affordability
June 27, 2011
Sticker Price is Up, but Net Price is Down
According to a new report on Net Price by the College Board, tuition and fees, adjusted for inflation and offset by federal grants and tax benefits, are actually lower than they were five years ago. Although tuition and fees rose steadily over the past five years, grants and financial aid outpaced this growth, leading to…
June 14, 2011
Harkin Holds What Could be Last Senate Hearing on For-Profits
Days after the Department of Education released its finalized Gainful Employment rule, Senator Tom Harkin held his fifth Senate hearing investigating the practices of the for-profit higher education industry. Senator Harkin focused the hearing on the high levels of student borrowing and outsized loan default rates for students at for-profit institutions. Previous hearings and reports…
June 3, 2011
Importance of Need-Based Aid for Achieving Attainment Goals
A recent Pell Institute Report proposed a new way to think about reaching President Obama’s goal of increasing the proportion of adults with a college degree to 60 percent by 2020. The Institute suggests that income inequality creates a two-tier educational system in which 25-34 year-olds in the top half of the income distribution have…
May 26, 2011
Pew Survey of College Presidents Highlights Divergent Views from General Public
Along with its survey of the general public, the Pew Center recently published a survey of 1,055 two- and four-year, public, private and for-profit college presidents, concerning the quality, accessibility, and affordability of higher education. The two surveys were conducted around the same time and asked similar questions. However, there were notable differences between the…
May 18, 2011
Recent Pew Survey on College Affordability and Quality Released
The Pew Research Center recently conducted a large telephone survey of 2,142 Americans to gauge opinions about higher education quality, affordability, and importance. While many respondents reported anxiety about affordability, most valued a college education highly and reported a belief that it would provide career benefits in the future. Some of the key findings of…
May 11, 2011
Legislature Authorizes Tuition Setting for WA Institutions
As of today, House Bill 1795 has passed both the Washington State House and Senate by wide margins and is on its way to the Governor. As outlined in our previous post, this bill gives Washington’s four year public institutions the ability to set resident undergraduate tuition rates, alongside new financial aid and accountability requirements,…
May 9, 2011
Tuition Setting
Friday, the Seattle Times published an article about a potential agreement between lawmakers to, given several years of steep funding cuts, allow Washington’s universities to set undergraduate resident tuition rates for a limited number of years and with new financial aid and accountability requirements. News of this agreement comes as the Legislature is in the…
April 11, 2011
Tuition-Setting Authority Coupled with Accountability: Two Bills Propose Reforms
Preserving the access to and quality of higher education is paramount in the face of massive budget cuts. Two bills, HB 1795 (Enacting the higher education opportunity act) and SB 5915 (Regarding higher education funding and performance), seek to achieve this goal by: 1. Giving tuition-setting authority to universities 2. Reforming Financial Aid 3. Strengthening…
February 14, 2011
Federal Budget Proposals Affect Higher Education
The UW Office of Federal Relations has posted detailed summaries of how recent federal budget proposals may affect higher education. As the House Republicans propose major spending cuts for FY 2011 that target Pell grants and funding for federal agencies that support academic research, President Obama has released a FY 2012 proposal that largely protects…
February 3, 2011
Americans Struggling Economically, Worried about Affordable Higher Ed
That Americans are concerned about the rising price of higher education is not news. However, Public Agenda’s newly released survey results, Slip-Sliding Away: An Anxious Public Talks About Today’s Economy and the American Dream, shed some new light on how the continuing economic crisis may have heightened those concerns. The telephone survey was administered to…
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