names. The host association uses a dot-edu in its web address instead of a dot-com, dot-net or dot-org; that’s an unusual practice because the sponsor is a not-for-profit association, not an academic institution. The domain for the U-CAN site is ucan-network.org. This surprised me when I typed U-CAN.org and got nowhere. They cannot use ucan.org; that domain belongs to the Utility Consumer’s Action Network.

So, my first suggestion to NAICU is to buy U-CAN dot-org, dot-com and dot-net before someone else does—or find a new name.

Two other problems come from searches. You cannot return to a list of search results if you want to look at more than one school in a state. For instance, I selected New Jersey and got a list of independent schools in the Garden State. After I finished viewing the complete profile of one school, I could not return to my list. I had to do the same search again. In addition, I could not do a search across schools in more than one state.

The search problems can make U-CAN quite cumbersome and, by comparison, they make the U.S. News print and online guides seem more user-friendly, if I want to compare schools.

That leads me to another suggestion: develop a print version of U-CAN that groups the schools by state and type of school using the available statistics. A print version of U-CAN confronts a major advantage of other guides—they’re also books—parents and guidance counselors are more techno-phobic than high school students.  The most difficult statistic to format in tables is probably tuition history. U-CAN lists tuition charges for each of the past five years; that can be converted into an average tuition increase.

U-CAN is an excellent site, if you have already whittled down your choices to a small number of private schools. It’s better designed to be your last stop for information gathering—after you’ve bought the U.S. News guide, read student school reviews and done your campus visits—instead of your first.

Tales of Two Harvards

Journalist Hanna Rosin has written God’s Harvard, a wonderful book about Patrick Henry College, a Christian school that its chancellor calls “a Harvard for the home-schooled.”

Rosin, who has covered religion and politics for the Washington Post, has crafted an insightful—some of more moderate or liberal political persuasions might find scary—story of a relatively new institution, one that has a mission of preparing an “evangelical elite” for political leadership.

Until I read God’s Harvard, I had not known of a religiously oriented school so driven in this mission. Historically religious institutions, including national universities such as Notre Dame were founded to train spiritual leaders. While they still take spiritual leadership seriously, such schools have long embraced a much broader academic agenda, including pre-professional training. Teachers do not need to be of the same faith as the order that leads the school. Notre Dame, for instance, boasts highly regarded business and law schools that welcome men and women of all faiths, so do sister institutions such as Boston College and Georgetown.

Patrick Henry College places literal interpretation of the Bible and approved classical literature front and center in its academic curricula. The institution seeks faculty who agree, in writing, to make that commitment. That does not make it different from the 105 schools in the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities—of which Patrick Henry and well-publicized Christian institutions such as Bob Jones University and Liberty University are not members. The school embraces discipline, to keep young people from temptation, but so do other Christian schools. The drive to place students and alumni into the upper reaches of political and media power sets Patrick Henry apart.

Founded in 2000, Patrick Henry College is a very small school, only 300 full-time students, and very selective. SAT scores of enrolled students range just below Ivy Leaguers. Their students, it appears from reading God’s Harvard, are no less bright and inquisitive as their peers at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

For curiosity’s sake, I read Rosin’s book back to back with Excellence Without A Soul, a critical reflection of undergraduate education at Harvard, written by Harry R. Lewis, former Dean of Harvard College. While Rosin is a journalist and Lewis is a mathematician and college administrator, they both presented some interesting contrast between God’s Harvard and the nation’s oldest, and probably most academically recognized university.

 

Harvard, in Massachusetts, was interestingly enough, founded as a divinity school for the purpose of training ministers. Students who did not desire to become spiritual leaders took the same classes as those who did. While Harvard has such roots, it has long been thought to be a secular institution.

 

Dean Lewis touches on several concerns for Harvard: a struggle to define the school’s intellectual and moral purpose in a consumerist higher education marketplace; professors are hired for their scholarly accomplishments, and not to be mentors to the young and confused, while the school espouses otherwise, and, he adds that “colleges no longer do a good job of helping students grow-up” because they have had to become surrogate parents. He also discusses the need to incorporate civic values in undergraduate education.

 

Going on the stories in Rosin’s book, I’d say that Patrick Henry College has no such problems.

 

Harvard’s undergraduate school is a liberal arts school; there is considerable freedom to select courses and distribution requirements are not terribly confining. Dean Lewis appears to believe in the liberal arts and general education requirements that form “part of the student’s whole education which looks first to all his life as a responsible human being and citizen.”

Lewis appears, in his book, to say that a liberal arts education is no longer appreciated by Harvard students, or their families, although the value of the good name of Harvard is still respected. He talks of hovering or “helicopter parents” who expect satisfaction for their money and their child, and question the university’s practices and judgment, in name of value, to protect their investment.

Lewis also speaks of liberal education as “a period in which young people can be freed from the presumptions and prejudices with which they were once raised, freed by the power of ideas to pursue their own path in life.” Going on his writing, I have to be more impressed by Harvard students and alumni than I had been before I opened this book. They are bright, motivated and successful, even in a setting where there has been grade inflation and few pats on the back from the faculty.

