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T.S. Eliot said that “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” The same can be true of universities. If Mizzou wants to be great, it can learn a lot from Purdue.

Under the leadership of President Mitch Daniels, Purdue has undertaken a series of projects designed to keep education affordable, research productive, and the college experience relevant in the 21st century. In addition to more traditional reforms like better budgeting and leveraging economies of scale to shave costs, Purdue continues to push the innovation envelope.

An easy way to lessen the burden of student debt is to reduce the amount of time that students must spend in the classroom altogether. Purdue has experimented with competency-based education (CBE) to achieve this. CBE is an accreditation system that grants students credit once they demonstrate mastery of a subject. Rather than waste time in the traditional 15-week classroom, students earn credit after demonstrating expertise in eight broadly defined primary competencies.

An expedited education can help more than just the student’s wallet, and Purdue’s Polytechnic Institute lets students work through a customized course of studies at their own pace. If they need to spend more time in a course that is especially challenging, they can. But if they can graduate faster, they face a smaller tuition bill and a quicker entrance into the workforce to earn income.

But that’s not all—Purdue is also experimenting with income share agreements (ISAs) to help students finance their education. Through the “Back a Boiler” program, students can commit a percentage of their income for a set amount of years to pay back their college costs instead of taking out a lump sum loan.

ISAs protect students who find themselves graduating but unable to secure a high-paying job. If their salary is lower than expected, they aren’t buried in unmanageable debt. Likewise, if students are more successful after graduation, then the school (i.e., the initial lender) will make back more money. Inherently, ISAs incentivize lenders to maximize the value a student gains from their degree, because both the school and graduates will benefit from post-graduation success

Third, Purdue embarked on an unprecedented partnership with Amazon to provide products at a much lower cost to its students. In fact, Amazon’s first-ever pickup store was launched on Purdue’s campus. Students are offered discounted products with expedited shipping, Purdue is given a percentage of the total profits to invest in scholarships, and Amazon is introduced to a fresh wave of users each year.

Eliot also said that “anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.” As Mizzou reels from fears of enrollment decline and a tarnished reputation, it can redouble its efforts to innovate. 

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We travel from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, where President Mitch Daniels has embarked on an ambitious program to keep costs down and design new majors and programs that allow students to progress at their own pace, to Texas, where then-Governor Rick Perry’s call to create a $10,000 degree spurred innovation statewide. Finally, we conclude at one of the finest universities in our nation, the University of Chicago, to show what it means to have a commitment to free speech and the open exchange of ideas.

Click on the link below to read more.

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The numbers he found were large. Very large.

If Missouri were to make all public 2-year and 4-year colleges free to in-state students, the total yearly price tag would come in at a staggering $808 million—on top of everything the state already spends. And if growth in college costs continues at its current rate, this number should only increase.

The paper also estimates the need for additional appropriations should the enrollment patterns of students switch as a result of this policy change. That is, students who might otherwise attend a private school in the state might decide to switch to a public school because tuition there would be free. If just 5% of each cohort switched from private to public, and thus got their entire tuition covered, Missouri would spend an additional $5.5 million per year. If 10% did, it jumps to an additional $11 million.

So what does roughly $815 million look like in the context of the state’s budget? Well the entire general revenue request for higher education from the Governor’s 2016 budget was only $913 million, so free college could essentially double that. The instructional budget of the whole University of Missouri system is only $650 million, so free tuition would cost substantially more than that as well. Absent massive federal subsidies, providing free college to Missouri students would require radical reallocation of state resources, resources currently spent in K-12 education, healthcare, infrastructure, and a host of other causes.

The Campaign for Free College Tuition deserves praise for their honest accounting, but the numbers their study produced makes it hard to support their goals. A more fruitful path to expanding college opportunity would be to work to drive down the cost of college and make it more affordable for more students.  Stay tuned for some research we have cooking on this very topic!

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The A-Plus program currently grants over 13,000 scholarships to Missouri community college students.  To be eligible, students need to attend a community college or vocational school, must have graduated from a Missouri high school with at least a 2.5 GPA and 95% attendance, and have completed at least 50 hours of community service.  The cost for the program in 2014–15 was more than $33 million.

