A Federal Policy for Higher Education?

...A prominent effect of these two funding mechanisms is to make a college's income heavily dependent on its success at recruiting and enrolling an ever-growing number of students...

...This approach has much to be said for it, but while it worked reasonably well through the fifties and sixties, it may be far less serviceable in a time when the rate of inflation outstrips the (now modest) growth in the pool of potential students...

...Higher education chose to concentrate its efforts on a Congress that it considered more responsive and less hostile, a decision that also had the effect of sustaining the fragmentation of policy and program that the congressional structure encourages...

...1.) The federal role in American higher education evolved over many years, slowly at first, much faster since World War II, by the familiar process of adding programs, a few at a time, in response to particular Washington priorities of the moment...

...Hence, for all the occasional clamor to establish a Federal Department of Education or the like, one finds higher education leaders reluctant to empower any one federal official with such sweeping control over their fate in Washington...

...That is a fourth-echelon position, the occupant of which might expect access to the Commissioner and occasionally the Assistant Secretary, but rarely the Secretary and never the President...

...The federal government has for a decade pursued a so-called "student aid strategy" based on the premise that federal dollars, other than for research, shouldflow to students who can use them to shop among the nation's postsecondary institutions...

...I should like to suggest four general reasons for the absence of a federal higher education policy, and then to outline a few of the key issues facing those who will be working on the legislation over the next eighteen months...

...Hence at the moment many critics feel the combined effect of the OE student aid efforts is inadequately helpful to either category in the population...

...The recent special issue of Daedalus, subtitled "Toward an Uncertain Future," is full of gloomy predictions by academic notables that have as their general theme the loss of excellence in American universities...

...But other forms of federal regulation abound: college cost-accounting systems must include detailed records of minutiae like what is consumed in dining halls, to help government calculate college -costs- for purposes of scholarship and loan formulae...

...policy seeks to respond to the system in its entirety...

...These two issues subsume dozens more, ranging from administrative matters--the programs as they now function are incredibly difficult for students to understand or colleges to administer, and they suffer from some troublesome inconsistencies—to the most basic debates of social philosophy...

...Hence the federal interest in higher education has been defined in the same incremental way as, say, the federal interest in agriculture or transportation...

...The congressional education committees now at work on student loans and scholarships, for example, have no jurisdiction over the largest federal scholarship program of all, that of the Veterans Administration...

...Dozens of federal agencies now regulate various decisons and actions of academic institutions, and to academics at least, these efforts often appear capricious, irrelevant to the educational mission, unrelated to federal funding, costly in themselves, and ultimately threatening to scholarly standards...

...But the ball still rests with Congress, where talented legislators such as subcommittee chairmen Claiborne Pell and James O'Hara, with much help from Albert Quie, John Brademas, and others, will write the new legislation with or without the assistance of the Administration...

...What's more, HEW appears recently to have hacked off...

...For many years it could be argued that a university had the choice of seeking federal funds, and thereby subjecting itself to the maze of accompanying compliance provisions, but now virtually every college in the land receives federal money, at least for student financial aid, and they may with some justification feel inconvenienced and aggrieved by the strings attached...

...The effect may be stagnation and slow starvation for many colleges, especially those private institutions faced with shrinking enrollments and soaring tuitions...

...One cannot be certain whether this is true or if so whether it is a problem of the sort that Washington can help solve, for the selective support of particular institutions on the basis of elusive and elitist-sounding measures of academic quality runs up against the populist sentiment and political dynamics of elected officials at every level...

...and the Administration, inherently opposed to any such increase, tends to favor the Basic Grants approach (thus the poor) and to seek the elimination of all the other programs...

...scientific research on human and animal subjects is subject to limitations, as is the confidentiality of student files...

...the universities that care about the NASA budget only coincide in part with those that gain from the Agriculture budget...

...A program that gives financial aid to a great many students but in which the maximum amount is small may have the effect of encouraging attendance at public universities, except for wealthy students and those willing to borrow large sums to attend private ones...

...The establishment and ongoing support of colleges and universities, as of primary and high schools, has been left to state and private initiative...

