 It's so great to have a full house to talk about a really important issue. My name is Wendell Pritchett and I'm the Interim Dean at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and together with the New America Foundation we are co-sponsoring this terrific panel which is entitled, Will Reauthorization Save the Higher Education Act? A little bit of a provocative phrase, but we're really happy to have all of you here. We're going to be talking about the Higher Education Act, the change, the turmoil within our higher education system, but also the wonderful opportunities that we have for change over the next decade. This program from the Penn Law perspective is part of our Expanding Government Service Initiative. We're doing a lot of different things to connect with policy makers in Washington and other places. This is actually for me, part of a class that I'm teaching this semester which is called New Models for Higher Education and my class is here. So they're going to be ready, they're going to be ready to ask, exactly. They're priming for lots of tough questions of our panelists so I'm going to introduce right now. Sitting right next to me is Nick Anderson who's the Higher Education Reporter with the Washington Post. He's a former education editor at the Post and he writes about college from the perspective among other things of a father of three who is soon going to be buried in tuition bills. He was just at a meeting last night, I think he might tell us a little bit about with regard to how he's going to pay for these three students. His interests include technological, the technological revolution in education, admissions and financial aid and the globalizing university market. Next to Nick, we have Kevin Carey for people in this building. He's well known because he's the Director of Education Policy, the Education Policy Program at New America. Kevin is an expert on higher education issues and he's written published articles in lots of different places including the New York Times and the Republic, the Quantico of Higher Education. His new book which will be hot off the presses in the spring is called The End of College, Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere. We're very excited and congratulations, Kevin. We also want to thank Kevin for all of his work in putting this together and also Kevin's boss, Ann Marie Slaughter, the head of the New America Foundation. I also want to welcome my colleague, Laura Perna. Laura is the Executive Director of the Penn Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy and she's also the James S. Reepie Professor at Penn's Graduate School of Education where she teaches some of the students that are in the room and Laura's research examines the ways that social structures, educational practices and public policies promote and limit college access and success. She's recently published a new book on state policy in improving the attainment agenda and last but certainly not least a man that many of you know who has spent a lot of time in Washington and other places trying to expand education access and performance is Ted Mitchell who's the Undersecretary of Education. At the U.S. Department of Education, Ted oversees policies, programs and activities related to post-secondary education. He's had a long and illustrious career in education. He was the former CEO of the New Schools Venture Fund, President of the California State Board of Education and he also served as the President of Occidental College. And we're going to start with Ted for many reasons including the fact that he might need to leave a little bit early, possibly. I think I'm going to be back and forth. I do have a call. And we know it's on important stuff. So while we have you right now, while we have you, let's ask you a big question which is that we're hopefully going to see the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, hopefully. So if it were up to you, what would you focus on in the reauthorization process? What do you think the most important issue? This is the magic wand question. Exactly. Excellent. You were king. And then we'll pass it on. So I think that the Higher Education Act, like most big pieces of legislation, has silted over time and has become, first of all, very complicated. And one of the things coming into the department that we recognize and Congress recognizes as well is that just trying to regulate in this convoluted system creates bad outcomes. It creates sometimes perverse incentives and really constricts the kind of innovation that I think we're going to spend some time talking about today. So item number one is a pretty dramatic gardening project where we take a look at things and really try to simplify, streamline, and talk about what it is we're really trying to achieve. That's one. Two, within that, I think probably one of the most complex parts of both the regulatory environment and the lived experience of students and families is the financial aid system. And so I think if we can use the reauthorization of the Higher Ed Act to do a number of things, simplify or eliminate the FAFSA form and connect access to student financial aid with pre-existing information about family income, that is both a good because it makes it easier. It's also a good because it allows us to encourage students and their families to think about college earlier. So that for Nick and I, it's not a sophomore year in college thing, and especially for first generation students, to be able to engage them in middle school and high school and say, here's what it's likely you'll be able to access. And I really won't take 45 minutes answering this question. It's an important one. Simplifying FAFSA and right alongside that, we have allowed too many distinct loan programs to emerge over time. And we have this really crazy matrix of different loan programs, different loan services. And if we could, in the Higher Ed Act streamline that, that would be great. And then I've got two more, another one in financial aid, which is to make Pell spending much more flexible over the course of a 12-month year rather than a nine-month year, because if we're going to tackle cost, if we're going to accelerate completion, we're going to need to enable students to access Pell grants in a much more flexible way. Moving slightly off the topic of federal financial aid, which I think should be flexible for all kinds of reasons that we'll talk about as we go forward, I think that the Higher Ed Act ought to have stronger expectations of states for maintenance of effort to be, once again, kind of balance the triad of funding between states, the federal government, and families. As we know and as we talked about here before, that balance during the Great Recession was really toppled. And with state disinvestments, although we tried our best to increase Pell, to move more money into the financial aid system, to create the American Opportunities Tax Credit, it wasn't enough to offset the state reductions. And so we've seen a really dramatic increase on the load that families have had to bear and that's had disproportionate consequences on traditionally underrepresented students. I'm going to jump in with a little follow up for you. Great. The president, as you know, came up with this idea of a federal rating system. I've heard that. It was in the summer of 2013. And there's been really vigorous debate about this in the Higher Ed community ever since. When I took the temperature of college presidents at first, it was somewhat mixed with some fans of it and some opponents of it. I've heard a lot of criticism, building criticism of it ever since, and the program itself has kind of been slow and rolling out. And we still don't have ratings yet. So my question for you is, the debate over the federal rating system, can we see that as kind of a precursor of troubles that you might face in trying to really rewrite the Higher Education Act with some of those principles in it? Yeah, so I'll try to respond to both and then we'll have to hear what our colleagues have to say about it. I think that I'll invert them. So I think that the interesting thing, going back to the very first thing I said, and it's what you guys know and write about and do really important research on, is that it's very easy to say we should go back and clean out all of these regulations that are cross-cutting. The truth of the matter is that each one of those had a sponsor, each one of those has a constituency, and each one of those has a continuing reason to exist. And I think that can't minimize that. And I think that we're seeing the same sorts of issues play out at the debate over the ratings system. We