The Increasingly Exclusionary College Aid Framework

Very important point by Felix Salmon:

The tragedy of Cooper Union is endemic to most American higher education, outside a few community colleges; Cooper is just the special case where the blind rush to some kind of global greatness directly and explicitly violates the institution’s founding mission. Now a fantastic report by Stephen Burd shows that it’s not just Cooper which is becoming more expensive for precisely the students who can least afford it. Rather, that’s happening across the US: aid which should be going to the poorest students is in many cases going to some of the richest.

The title of the report is “Undermining Pell”. The Pell in question is Claiborne Pell, the Rhode Island senator who created the first grant designed to remove the financial barriers that prevent low-income students from enrolling in and completing college. The Pell Grant system has been growing fast, and reached $33 billion in the 2010-11 academic year, thanks in large part to the effect of the recession on poorer families’ incomes, and the way that high youth unemployment has encouraged American kids to go to college.

But the money is not, in truth, making college more affordable.

Paul has made similar points about explosion of tuition in the law school context. While eliminating the availability of grants and loans to poor students would be a cure worse than the disease, the government should be using its leverage to insure that taxpayer money doesn’t just to to tuition increases. Actually reversing the trend of state governments making nominally state universities increasingly private ones would also be an important way of addressing the problem, although I assume that ship has sailed because FREEDOM.