Questions Colleges Need to Answer

With Congress providing a significant increase in Pell Grant aid, federal lawmakers have some pressing questions to ask colleges about how they spend their institutional aid dollars. Will colleges use the influx of Pell Grant dollars to supplement their aid and insure that low-income students dont have unmet financial need and therefore wont have to take on unmanageable levels of debt? Or will they use the new federal funding to replace institutional aid dollars they would have spent otherwise, and shift dollar-for-dollar their own institutional financial aid resources toward non-need-based, "merit" aid programs, designed to lure wealthier students to their campuses?

We at Higher Ed Watch believe these are extremely legitimate questions for lawmakers to ask. The federal governments primary role in higher education is to ensure that the doors of college remain open for low-income students. For too long, the government hasn't lived up to its end of the bargain, allowing the purchasing power of the maximum Pell Grant to wither away. But now that federal officials are anteing up, they have every right to make sure that their efforts are not for naught.

Most of the nation's leading higher education associations, however, are dead set against having their member institutions asked these questions. They'd obviously prefer to keep a veil of secrecy around their institutional aid policies and practices.

Case in point: The American Council on Education (ACE) recently sent a letter to Rep. George Miller (D-CA), the chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, on behalf of itself and four other national college lobbying groups, asking him to strike from a pending Higher Education Act reauthorization bill a provision that requires colleges to report more detailed information about their aid policies. The provision, which was included in the original House version of the budget reconciliation bill, asks colleges to report the average amount of grant aid that institutions provide their students and the number of students who receive these awards, as well as other types of consumer information, such as graduation and completion rates.

In the letter, the college groups argue that "prescribing a set of information elements in statute would limit the progress" some of the associations are making voluntarily "to provide useful information about our institutions to the public."

Come again? It's laudable that some college groups, after years of pressure from Congress and the Education Department, are voluntarily releasing more consumer friendly information to students than they have previously. But doesn't the government and the public have the right to request the data they need to determine whether institutions of higher education are helping or hindering public policy goals without having to hope that colleges will voluntarily provide it? And how exactly will adding disclosure requirements on institutional aid practices hamper the voluntary efforts when those efforts do little to shed more light on how colleges dole out their aid dollars?

Now don't get us wrong, we don't think the House provisions are perfect. In fact, we have argued that asking colleges to report on the "average" grant aid they provide won't tell us much if the aid is skewed toward non-needy students. We suggested that it would be more useful to break down the numbers by looking at the average amount and proportion of institutional aid that goes to Pell Grant recipients, and the average amount and proportion of aid that goes to non-Pell-eligible students each year. That way we would know which colleges tend to reward wealthier students. Others have argued that colleges should be required to provide a breakdown by income of students who receive institutional aid. And still others, including one college group representing state colleges that didn't sign on to the ACE letter, have argued for using proxies for income since colleges don't always know the income of students' families if they haven't received any federal aid.

These are issues that lawmakers will be sorting out in the coming weeks as they try to finalize the Higher Education Act reauthorization legislation. Somehow we don't think that they will accept ACE's rationale for not providing the information. After all, they surely want to know whether all the money they're sending to colleges to help low income students is money well spent.