have had lots of conversation, and I feel good about the pace at which we are developing the rating system, because it reflects our interest in hearing from experts and college presidents and parents and families. So we've spent a lot of time listening, and I think maybe we're seeing different sides of the elephant, but I'm from where I sit, there's been, as we've been talking more and more about the sets of principles behind the rating system, there has been more acceptance that a rating system that is simple and that is focused on access and affordability and outcomes and sort of the long-term value sort of makes sense as long as it doesn't get too convoluted, too fancy, and creates still another black box algorithm that everybody's got to kind of re-engineer. So because we've gotten that message out, people have started to think, OK, this is going to be OK. I think a couple of other things that we've talked about in the rating system have gotten to this issue of very different interests. I think the core worry that the college presidents I talked to have is that the rating system will somehow not reflect their mission or their position in the world. And so I think we've been saying for the last several months, and we heard that loud and clear, is that our intention is to build a rating system that is going to compare like to like. And in addition, importantly, it's going to take what Walter Kimbrough calls the difficulty of the dive into consideration. So we know that there are different outcome profiles for institutions that accept a different range of academically prepared students. And we ought not to compare somebody at the high take rate from elite K-12 institutions from somebody with a low take rate there. So I think as we've gotten those words out, I think that people have started to say, OK, I will be represented in these rating system because my population will be compared to like populations. My institutional mission will be compared to like institutional missions. And so those interests then are able to be more compartmentalized. Sorry about that. That was a very good answer. So Laura, I want to invite you to comment on Ted's priorities, but particularly with regard to the issue of attainment because you've been working on it so much. So obviously, the rating system is as good as it if it helps us to achieve our goals. And our goal is attainment. So I wonder if you have thoughts about the rating system, but more importantly, again, about how do we actually expand attainment in this country? So thanks. That's a big question. So my premise is that in terms of what we need to accomplish with regard to higher education, we need to raise attainment. And we need to close attainment across groups. So those are the broad goals that we need to be working towards. The Higher Education Act is certainly an important part of accomplishing that goal. And so I think part of the challenge is to recognize the roles and responsibilities of different players in this. And so the Higher Education Act has played in a really important role, I think, as you've said, with regard to financial aid in particular. There are also other important initiatives like the TRIO programs that I think play an increasingly important role as other services in communities like Philadelphia as the school district makes some changes that really further limit opportunity. There are many different pieces of the Higher Education Act that are important. I think the priorities that you've identified, and we can have a long conversation about, I agree with the simplification, I think that's really important. We're losing our system. So the beauty of our American Higher Education Institute system is that we have so many different options. And there's so much complexity in terms of post-secondary opportunities. And then we have so many different ways that you could finance it, right? And so they all seem to be strengths, right? But there's so much complexity that it limits opportunity for students who aren't, like most people, are not able to figure out how to successfully navigate this complex system. So while we have the illusion, it's really an illusion of choice, I think. Opportunity is structured in a lot of different ways because we fail to help people figure out how to navigate this. And so then I think the challenge for us to think about is, well, what are the right tools that we can help, as from the perspective of research and policy, to help people have better outcomes and get to where we wanna be as a nation? The Reauthorization Act is one way. I love the idea of trying to figure out a way to, and I wouldn't say maintenance of effort, I would say incentivize states to do things that we think that if we can come to agreement on what some of those goals are, like improve affordability, ensure that everyone is college, academically ready for college, improve the knowledge so people can make the right choices of institutions so that they'll be able to succeed. I think that's great. In terms of the rating system, could be another potential mechanism to help address some of these issues about making sure that the post-secondary options that are available are good ones, another potential use of a rating system could be to help improve the information that people have. I'm just, personally, I'm skeptical about the extent to which one thing can do. We have a lot of different types of needs in how you address those different types of information needs from the perspective of accountability, from the perspective of folks who are trying to make decisions about which college is best, and recognizes also the great diversity of different types of post-secondary institutions. Yeah, I don't know. Okay, Kevin. So we're here with the notion that the Higher Education Act needs to be saved. Presumably, there's a problem with it. But also at the same time, out in this vast market of colleges and universities, there's a lot of interesting experiments going on. People are trying new things and presumably the federal, a new federal law will encourage some of these new things. What do you see out there as some of the sort of more promising models or ideas that a new law ought to nurture? Well, I think we, I think there are some, and so I appreciate the question. And I think this is a good time to sort of step back and ask what is the Higher Education Act for? I remember the last time we reauthorized it, either we started that process in 2003, it took five years, the conversation was dominated by how can we make college more affordable? I think we can conclude that that totally failed, right? I mean, and you know, there were a lot of, when it was passed, I was at the signing ceremony, when it was passed and everyone said, we've done some good work here. Like, this law is gonna, this is gonna do it. And totally that is not what happened at all. It did not work. Because in the end, it didn't do all that much. And because I don't think that the Higher Education Act, as it's formulated is really, proceeds from a set of clear principles around the goals and aims of a national higher education policy. I think it's also didn't change the fact that higher education is really the weak link in the larger system of American fiscal federalism. So if there's a recession, you can't just stop, spend less money on Medicaid and say to the federal government, you spend more. You can't just spend less money on transportation and say to the Department of Transportation, you fill in the gap. Well, you really can spend less money on higher education and say to the Department of Education, just lend more money and make all the numbers work out. There's nothing to stop states from doing that. And I think that has to change. I think there needs to be in some ways a tighter relationship. I guess I'm beyond encouragement. I think states operate under a set of kind of clear incentives about dollars and cents and we need to sort of recognize that and not have a repeat the next time there's a recession as there surely will be. I would also really like to kind of orient the aims of the Higher Education Act more explicitly around the goals of student learning and entertainment. It was, I was reflecting last week I think or maybe the week before there was a headline in the newspaper and it said, US Department of Education cracks down on Princeton because of Princeton's sexual assault policies related to students, which it's been great to see there were new detention to the very real problem of sexual assault on American colleges and universities and good to have the Department of Education playing a strong role in that. But it did strike me that