A good friend of mine, Luke, pointed me to an “article posted on Fox News’ website”:http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,199898,00.html a few days ago. With a lot of verbal drama, the article discusses the issue of the landscape for federal college financial aid and the conclusions of the 2005 National Academies study, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm”:http://www.nap.edu/books/0309100399/html. In the article, the writer first points to some numbers that were off in the original NAS study. Then he goes on a long tirade about the “ivory tower” and twenty-somethings’ argument that Federal financial aid is in decline. The author argues that this is a hollow complaint, that people make it just to squeeze more money out of the government, and quotes a number of facts to back up this claim.
First, the article makes two completely unrelated points, but uses the second to cast doubt on the source that it cited for the first. The first point is that the NAS overestimated the number of engineers graduated by China, and underestimated those graduated in the U.S., in the Gathering Storm report. They did so by about about factor of 2 in both cases. Concerning the China numbers, this is not in and of itself a very big surprise; such data is quite difficult to gather from China since it is not as public as here in the U.S. However, that doesn’t change the conclusion: nations that are experiencing rapid economic growth are graduating more skilled individuals per year than the U.S. Let’s not forget our friends in India – that data hasn’t changed, even if the Chinese numbers have [GatheringStormEngineers]. Also, engineers are a distinct set from, say, basic research scientists (chemists, physicists, mathematicians). What about those?
The second point, which despite the article’s efforts is not in any way connected to the NAS study, is that “ivory tower” institutions whine about federal financial aid and claim it’s falling. The NAS study *nowhere* makes this claim (I’ve read this report twice and I searched it again this morning using the NAS web interface to the report). The only place that “financial aid” and “higher education” meet in this report is in reference to improved financial aid for low-income students, to encourage them to pursue tech/science careers by choosing their university, and unencumbered financial aid (grants and subsidized student loans, for instance, I would assume) that doesn’t put students in large debt after college (some debt is certainly unavoidable). See page 150 of the report for those statements, in context.
I went to the College Board website and downloaded the data in question [CollegeBoard]. Indeed, federal aid has certainly increased (slide 3). However, the article makes a few claims that are semi-orthogonal to one another. Let’s consider each claim, and determine whether they are rational follow-ons of one another, or slight obfuscations to hide an underlying problem:
* “By the Board’s numbers, between the 1994-95 and 2004-05 academic years, total inflation-adjusted federal student aid more than doubled, from $44.5 billion to $90.1 billion.”
* certainly true, given the data on slide three. I see no problem with this statement.
* “Real Pell Grant funding rose from $7 billion to $13.1 billion, supplemental grants increased from $743 million to $771 million, work-study rose from $965 million to $1.2 billion, and federal tax benefits increased from nothing to more than $8 billion.”
* The inherent argument here is that, for instance, Pell Grant funding increased and therefore that in and of itself is good enough. Since the Pell grant is meant to help under-served students, we have to keep in mind that what matters is the fraction of the grant in relation to the overall cost of college. If we look at slide 10, we see that for both private and public universities the Pell grant does less and less with time. The supplemental grants’ increase mentioned in the article is tiny, so it’s essentially flat (when you consider the number of students applying versus the increase in college cost). The fact that work-study went up is complicated. This is complicated because the increase could mean
* departments aren’t able to hire students with their budgets, so they need more work-study to pay for student workers,
* it doesn’t mean the student is working in their chosen field, and
* it means that students are having to work more to supplement their income while still balancing studies.
That work-study went up is not necessarily a good thing, but the article doesn’t discuss this.
* “Again, according to College Board data, between 1994-95 and 2004-05 inflation-adjusted grant aid per student from both federal and other sources ballooned 51 percent, from $2,965 to $4,479, and overall aid rose 61 percent, from $6,261 to $10,119.”
* This would seem to be a follow-on from the previous statement, suggesting that the increases mentioned translated directly into per-capita improvements. However, one thing this obfuscates is that the proportion of grants/loans has started to shift toward dominance by loans in the last 10 years. For instance, looking at slide 8 we see that in both grads and undergrads, the fraction of total aid occupied by loans is on the increase, while for grad students the fraction paid for with grants has been crashing for a decade.
This article appears to commit several sins, some major and some minor. The major sin (tut tut, Fox) is to try to link NAS’s conclusions to the so-called “ivory tower” argument about declining federal aid. There is no such link – the NAS study is clear when it comes to such aid, recommending that low-income students receive “unencumbered aid” to encourage them to pursue wealth-limited jobs in tech and science. The minor sins are about taking a group of facts and trying to paint a rosy picture with them. Yes, federal aid is increasing, and yes there has been a per-capita increase. However, more and more we see loans available over grants, we see the Pell grant (which is meant to help low-income students) waning as a fraction of college cost, and we see graduate students really getting stuffed with the price of their academic pursuit (not in physics, but certainly in many other fields).
What frustrates me about articles like this is that the real problem is the growth of college costs over economic factors, such as inflation. It seems to me that the problem is that there is some unmeasured combination of greed and financial waste that balloons college cost, which this article doesn’t touch (perhaps because the author and/or their close friends benefit from the financial rape of the student population… ok, here I COMPLETELY diverge from my point to wild speculation). The problem is not that the federal government needs to pay more and more and more money for education; the problem is that we need to shore up such programs to make sure they are a financial bedrock for our growing need to educate, while also identifying the reasons why college tuition stays way ahead of inflation.
.. [GatheringStormEngineers] “China also graduated about 290,000 with 3-year degrees in these same fields, while the US graduated about 85,000 with 2- or 3-year degrees.30 Over the past 3 years alone, both China31 and India32 have doubled their production of 3- and 4-year degrees in these fields, while the United States33 production of engineers is stagnant and the rate of production of computer scientists and information technologists doubled.” (Rising Above the Gathering Storm, page 10)
.. [CollegeBoard] “http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/press/cost04/trends-student-aid.ppt”:http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/press/cost04/trends-student-aid.ppt
