We found Richard Colvin, director of the Hechinger Institute, taking notes at last week’s national summit on college costs. We told him we have a blog, and asked him to offer his observations. Here is his contribution, which we think is a terrific overview of the day’s events:

The most striking aspect of Lumina Foundation’s national summit on college costs on Nov. 2 was the bracingly honest conversations. The presenters did not minimize the challenges — educational, demographic, political and economic — that lie ahead for the U.S. and its colleges and universities. Nor did they shy away from acknowledging that not only have colleges and universities done little to address these challenges, they have little incentive to do so in the current seller’s education market. Except, of course, if they expect to survive over the long term.

As William “Brit” Kirwan, the chancellor of the University of Maryland, put it, higher education’s apparent willingness to believe that college costs will always grow at a rate that outstrips inflation assumes “a model that is not sustainable.”

Tuition and fees have risen at an annual rate of 5 percent to 7 percent, depending on the type of institution, over the past decade. Given current trends, materials presented at the meeting in Washington, D.C., reported that by 2010 4.4 million students will be unable to afford to attend a four-year college.

The cost of college is just one factor that explains a disturbing trend that was the subtext for the day: the rate at which American students are graduating from either two-year or four-year colleges or obtaining a specialized postsecondary certificate has been flat for more than a decade and is beginning to decline.

Meanwhile, countries around the world have made increasing the college-going rate a national priority and have caught and surpassed the U.S. As Kirwan noted, the U.S. ranks 7th among devleoped countries in its high school completion rate and fifth in college-going. Even more ominous, the U.S. is the only developed country in which the college-going rate is dropping, not rising.

In an example of the blunt language that characterized the day, David Breneman, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, warned that the U.S. would be committing “national suicide” if it failed to increase the opportunity for future generations to attend college. Several commentators invoked the words of Lumina Foundation’s chairman of the board, John Mutz, who said that the nation faced an educational and economic crisis and that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

Former North Carolina Gov. James Hunt, in introducing a panel of speakers who spoke of the need for collaboration, said that good U.S. jobs were being lost to international competition. “Now the good jobs we wanted for our children and grandchildren, those good jobs that represent our high standard of living, are beginning to slip away,” Hunt said. Meanwhile, though, even as the international competition for jobs has intensified, the U.S. has failed to increase the national college graduation rate.

Hunt said that in 1990 China was sending 2 percent of those who graduated from the equivalent of high school on to college. But recognizing that economic modernization demanded that more of its people gain an education, China set a goal of increasing the percentage of students going on to college to 20 percent by the year 2020. China now expects to achieve that goal by 2015.

Hunt said the U.S. needs to follow the Chinese example and set an ambitious goal. With about 18 percent of U.S. students achieving some sort of post-high school certificate or degree, Hunt suggested it would be appropriate to try to double that number by 2030. “We had better have some high goals and work our heads off, folks, or we’re going to lose what we cherish in this country,” Hunt said.

Other countries, said Madeleine F. Green of the American Council on Education, are thinking about higher education as a public good and are making “massive investments in higher education as a … tool of nation-building.” Meanwhile, the United States continues to think of higher education as only a private good.

Luncheon speaker Thomas Friedman, The New York Times foreign affairs columnist, explained that the stakes are high and rapidly growing higher for the U.S. The thesis of his latest book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, is essentially that technological, political and economic changes have created a worldwide “platform” on which only the most creative and well-educated workers will be able to earn middle-class wages. “If we’re going to try to compete by working harder and cutting wages, we’re going to get creamed,” Friedman said, pulling no punches. “We will leverage this platform by working smarter, not harder.”

Friedman said that, in this environment, workers will need the skills to do many different tasks, and that requires one thing: “You have to be smart.” But you also need what Friedman calls the “ability to connect the dots,” which requires a love of learning. “Learning how to learn is the single most important thing you can learn and we can teach,” Friedman said.

One highlight of the conference was the release of a compilation of ideas for making college more affordable. Breneman said anyone concerned about college affordability should remember that cost and price are not the same. Moreover, he said, not all ideas for reducing the cost of providing education will actually result in a lower price paid by students. As Patrick M. Callan, the president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, explained, cutting budgets do not necessary make public colleges more efficient, because they often simple “backfill with tuition increases.”

Nor, he and others explained, will simply reducing cost increase access. In fact, some efforts to make college more efficient actually curtail opportunity. But, he said, cutting costs is essential if the nation is to substantially increase the percentage of students going to college. As was the case all day long, Callan did not mince words.

“No matter how optimistic we are about the strength of the economy,” the veteran policy analyst said, “we will never have enough money to achieve that goal if the cost of college continues to rise at the rate it has over the past decade.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 at 11:12 am and is filed under Aligning tuition, aid & appropriations, Expanding capacity, Time to degree. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.