around the same time there was a lot of news coverage around at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, this tremendous academic scandal there where it turns out right within one of our most well-regarded public research universities there was a credit fraud operation that went on for almost 20 years completely undetected by the university involving thousands of students. And while the NCAA is kind of looking into it again because about half the students were athletes and the accreditor is kind of saying, yeah, we're gonna do something although I have no idea what. What I didn't read was US Department of Education is cracking down on UNC Chapel Hill because of its credit fraud operation. And the reason is nothing about the Higher Education Act gives the Department of Education any reason or ability to do that. It's almost as if our law sort of considers colleges to be important in our culture but not our education system. And so we have strong regulations around issues of gender equity in sports and issues of safety on campuses as we should but we just leave the question of teaching learning totally aside. I think that's very strange and we leave the question of are people actually graduating and getting college degrees aside? So as a sort of a long precursor to your question I do think that there are institutions out there particularly some of our better public institutions although usually they're not the flagship public institution they're the next two or three on the total poll in their state that really are committing to the idea of substantially increasing the number of students from diverse economic, ethnic and academic backgrounds who they enroll and who they help get degrees with real value in the job market. Those are the places where we can really move the needle if we think about the president's original North Star goal of returning us to the world lead in college attainment although I'm never quite sure when we did have the world lead it's always a little bit of vague where how the statistics are but nonetheless I think it's been I mean that really has been consistently what's animated the Obama administration's education policy for the last six years. To make the numbers add up you have to go to where the students are and the students are in large public institutions and particularly some of these big public four year research universities we actually had a report here in New America that came out last year where we looked at institutions like Arizona State University, University of Central Florida, Georgia Tech University these are big into high quality institutions their degrees mean something in the labor market they are getting bigger they are forging partnerships with local community colleges. Right I'm gonna jump in here we did a story in the Washington Post magazine on this subject of community college partnerships with these interesting public universities I went to George Mason University which I think probably is one of the kinds of universities you're talking about and its partner institution is Northern Virginia Community College and there you've got 50,000 students in a given year it's a very vibrant community college sprawled out across Northern Virginia serving an amazing array of students at obviously a great price and really drawing them into the system and then what's interesting is the pipelines that were built very intentionally built between this community college and George Mason University so you've got thousands of students in a pipeline going from the one to the other and graduating and getting a George Mason degree and I found it incredibly inspiring I mean one of my jobs is to as a reporter is to go out there and find the problems but this was a solution an interesting solution University of Central Florida you mentioned is the same thing I'm kinda curious to see whether the federal government can or should do anything to kinda really enlarge the role of community colleges so that they are the engines for the new kinds of graduates that we need to get to reach the goals Please So we're big fans of community colleges big, big fans and it goes to Kevin's point about the math problem of the North Star goal and going to where the students are the completion issues the attainment issues are every bit as difficult in community colleges as they are in four year and then when you move the transfer problem from four year to two year unless you've built durable, predictable, transfer credit pipelines Very explicit You have to be very explicit common course numberings the kinds of things that they do with George Mason the kinds of things that they do in Florida, Florida system, Texas but that's sort of one part is making it more possible for more community college students to transfer with less friction into four year institutions is a high priority for us The other side of the community college mission which is preparing people who are not on a four year path for careers and work is a truly vibrant area of work right now and the reauthorization of the WIOA gives us an opportunity to work with community colleges across agencies in the federal government to establish more targeted programs for students that are linked to real jobs in their communities and here there are community college probably my favorite example is in Tennessee the Tennessee Tech Centers where they are actually purpose building programs to industry specifications with some general education added in that enable students to come in do focused work, get a certificate and move out into the workplace in a really quick manner I don't want to say that that ought to be a substitute for all of the other things that community colleges are doing right now but enabling more of that is an important priority for us Laura, do you want to comment this is another area that you've done a lot of work in either about what's going on at the state level or how you see the federal policy issues so this was an issue that emerged Wendell mentioned in my book with Joni Finney on the attainment agenda we did case studies of five states and looked in depth at what are the policies and practices that are designed or not to help promote and achieve some of these attainment goals one of the clear conclusions is that we're losing a lot of students as they try to move first when they try to move from K through 12 into higher education and then once they enter higher education as they try to navigate and transfer between institutions you know in all five of our states we found examples of some institutions that were doing some very exciting types of things but not enough on a state and I think this is a state policy issue given how much variation there is across states in terms of the configuration of higher education systems in some of the policies that are already in place even when there are some of the credit or numbering systems in place it doesn't guarantee that when you go from one institution to another those credits will be counted I think there are some models that are being developed where that allow students who participate like in Maryland and Texas and associate of arts of teaching will transfer in whole to a four year college so there are a few things that are beginning to happen but given how much students move across institutions I think this is an issue that has to be addressed more widely. So Wendell I'd like to kick it over to you for a minute and I just I wonder if you've given any thought to the magic wand question yourself which is you know if you could wave a wand and sort of fix one problem in higher ed through this rewrite what would it be? Well I have thought about it a lot and I don't have one answer I do think though the question that Kevin raised and Ted was nodding is that we don't really regulate higher education and so we regulate aspects of it but we don't regulate the core educational experience and I do think so to answer your question we have to get higher education to make the number one priority the educational experience helping students become lifelong learners right? So that should be the focus of all of our discussion the question of course is how do you get what's the government's role in all of that and we've tried a bunch of different things we were focused on accreditation for a little while we thought that was gonna help us change the way universities operate I'm not really sure that there will be one thing that the Higher Education Act can do to change that but I hope that in this conversation which unfortunately is probably gonna be several years long in reauthorization that we're constantly saying to educational institutions that they have