Searching for Common Ground: Student-Loan Forgiveness and the Cost of Higher Ed.
Pedro Noguera, the dean of the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education, and I have a podcast (Common Ground: Conversations on Schooling) in which we dig into our disagreements and seek to identify common ground on some of the thorniest questions in education. I thought readers might enjoy perusing snippets of those conversations every now and then. Recently, Pedro and I had a conversation about Biden’s loan-forgiveness plan (currently paused due to a court challenge) as well as the cost and value of higher education.
Pedro: So, my first reaction to the plan was that it’s not going to do much. The college-loan debt of so many younger Americans is so high that 10K is more of a symbolic gesture. But then, I’ve been talking to people who are dealing with these loans, and they all said, “It’s a help … a step in the right direction.” So, I have mixed feelings. I think the loan relief doesn’t address the bigger problem—the cost of college, which is rising every year. That’s something we’ve got to deal with, and this plan doesn’t address that. This is a very temporary measure to help the people who are burdened with college loans now. What about the people who have to take out loans next year? And the year after that?
Teaching About Slavery in the U.S.? Start With Honesty. (Opinion)
Rick: My feelings aren’t too mixed. I think it’s wrongheaded. First, I totally agree with you on the cost of college question. What’s especially frustrating to me is that this sends the signal to future borrowers that they might as well borrow money, because it might be free down the line. You’re right that $10,000 for folks who might owe substantial amounts isn’t a huge amount to them, but the total price tag for this thing is nearly half a trillion dollars to American taxpayers—including our kids and grandkids, who didn’t borrow any of this money. That’s more than twice of all the COVID-relief money provided to K-12 education. It’d be enough to double the size of the Pell Grant for decades. And instead, it’s being given willy-nilly to pretty much anybody who borrowed money. I regard any government lending program as a handshake between the borrower and the taxpayer. If people borrowed money and are unemployed, having a rough time, or they didn’t get their degree, well, I understand the case for targeted relief to those in these particular circumstances. But using a provision of the Post-9/11 HEROES Act, targeted at military families, to give hundreds of billions to people who’ve borrowed money for law school or what-have-you—it doesn’t strike me as responsible or constructive.
Pedro: I want to put it into perspective. We give all kinds of relief to homeowners and tax breaks to business owners. If you think about it as far as who benefits from government subsidies of various kinds, lots of people do. There is not a lot of complaining when we have some of the biggest corporations in the country not paying their share of taxes. At the same time, what most concerns me is that it gives the appearance that we’re solving the problem, and we’re not. The issue we have to tackle is why states have stopped subsidizing their public colleges. If public colleges were cheaper, it might force some of the private colleges to lower their tuition. When I went to college at Brown, it was about $7,000 a year. I ended up with about $5,000 in debt at the end of four years because I had Pell Grants and scholarships that covered it. I still thought that was a lot of money. Right now, the cost of an education at Brown is close to $80,000 a year. And it’s hard to say whether you’re getting something more, or better, now than when I was a student.
Rick: I hear you. It’s a reasonable point. But we already have policies and laws that provide subsidies for college borrowing. There’s the Pell Grant. There’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness and income-driven repayment options. Direct lending is already provided at a better-than-market rate, since it’s provided by the government. And then there’s public funding for public institutions, work-study, and so forth. So I’d argue that college-goers and colleges are already receiving a whole lot of public support. And I’m especially troubled by the notion that taxpayers should give these students money so that Harvard or Stanford can squat on its endowment—that seems just morally perverse. It seems to me, one policy response here is for those deep-pocketed institutions that have an endowment of a certain size to take some of this off the taxpayers. Washington should make clear that if endowed institutions wish to continue to be eligible for federal student-lending, research funds, or other aid, they ought to have to work out a deal with the government where they have to repay taxpayers the money used for their former students as a condition for continued eligibility. Think of it as a version of what General Motors had to do when taxpayers bailed out GM in 2009, under the Obama administration. That kind of arrangement would, at least, draw a distinction when it comes to these extremely resource-rich institutions which could have used their endowments to reduce student borrowing—and instead have chosen to hoard them.
Pedro: I like that. The average amount of debt owed by a college graduate is $28,000, so $10,000 represents a significant amount, which means that many of those people will be able to buy homes, cars, and other things that will help them and the economy. So, if you think about debt relief that way, it will be a real benefit, even to people who don’t qualify. But if the cost of colleges keeps going up, it might result in a lot of people saying college is not worth it, and that’s not good for this country. We need an educated population.