...The fact that many of the provisions in the landmark higher education legislation of 1972 embodied principles and proposals that emanated from the Nixon White House was little recognized and, by the time the Watergate tide reached its flood stage, was immaterial anyway...

...Thus although the "poor" would be covered by any formulae that are adopted, if most of the rest of the nation is also covered then the sums available for the lowest-income families may not be adequate to make college a real possibility for them, at least not without considerable extra subsidy from state and private sources...

...These now total about two billion dollars and touch millions of students and virtually every college in the land—although they comprise only a fifth of overall federal spending in higher education...

...Moreover the residents of Wyoming, a state with no private colleges, might well ask why they should be taxed to support the selective universities of New Jersey or Connecticut...

...labs and other facilities must make vast and expensive physical plant alterations to comply with the Occupational Safety and Health Act...

...Senator Proxmire, for example, recently charged the National Science Foundation with continuing "to pour funds into the academic oligarchy of the large universities...

...Uncle Sam presently provides about ten billion dollars a year to the nation's colleges and the students enrolled in them, in all about a fifth of the institutions' total budgets...

...Yet across-the-board assistance to colleges and universities would carry with it the risk of undue federal control, of high cost to the taxpayer, of rewarding inefficient and expensive colleges, and of sustaining marginal institutions that the marketplace, would probably let die...

...And at this writing the position isn't even filled, except by an "Acting" official brought up from the fifth echelon...

...The advent of thoughtful and politically savvy new leadership in some of the higher education lobbies—notably the umbrella American Council on Education —combined with new faces in the Ford White House suggests that we may now have entered a period of rapprochement between higher education and the executive branch...

...But high inflation and rising costs of college attendance are also pinching middle-class voters, and there is much sentiment for redirecting the programs so that the money is stretched across more of the population...

...With few exceptions, federal postsecondary spending arrangements make no attempt to stimulate state spending, to compensate for differences in state wealth or effort, or to give state governments money to allot as they see fit...

...With many of the federal higher education programs expiring during its lifetime, the Ninety-fourth Congress has already begun to address itself to the tangled question of which to keep, which to change, and which, if any, to add...

...Whether project research funding of this kind—with all its ups and downs and changes in emphasis—is adequate to ensure the maintenance of high quality scholarship and training is not clear, particularly in private universities, and particularly when it constantly faces criticism in Congress...

...Almost alone among the various areas of federal domestic- activity, higher education programs virtually ignore the states and concentrate on individual students and universities...

...No agency or congressional committee has responsibility for more than a fraction of the programs and moneys that affect higher education, and nowhere in the executive branch short of the President himself is there anyone with an overview of the myriad activities that comprise this subject...

...Enrollment growth accounts for some of this, to be sure, but one wonders if it might not also have something to do with the political attractiveness of giving kids a college education rather than underwriting the costs of advanced scholarship...

...If this was true in the sixties, it is more so since the inauguration of Richard Nixon, for most educators viewed his Administration with a deep mistrust that, although largely unwarranted at the start, was increasingly reciprocated as the months passed...

...2722841: "Programs relate to a single part of the system...

...As debate about student aid—grants,loans, work-study programs, and the like—heats up in Washington, it invariably turns on such arcane matters as benefit levels, cutoff points, interest rates, default levels, and regulatory problems, for like many another area of federal domestic policy in the 1970s these deliberations take place largely among technicians and experts...

...The so-called "proprietary" schools—actually profit-making institutions—generally wish to be treated like conventional colleges, but their inclusion raises complex issues about the nature and motives of higher education and threatens its unanimity as well...

...3.) Unlike other areas with similar histories of diffuse and incremental government involvement—agriculture and transportation again come to mind—the federal structure for dealing with higher education is exceptionally discombobulated...

...One can easily exaggerate the virtues of overarching policy and centralized management, and many in higher education feel that they have a better chance of getting what they want from Washington—and avoiding controls they don't want—if federal funds flow from a variety of agencies through a great many programs that are watched over by bureaucrats and subcommittees with competing interests and limited authority...

...The complications in university hiring posed by the Affirmative Action movement are too well known to bear repetition here...