At slightly more than $2,500 per student, this may seem like a good deal, until we see exactly what we are getting for our money. A forthcoming study in the Journal of Higher Education by scholars at the University of Missouri, for example, finds the A+ program increased “two-year college-going rates by 5.3 percentage points.” This gain, however, was nearly offset by a 3.8 percentage point decline in the number of students attending four-year institutions.  While this is not entirely bad, it is a far cry from a “bright shining light.” If the goal is to get more students into college, we are not seeing much bang for our buck.

There is no question that college costs have been spiraling out of control.  According to the College Board, the cost of public, two-year college has more than tripled in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1975. It has almost quadrupled at public four-year colleges. Middle class families are feeling the squeeze. They want their children to get good jobs, which increasingly require a college degree, but cannot afford the skyrocketing prices. 

Some politicians are tapping into those fears and proposing plans, like the A+ scholarship, that would make some or all of college “free.”  But here is the dirty little secret about “free college” plans. They don’t actually make college free. They simply shift who pays for it.

We have a college cost problem. Just changing who pays that cost doesn’t make it any less of a problem.  We should be talking about ways to rein in the cost of college, like promoting greater transparency of results and breaking up the accreditation cartel that keeps out new, lower-cost providers. We should also make universities that accept public scholarship dollars have some skin in the game, and require them to pay the state back some portion of those dollars if students do not succeed.  Andrew Kelly at the Center on Higher Education Reform at the American Enterprise Institute has written volumes on how to accomplish this.

These reforms would actually help drive down the cost of college and help the state strategically use its scholarship dollars to promote real student success.  That, not revolving-payer shell games, is what we can do if we really want to help our students.

The goals of Missouri’s A+ program are certainly commendable, but that does not make the program a model for the nation. We’re not even confident that is the right model for Missouri. 

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Click may appeal the Board's decision, but whatever the outcome there, Click's case was always very separate from the important policy issues her behavior brought into focus. Policymakers should recognize that Click is a symptom of the broken campus culture at Mizzou, not the cause of it. Accordingly, legislators should not take their eyes off the reform ball that's already started rolling this session. 

• Along with a host of other transparency measures, professors at Missouri universities should have to make their course syllabi available to the public. The idea that taxpayers don't have a right to see what they're paying for is ludicrous and anti-democratic. Our universities are there to act as stewards of taxpayer money to educate students so that they can be productive, informed, engaged members of society; taxpayers should be able to see the fruits of that investment.
• Mizzou is an important institution, but Mizzou is not "owed" money by taxpayers; rather, it and all state universities owe taxpayers a duty to earn every dollar they receive. That's also why regular audits of the school are also eminently reasonable.
• Policymakers should also decide whether Mizzou should have the privilege of acting as a bottleneck to degree programs across the state. Universities in every region of Missouri are providing valuable and innovative educations to students already. Why should Mizzou have effective veto authority over the degree decisions of other institutions? Maintaining this status quo seems unwise and exceedingly risky.

Melissa Click represented problems that have institutionally bedeviled the University for years, and her departure should signal not just the end of her tenure, but the beginning of a round of higher ed reforms that taxpayers can be proud of. After all of the embarrassments Mizzou brought to the state last year, that would be a welcome change of pace.

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Bright Flight works with—not against—need-based aid. It is good that Missouri universities promote diversity in their student body, whether that’s diversity of race and gender or diversity of income. Think of Bright Flight as promoting diversity of academic achievement. Having high-flying students, regardless of their background, makes universities more well-rounded and interesting places. That’s why Missouri has a basket of scholarship programs (of which Bright Flight is a small part) to try and recruit diverse students into our universities.

Not just “wealthy” kids get Bright Flight Scholarships. In the advocates’ literature, they use not qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch or attendance at a private school as a proxy for wealth. That is not necessarily the case. In Missouri, you qualify for reduced-price lunch if your annual household income (for a family of 4) is $44,863. You could fail to qualify and still be far from wealthy. There are also lots of middle- and low-income kids who attend private schools in Missouri through large financial aid awards from those schools. (I was one of those kids, who also received a Bright Flight Scholarship, for what it’s worth). Their families will struggle to afford college, and might not get as much need-based aid as those who are less well off, so a Bright Flight scholarship could mean a lot to them. Why take that away?