By contrast, Patrick Henry, an institution that targets bright home-schooled students has little choice but to reach out to parents; their children have not been taught alongside peers in more traditional public and private schools. If I were a father who had home-schooled my children for several years, I would want to know about the academic program and student life of the prospective college that my son or daughter might attend. I would also want to know if my values would be carried forward away from home.

Harvard and Patrick Henry do share similar motives: to select students who will make a difference. However, Patrick Henry reminds them that they will; their faculty and administration will give their students a pat on the back, or a kick in the toukis when necessary.

I did business with colleges and universities for almost a decade, at a time of great technological change and values-driven politics—both family values and financial values. I am impressed by the institutions that find their niche and stick with it instead of trying to be all things to all students.

You’d be surprised which institutions do well to stick to their knitting. I can name names, and I can tell you that Harvard is not one of those institutions, but based on Rosin’s book, I’ll add Patrick Henry on my list.

I may not agree with the politics of the institution, but I cannot deny that their students, parents, faculty and administrators are joined in a common mission. Evangelical political leadership is not going away; those who served the departing administration will lie in wait as legislative aides, journalists, researchers and lobbyists until they have a new leader in the White House.

That does not mean that Harvard is not a great university—that has been proven statistically and otherwise, time and time again—and its community has been the impetus for its greatness. However, traditional colleges and universities have too often looked to Harvard as a benchmark or a model, even when it has not been Harvard’s mission to set the missions for other schools to follow.

That makes little sense; you might be able to duplicate the Harvard’s academic pressure, but you cannot duplicate the Harvard community. It’s better for colleges to find their own way, as Patrick Henry has done, and let Harvard be Harvard.

SAT Optional Schools Not Always Easy Schools

It has been 30 years since I was a high school senior, but I had to take the SATs just as 11^th and 12^th graders do now. I did okay, but not good enough to get into my two first choice schools. Back then, I blamed the SATs and called them unfair, but life went on. I graduated happily in four years from the school I chose.

I am no better qualified to evaluate the validity of the SAT today than I was in high school, but I know that the test is still a fact of life. I also learned that students who performed at a high level in all college-prep subjects usually scored high on the SATs. That is a very small segment of a high school graduating class; it is the people at the very top. Most of us had difficulty with a subject or two. Sciences were my weak point in high school and I avoided them in college.

 

The people who did the best on these tests were well read, studied Latin and also achieved excellence in math. I took four years of math, through pre-calculus; I was doing math problems every day at school, so I was adequately prepared for SAT math. However, I was not the reader I am today, nor did I have a large vocabulary, so my verbal scores were not so hot. When I got to college, I met someone who had scored over 700 on the verbal portions of the test. “The SAT vocabulary was easy,” he said, “if you knew Latin roots.” He had three years of Catholic school Latin under his belt, so his education gave him an advantage. I will not call that an unfair advantage; he still had to remember all those roots for the test.

 

I got a better understanding of reading comprehension, an important part of the SAT, when I took my GMATs for business school. My Princeton Review tutor warned us non-scientists about the science essays on the exam; she pointed to the “caffeine passage from hell”, an essay on the chemical composition of coffee, to make her point. If you had done poorly in chemistry, your eyes would glaze over that essay and you were likely to get the questions wrong. If you did well in the sciences, and understood the passage, you could get those questions right.

What is my point? The best students, the ones who do well in every subject, should have little to fear from the SATs. They should score well enough to get into an excellent school. Especially if they are well read, do math every day and bone up on their Latin, if they have the chance. That will land an applicant in all but the most selective schools, where admissions officers must split fine hairs to make a decision—and decision is likely to be based on something other than SATs.

 

Fairtest.org, a non-profit education advocacy group, reported that 704 U.S. colleges and universities do not require the SAT for admissions purposes. However, the same organization reports that some schools still use the test results to evaluate applicants who do not meet their minimum criteria for class rank and grade point average; this includes flagship state universities such as the University of Texas-Austin (except engineering), the University of Iowa and the University of Oregon. In addition, some SAT-optional schools still use the SAT to place students into freshman-level courses. It’s wise to get specifics from the schools of interest to you before deciding to avoid the test.

Who benefits from an SAT optional policy at a competitive four-year college? The students with good to excellent grades in college-prep subjects, but are also exceptional or passionate, about an academic subject or a creative pursuit. Such talents can be demonstrated in the application packet, recommendations, a portfolio, or interviews, but not on the SATs.

An SAT optional policy makes admissions more competitive, because it atrracts larger numbers of qualified applicants. Every competitive college wants their fair share of artists, performers, activists, scientists, and even athletes in their entering class; some are willing to deemphasize standardized tests to get them. While an SAT optional policy obviously lessens the likelihood an applicant is rejected because test scores, the applicant must be exceptional in some other way to compensate.

If you want to take a shot at an SAT optional school, and you have to contend with SAT scores below the school’s average, take the time and attention to prepare an exceptional application that stands out from the crowd, and show that each school is your first choice.

The line of applicants to SAT optional selective schools and flagship universities will be getting longer every year. It will be harder to stand out in a larger applicant pool.