...The interests of the community colleges do not necessarily coincide with those of the graduate schools...

...A federal boost to matriculation at low-tuition schools may also have a less obvious effect: since the public institutions themselves receive large operating subsidies from the taxpayer (generally through state governments) each student in them has what amounts to a handsome hidden scholarship even if he pays all the tuition himself...

...2.) Despite the many clauses-that now comprise the functional definition of the federal interest in higher education, our national government has never embraced the most basic element of all, the maintenance of the higher education system itself...

...It would, however, be interesting to see someone make the attempt...

...Over the years federal support of "excellence" has come through research grants awarded on a competitive basis to universities with particular academic strengths, and it is indisputable that such research moneys have been concentrated in a hundred or so well-known public and private institutions...

...This is, of course, an extremely loaded choice, and it may be noted that in the field of higher education policy these socioeconomic groups are defined rather differently than for most federal domestic programs: poor generally means a family income up to about twelve thousand dollars a year, which is to say approximately half the American people (although a smaller fraction of the college-going population), whereas the addition of the "middle class" to the rolls of those eligible for financial aid could push such assistance to families with incomes well above twenty thousand dollars and thus embrace eighty or ninety percent of the nation's population...

...It should be understood that although the existing legislation—the 1972 amendments—made a historic commitment to scholarships for the poor, the funds that would be needed for that program of Basic Education Opportunity Grants to fulfill its promise are partially diverted into four older programs...

...To be sure, Uncle Sam has at times aided categories of colleges, and it runs a few of them—notably the military academies—itself, but the continued existence of the University of Chicago or the balance of two- as against four-year colleges in New Mexico are not the sorts of issues addressed in the federal statutes...

...Revenue sharing may help, and the 1972 education amendments did contain two minor provisions designed to prod state effort, but on the whole one must still conclude that the states have little place in federal higher education policy, even though they hear primary responsibility for the nation's higher education system...

...Some of the reasons for this are obvious...

...The Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the only Cabinet agency with some general responsibility for higher education as such, has a Deputy Commissioner of Education as its highest ranking official with full-time duties in this field...

...It seems doubtful that these kinds of questions will be asked and less likely that, if asked, they will get definitive answers in Washington between now and June 1976...

...First, will the available student aid money end up helping the poor or the middle class...

...I will outline four such matters, all of which would seem central to a serious review of federal higher education policy...

...Attention to date has focused on H. 3471, O'Hara's bill to amend the six major student assistance programs run by the Office of Education...

...Those who watch this process would do well to focus on the political lineups, for the student aid debate in recent years has tended to shape up in rather unexpected ways, the Democrats worried about the middle-class family and the Republicans tending to dwell on the needs of the poor...

...Does federal money, for example, tend to flow disproportionately to rich states or poor, to those that tax themselves heavily to support higher education or those that don't, to those with strong public or with historically private postsecondary systems...

...Second, will the money be parceled out in sums and ways that primarily help students at low-tuition (read public) colleges or that give them the opportunity to choose high-tuition schools and thereby pump more funds—and more students—into the nation's hungry private institutions...

...The recent congressional reforms do give the House education committee some oversight of programs not within its original jurisdiction, but the effect of that change remains to be seen...

...Most state support to higher education comes in the form of grants to public colleges via formulae based on their enrollment figures...

...4.) Should national higher education policy take account of state efforts to support higher education...

...Lacking the shared interests and hierarchical structure of, say, organized labor or the shipping industry, higher education has therefore tended to seek its varied ends in ways that encourage a proliferation of programs and discourage any move toward a unifying policy...

...While the federal government has been actively involved in education since the early days of the nation, Congress and the President have never come to a policy decision that "henceforth the nation has an interest in education and shall define that interest in such-and-such a manner...

...Thus federal efforts that tend to encourage public college enrollment at the expense of private have the general effect of promoting public subsidies to all students regardless of their families' means, a situation that is undeniably attractive to students but that at least causes one to ask whether this is the most efficacious use of the society's tax resources, particularly when there exist private colleges that, with some rearrangement of aid policy, might be made equally attractive to many students at less overall cost to the public sector...