Merit is something we should encourage. One would think that in America this would go without saying, but I guess not. We should be pushing our students—poor, middle-income, or wealthy—to try and do as well in school as possible. Those high-achieving students are our future innovators and leaders, who can help make the state better for all of us. I don’t care if the person who can make the next great breakthrough in medicine or forge a new era of good government was born rich or poor. I just want them doing it here!

Bright Flight isn’t the reason that low income and minority students are not succeeding in Missouri Universities. Let’s look at the Missouri statistics on college readiness for African-American students (from this report): Only 6 percent scored college-ready in all four tested subjects on the ACT, only 2.7 percent graduated high school having passed at least one AP exam, and a whopping 68% enrolled in remedial coursework when they got to college The real scandal, and where we should focus our reform efforts, should not be scholarships for Missouri universities, the K-12 education system in our state that fails to prepare our low-income and minority students for success in college.

Ultimately, I think the campaign against Bright Flight is misguided. We do need to do a lot more to help our low-income and minority students succeed in college, but getting rid of Bright Flight isn’t going to accomplish that. I’d rather focus my energies on the levers that can actually help more students do better rather than punishing kids for doing well on the ACT exam. 

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Several decades ago, earning a college degree—almost any college degree—was all it took to get a job. Now, many college students must strategically choose the right major in order to break into the field with the greatest growth potential. Experts say that majors in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), health care, and agriculture offer the surest path to rewarding careers. But how good are these “expert” predictions? Should state governments direct tax dollars toward these winning degrees?

For years, states have incentivized the pursuit of certain majors through grants and scholarships. Gov. Nixon signed a bill in April, for example, which will grant 80 $5,000 scholarships to agriculture majors who agree to work in the agricultural industry in Missouri after graduation.

“The overwhelming argument now for education—at all levels and from government—is that it’s a preparation to make you a better factor of production,” Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn told the Wall Street Journal recently.

It’s certainly true that students are no longer attending college to learn for the sake of learning, but before we continue our practice of picking winning and losing majors, there are a few things we should consider.

First, 80 percent of college students switch majors at least once. Though a student may pursue a degree through the assistance of a grant or scholarship, there is no guarantee the student will remain in that major, complete the degree, or pursue a job within that field of study. In many cases, students must repay loans for coursework they never use in their actual career.

Even if scholarship programs hold students accountable through loan repayment agreements, employment trends change. According to Will College Pay Off? author Peter Cappelli, “The odds of predicting correctly are zero to none.” By the time students graduate and enter the job market, a prediction might not pan out, or new “hot” jobs will replace old “hot” jobs. Cappelli cites the increase in the demand for petroleum engineers due to fracking. Ten years ago, the word “fracking” bore little significance to the public. Now petroleum engineering graduates have the highest projected median starting salary for the class of 2015.

Just as it’s not always clear which fields are expected to experience job growth, it’s also unclear if any of our attempts to attract specific students to certain fields have paid off. For example, Missouri offers the Minority Teaching Scholarship to students who agree to teach within a Missouri school for five years after graduation.

While attracting minority students to the teaching profession is a concern in schools everywhere, there are a lot of unknowns. How many students remain in the profession beyond five years? How many students decide to pursue a different career and become burdened with student debt? Do these students teach in high-need schools? Do these students become effective teachers?

We don’t actually know, because we aren’t tracking these investments. At this point, the state is about as good at predicting the future of the economy as an 18-year-old is good at picking a major.

This is not to say that investing in education isn’t worthwhile, but we should be cautious about expanding our practice of picking winning majors, especially if investing in certain degrees does not result in net gains for taxpayers and college graduates.

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At its peak Corinthian Colleges had over 100 colleges throughout the United States and Canada, including Everest College campuses in Earth City, Kansas City, and Springfield. Last month Corinthian Colleges, Inc., a large for-profit post-secondary education company, announced it would cease operations in all remaining U.S. locations effective April 27, 2015. The closure of Corinthian has left 16,000 students in quite the predicament. Many have taken on burdensome student loans, and now their school is closed.

