This is a re-post from the On the Issues blog maintained by the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [
http://futureofhighered.org/
].

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After a brief experiment in charging tuition, Germany—the strongest economy in Europe and one of the strongest in the world–is abolishing fees at its colleges and universities.

Why?

As quoted in a recent article in Inside Higher Ed, supporters of the move argue that “’higher education is a human right’” and should be “’equally accessible to all, on the basis of capacity, by every appropriate means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education.’” Continue reading →

A cluster of recent articles has addressed the growing issue of access to higher education for students from poor and working-class backgrounds.

Published in The Atlantic, Jordan Weissmann’s “How Colleges Are Selling Out the Poor to Court the Rich” opens with an assertion that is absolutely true but will come as a major surprise to most Americans: “Neat fact: If the federal government were to take all of the money it pours into various forms of financial aid each year, it could go ahead and make tuition free, or close to it, for every student at every public college in the country.” Weissmann then references an earlier article in which he addressed the exploitation of federal student grant and loan programs by for-profit colleges and universities whose revenue derives largely, if not almost entirely, from those programs. Here, he shifts his attention to the ways in which federal grants and loans to less economically well-off students are being used by a growing number of private and public colleges and universities to offset tuition reductions for students from affluent backgrounds. The private institutions are typically those with small enrollments and limited endowments. Most of the public institutions are in eight states in which the model of “high tuition/high aid” provided by elite private institutions has been implemented, largely unsuccessfully, to offset steep declines in state subsidies. In the mid-1990s, private institutions provided almost twice the amount of need-based as merit-based direct aid to students. Academically gifted but less economically well-off students often received enough aid directly from these institutions to cover most of the costs beyond the grants and loans provided through federal programs. Today, they are receiving less direct aid from the institutions, and those funds are being spread out to cover more modest financial aid offers that might entice more affluent students to enroll. In a recent study of almost 300 institutions at which 25% or more of the students receive Pell grants, Stephen Burd of the New America Foundation demonstrates the dramatic shift from need-based to merit-based aid in this way: the out-of-pocket cost to students receiving Pell grants is now almost exactly the same as the direct institutional aid provided to more affluent students in the “merit” category. Nationally, private institutions now provide more merit-based than need-based direct aid to students, and that trend is being replicated at an increasing number of public institutions. Continue reading →