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The 2012 Academic Bowl Championship Series

  • By
  • Alex Holt
December 10, 2012
2012 Academic BCS

The results from our sixth annual Academic BCS are in, and we have a Cinderella story that rivals any BCS bowl game. If Academic BCS had a title game, Northwestern University would match up against… Northern Illinois University. Talk about an upset.

The Bowl Championship Series games, which pit the top-ranked football schools against one another, are great to watch. But it’s worth taking a step back to examine the darker side of NCAA football: too many elite football schools are doing a dismal job of graduating their players. Most of these players won’t make it to the NFL, which means that while the school has profited from them, all they can walk away with is a college degree. The trouble is that the graduation rate for football players is often much lower than it is for the rest of the school.

To focus on the student side of collegiate sports, the Education Policy team at the New America Foundation developed the Academic Bowl Championship Series rankings for Higher Ed Watch. Here’s how our formula works:  We calculate the difference between the entire football team’s graduation rate versus that of the male students at the university; the graduation gap between black and white students on the team versus the same gap among the overall school’s male population; and the gap between the graduation rate of black football players versus the black males at the school.* We also factor in the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate (APR).**

We only rank the top 25 BCS teams, thus the winners of our Academic BCS have displayed prominence both on and off the field. For a full explanation of the formula, click here. For the full breakdown of scoring for this year and past years, click here.

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How Much Student Loan Forgiveness Would Senator Rubio Qualify for Under New IBR Repayment Plan?

  • By
  • Jason Delisle
  • Alex Holt
December 6, 2012

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) just announced that he paid off his student loans early with the proceeds from a book deal. Paying down debt ahead of schedule is generally a prudent financial move. But if the Obama administration’s new Income-Based Repayment (IBR) plan had been in place when Senator Rubio graduated from law school, his decision to pay down debt early would have been a sucker bet. Why pay early when your unpaid loans will be forgiven?

Read the full post on Ed Money Watch.

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A Holiday Gift from Eric Cantor: Better College Data

  • By
  • Amy Laitinen
December 5, 2012
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On November 7th, the day after the Presidential election, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) sent a letter to his Republican colleagues expressing disappointment with the outcome, but also the belief that there was room for Republicans and Democrats to “act to bridge our differences and deliver results.” Among the short list that Cantor laid out was the following: “Making it easier for parents and students to make informed decisions about what type of post-high school education is right for them.”

That’s right. The day after the most expensive Presidential campaign in American’s history, amidst deep divisions about the fiscal cliff, taxes, spending, and social issues, education data made the legislative “to do” list.

Both political parties spent much of the past year talking about the need for better information in the face of skyrocketing college costs. President Obama proposed a college scorecard with comparable, easy-to-understand indicators of college value. The GOP platform called for greater transparency around “completion rates, repayment rates, future earnings, and other factors that may affect their (college) decisions.” The message was clear and consistent—students and families need better information.

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The Net Price Myth

  • By
  • Kevin Carey
November 26, 2012

[This blog post ran first at The Chronicle of Higher Education]

The concept of “net price”—what students actually pay for college after financial aid is subtracted from published tuition rates—has become increasingly important  in discussions of college affordability. It was prominently featured in last month’s annual College Board pricing report and accompanying news-media coverage, and has been promoted through tools like the U.S. Department of Education’s net-price calculator.

The fact that many students pay substantially less than sticker price is significant, and deserves to be part of the conversation. But it shouldn’t give anyone false comfort about the magnitude of the long-term college-affordability problem.

Most colleges are nonprofit and spend all the money they get, so there are three big numbers to watch here: (1) how much colleges spend per student; (2) how much money comes into the system from sources other than students; and (3) how much students and their families pay out of pocket. Colleges prefer to ignore (1) as a contributing factor to unaffordability and focus on the broadly correct argument that (2) and (3) vary inversely: If state subsidies decline or endowments take a hit, then student charges must rise in order to maintain spending. Similarly, if Pell Grants go up, then students pay less out of pocket.

That’s all generally true. But ignore (1) at your peril because college spending is the driving force behind affordability or lack thereof in the long run. External subsidies and student charges are both limited in how much they can increase over time by a combination of overall growth in economic output (particularly as it’s distributed among families of college-age students) and the political economy of government fiscal policy.

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Happy Thanksgiving

November 19, 2012

At Higher Ed Watch, we are off this week to celebrate Thanksgiving. There's plenty to be thankful for this year, but mostly we're grateful for our loyal and spirited readership. Have a great holiday! 

Forget the Spin: National Clearinghouse Data Shows that College Completion is Still a Problem

November 16, 2012

By Chad Aldeman, Guest Blogger

The National Student Clearinghouse, which boasts of “near-census national coverage” of all college students in the country, has released a number of new reports in the last few weeks, most noticeably a large report yesterday on degree completions. Due to the breadth of its data—indeed, it has quietly become nearly a national student record database—it was able to rely on a sample of 1,878,484 students who began college in 2006. While the Clearinghouse deserves praise for accuracy and completeness of its data, the headline story touted by both the Clearinghouse and Inside Higher Ed, that the data showed, “that America is doing better on college completion than had previously been revealed,” relies on a misreading of the data. Here's why:

  • While the data are richer, the outcomes aren't demonstrably better. For students who start at four-year public universities, after six years, the Clearinghouse found that 48.6 percent had completed a degree at the same institution, 8.7 percent have completed a bachelor’s degree at another 4-year institution, 3.2 percent had finished a two-year degree somewhere, and the rest had not completed any degree. That's a sum total of 60.5 percent of students completing any degree, which is lower than the 64.8 percent that NCES found in 2009 for first-time, full-time students at public four-year institutions. The Clearinghouse added in part-time students who aren’t captured in the federal calculations, but the final numbers look about the same.
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Morehouse: A Cautionary Tale in PLUS loans

  • By
  • Rachel Fishman
November 15, 2012
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Morehouse, a private, all-male, liberal arts college, is one of the most prestigious historically black colleges in the nation. With a mission to develop men with disciplined minds who will lead lives of leadership and service, and a notable alumni list that includes Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Morehouse attracts some of the best and brightest. So why has this esteemed, selective institution of higher education suddenly been forced to furlough faculty and staff? The answer proves to be both surprising and unsettling: Parent PLUS Loans.

As I’ve written here before, Parent PLUS loans have increasingly become a burden for many families. While the federal government issues these loans, they are most similar to private loans and require parents to pay a high, fixed interest rate of 7.9 percent (plus a 4 percent origination fee, for a total APR of about 9 percent). Parents borrow these loans on behalf of their college-going children, and must meet minimal standards to qualify (more minimal than for private loans).  Unlike federal Stafford or Perkins loans, there is no cap on PLUS loans. Parents may borrow up to the full “Cost of Attendance” (COA) of the institution.

Here’s the problem: Morehouse is expensive. Its COA for 2011-2012 was around $44,000. Even when taking into account federal, state, and institutional financial aid, its average net price was $23,324. For students from families with incomes at or below $30,000, the net price was $23,036. Think about that. Some families are paying more than what they make in one year to send their children to Morehouse.  And Morehouse attracts a significant percentage of low-income students—almost 50 percent receive Pell Grants.

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Our Wish List for President Obama’s Second Term

  • By
  • Stephen Burd
  • Amy Laitinen
November 7, 2012
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Now that President Obama has been reelected, and he has more time to sit back and read Higher Ed Watch, we are presenting our wish list for his second term. [And Mr. President, while you're at it, we're sure you'll enjoy our posts from last week highlighting your first term's biggest higher education hits and misses!]

Among other things, we (the authors of this post) would like to see the Obama administration do the following:

  • Develop long-term solutions for revamping the federal financial aid programs, rather than continuing to scramble to come up with stop-gap measures to shore up funding for these programs in the heat of high-stakes budget battles.
  • Finalize the financial aid shopping sheet and scorecard—and make them mandatory. Students and families need clear, consistent, useable information at key points in their decision-making process. Given that many institutions currently benefit from the lack of this information, voluntary adoption of these efforts will accomplish very little.
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Governor Mitt Romney's Higher Education Record

  • By
  • Rachel Fishman
November 5, 2012
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Last week we highlighted President Barack Obama’s higher education hits and misses during his time in office. With the presidential election fast approaching, we thought it would only be fair to take a look at Mitt Romney’s higher education record during his tenure as governor of Massachusetts.

Even though the candidates mentioned very little about higher education during the debates, Governor Romney’s record in Massachusetts provides some insight into how higher education might fare under a Romney presidency:

  1. Not afraid to cut higher education: When Romney took office Massachusetts was facing a $600 million budget gap in addition to a potential $3 billion dollar deficit.  Within weeks of taking office, Romney instituted a package of emergency budget measures that cut $12 million from the $1 billion higher education budget. And Romney continued to slash the budget during his years in office—between 2001 (when his predecessor was in office) and 2005, Massachusetts saw a reduction of 33 percent in state spending. While Romney has touted throughout the presidential campaign that Massachusetts has the best public k-12 education system in the nation, under his watch, Massachusetts ranked 49th in the nation in higher education spending, spending more money on prisons than on higher education.
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President Obama’s Biggest Higher Ed Misses

  • By
  • Amy Laitinen
  • Stephen Burd
November 2, 2012

With the presidential election fast approaching, we are taking a closer look at President Obama’s higher education record. Yesterday, we highlighted the administration’s most significant accomplishments in this area. Today, we are examining the administration’s most significant blunders and missed opportunities.

So without further ado, here are the Obama administration’s biggest higher ed misses:

1. Fighting to Keep the 3.4% Interest Rate: Eager to woo the youth vote and tap into America’s anxiety about student debt, the Obama administration launched an all-out “don’t double my rate” PR campaign earlier this year aimed at stopping Congress from allowing the temporary 3.4 percent fixed interest rate on federally-subsidized Stafford loans to revert to 6.8 percent. Not wanting to be on the wrong side of this popular issue during an election year, Republicans and Democrats lawmakers made national headlines for their bipartisan efforts to maintain the lower rate. Largely left out of this debate, however, was any acknowledgement of how small the benefits of this fix would be: after all, it only extended the 3.4 rate for another year, only applied to a subset of new borrowers (those who qualify for subsidized Stafford loans), and only would save eligible borrowers about $9 a month. And it cost the government $6 billion. With the Pell Grant program facing a multi-billion dollar funding cliff, it’s a shame that the administration spent so much political and financial capital on a one-year gimmick that provided neither meaningful relief to financially-distressed borrowers in the short term nor to the Pell Grant program over the long haul.

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