to be focused on learning as their priorities as a chancellor for the past five years I was struck by how little time I spent or we talked as senior administrators about that question right? We talked about football we talked about fundraising we talked about new buildings we talked so seldom about how do we help our students learn accountability is what you're getting at right? Yeah, yeah It's a bad words in some quarters but I gotta say it accountability should higher education be accountable and so for what? Yeah and I don't know what the right way of the lever is with the Higher Ed Act I don't know what you think on that So I'm torn I think that some part of my soul is a deeply troubled regulatory soul and so I'd love to have all those tools in my hand to be able to go to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and say that was really bad and so you're gonna lose title four eligibility for two years or something like that I also I think that there's another kind of accountability that our rating system is trying to aim at which is a very public very transparent accountability system that lets everybody see the answer to the question how is Institution X doing against a couple of goals that we as a society have set out for ourselves? I don't think that they are substitutes for each other but I do think that they somewhat compliment each other but I would love there to be more authority in the federal government to crack down on what we see as educational abuses as opposed to financial abuses or the like Kevin what do you think about this question you've written a lot about it sure well I think one opportunity new opportunity that we have now that we didn't have before is that we can start to look at one only one but a very important element of why people go to college and why we have colleges which is are we helping students get the skills and credentials they need to be able to successfully enter the workforce and that's really the whole foundation of the gainful employment regulations that under Secretary Mitchell may also have heard of that were just finished last week and instantly litigated again right afterwards but the whole foundation of that approach to thinking about quality is to look at how much money do graduates of a given program earn compared to how much debt they have to take out and I think that comparison is crucial you could have people who don't earn very much but if the education was very inexpensive maybe that's an okay place for them to be they could earn a lot but if they had to borrow fantastic amounts of money that might be not a good place to be so it's that sense of value it's the comparison of what they paid and particularly what they borrowed because of the very specific in some ways is severe circumstances we put students in in terms of having to borrow before they have the ability to repay that perspective although the Department of Education legally can only regulate programs that lead to gainful employment using that lens they're only allowed to say you're out of Title IV we can certainly expand that perspective to anyone in higher education we can ask the same question of nonprofit programs again we're not gonna sort of throw them under the same regulatory umbrella but we can get the information out there we can rate them that way I mean the most popular major in American higher education by far by far is the bachelor's degree in business it seems reasonable to ask whether people to assume that people studying business probably wanna go get a job in a business and to find out what happened and start to draw some conclusions about that again that's not gonna tell you the totality of what we wanna know about whether a program is successful but people gotta pay their loans back and we should know if they can and what's critical about that perspective and it deeply informs gainful and I would argue should inform anything that we do in reauthorization is that it's based on outcomes for a very long time even the accreditation process has been approving programs based on a description of the inputs and processes that are involved and so I would wanna make a very bright line if we're going to expand by statute federal regulatory authority to have it be about outcomes and not processes or inputs great great so we have why don't we turn over to the audience for a little while at least for questions and we might have some follow-ups but we have microphones here I would ask you to introduce yourself and ask a brief question or comment and I think the microphones are coming up here they come and when I get up and walk out in five minutes it's not to avoid a hard question although it might be it might be it might be good Alan Sessoms American associate of state colleges and universities as one of those I was a university president three times over in different places painful experience but let me get to let me get to the most painful experience I had we had students who graduated near the top of their class from public education to students who couldn't read and write the governors of the states through the NGA push the common core and that's been adopted lots of places but all of a sudden it's become a political football and the federal government is being blamed for the common core that they had very little to do with how do you expect discussions around the reauthorization of the H.E.A. to be less political than something as simple as that just asking this is a very tough question so we since we're only going to have you for a minute but we might invite Kevin after Kevin will have a better answer than I I mean I think I mean the common core has become politicized in part because everyone sends their kids to K through 12 schools and the parents on the parent feel a particular sense of obligation and ownership over that experience whereas in higher education we are talking about adults, young adults, many making that transition to adulthood so I think and also no one is talking about a common core for higher education what Ted is talking about is outcomes not prescribing you know the common core was really an attempt to bring more regularity to the processes of K through 12 education I think there is a deep historical principle in American higher education of kind of leaving the processes alone that's the dynamism, that's the diversity, that's what colleges specialize and compete on but to have a bottom line perspective about what happens afterward and particularly if we're framing it in terms of loan money which is federal money, these are taxpayer dollars that we are lending to students who then turn right around and give it to colleges it's reasonable to find out what's happening to them afterwards so I think that kind of cost benefit perspective I would only add, I agree completely with Kevin I would only add that I think that in this environment the A word around accountability for higher education is one that resonates for maybe different reasons but it resonates both on the Republican side of the aisle and the Democrat side of the aisle and I think that knitting together a consensus around high outcomes for all kids at a low cost that can be borne through their employment uh... is I think that there's a straight line there that's not as straight when you're talking about what every kid in America should know and be able to do at every grade level and every subject can I make a quick point about a legislative process that's kind of off of your question which is in my experience what gets hot is what congress addresses first and I would expect that congress is probably going to want to weigh in on K-12 it's been a long long time since congress has weighed in on K-12 and the ESCA it's way overdue more overdue than higher education act so this is just my seat of the pants guess when Lamar Alexander as a Republican takes the gavel in the Senate committee that handles education he's going to change a few things but I bet he's going to focus on K-12 uh... first and I bet that there's energy to do that in uh... on the house side as well and then uh... maybe h e a will be a quieter discussion it may sort of proceed on it it'll proceed on a separate track i would bet but you're more likely to see congress go first on K-12 then then on higher ed is my my guess hi i'm elizabeth morgan from the national college access network i'd love to hear everybody's best guess today for when h e a will move actually the follow-up on nicks comment and then assuming perhaps that it might be a few years could we um... would it be worthwhile to move forward say with senator um... alexander's uh... fast uh... fast for simplification scheme separately