by Finbarr Curtis
Recently, a spate of critiques of the President's speech last month in Buffalo on educational affordability have led off with a diplomatic effort to find common ground over the commitment to lowering college costs.
Like this statement by Rudy Fichtenbaum of the American Association of University Professors:
While we applaud the President for raising concerns over rising tuition and student debt, concerns that we share, we also believe that the President’s proposal will do little to solve the problem and will likely result in a decline in the quality of education offered to working class and middle class students, particularly students of color.Or this post by Frank Donoghue at the Chronicle of Higher Education:
My reaction to his speech, however, was decidedly mixed. Parts of it resonated emotionally, as it contained, not surprisingly given Obama’s skill as rhetorician, several applause-worthy lines. I couldn’t help come away with the sense though, that the Obama administration doesn’t fully grasp the entire universe of higher education in the U.S., and that his punchiest solutions are ultimately unworkable.Or another critical response from the Chronicle of Higher Ed from Biddy Martin:
I applaud President Obama for putting the importance of a college education squarely at the center of the national agenda in his speech at the University at Buffalo, and for insisting that students get the education they need regardless of economic circumstances.I applaud these responses for their rhetorical generosity but I'm going to refrain from applauding the President's support for affordable education because then I would have to applaud for every person in America. No one likes rising college costs. Applauding the President's commitment to lowering educational costs is roughly equivalent to saying "I applaud President Reagan's commitment to the broad concept of peace when he named those missiles Peacekeepers."
The reason I am not applauding is that with the exception of the laudable goal of shifting assessments of educational quality away from US News-style ratings, most of the specific proposals are the kinds of things that will either increase college costs or decrease the quality of education. Not only that, the President's call to put more work into developing measures of educational quality is obviously something that will increase costs because it will require more resources to sustain the administrative oversight that has been one of the larger contributors to rising college costs.
But others have already made this point. The interesting question to me, then, is not so much why the proposals in the President's speech will not lower college costs but why anyone would believe that they would. One possible answer to this lies in the President's call to "jumpstart competition between colleges." This is curious because colleges are already pretty competitive in all sorts of ways. Indeed, competition among colleges for what are imagined to be the most select pool of undergraduates is one significant source of the explosion of costs.
