Higher Ed Watch

[This article ran first at Zócalo Public Square]

To understand how public universities reached their present state of decline and near-crisis, you might look back a century and a half to July of 1862, when Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Land Grant Act into law. The act, to which we can credit many of the higher-education triumphs of the United States, did not, as is sometimes believed, give states acreage upon which to build huge public universities. Instead, each state was granted rights to federal land in the western territories, the income from which would be used to create:

at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.

To implement the law, the federal government gave states scrip redeemable for land. Flooding the market with newly printed currency caused inflation, and many states sold their land rights quickly for 30 cents an acre. In New York, by contrast, Ezra Cornell convinced state leaders to wait for the market to rebound and eventually directed the purchase of a half million acres of valuable pine forest in Wisconsin, returning nearly $10 an acre to the university bearing his name.

Thus, the Morrill Act helped establish bedrock features of America’s public universities that persist to this day. Tension between mechanic arts and classical studies—between the practical and the sublime—would be built into their character. They would serve industrial and other classes who had seldom if ever before been seen as worthy of higher education. The states would be given free rein to run public universities in such manner as their legislatures prescribed. And some states, in matters financial and otherwise, would prove much wiser than others.

Our entire massive multibillion-dollar federal financial aid system runs on credit hours. Credit hours are used to determine a student’s full- or part-time status, which changes the amount of aid an individual can receive. But as we note in our report Cracking the Credit Hour, credit hours simply measure time, not learning. Despite the trillions of dollars spent by students and taxpayers on higher education, we don’t know whether students are learning or not (and there is increasing evidence to suggest that students aren’t learning much at all). As higher education becomes increasingly necessary and increasingly expensive, measuring time, rather than learning, is a luxury that students, taxpayers, and the nation can no longer afford.

The U.S. Department of Education should use the three financial aid tools it currently has at its disposal to pay for learning, rather than time. This could go a long way in helping institutions think differently about how they do or do not think about learning.

As anyone who has ever attended college probably realizes, the currency of degrees and credentials are credit hours.  But few people know where the credit hour comes from. Today the New America Foundation and Education Sector have released Cracking the Credit Hour, a report that covers the credit hour’s history from the days of Andrew Carnegie to the latest “credit hour” regulation. This new policy paper argues that measuring time, rather than learning, is a luxury that students, taxpayers, and the nation can no longer afford. Throughout the week, I will be blogging about Cracking the Credit Hour, beginning with the origins of the credit hour.

Surprisingly, credit hours  came about largely because of professor pensions, and not as a way to measure learning. As a trustee of Cornell University, Andrew Carnegie was bothered by low compensation that didn’t allow faculty to save for retirement. Through the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, he created a free pension system for professors (the legacy lives on today as the not-free TIAA-CREF).  Colleges and universities were of course eager to participate in a system that offered free pensions for their faculty. The Foundation decided to leverage this excitement to promote high school reform by requiring that any college wanting to participate in the pension program had to use the “standard unit,” developed earlier to standardize high school courses, for college admission purposes. Colleges had nothing to lose and free pensions to gain, so the time-based standard unit (forever after known as the “Carnegie Unit”) became the de facto standard for determining high school graduation and college admission requirements.

Over the past 25 years, federal officials have put in place a punitive student loan collection system that is designed to stop “deadbeat” borrowers from ripping off the government by failing to repay their debt.

Among other things, policymakers have made it virtually impossible for student loan borrowers to discharge their debt in bankruptcy, and have removed any statute of limitations on the collection of these loans – allowing the government to unleash an army of student loan collection companies to pursue these borrowers to the grave. They have also empowered the government to garnishee the wages of defaulters without a court order, and seize tax refunds and other federal benefits, such as Social Security payments from elderly and disabled borrowers.

It is certainly unacceptable for students to take out federal loans without having any intention of paying them back. The reality, however, is that many, if not most, people who default on their federal loans do not choose to do because they want a “free ride.” They do so because they simply don’t have the money to make their payments.

Yet, as I wrote in a Washington Monthly article entitled “Getting Rid of the College Loan Repo Man,” our system for collecting on defaulted federal student loans does not recognize that distinction. Borrowers who deliberately skip out on their loans and those who are too financially distressed to repay them are subject to the same harsh treatment.