In response, the Department of Education (DOE) announced a plan to wipe the debt slate clean for all students that attended these schools, a move that potentially could cost taxpayers $3.6 billion. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan defended the plan saying, “You’d have to be made of stone not to feel for these students.”

While I agree wholeheartedly that it is more than a minor inconvenience to have your school close, this is the wrong course of action. Indeed, this plan is wrongheaded and will simply encourage more of the behavior that created this crisis in the first place.

First, there is no need to forgive loans for courses students have already completed. They did not spend their time at Corinthian schools in vain. These students are still eligible to transfer their credits to other schools and continue their educations. Countless universities have made it clear that they want to help and are willing to open their arms to students who take the initiative to transfer credits and continue their pathway toward a better life. Long Beach City College President Eloy Oakley summed it up perfectly back in April: “They have options and no matter what, at the end of the day, we want them to finish their education, stay in the community and become economic assets to the community.”

Unfortunately, one of the catches of the DOE’s plan is that closed-school debt relief is only available to students who have not transferred their credits to another university. This bailout encourages students to throw away the years they have dedicated to attaining a degree and bettering themselves.

Second, this is potentially the largest debt relief program the government has ever offered students, and it sets a bad precedent. Taxpayers should not be held accountable for the billions of dollars students borrow in full knowledge of the consequences. Most of these students never would have attended a Corinthian College if it were not for the government’s subsidization of college loans. This bailout essentially means students bear no risk when making college selections; they can easily obtain college loans, and the government will forgive them if things go badly.

The students of the now-defunct Corinthian Colleges certainly got a raw deal, but that is no reason to enact measures that will encourage the same type of behavior in the future.

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From Ugarte’s commentary:

[T]he reason I’m against SB 465 is that I don’t trust the motivations of those who are proposing it. It’s a bill with an agenda that goes far beyond a desire for transparency. It provides an opportunity for those determined to question, debunk, attack and diminish the pedagogical and research projects of university professors. I don’t think the effects will be positive; rather, we will have more of the same: animosity and lack of understanding.

As someone who has written on and testified in support of curriculum transparency for Missouri’s public universities, I can tell you that my motivation for supporting proposals like this comes from a conviction that public universities—and all public institutions—should be candid and open with the public about their affairs. Members of a public university should abide by the same transparency laws as everyone else who works in our public sector.

My motivation for supporting this bill doesn’t stem from a desire to “question, debunk, attack or diminish” the university, but I find it odd that a scholar would view someone questioning his work as a problem. Scholarship thrives on debate and challenges. As a student at Mizzou, you can bet I questioned my professors. They questioned, attacked, and debunked me right back. And I got a great education because of it.

I disagree with Professor Ugarte’s contention that an open academy will breed animosity and lack of understanding between it and the rest of society. On the contrary, I believe an open and honest discourse is the way you build trust and understanding. And there’s no reason why open and honest discourse can’t involve questions, debate, and, yes, sometimes even debunking.

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Meanwhile, the General Assembly, through House Bill 1812 and Senate Bill 784, is focused on reform of the Access Missouri grant. Currently, Access Missouri is structured to award a maximum of $1,000 in aid to students enrolled in two-year Missouri public schools, $2,150 to students at four-year public schools, and $4,600 for students attending Missouri's private colleges and universities. The bills in consideration would equalize these aid amounts to a maximum of $2,850 for all students, across all participating schools.

Choking the channels of aid to private school students while continuing to lavish aid on public school students only exacerbates the inequality and inefficiency that is characteristic of how the state currently supports its students. The current level of funds that the state awards to public school students already dwarfs the pool of funds directed toward private school students. In 2009, the General Assembly appropriated roughly $808 billion for four-year public higher education institutions. This amounts to an average per-student subsidy of approximately $7,280.

On top of this, qualifying public school students enjoyed an additional $56 million of publicly funded scholarships. Meanwhile, private school students received no per-student subsidies and shared a slightly smaller total of $52 million in public scholarship funds. Those who argue in favor of equalizing Access Missouri funds are misguided when they consider only Access Missouri and ignore the state's larger funding apparatus. Put simply, moving toward greater equality in Access Missouri is also a move toward greater inequality in total state support. There is, and always has been, a large disparity of public aid distributed between public and private students. Both reform proposals increase the size of this wedge. It is imperative, then, to consider whether this wedge is justified.

