There are virtually no educational standards. Students who meet the various income tests can get federal aid as long as they have a high-school degree. In practice, this standard is meaningless, because high-school graduation requirements are so low. Less than half of high-school seniors attain adequate reading skills for their grade. The obvious way to toughen college entrance requirements is (as I have argued before) to insist that students wanting federal aid pass a test showing they can do college work.
Why should this be controversial? It makes no sense for taxpayers to send unprepared students to college. It isn’t even fair to many students, who become saddled with huge loans that they can’t repay. The default rate now runs at about 20 percent. In fiscal 1991, defaults cost the government $3.6 billion. But political interest in tougher standards is zilch. The new law almost certainly won’t include any. “We had 447 witnesses,” said Thomas Wolanin, staff director of the subcommittee that rewrote the Higher Ed Act. “Nobody advocated new academic requirements.”
Gulp. This truly captures the hypocrisy of the school-reform debate. The commitment to “excellence” exists in speeches, not in practice. President Bush and his secretary of education, Lamar Alexander, propose sweeping goals for the year 2000: for example, American students should be first in the world in science and math (in a comparison of 14-year-olds in 17 countries, U.S. students tied for third to last place). But a more mundane goal-setting standards for federal college aid-is beneath them.
Congress is of the same mind. It won’t offend college-bound students or their parents. Going to college has become a mass-market entitlement. The idea that it should be earned by academic achievement has vanished. More than 90 percent of our 3,400 colleges and universities essentially have “open admissions”: anyone with the money and a high-school diploma can go.
Colleges and universities don’t want higher standards. Student enrollment might decline and, with it, tuition payments. Most colleges seek to maximize revenues, not education. If this judgment seems harsh, listen to Robert Atwell, head of the American Council on Education, the trade group of colleges and universities. A few years ago the ACE staff proposed a test colleges might give to their students. The idea was to set standards-not for admissions, but for a baccalaureate degree.
“We no longer know what a baccalaureate degree means,” says Atwell. “Shouldn’t there be some underlying level of achievement [for] all degree holders?” Swell idea. It bombed. “The constituency I serve-college and university presidents-simply wanted no part of it,” he recalls.
You might think that, given the prominence of the school-reform issue, the press would pay a lot of attention to the Higher Education Act and its implications. Nope. Education reporters generally don’t connect colleges to “the school problem.” Their indifference, I suspect, reflects a belief in three pervasive myths.
A delusion. Higher education consists of more than elite institutions and, as a whole, it’s hugely wasteful. More than half of college students never get degrees. Put another way, dropout rates for colleges are much higher than for high schools. Graduate quality is also slipping. Since the 1960s, scores on more than half of 24 graduate-school admissions tests have dropped. One reason is that research-conscious professors pay less attention to teaching.
This is half backwards. Lax college admissions standards are a major cause of lax high-school standards. The two feed on each other. Many students work only as hard as they must to get into college-and that isn’t hard. Typically, high-school seniors do less than an hour of daily homework.
Again, half true. Not even elite students have escaped the effects of low standards and “dumbed down” courses. Since 1972, the share of students scoring above 600 on the verbal Scholastic Aptitude Test (on a scale of 200 to 800) has dropped from 11 to about 7 percent, reports historian Daniel J. Singal in the November issue of The Atlantic Monthly. He documents how students at top colleges are less well prepared than they were 20 years ago. He quotes one historian at Berkeley with students who can’t distinguish between the American Revolution and the Civil War.
I guarantee that a meaningful test requirement for federal college aid-we could argue over details-would improve matters quickly. Nearly half of all college students now receive some sort of federal aid. A standard for them would become a standard for most incoming students. In high school, college-bound students would work harder. Average students would do better, putting more pressure on the best students. Public schools would face demands from parents-to strengthen courses, monitor teacher competence-to ensure that their children passed the test. Fewer students might go to college, but those who did would be better prepared. Graduation rates would rise. Waste would fall. We could use the savings to do a better job educating those who don’t go to college.
In practical terms, college aid is the federal government’s only weapon to force schools and students to change. The weapon has been sheathed, not because reform is undoable but because the problem is misunderstood and there’s no political will. Congress will merely expand these programs. Grants and guaranteed loans will increase. Colleges and universities will approve. They want more money and less accountability.
The results are predictable. Greater aid will abet tuition increases and foster continued loan defaults. There will be no improvement in standards, no reduction in waste. This is not educational policy. It’s educational pork barrel.
