College affordability belongs in debate

Don't stop investing in a prosperous future.

Last update: September 19, 2008 - 6:29 PM

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SLEEPER ISSUE?

A nationwide survey conducted July 21-Aug. 3 by Project New West for the National Education Association found:

•64 percent said higher education is no longer a luxury, but a necessity to make ends meet.

•64 percent said the middle class doesn't get enough help paying for college.

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After this wicked week on Wall Street, candidates for Congress, the statehouse and the White House are bound to say a lot about the economy from now until Nov. 4. Here's some advice for them: Make sure those comments include ideas for making college more affordable.

Worry about how to pay for college is swelling in countless American families, as stock market investments sour and home equities sink. That should be reason enough for candidates to take up the topic in earnest.

But there's more: The nation's competitive posture in the global economy depends on increasing the share of its workforce that has attained both two-year and four-year degrees. A soon-to-be released study by the think tank Growth & Justice will recommend that Minnesota increase by 50 percent the number of college grads it produces by 2020, to maintain its competitive edge among the states.

Making college more affordable isn't all that's needed to give Minnesota and the nation a college degree surge. It will also take better academic preparation, pre-K through grade 12, and changing attitudes in the subcultures that do not encourage their children to get as much education as they can.

Scaling the cost barrier to college is a very necessary if not sufficient step. And with states like Minnesota likely confronting big deficits next year, government is going to have to make that step in the most cost-effective way possible.

That means concentrating state and federal efforts on putting more financial help directly into the hands of students. In Minnesota, it means shoring up the 25-year-old State Grant Program. The brainchild of the late professor/legislator John Brandl, the grant program discounts the price of college for about 80,000 lower-income students -- about one in four of every Minnesota public and private college undergraduates, at both two- and four-year institutions.

When it was new, the State Grant Program was often hailed as a national leader. Today, it doesn't compare as well. Higher education researcher Laura Perna of the University of Pennsylvania told a Minnesota audience last fall that the strong-economy states that Minnesota seeks to emulate provide more grant assistance for needy students. Minnesota would need to spend $216 million more per year to keep up with the most generous states.

A strong grant program is especially important in Minnesota, in the aftermath of a squeeze on state funding earlier this decade that sent tuition at public colleges and universities soaring. It coincided with mounting average student debt loads and growing awareness that Minnesota has a "college dropout" problem. The state's higher education flagship, the University of Minnesota, responded in 2007 with its own assistance program for middle-income students. The Legislature smiled on those efforts, but didn't match them for students at other institutions. That ought to be its aim next year -- regardless of the state of the economy. Or, more precisely, because of it.

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