from uh... and instead of waiting for the full h e a if i if i was a betting man i would bet on not during this congress they got me one i mean post twenty sixteen honestly i think i mean for a lot of different reasons uh... probably because just simple priorities as nix said partly the larger the sort of larger political dynamics in the difficulty of moving large pieces of legislation forward uh... the thing is to you can an awful lot of what the federal government does around higher education uh... involves money uh... and so you do have uh... you know appropriations bills kind of moving uh... and budget bills where you can plausibly make policy changes uh... that have to do with higher education policy because their their plausibly connected to dollars uh... so in that sense uh... yeah i think it's been very hard to to be wrong about uh... betting on congressional dysfunction over the last ten years and so i'm gonna stick with that so i'm not gonna bet on a date but i will say that i think it's a both and that i think that we should be uh... relatively opportunistic and look for places to uh... work together with congress and past bills that will make a an impact on the felt experience of of students going through this process and uh... at the same time keep our eyes on a bigger a bigger price and i'm gonna walk right up here but i'll be back other questions up here and then we'll go back to the back uh... montez-pauchel lowly grad student so uh... we talked a little bit about uh... streamlining financial aid kind of making it a simpler process as well as yet just kind of getting rid of the faffsa uh... my question and it might be a little lofty is i'm gonna throw the a word out there again uh... accountability on the loan and as we're finding especially this stage in higher ed a lot of students are graduating and not able to get jobs uh... and then we're also finding out that consumer knowledge is very low uh... when it comes to acquiring loans so a lot of people take out loans and don't really know the full magnitude of what they're doing uh... and then of obviously we have a lot of defaults uh... a lot of bad credit going around uh... some wondering if in a jay will there be any kind of measures of accountability when any of the actors that are involved with the loan process more so to crease consumer knowledge at the very least and if so who would it be on would it be on the government would it be on the private loans uh... distributors or would it just be on the families is there something you were thinking about we were talking about before well i like this question because it gets at the at the issue of consumers and the real experiences consumers have you know they're they're sitting there they're staring at their financial aid offers the financial aid offers are often to them sort of not comparable from one school to another so it's very hard for them to decipher loans are thought of as financial aid let's pause on that for a second now there's a good reason for that because certain kinds of loans are have favorable terms that that sort of facilitates student uh... students uh... going through college you know that certain kinds of loans are subsidized meaning they don't accrue interest during college and they there's a grace period after you leave college hopefully you're after you graduate there's a reason why some of these loans are a but a lot of them basically are being sold as aid and are uh... in fact just simply alone so i'm to mine see i as a as a dad as a parent i want to say to the teenager young adult hey you want to be treated like an adult think about it when you're signing your name onto a promissory note uh... that's one of the most fundamental things you can do in your transition adulthood is to understand the consequences of a signature like that uh... students and consumers are uniquely vulnerable and if we're trying to get consumers uh... more consumers what more students uh... from disadvantaged backgrounds especially into college and through college then we have to think about educating them and i think one role the federal government could play uh... if if it's in the in the business of simplifying and shining light on things is to is to try to set up some some rules of the road for what financial aid offer should look like and how colleges ought to be out instructing students on sort of the terms of the aid offer and what alone means and what it is that's that's a possibility for the federal role i think that answers your question i think that's right and it's so much variation in how information is presented and we know that there's lack of understanding and knowledge of what's alone and and what that means for students you know it was a complex right so for most students who borrow reasonable amounts of money and they finish their degree they go on and they get us a job with the salary that allows them to repay them the problem comes in when people borrow high amounts of money and when they don't finish so i think the completion part of the of this when we talk about loans i think the completion part is a very important component of the of this so you know and that goes back to helping students make good choices about where they're going to school and their likelihood of finishing with those different types of options i think there are other reasons to be concerned about loans so the increasing you know the shift of the burden because of the state decline in state appropriations per student so the shifting of the responsibility to students to pay so the percentage of students who are borrowing is increasing the amount of money that students is borrowing is increasing and so you know from my perspective another bigger picture issue to think about is well how do we reduce the cost of of education and how do we ensure that especially for uh... so loans are most risky for those who are least likely to finish right and those are our most vulnerable populations that we're trying to increase attainment for so how do we make loans less risky for those students one way would be to provide more need-based grant aid and things like that kevin you've written recently about organizations that aren't even part of the financial aid system uh... you might want to comment on this question but i also invite you to to talk a little bit more about them and and and how you think what role they will play in the future whether you think that actually really is a growing aspect of of this uh... ecosystem so a few things on loans uh... in two thousand ten the federal government took over the entire federal student loan system uh... and so it really so we can't really hold the lenders accountable because the federal government is the lender now we have a private loan system that it exists like completely outside of regulation it's not a different than going to a bank and saying let me money to buy a car or give me a credit card or something uh... we do have a week set of regulations that hold colleges accountable if you're loan default rate is very bad for a number of years in a row we'll kick you out of the title for system uh... but very few institutions are caught by that the department of education actually weakened that uh... uh... regulation a little bit uh... not that long ago uh... probably give the ted left for for this part of the conversation we can ask him when he gets back uh... so that you know the it's those regulations are there there's a foundation there i think there will be a lot to be said for tightening them up so colleges really have more of an incentive to not uh... take loan money if they've not really prepared to help people graduate and and be able to pay their loans back as there are very many centers right now the great thing about colleges you get paid up front doesn't really matter what happens to your graduates after they leave or whether they default uh... so i think that we can do some things there it's also it's worth uh... just acknowledging that the federal government has recently put in place uh... a series of actually quite generous income-based repayment and loan forgiveness programs uh... so if any of you out there are in college or have loans i imagine that applies to some of our students from penn today uh... you can uh... apply for a program that will both limit your monthly loan payments to a percentage of your discretionary income and after a certain amount of time uh... forgive a remaining balance and if you go into a public service look if you come work for me here at the uh... uh... new america foundation uh... or for penn uh... not for the washington post uh... sorry any anything you can limit your payments then