In 2008, Missouri's Coordinating Board for Higher Education adopted a set of basic values to guide higher education policy in the state. First among the list of values, the board recognized that the system is focused on students, learning, and each individual's realization of his or her full educational potential. The proposed reforms to higher education funding fail to do this vision justice.

First, the reforms do not support the full realization of student potential because they fail to honor the individual interests, skills, and needs of Missouri's diverse student population. For example, no public institutions in Missouri offer a complete architectural studies program, so students with an interest in architecture must turn to private institutions. On the margin, students unable to finance a private school education without assistance will necessarily settle for public-institution programs to which they are comparatively less suited.

Second, the proposed reforms pervert the vision of a higher education funding apparatus as centered on students. Instead, the reforms elevate the importance of institutions and suggest that students who attend public institutions are somehow more deserving of the taxpayer dime than students attending private colleges and universities. This is especially disturbing when considering that students attending private institutions contribute along with their parents funds to the pool of tax dollars that finance Missouri's support for higher education. The reform bills in the legislature would only serve to more unevenly distribute the resources of this pool. Meanwhile, Nixon's proposal would restrict private students access to the pool entirely.

The governor has said, In times like these, we simply can't continue to subsidize the choice to attend a private school.” This seems to suggest that the institutional choices that students make should be more relevant to the amount of aid they receive than their income, ability, or interest. This view fails to recognize that it is precisely in times like these that Missouri cannot afford to abandon its principles, or its investments in higher education students regardless of the institutions they choose.

Abhi Sivasailam is an intern with the Show-Me Institute and an economics student at the University of Missouri Columbia.

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Proponents of reform have made three, general arguments, all of them dubious:

First, they assert that reform would make the distribution of public aid more equitable. It’s atrocious that private school students may receive more than $2,000 in additional funding than their public school counterparts. This is tantamount to pandering to special interests. This argument is very puzzling; do its exponents not remember that the award amounts were carefully derived from two years of collaboration among private and public representatives and financial aid experts in order to meet “just” and “equitable” standards? Do they not understand that public aid is already lavished upon public school students and that the Access Missouri grants constitute the only form of public aid available for low-income students attending private colleges? Would not equalization of AM grants then be tantamount to pandering to public college students at the expense of their deserving private school counterparts? Are taxpaying Missouri citizens choosing to attend private colleges less deserving of the taxpayer dime than those attending public colleges?

Second, they argue that private school students should not receive a higher subsidy because they chose a more expensive education. It is an inefficient use of government funds to confer grants to students who are simply “paying too much” for education that they could receive at a public institution at a much lower cost. Here, too, problems abound. First, this claim once again ignores the state appropriations already going toward public institutions and the students who matriculate there. Second, the claim assumes that private and public schools have homogeneous curricula that can easily be compared. The reality is more complicated. Private colleges offer unique course and degree possibilities, with unique levels of quality and market value relative to public schools. In that light, the value of education at a private college is private and subjective. Even if we were to assume that private and public colleges are perfect substitutes, it is unclear why Missouri should, other things being equal, choose to subsidize one group of students at the expense of another group.

Third, proponents suggest that reform would open access to more students. Some legislators have argued that equalizing the award amounts would result in an increase in the total matriculation of Missouri students. Given a dearth of quality data on the impact of Access Missouri, this claim is utterly unsubstantiated; without appropriate data, I find it very difficult to accept prima facie. To begin, the reform package reduces the maximum amount of private aid by $1,750 and increases the maximum amount of public aid by $750. All else equal, it is reasonable to assume that students would be less motivated to attend private colleges, but not significantly more motivated to attend public universities. Of course, all else would not be equal, and the sum effect of reform is difficult to project. What can be said is that the claim that access would increase as a result of the reform is premature.

The Post-Dispatch doesn’t seem to like the reform package, and instead suggests that schools compete for funds. As per this view, students would receive aid relative to the “effectiveness” of the institution they attend. It is an interesting idea, primarily because it would involve the development of outcome measures that higher education currently lacks.

I have a better idea, one on which I have previously written: Support students through higher education vouchers, and then use Access Missouri for the rest.

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