Lapas attēli
PDF
ePub

ularly postsecondary education policy, the natural thing to do, no matter who was in charge at the very top of the Office of Education, or the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, has been to pick up the telephone and ask Peter Muirhead.

Peter Muirhead, I am grieved and a little skeptical to say, is about to retire from the Office of Education. After 16 years of advising Congressmen, Presidents, Commissioners, Secretaries, college deans, school board chairmen, parents and students, Peter Muirhead is about to leave public life or so he thinks.

The fact is that as long as I have Peter's telephone number-and I understand he will still be in the Washington area-he is not going to get off without advising me. And I think I speak for every member of this subcommittee, for all those who have testified before us, for all those who have worked with him, and for the millions who have benefited from his work, when I say that Peter Muirhead may be off the payroll, but he cannot be taken off the honor roll. Let me tender to you the official and formal thanks of this subcommittee for all your help over a great many years.

Mr. MUIRHEAD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for those gracious and generous remarks. It has been an eventful time to work in the Office of Education during these past 16 years a period when the Federal interest in education has been and continues to be "center stage" in the deliberations of our Government. Although I have been privileged to work for the executive branch during all of that period, one of the most precious memories that I will take with me will be that of the creative wisdom and productivity of this committee and its unswerving commitment to serving the postsecondary education needs of our youth.

Mr. O'HARA. Gentlemen, I don't know if we really ought to let Mr. Dellenback sit up here. It is sort of a conflict of interest but I guess it is all right.

Would you like to make some observations?

Mr. DELLENBACK. I am here to ride shotgun.

Mr. O'HARA. I am sure they don't need any protecting but I am sure you will do a good job if they do.

Gentlemen, if you will proceed.

STATEMENTS OF PETER MUIRHEAD, DEPUTY COMMISSIONER FOR HIGHER EDUCATION, U.S. OFFICE OF EDUCATION; DON LEONARD, LINCOLN, NEBR., CHAIRMAN, NATIONAL COMMISSION ON THE FINANCING OF POSTSECONDARY EDUCATION; BEN LAWRENCE, NATIONAL CENTER FOR HIGHER EDUCATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS, DENVER, COLO. (FORMER EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, NCPE); GEORGE WEATHERSBY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY (FORMER ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, NCFPE); AND DAN MARTIN, ASSOCIATED COLLEGES OF THE MIDWEST

Mr. LEONARD. I believe Dellenback and Brademas have been riding shotgun to assure the Commission got things done in the last year and a half.

Chairman O'Hara, members of the subcommittee, ladies and gentlemen, this presentation is the last official act of the National Commission

on the Financing of Postsecondary Education. In a sense it is appropriate that our last official act end here, because I understand that the initial discussions that led to the Commission's creation started here.

On the other hand while the Commission's work has ceased we are pleased at the work we have stimulated. As you are aware, in discharging its responsibilities, the Commission chose not to rehash old issues so thoroughly examined by other study groups, but tried to add something new to the base of knowledge they had accumulated. Of course the Commission's report, its staff reports, and its data base provide testimony to one of its major impacts. I am attaching a list of Commission reports now completed for your information.

This includes the basic report of the Commission and certain staff reports which have been issued or soon will be.

The Commission's approach, of course, has been well publicized. It was to devise a means whereby we could determine in a more systematic way, and hopefully more accurately, what would happen in the future if we chose one policy alternative as opposed to another in the financing of postsecondary education. It has recommended the use of an analytical framework and placed high priority on assembling pertinent data to permit the thorough analysis of policy proposals to assist Federal and State policymakers in making wise choices concerning the financing of educational services to our people.

The Commission has also attempted in a rudimentary way to use that framework and data to demonstrate the potential usefulness of such an approach and to provide you with the most current information available. We find evidence already that these approaches are being seriously attempted and we are pleased.

I am distributing a publication by our Executive Director which provides a brief summary of the Commission's report which you may find easier to utilize and make reference to than the large volume.

We would also like you to be aware that we have completed our assignment within the time frame provided and within the appropriation provided.

I would like to give high compliment to the staff who worked long hours in bringing about the work of the Commission.

In your letter of June 12, 1974, you asked us to focus our attention on the student assistance questions and these issues, such as tuition and institutional aid policies which are part and parcel of the student assistance question. We intend to do that.

Dr. Weathersby will report the findings of the Commission that are relevant to student assistance. Dr. Martin will speak briefly about diversity and distress in institutions as related to student financial assistance focusing particularly on the concerns of private and other high tuition institutions.

Dr. Lawrence will speak to you about objectives and incentives of parents, students, institutions, and States, and how that affects the effective operation of Federal financing programs and finally in our discussions following our initial presentation we hope to be able to present some personal observations that cannot be attributed to the Commission's work but arise out of our experience with the Commission and other involvements in the postsecondary education enterprise. In particular it is the hope of the president, that the presence of Dr. Muirhead can add materially to this discussion.