Rick: You noted that rising tuition costs, in some cases, can be partially attributed to reductions in state aid. But let’s set that aside for the moment. That’s obviously not a factor when it comes to private institutions like Stanford, Oberlin, or Yale. What do you think is driving the huge growth in college costs at these places?
Pedro: You know the cost of operations. Including the salaries of professors. There are certain academic fields where professors have been able to demand very high salaries, particularly in economics, business, law, and medicine. At the same time, parents want their kids in nice dorms, they want them to have the luxuries of middle-class life while they’re in college, and so they expect that if they pay high tuition, then the school will meet their needs or desires.
Rick: When the government winds up being asked to step in and bail out a sector, we usually say, “Well, let’s make sure the crazy behavior doesn’t continue.” That was certainly the case with GM or the housing mortgage lenders in 2009. So, it seems to me, we ought to say to the colleges, “If you want to be eligible for the feds to help underwrite student tuition, you’ve got to keep tuition under control. We are not just going to keep writing checks so that 19-year-olds can dig themselves into debt without realizing what they’re getting into.” At the end of the day, by simply mailing money to grown-ups who chose to borrow this money for a B.A. or to attend grad school, are we teaching the wrong lesson? Are we teaching people that if you complain long enough and loud enough, that someone will give you stuff?
Pedro: I don’t think that’s true. You can make the comparison to health care, where people often end up with lots of debt and even go bankrupt. As you know, I was sick a year ago, and when I saw the cost of some of the procedures, it was outrageous. Who’s paying that? The health insurance company. It’s out of hand, and I don’t know what we do to contain the cost of higher ed. or of health care. But that’s a big part of what’s distorted in this whole economy. We need to figure it out because we need health care and we need education. Our society benefits from having well-educated people, but we’ve got to figure out how to do it efficiently, like Canada.
“The nation’s report card” was released today, reporting the 2022 results for reading and math in grades 4 and 8. While I could ramble on about the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ latest outcome, I was far more interested in hearing what Marty West made of them. Academic dean for Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, research fellow with the National Bureau of Economic Research, editor-in-chief of Education Next, member of the Massachusetts board of education, and member of the National Assessment Governing Board (which oversees NAEP), West has as good a sense of these results as anyone in the nation. Here’s what he had to say.
Marty: The bottom line is that 4th and 8th grade reading and math NAEP scores are down from 2019 levels nationwide. They are down substantially. And they are down nearly everywhere: Every state (and the District of Columbia) saw scores drop by a statistically significant amount on at least one of the four tests administered this spring. The same is true for each of the 26 large urban school districts that participate in NAEP. And in those states or districts whose NAEP scores in a particular grade and subject were officially unchanged from 2019, scores were typically lower than they had been that year—just not by enough to achieve statistical significance. It is fair to say based on these results that there are very few school systems nationwide where students didn’t lose considerable ground over the course of the pandemic.
We certainly expected 4th grade scores to be down based on the long-term trend NAEP results for 9-year-olds we released in September. This release revealed that the declines were larger and more pervasive in 8th grade math, where scores were down in 49 of 50 states (all but Utah) and in DC. That was the bad news.
As for good news, there were certainly some systems that seem to have weathered the pandemic better than others. At the state level, Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, and Iowa stand out as places where scores fell less on average across grades and subject areas than others. Among very large districts, Dallas, Miami-Dade, New York City, and especially Los Angeles fared surprisingly well. Catholic schools nationwide saw student scores hold steady on three of the four tests, though it is possible that this reflects shifts in enrollment into those schools in response to public school closures. And the schools operated by the Department of Defense Education Activity actually registered gains since 2019 in 8th grade reading and matched their prior performance on the other three tests. I expect we will see many efforts in the coming weeks to explain those outliers.
Rick: We’ve seen a number of troubling test results over the past couple months: September’s long-term trend NAEP results were dismal, ACT recently reported its worst results in 30 years, state assessments have been grim. What do these NAEP numbers tell us that we didn’t already know?
Marty: You’re right that we have multiple sources of evidence that achievement fell during the pandemic, but they all have limitations. Not all students take college-entrance exams like the ACT, which makes it tricky to interpret changes in scores over time—especially during a pandemic. State tests differ from one state to the next, which makes it hard to compare both achievement and changes in achievement over time. Only NAEP can speak with authority about what has happened to student achievement nationwide and how that varies across states.