after ten years any any remaining balance will be forgiven by the federal government and so people uh... the uptake on those programs has been slower than perhaps uh... some people have wanted but that is kind of a back-end way that the federal government is using to help manage loan balances when will you have any thoughts on on what colleges can do to sort of to to limit indebtedness to student indebtedness yeah i do think that this is a universities have a big obligation here that a lot of us are failing to to right now uh... it is true that we are limited by law in some way and how much we can restrict access to loans in particular that there are there are unfortunately too many stories of students who took out more loans than the one where it was recommended by their university but that's a small thing compared to the university obligations so uh... i do think that we have to provide a lot more education i do think that that uh... universities that are high quality are doing more education as it was ted said earlier on it might have been kevin early earlier on you know when we're doing the admissions process or when we're even recruiting students we're starting to talk to them and about what are some of the different structures for uh... for loans and what are what are the what are these things mean getting back to your question but there's a lot more work that we have to do here i think if you look at the the size of financial aid offices at most universities they have increased pretty significantly over the last few years i know as a large part of records camsons budget uh... and we did spend more time on this but there's still a lot of work to do in the back i think it's the next hello how's it going my name is justin habler i am the legislative director of the united states student association so um... we've been discussing a lot about uh... costs affordability attainment uh... we know for a fact that one of the primary reasons that we see increasing attainment um... and lowering costs is exactly what you were saying Laura is grants need base grants so my question for all of you is where do you all stand on a re-instituting the year-round pail grant and we heard before from undersecretary michael making the pail grant more flexible so i think that'd be the cornerstone of flexibility if you could speak more to that uh... i'll just note that my uh... my colleagues uh... ben miller and jason delisle ben raise your hand in the back uh... we'll have a paper coming out soon next month am i right next month uh... about exactly that question about the the late uh... briefly existing and then immediately was destroyed year-round pail grant that we had uh... for like six months in this country uh... it it's turns out to be pretty complicated you know i mean it's it's not uh... there's a difference between having a year-round pail grant and just giving people a whole nother pail grant doubling their pail grant in a given year that's would be very expensive i mean the pail grant is already a thirty five million dollar program as it is so i mean undersecretary mitchell i think we've mentioned this uh... briefly uh... it is very important that we modernize our financial aid system to recognize the fact that the traditional show up in august leave in may system is uh... increasingly unusual it is represents the minority of all students and certainly the minority of students for whom financial aid is most important uh... so i think making that system more flexible uh... and fit better with the realities of attendance that can be uh... go from full-time to part-time to into out different institutions is a a huge priority something we definitely need to do that's that one one data point at ruckus camden that the program was there for two years three maybe so the summer that was definitely around yeah we had twice as many students registered for class as the next summer when the program was eliminated so i think it went from two thousand students registered to one thousand students i mean that's just a perfect example of the value of the program those students will finish faster uh... then the students who don't have access to that just add on the pelgrin subject legislatively i mean i think this is where you're going to see congress uh... have to deal with issues uh... related to higher ed is on pelgrin it's a it's a perennial question you know how much funding there is for the pelgrin program whether she be expanded whether it's underfunded whether you know that kind of that kind money question is is probably where higher ed policy is going to be made in this congress and the other thing i would add about about pelgrins is that uh... when i talk to colleges uh... about sort of things that the college presidents about things that they would like to to to fix or what their priorities are priority number one is probably pelgrins they they just they want more more funding for pelgrins it's just that it's a universal theme among the college presidents i talked to because it just so it's the core of everything they do number two is is uh... federal research funding but that's another subject the other thing about pelgrins that is probably worth talking about here because this is an h e a conversation is that there's a great debate about about what we're getting as taxpayers for our buck on pelgrins so you ask me for my stance i don't have a stance on this one i'm a reporter i'd you know i'm not going to take a position a policy position on on the question you raise but i would say this i'd be very interested to know uh... what are the colleges that have the best rate graduation rates of pelgrins students and not just uh... first-time full-time students but uh... somehow a graduation rate that accounts for the nuances of transfers and flow of students back and forth across institutional lines uh... as as a reporter i'd be i'd love to have that kind of information and that's probably something that that an h e a could could facilitate knowing more about pelgrin outcomes so just related to this point so part of the reason why university presidents asked for pelgrins is when the more need-based grant aid comes from the federal government it means that less obligation for the institution to provide that aid and we tend to look at policy in isolation but we have a lot of different efforts out there that are designed to achieve the same goal if i could wave a magic wand it would be to have some sort of mechanism to promote greater alignment and greater understanding of how all these different pieces fit together to try to maximize and think about more intentionally so this is the role of the federal government in providing need-based aid this is the role of the state government this is the role of the institution because there's a lot of variation in how that plays out so as you've found in your book where you live what state you live really affects your prospects that we know that for a lot that's true for a lot of things but it's particularly true for higher education right there some states where there's a lot of support where you can get done relatively quickly and there are other states where you have very little support and i don't know if you want to add anything about that more right and so it varies based on your characteristics too so if your state awards its financial aid based on academic criteria rather than financial aid criteria so how the how a state decides to allocate its funding in in order to address the affordability issue is one thing how a state has come together or not around the academic preparation issue is really really important and we've made so little progress in figuring out how to make sure that everyone who enters college is ready for college level work there's also great variation in the types of systems and educational opportunities that are available and building on that early one of the earlier comments about having different types of post-secondary opportunities available and perhaps some that are more directly related to the workforce the state the Accenture which a state emphasizes workforce training in its post-secondary options varies and the outcomes vary for folks too the Accenture which a state provides mechanisms to ensure that even if you get a workforce-oriented credential you and then you decide oh I actually would like an associate's degree or bachelor's degree you're able to continue on and apply those credits rather than start over so there's you know there's so much variation on so many different measures that matter to these outcomes where's the mic, who has the mic right here, how about right here hi Julie Johnson with Complete College