...Neither the government nor the affected interest groups seem organized to deal with them, and the mere presence of four-hundred-odd programs is reason enough to suspect that ten years hence there will he five hundred...

...In any case it would seem fruitful to examine the results of the present nonpolicy and to assess its adequacy for the future...

...I use the terms in the straightforward sense employed by Daniel P. Moynihan in his essay "Policy vs...

...Some of these organizations are skilled at securing desired results for their members, but taken together they have a less than distinguished record of agreeing on what they want from Washington and then uniting to build a persuasive political case for themselves...

...Who, in the end, should pay for higher education, the student who obtains it or the society generally, and if the latter, then which economic strata within the population should subsidize which others...

...Since federal regulation of higher education is not itself a policy—quite the contrary—nor even a program, and since it spans so many agencies and statutes, one doubts that either Congress or the executive branch will assay the subject...

...It may be significant that the only sector of American higher education, that now finds its income growing faster than inflation is the two-year community colleges...

...The amounts presently devoted to student aid under the OE programs—and likely to be devoted in the next few years—are simply inadequate to afford significant help to that large a group...

...Although federal resources have been employed in the creation of new universities—most notably under the 1862 Land Grant Act which sought to give each state the wherewithal to establish at least one such institution—and of new schools within existing universities, a state's pattern of higher education and the operation of its colleges and universities have never become a federal responsibility...

...Nor do they have much to say about the billions of dollars in research money that flow from a dozen Washington agencies into university coffers...

...Without belittling the importance and complexity of the details, it should be noted that they tend to obscure a pair of important policy choices with vast political ramifications...

...The higher education lobbies tend to find agreement among themselves only on student aid packages that entail vast increases in total federal spending...

...3.) Have we got a proper mix between holding colleges accountable for federal funds and leaving them the autonomy they need to function, or has the balance tipped in the direction of excessive federal "regulation" of American higher education, perhaps without even securing adequate accountability along the way...

...Chances are that as with many such nettlesome matters, the Congress will again leave them largely unresolved, which is to say that it will tinker with the programs at great length but in the end sidestep the tough choices and seek to do something for everyone, thus again probably doing little for anyone...

...1.) Has the time come for some kind of general aid to colleges and universities...

...For all the attention to issues raised by the Office of Education student assistance programs, it should be understood that such a limited debate cannot touch on some other considerations of importance to American higher education...

...A study recently made for the National Commission on the Financing of Postsecondary Education counted some 380 separate federal programs through which these funds flow...

...Yet it is hard to debate national higher education policy without at least asking whether it is our intention that federal officials should make a growing share of the decisions on our campuses and whether, in return, we have at least ensured that our funds are being spent in ways that accomplish the purposes intended...

...4.) For purposes of dealing with the federal government, the higher education lobby is a loosely coordinated assemblage of interest groups...

...Subcommittee hearings have begun and the university lobbies in Washington have started to write their legislative shopping lists...

...2.) Others might argue that Princeton and Yale are national resources, and that the maintenance of quality in American higher education is itself a proper federal concern...

...Perhaps that is the best way for Uncle Sam to deal with the extraordinarily varied and complex system of higher education in the United States, a kind of involuntary adaptive response to the difficulty and hazards of trying to organize and rationalize the whole thing...

...the formulae for federal scholarships that benefit public colleges may find little favor with the presidents of private ones...

...This undoubtedly helped build our varied and pluralistic system of postsecondary schooling but it also produced a federal preoccupation with specific programs, categories of students, research projects, and the like: hence a situation not very conducive to overarching policy...

...Program in the 1970s" [see Coping: On the Practice of Government, pp...

...It is unclear whether this is a desirable parceling-out of governmental roles in a federal system or whether it is simply a residue of the days when all Washington sought from colleges was specific research projects...

...Although this retreat may be reversed in court, it is extremely hard to force an understaffed and reluctant federal agency to enforce an unpopular provision in anything like an evenhanded way on some three thousand campuses...

...Therein lies much of the problem faced by anyone trying to make sense of this subject, for despite, or perhaps because of, this proliferation of programs, there is effectively no overall federal policy toward higher education...