The Senate keeps up the pressure

In How higher education will contribute to greater access I picked up a theme of earlier posts - both Democrats and Republicans are very interested in increasing access to higher education, lowering college costs is one way to increase access without increasing government spending , and one good way to get costs down is to get the universities and colleges to somehow foot more of the bill themselves.  The most obvious way to get higher education to pay more of the bill is to look to their endowments for greater payout.

Continuing to keep the pressure on this theme, yesterday Sen Max Baucus (D), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and Sen Charles Grassley (R), senior Republican on the Committee, sent out a letter to 136 of the best endowed colleges and universities asking for considerable data on costs, financial aid, endowment management, growth and payout.   Just in case anyone missed the focus of this request, the press release about the letter quotes Grassley as saying  Tuition has gone up, college presidents’ salaries have gone up, and endowments continue to go up and up. We need to start seeing tuition relief for families go up just as fast. It’s fair to ask whether a college kid should have to wash dishes in the dining hall to pay his tuition when his college has a billion dollars in the bank.

It seems likely that this request will produce considerable data that has not been publicly available previously. And that probably will be a very good thing. However, since each of these institutions differs from the others in sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle ways, viewing the responses in a one-size-fits-all way could lead to some very shortsighted policies.   In any case, it looks as if Higher Education will be following with great interest the activities of the Senate Finance Committee this year.

Comments

[Chris Tilghman]

Lloyd,
Did you see that this data came in? The CHE did a big article on it. If you need help locating the link, let me know.
(I doubt that congress will take any significant action on this front.)

- CT