America so in thinking about this Kevin you're coming up with a book called The End of College and it makes me wonder if there's any opportunity in the reauthorization to think about how do we help colleges move forward, adapt, prepare to to change as as times are changing as we talk about innovation in different pilot programs to facilitate that well they're all doomed as my book will explain they're not all doomed that's not what I mean by the end of college I do think that colleges are very locked into a certain way of seeing understanding themselves and conducting their business financially and otherwise and Wendell actually prompted me earlier with a question that I didn't get a chance to answer which was to talk a little bit about some of the interesting things that are happening in the the whole other world of higher education that has nothing to do with the government most higher education almost all of it is either conducted by a public agency or financed by the government one way or the other including for-profit colleges which in many ways are like the most public of them all if you look at where their money comes from but there are in certain parts of the economy now a growing number of they're not colleges really that's not the right word to use for them their higher education organizations their learning organizations uh... i wrote a magazine article a couple months ago about an organization called general assembly uh... which has an office here in washington it's actually right across the street from washington post uh... they're in brooklyn they're in san francisco they're expanding to seattle and austin lots of other places what they provide is an eight to ten week intensive boot camp educational experience that prepares you to get an entry-level job as a web developer uh... ux designer the very very high demands uh... high-paying institutions in the tech startup economy uh... there's almost an infinite appetite for good programmers out in silicon valley nobody can get enough of them uh... in that market is so strong that uh... people will pay there's almost a strange thing to say like money out of their pocket for college they'll like put it on their credit card they'll just like why to check for eight or nine thousand dollars because the return in the labor market is so strong they have ninety-seven percent of their graduates are placed immediately after finishing i think the colleges are going to have to start thinking more directly about what kind of value they add uh... and how much that costs and colleges are not set up to think that way right now they're set up to think about where does my money come from and how can i spend it on the stuff that matters to me that's different than saying how much is it cost to provide a certain kind of education to a certain kind of student successfully how you know how much of my charging them and there's a deliberate sort of blurring in terms of standard tuition of all of those things inside these very large financially complicated organizations so i think that you know what we get what we what college is will need to do going forward and that's what good public policy will help them do is find ways to specialize at the things that they are good at and they are good at lots of things there are lots of amazing educators in colleges all over the country but what i do think we're kind of getting to the end of is uh... the college model in which everyone is comprehensive in which you have to have an English department in the history department in the math department everyone has to teach all of the same introductory courses that gets hot and developed over and over and over again that model doesn't make a lot of sense and i think colleges are going to have to move towards something that's more about what they're good at it's going to be a long slow process doing that well so that's that that's the question uh... i mean i don't know i'm not sure it will be there's different sort of theories of how change can happen and sometimes the money starts to stack up against you and in your force to change a lot faster than you thought you had to i think there's pressure on college building on what you're saying there's pressure on colleges to rethink the first couple of years of college uh... especially sort of the the first entry-level undergrad courses like that a lot of them are dissatisfied unsatisfying experiences for a lot of students and there's a lot of retention problems and as a result students who are going to large lecture hall classes and you can picture it in your mind in economics or in psychology or sociology or what have you and uh... that those classes are just not functioning as well as they should in a lot of places right and so uh... one of the interesting things is though that we have this notion of college in our heads is like a four-year process whereas uh... what you're getting at here is that you know colleges about college can be about education and sort of figuring out where you need to go and how you're going to get there and that doesn't necessarily have to be a four-year process again with uh... we go right here i am uh... frank balmer the national association state student grant aid programs and i'm interested in your any of your thoughts on whether any of the there's a lot of very successful state programs you can look them as it's way to have a pilot program for you roll out on all fifty states and like one of the leading trends in states is performance funding and sending either the school to have more completion and completion to be defined as just credits for a community college as opposed to graduation and the other side in sending students with say larger need-based grants to take fifteen credits of twelve and then there's a lot of innovation loan programs to you have enhanced loan counseling that created zero percent default rate in one stage you have another state where the loans are forgiven if uh... if the student graduates in four years and things like that some curious if you see any interest in what states are doing in terms of how they might affect reauthorization for one budget comment but and could you do you know a lot of i'm sure you would what is there any good research on this performance-based funding so what do we know of from the research that that's been done so that's i thank you for that opportunity to plug a recent publication on that uh... so with michael mclendon he and i have it uh... issue of the annals from the american academy of political and social science came out in september there few papers on performance funding there uh... and so that's one piece of information i'm gonna draw and then a second in all five of our states now we were collecting data at the height of the recession which i think influenced a little bit how much people are thinking about money uh... but in all five of our states there is some discussion about performance funding as a way to try to do more with less and help hold higher education institutions accountable the research on so the early there's in the there's a discussion in the literature about the first wave of performance funding and then performance funding two point oh the research on the first wave suggested didn't have much impact on outcomes and so it that and it didn't have much impact on changing institutional behavior also within institutions there's some new for the optimistic people who are moving forward the performance funding two point oh there's a feeling that these are bigger programs and perhaps they will be more effective in creating change so with regard to what we know about performance funding we don't really know that much that is helpful in terms of saying this is a good model so in our book we looked at georgia maryland texas washington illinois so that's one example of performance funny certainly is something that people are talking about and i think the rhetoric comes from this interest in trying to hold higher education accountable really really try to identify what are the outcomes and how to ensure that money that is invested especially given that my money is finite and there are other polls on it how what's the right return on that investment uh... there's so many different pro getting to the part of uh... another part of what you talked about so many different programs operating within states it's really amazing one of the things that we pointed to in illinois was uh... being very good at establishing programs but they couldn't even scale up when we look at the time of our study had trouble scaling up even within their own state right so uh... and again i think part of what's on what underlies