Rick: Parents and educators sometimes worry that there’s too much testing and may wonder why we need NAEP in addition to all those other assessments. Why should readers pay attention to NAEP, in particular? For those who aren’t familiar with it, what’s distinctive about it?
Marty: The NAEP program provides data that parents, educators, and policymakers need to put results from other tests and other measures of student performance into context. It is the only test that is routinely taken by a nationally representative sample of students and by representative samples of students in each state. It is this feature that makes it possible to understand how student achievement differs across all 50 states and, through the creative work by researchers at The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, across school districts nationwide.
A second feature of NAEP is that it is a no-stakes test. Except perhaps for governors or chief state school officers, no one’s evaluation or performance rating hinges on the results. In fact, NAEP results aren’t even available for individual schools and students. This means that we don’t have to worry as much that score gains could reflect the use of crude test-prep strategies or an over-emphasis on the test content as opposed to other education goals—a common concern when it comes to state test results.
One final unique feature of the test that parents may appreciate is that no one student takes the entire exam. We instead use an approach called matrix sampling, where several students each take one part of it. This is designed to minimize the burden placed on schools and students selected to participate.
Rick: Can looking at the results tell us more than we already know about which kids have been hit hardest by the pandemic? Are there any surprises here?
Marty: One troubling pattern in the long-term trend NAEP results released for nine-year-olds in September was that lower-performing students seemed to have lost the most ground. That is, the achievement of students at the 10th and 25th percentiles of the national distribution fell considerably more than that of students at the 75th and 90th percentiles. The gaps between higher- and lower-performing students on various NAEP tests had already been growing throughout the decade leading up to the pandemic, and the pandemic seems to have accelerated that trend.
Looking at the results out today, we see this same pattern in both math and reading at grade 4—which is obviously cause for concern. The Black-white and Hispanic-white achievement gaps also grew in 4th grade math, which is a reversal of a long-term trend toward greater racial equity in NAEP results.
What is more surprising is the fact that 8th grade math scores fell dramatically—and by roughly the same amount—for both higher- and lower-performing students. This is the main reason why the change in average scores was largest on this test.
Rick: OK, but how much faith should we put in these results? A number of superintendents and a few state chiefs have told me that, during the pandemic, kids got out of the routines of test prep and test-taking—and that’s what we’re seeing. Do you think that’s a significant issue?
Marty: The fact that NAEP is a no-stakes test means that it is not a main focus of test-prep efforts in schools, even in ordinary times. The test prep that I worry most about when interpreting scores is activity focused on the unique features of a specific testing program—for example, coaching students on topics that are always included or questions that tend to be asked the same way every year. This is generally not possible on the NAEP, and educators don’t have an incentive to try to prepare students for the test. If students are out of practice when it comes to answering the types of questions posed by NAEP, I’d think that would also affect their performance in their classes and ability to make progress over time. For that reason, I’m not sure that I could separate a decline in NAEP performance from learning loss generally.
That said, the theory you cite is testable in the sense that, if it is correct, we’d expect a rapid recovery from this year’s losses by the time the main NAEP, which measures reading and math performance every two years, is next given in 2024. If that happens—and I hope it does—renewed familiarity and comfort with test-taking could be part of the explanation. But I’m far from ready to dismiss this year’s results based on that concern.
Rick: You co-direct the annual Education Next survey on education. One of the things the survey has historically looked at is public views toward testing. Where is public sentiment on testing right now, and do you think there’s anything in these results, and in other grim assessment outcomes, that’s likely to move the public’s views?
Marty: What’s most striking to me is the public’s continued strong support for the federal requirement that states test students annually in grades 3-8 over the course of the pandemic. Roughly three of four adults favor that policy, which suggests that there hasn’t been a groundswell of anti-testing sentiment among the mass public. That pattern doesn’t mean that the public favors all uses of tests, of course, but Americans do still seem to see tests as a valuable source of information. I don’t see anything in these latest results that would change that.
In fact, my hope is that these results can play a role in shaping parents’ views of where their children are academically, as we emerge from the pandemic. When we at Education Next surveyed parents in May 2022, the parents of only 9 percent of students said they were not confident their child will “catch up” from Covid-related learning loss within a year or two; the parents of the rest either are confident the child will catch up or perceive no learning loss in the first place. Today’s results suggest that parents are far too optimistic—and I hope the results spur some parents to take a closer look at their children’s academic progress over the course of the pandemic and what may be needed for them to catch up.