Ok, now this one is kind of bizarre...
Congress targets rising college tuition
Essentially Rep. McKeon from California has authored a bill which will yank money for College Work Study programs from Universities which raise tuition sharply.
I have to agree with Rep. Betty McCollum when she says "It penalizes colleges and students for what, in the majority of cases, is not their problem." She has introduced a competing bill using a carrot by providing incentives to schools that keep costs down. Rep. McCollum is a great lady, and on top of that she was one of the first to endorse Wes Clark. :-)
It's an interesting issue, and I'm actually rather surprised that Congress has decided to start talking about it in 2004. I don't recall this ever really coming up before, but I may not have been paying as close of attention.
I attended a public University back from 1986-1991, each and ever year tuition went up by double digits usually around 15%. My first year tuition was $1800 for tuition, by the last it was $3000, nearly doubling in 4 years. I shudder to think how much it is these days.
The problem is ultimately that the Universities don't keep down costs. Unfortunately the regents and other officials are also of the mentality that a tuition hike isn't that big of a deal because student aid will kick in and make up the difference.
And that's where this bill comes in. It's an interesting concept, but I agree with McCollum that it penalizes the wrong people, the students... It's not the students fault that Universities do not manage themselves well.
Unfortunately I don't really have any better suggestions. It's a problem, we know one of the symptoms of the problem, but how do we get to the root cause? What sorts of incentives can we offer to make Universities change their culture.
BTW, I also worked at the University after graduating... There is a bizarre amount of waste, it's penny-ante stuff, but it adds up fast.
There is also a bizarre mentality. Working at the library as a student, they introduced copy machine cards. There was a great debate as to whether to use student ids as credit cards and bill students, or require students to prepay onto the cards and debit the copies.
The ultimate decision was made to use the prepay cash cards, because they could make extra revenue with the calculated assumption that students would lose cards and never redeem the values.