Lori Sturdevant: Senate race offers higher ed substance

After the cotton candy of the State Fair and two national conventions, the good readers of these pages told us last week they craved some meat and potatoes. Tell us about real issues, they pleaded.

Obligingly, along came U.S. Senate candidates Norm Coleman and Al Franken with a nice to-and-fro on how to get more Americans into and through college.

You missed it? Of course you did. It was obscured by exhaustive parsing of Barack Obama's common cliché "lipstick on a pig," of Sarah Palin's insistence that she said "thanks but no thanks" to federal bridge money that Alaska kept, and of John McCain's commercial claiming that Obama once voted for "comprehensive sex education" for kindergarteners. (That ad should carry a Mr. Yuck label. Don't swallow it.)

All of that should make the higher-education stew served up in the Senate race even more savory. Allow a recap:

On Monday, DFLer Franken proposed a new federal tax credit of 50 percent of the cost of college tuition, books and fees, up to $5,000 per year, per student. Families with household incomes up to $200,000 would be eligible. It would be available to offset tuition at both public and private colleges, of both the two- and four-year type, for any student at any age.

Coleman countered by noting that Franken's proposal ($48 billion over five years) would likely need to be financed with tax increases, which he opposes. (Franken wants to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire for those with yearly incomes greater than $1 million, which would raise $319 billion over five years.)

The Republican senator also issued a recounting of ways in which he's acted to send more help to students without raising taxes. The prize on his list: the near-doubling of Pell grants for low-income college students by 2014, authorized this summer in a bipartisan effort that allied Coleman with Democratic Sens. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin.

Strip away the accompanying campaign boilerplate, and I took away the impression that Coleman is most interested in targeting federal help to low-income students, while Franken is more willing to extend Uncle Sam's hand up the income ladder, well into the middle class.

That was until I talked to the two big-party candidates, and found a lot of common ground. Coleman likes Franken's idea. "We've got to do it all," he said.

Franken is also big on helping low-income students. "My wife went to college on scholarships and Pell grants," he said. "I want that program to grow, too."

His tax-credit idea "is for so many people who are middle-class, who have saved, and find that their kid can't go to the college he wants, or that if he does he'll have to work so much that he can't study."

Both candidates sound as if they've been talking to education experts like Angie Eilers at the progressive think tank Growth & Justice.

Minnesota has a college dropout problem, recent studies have shown, and financial stress on middle-class students, as much as on poor ones, is a big reason for it, Eilers said. Too many hours working rather than studying and too much student-loan debt are getting in the way of students' performance and persistence.

Solving that problem is especially critical for a state like Minnesota, which is banking on its brainpower to keep incomes and quality of life as rich as they were in the last quarter of the 20th century. Eilers says to stay prosperous, the state needs to set and meet an aggressive goal: 50 percent more graduates of two- and four-year colleges by 2020.

That would be the educational equivalent of a moonshot — one that needs as big of a federal assist as Washington can muster.

That gets back to Coleman and Franken, and the bottom-line difference I found in their higher-education ideas. It isn't, after all, in how federal spending is targeted. It's in how much the feds will spend.

Coleman gets it: Putting more money in student hands pays dividends, for individuals and for the nation. But his record shows that any time more help for students was linked with a tax increase, even the closing of corporate loopholes, his vote was no.

Franken's counter: Moonshots don't come cheap. And the high cost of not doing them is only apparent in hindsight.