this is the so in terms of our conclusions we really point to them uh... the role of state policy leadership and really trying to figure out what are the goals that we're trying to accomplish and then what are the policies that are going to take us to where we want to be in making a commitment to those policies i mean it's a great question it underscores something that i think is not well understood enough particularly in some of these national conversations which is how much how different states are from one another in how they conduct and finance higher education it just varies a ton i mean you have on one end of the extreme you have a state like colorado which i don't think credibly has a public higher education system i think colorado uh... has some state-owned private non-profit universities that basically charge market prices uh... they're not in the business of using taxpayer money to subsidize higher education and uh... even the sort of state disinvestment narrative which is true in the aggregate and uh... very true in some states like california and arizona that really pulled money out and saw tuition jump by fifty percent but other states didn't do that i mean other states managed through the recession cutting higher education by kind of about as much as they had to given the fact that they didn't have as much money anymore and you can i mean i'm i'm from new york state you can still go to a suny college suny university and tuition is not very high there and they have generous uh... you know additional financial aid programs and then you go you know south one state to pennsylvania pennsylvania is kind of a disaster when it comes to public higher education it has been for a long time uh... so you know and again this kind of speaks to the fact that uh... there really is no national like policy architecture to put any boundaries around those choices and so we just get a lot of different things we have time for one possibly two more questions at the short while we go to the back and then we'll come back up to the point thank you i'm fred winter if i went to associates we're hearing a lot about accountability a lot about attainment not too long ago this panel would have been all about the other a word which is access uh... is this a trending issue is it that we think we've solved the access problem is access going to be embedded within the financial aid and pell grants uh... and how do you see access being woven into the new higher education act uh... i would just say that access is sort of a given as a policy objective right now and i don't think you hear anybody arguing against access so then the question becomes well once you bring them in uh... how do you ensure that they finish that kind of leads you into the accountability discussion so it's not an either or access or accountability it's kind of a both uh... and i i haven't i for one haven't heard republican uh... lawmakers say that she or he is against you know or it is for restricting access to college you don't you don't really hear them camp the republicans campaigning against the pell grant and so forth i mean sure they're going to be arguments about uh... the the magnitude of investment in education and sure in individual states the disinvestment as kevin notice noted as huge and in others it's not access seems to be a consensus position the issue the issue then after that is completion so i would mostly nick but uh... it's it's an interesting question because so in in policy circles i completely agree with you there was this period and it was during the presidential campaign where i thought there there was a of backlash or small growing backlash about this question remember senator sanctorum question whether everybody should go to college and there were there were a bunch of discussions about this and you know it's secretary secretary bennett had a book about college that being worth it we had this little boomlet but it seems to me that this is this is the question for all of us that it's subsided uh... it seems to me that it didn't really take hold uh... it will be interesting to see given the change in the congress whether or not it comes back but my sense is like yours that no in fact there was a lot of push against that quick critique of access on that we all there is generally consensus on i don't know what you guys think of this question i agree with nick i think access is the foundation of federal higher education policy and anything that we do will be on top of that not a substitute for it and and the program is one of the most popular federal government programs that exist anytime mean the way you can you can tell this is anytime the president releases a budget or someone releases a budget somewhere in the ten things that shows up in the new story is how much of the program go up or down even though the program is actually a fairly small piece of a very large federal budget it's very public is it's universal uh... people depend on it it's i mean it's remarkable that the program which is a need a targeted uh... need based program uh... doubled in size over the last five years it was it was about a sixteen seventeen billion dollar program uh... in two thousand eight it it got all the way up it's now about a thirty five million dollar program i mean not that certainly wasn't true of all the other federal programs there that are meant to help low-income people uh... uh... go on in their lives uh... and you know the loan system is i mean that the federal government is the student lender for america now and there's no there's really nowhere to go from there and so i think both those things will continue to be true i think what's being questioned is the historical assumption that if we provide access access the rest will work itself out that we can trust the combination of states accreditors and the market to ensure quality that has been the assumption uh... that those three things together will uh... uh... insured that it is access to something good and i think that that federal policy makers are realizing that that that is simply not a a fair assumption to make and we need to something else that we are one thirty-five well one yeah please we started this uh... talking about fax as simplification that's a real access issue so it's it's instructive that lamar alexander uh... and and uh... a bunch of democrats are both in support of radical faxa simplification so if if they're if they get their way and he has the gavel in the next congress mean uh... a a faxa form application that's the size of a postcard with a couple of questions would be the law of the land and that would basically guarantee a bunch more pell grants for people if you know if students are able to fill out those things let's let's be clear uh... faxa simplification means major policy change there's you cannot radically simplified faxa and keep in place the system of choices about who to subsidize whom not to subsidize that we have in place that's it is impossible to do both of those things at the same time so i mean it may be faxa simplification may be good policy change but let we shouldn't pretend that it's no policy change no i know it but it's a big access policy change right maybe i don't know i mean i think that's maybe a subject for a whole other conversation i mean i think it is i mean it is you know like money is complicated like financial circumstances are complicated in there are but i think i think the federal government is historically gone too far in making financial aid complicated basically to make really really sure that everyone who gets a dollar deserves it that we don't have some person with some strained set of financial circumstances who shouldn't get that money and so we check lots and lots of things i think it's from a cost-benefit standpoint would be a good thing to not check all those things and make it easier but we are making some changes at that point so uh... now that we've all agreed you get the last word we wrote the whole act while you were going out who took notes there are lots of notes here and by your attendance you have endorsed it well i'm glad you're back because i think we were just finishing up and i think the takeaway is stay tuned uh... and uh... there's going to be a lot of interesting discussion over the next couple of years about this and it is great that so many people want to be engaged in this conversation because there are a few things i don't think there really anything more important than uh... helping people become and continue to be lifelong learners so i want to thank our hosts at the new america foundation uh... thank my colleagues at penn law and thank all of you for coming