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JK: I think that there have been studies that have looked at this; there is not a lot of evidence that Pell Grants raise college tuition. Normally when people talk about the problem of college cost, a lot of people have in mind the $40,000 a year that elite private colleges charge. The Pell Grant is less than $6,000. So taking a Pell Grant from $5,300 to $5,700 is not going to have a big impact on the prices charged by those elite colleges. Now, that said, the President is definitely focused on the question of college tuition. And he has said that colleges have a responsibility to remember their mission and provide quality education at an affordable price.
WM: Does that have any policy implications?
JK: Historically the federal role has been providing student aid. There may be more things that we can do. We are in the process of creating new disclosures around college costs; those were enacted by Congress in 2008. We will be making information available on which colleges will be increasing tuition most. We hope that kind of transparency will help students and families make good decisions.
WM: How about the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA)? I feel like it’s been 4 or 5 administrations in which people have been talking about how long and complicated FAFSA is. Administrators have been making only minor changes every once and a while.
JK: I think we’re making some progress. There are over 150 questions on the form. The complexity of it has created a few problems. First of all, we now have nearly 20 million people a year filling out the FAFSA, so that’s 20 million headaches created by the complexity of the form. There is also some evidence that the students enrolled in college don’t get the student aid they’re eligible for; a study by the American Council on Education estimated that there are million students eligible for Pell Grants who haven’t applied. Evidence indicates that the complexity of FAFSA is at least a factor there.
WM: Talk to me a little about what Obama would like to do.
JK: One thing our Department has already done is create “skip logic,” which means we are tailoring the form to student’s individual circumstances. So, for example, if we know you are older than 24, the [automated computer] FAFSA will automatically skip all the questions that only apply to younger students such as parent’s income.
That was one problem we had in the past: people didn’t know which questions applied to them, so they ended submitting a bunch of information [the Department] didn’t need. Depending on individual circumstances, that can bring significant reductions.
The second thing we’ve done is work with the IRS to make available people’s tax information. So this is available now to some students and we’ll be making it available to more students as the year goes on. And that will allow them to automatically pre-fill their form with their tax information. They don’t have to go digging up their tax return.
WM: What is the time frame for that?
JK: We started it in January for some students. We started it for people applying in the current academic year, 2009-2010. We will be expanding it this fall for people applying for the 2010-2011 academic year.
The third thing we’re doing is to propose legislation to remove questions from the form. It’s approximately two dozen that we’ve got to get Congress to remove. This has to go through legislation because the questions are pieces of the financial aid eligibility formula.
WM: Could you talk a little about the gainful employment rule for the for-profit schools? I know you can’t tell me what the plans are, but everyone’s wondering why it wasn’t introduced along with everything else.
JK: Yeah, I’m limited in what I can say about it because of where we are with it.
WM: Which I totally understand.
JK: This piece the secretary of education thinks is very important. We wanted to take our time and do some careful analysis. The other pieces were ready to move forward. We didn’t think it made sense to hold them up. But we wanted to make sure we looked at all the corners of the gainful employment role. So that’s what we’re doing now. And we’ll be moving it forward in the near future.
WM: What’s the time frame for that?
JK: Our goal is to have it published as a proposed rule in the coming weeks and to have it finalized by the end of October so it can be effective next July.
WM: Because you’re following Robert Shireman, everyone’s wondering how you feel about for-profit schools. Speak a little about for-profit schools.
JK: I think there are a lot of high quality trade schools and for-profit schools. Some of them have done some good work in reaching out to students and enrolling them in college and helping them complete and providing quality education. At the same time, it is a sector that has been prone to some abuses in the past.
WM: It seems to me that looking at this over the long term, depending on whose administration it is, we get a gigantic growth in for-profit and then they get scaled back. Will this happen indefinitely? This doesn’t happen with other schools.
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Bronx on February 08, 2011 9:21 PM:
FEAR THE KVAAL!!!