Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
And Happy Father’s Day. I’m celebrating it by driving across the country with my son who needs to get back to St. Louis for a summer internship.
Yes, CharterFolk, this one comes to you literally from the passenger seat.
A long way to go, but hey, I’ve always wanted to see KIPP St. Louis, which has graciously agreed to host me for a visit!
I pass along personal congrats and thanks to this year’s Brian’s Voice Award winners.
There’s great thought leadership coming not only from the leaders themselves – Brandon, Derrell, and Karega – but also from the important organizations they lead: The Mind Trust, 50Can, and NACSA.
Keep ’em coming, CharterFolk.
On we go.
What We’re Getting Wrong and Right About College Costs
This is a topic I’ve been meaning to turn to in recent months, having seen this recent blog post that has gotten a lot of attention.
It’s a long and insightful post about how inflation in service fields is not as out of control as advertised in the “Chart of the Century,” which I have used as a launching point for a few posts over the past year.
The post looks at services more broadly, but dedicates a significant portion of its analysis to college costs, which the author asserts have been misreported:
Higher education has been getting more affordable for years, and the decrease in affordability in the late 2000s and 2010s was significantly overstated. The popular narrative that college is getting less and less affordable is wrong, and it needs to change.
This analysis is making its way into the mainstream press.
Obviously, the last thing we want to do is contribute to the miseducation of parents in a way that causes fewer kids to pursue degrees in higher education that could open up new opportunities – especially for low-income families.
Noahpinion’s thesis is that, if you look at real costs as opposed to nominal ones, college expenses have actually been decreasing since the pandemic.
Further, the Chart of the Century reflects the sticker price colleges advertise – not the actual costs students pay …
… which are actually far lower, and when you factor in financial aid, costs are either flat or perhaps even a little down since 2006-07.
It’s an interesting take, one that convinces me that it’s not wise to track college costs with the Chart of the Century, which doesn’t incorporate the actual amounts students pay for college.
Nor is it helpful to focus on nominal costs in general.
The graph showing the rise in student debt, which I’ve included in recent posts, is visually compelling.
But it overstates the case.
Here are nominal costs compared to real ones.
They’re not as severe. And on this topic, we clearly want to avoid overstatement. Just as we want to avoid imprecision, like focusing on college sticker prices rather than actual expenses.
So I see the Noahpinion article to be a helpful one and will adjust my future reporting on this topic accordingly.
With all that said, though, I also maintain that the central thesis that I have shared on this topic over the years remains intact.
Yes, looking at debt in real terms makes the problem look less severe. And narrowing our view to trends happening in recent years, the growth in student debt can seem almost manageable.
But looking at things over a longer timeframe, you see the picture is not nearly as positive.
There’s been a plateau in recent years, but it’s a plateau that follows decades of exploding costs. And that’s my central criticism of the Noahpinion piece and the op-ed in The New York Times:
Their choice of timeframe.
What I’ve tried to do in my reporting on this topic is to take the longer, multi-generational view.
Education costs, like housing costs …
… only come into clear focus when we step back and look across the decades. That’s when we see that today’s students are navigating an economic reality fundamentally different from that of their parents or grandparents.
The change has come not so much over the past decade as it has over the past six decades.
And the primary problem has been bad public policy.
We haven’t just stumbled upon this debacle.
We’ve created it.
Here is a chart showing college costs and borrowing levels in real terms going back to 1940, overlaid with various changes in public policy that have occurred over the years.
We see that after WWII, the GI Bill helped many returning soldiers attend college, nudging up costs. But student debt stayed flat until the Higher Education Act of 1965, which created the Guaranteed Student Loan (GSL) program. In 1972, access to GSLs expanded, and by 1978, all undergraduates were eligible to borrow. Here’s a chart summarizing policy changes that have had a huge effect on college costs and student debt over the past 60 years.
So rather than the last decade being a time of improving affordability, it’s more accurately become a shelf of continued unreasonableness. It’s led to students borrowing as much as they can, and many falling into default.
Even those with strong credit scores are getting caught up.
And while I wouldn’t claim access to data showing causality, sky-high college costs and borrowing rates are certainly correlated with the United States losing ground on college completion relative to other countries.
This past month, much has been made of the fact that Ireland has become the country with the highest percentage of people who have completed undergraduate degrees.
Here is how college completion rates have changed in Ireland and the United States over time.
Here’s the same view, overlaying college costs and student debt in Ireland and the United States.
Ireland’s growth in college costs and student borrowing has been minimal in comparison. And America’s declining college completion rate relative to Ireland is no anomaly.
The percentage of U.S. students who graduate from college has dropped from leading the OECD to near the bottom.
Meanwhile, the economic mobility benefits that college attendance offered to low-income students have seen precipitous decline over the last 40 years.
Here’s a graph that ChatGPT helped me create from the data in the report.
It shows that college used to offer significant mobility for low-income students. But over the decades, that benefit – while still positive – is now far lower than for their more affluent peers. In short, it’s a story of the less well-off doing slightly better, while the affluent do far better, widening the gap.
There are many reasons for the decline in mobility, including a growing divergence in the types of degrees pursued by low- and high-income students.
And there are certainly many reasons why that divergence is occurring. But one significant factor, no doubt, is the declining college readiness of low-income students. Even during periods when NAEP scores were rising, economic mobility in college was headed in the wrong direction. But now that NAEP indicators of readiness are falling, the mobility benefits of college for low-income students are falling off a cliff.
Which brings the discussion right back to the K–12 realm:
When low-income students are less prepared, they are less likely to complete college or to enter high-ROI majors – reducing the economic return of college itself.
This is the economic backdrop against which the backlash to “college for all” continues to unfold.
As the Noahpinion piece points out, we’re entering this new phase with a great deal of misinformation in circulation.
Ultimately, many parents like me still know it’s worth spending long hours in the passenger seat to help our kids earn strong college degrees.
The same is likely true for many more low-income students than are currently on a path to college.
So, as we work to help the country recover from decades of misguided policymaking that have made college needlessly unaffordable for this generation’s young people, thousands upon thousands of students and families will need someone in the passenger seat – helping them make wiser, better-informed choices.
That’s a seat I envision the charter school movement occupying more and more in the years ahead.