Students: why bother studying? - need for higher standards for financial aid to college students

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Nov, 1994 by Fred Mulcahy

The Department of Education wields enormous influence through its power to award Federal grants. (One college president I worked for seemed to spend half his time trying to "bring home the bacon." It was rumored that he had gotten the presidency because he had been an official of the Department of Education and knew his way around Washington.)

Maximization of revenues may be the key. State community college revenues come from three sources: Federal Higher Education Act grants, state grants, and local appropriations (tuition represents a mere 20% of total receipts), all three of which are related, more or less, to the amount of students enrolled. The more lenient the admissions policy of a school, the higher its enrollment and revenues.

Colleges with lenient admissions policies attract unprepared students on Federal tuition grants and loans. They tend to value the importance of education less and are the ones most likely to start a course late and then drop it before the final exam.

This makes teaching and learning in these schools not only more difficult, but more costly--due to lower student/instructor ratios and the need for more class, lab, and study-center tutors. Even with special tutoring, many of these unprepared individuals fail.

Whether individuals deserve tuition grants or loans or are getting much benefit from attending college are questions that the Federal government always has ignored. Students' rights, rather than responsibilities, evidently are the major concern. Over the years, I often heard Washington officials and their academic allies discuss unprepared students as people who "never had a chance to develop a sense of personal responsibility because they existed in a `culture of dependency.'"

This apologia is unfair to the students themselves. Schools with the most lenient admissions policies still have strict standards for graduation in order to maintain their accreditation. (Of the state community colleges I worked for, most of their credit courses are accepted for transfer by four-year colleges and universities.) These institutions are like mazes; unprepared students can get in, but not out.

When Pres. Jimmy Carter established the Department of Education in 1979, America was growing richer and such social policies as the predominance of student rights over responsibilities could be afforded. Today, the Federal government is going broke. The budget deficit is about equal to interest payments on the national debt, so the government is borrowing simply to pay interest on what it previously had borrowed.

Establishing standardized minimum academic skills

Recipients of Federal college tuition grants and loans should be required to pass a standardized minimum academic skills examination--perhaps similar to the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT)--to prove they are ready for college, then to maintain a minimum grade-point average. Those failing this standardized test could be urged to look for another line of training, permitting them to move into productive jobs more quickly. I once suggested this to a student who had been placed on probation for failing credit courses in a state community college. She returned about a year later, very pleased with her success, to tell me she had graduated from a cosmetology school and found a good job.