Since we have prepared statements we will summarize them briefly, trusting that the summary will stimulate our discussions with you and that you will have an opportunity to read our prepared statements at another time.

Dr. Weathersby.

Mr. WEATHERSBY. I am not going to read this document in its entirety but will highlight it as I go through.

Mr. O'HARA. Without objection the statement will be included in the record in its entirety.

Mr. WEATHERSBY. In view of the recent subcommittee hearings on student assistance policies, I believe much of the work of the National Commission will be directly relevant to your considerations. In the next few minutes I would like to share with you the substantive research findings and procedure of the National Commission and to relate my personal observations.

The Education Amendments of 1972 will be regarded as landmark legislation because it created numerous new financing programs for postsecondary education, including the National Institute for Education, the fund for improvement of postsecondary education, and the basic educational opportunity grants (BEOG), as well as extending virtually all of the previously authorized programs for another 3 years. The Education Amendments of 1972 also marked the transition of policy focus from higher education to postsecondary education. In 1972 postsecondary education was about a $30 billion industry annually with the Federal Government-$8.1 billion-providing almost as much as all 50 States and nearly 500 local governments combined $9.3 billion. There are about 2,950 colleges and universities in the United States; in addition there are more than 7,000 accredited technical and vocational noncollegiate schools, about 5,000 of which are proprietary. There are about 9.3 million students in the collegiate sector and 3 million students in the noncollegiate sector. Total 12 million.

Structuring public policies to respond to this broad scope of institutions and students in postsecondary education is very difficult and leads almost inevitably to policies which are not particularly responsive to any one type of institution. The work of the Commission dealt with the whole sweep of postsecondary education and its financing-and not with particular institutional sectors. Therefore, the following discussion of the results of the Commission will be presented in general terms with no assertion that these general results set the context for developing public policy to deal best with every institution.

The Commission had two principal outcomes: A recommended process for planning the financing of postsecondary education and a set of data-based research findings on the degree of accomplishment of some objectives, the extent and causes of institutional financial distress, the applicability of available uniform costing procedures, and the likely enrollment and financial consequences of alternative financing plants for postsecondary education.

The decision by the Commission to operate on two levels-the process of planning for and the substance of national financing policies-was deliberate from the very beginning of the discussions of the Commission. I believe this decision reflected the frustrations some members of the Commission had felt in the last several years as they struggled in the national policy arena without any clear conceptual guidelines.

Perhaps this decision also reflected the attitude of some Commissioners that the role of this Commission was to advise the Congress and the President on the current state of postsecondary education and the likely future state of postsecondary education if different policies are followed in the future.

To provide a context for this substantive information, the Commission also had to describe the conceptual approach it had taken in its analysis. Conditions affecting postsecondary education will change, as will public priorities, in ways that are difficult to predict; yet it is the hope of the Commission that the analytical approach it has developed will continue in the future to be useful in developing appropriate national policies.

The two-level focus of the Commission's report has possibly made it more difficult to analyze the report. The substance is complex both because the financing of postsecondary education is complex, including over 380 Federal financing programs plus several hundred more State, local and private financing programs, and because of the highly decentralized decisionmaking of the more than 10,000 institutions and 12,000,000 students in postsecondary education.

Unlike the Carnegie Commission which focused on the collegiate. sector and the Committee for Economic Development report, which focused on undergraduate collegiate instruction, the National Commission included the noncollegiate sector as an integral part of its analysis.

Using aggregate categories of students-by level and income group-and institutions-by public/private, Carnegie category and USOE Career School category-the Commission made many observations including:

(1) Consistent with other recent studies, the Commission observed that ethnic minorities, persons over 25 years old, and women having substantially less access to postsecondary education than young white men. Family income per se is not a particularly important variable in explaining, statistically, the difference in participation rates. And, as corroborated by the available estimates of the response of student demand to changes in the price of postsecondary education, the net effect on enrollment of moderate changes in student aid or tuition is also not particularly large.

In years past we have thought of financial need as an almost physical barrier preventing would-be students from attending college. The partial evidence available suggests that parental education and occupation, individual ability and high school tracking are all more important than family income in affecting an individual's college going choice. Furthermore, most of these factors are not instruments of public policy, at least not for this generation of young people. The evidence does not argue that equal access is a hopeless objective--but it does suggest that achieving equal access through monetary incentives alone will be both difficult and expensive.

(2) The income composition of enrollment in each sector of postsecondary education-for example, private research universities or public 2-year colleges-is not a function of the average price of the sector, indicating that there are some strong signs of equality of student choice in American postsecondary education.

The Bureau of Census data show no significant relationship between the enrollment composition by income and the average after-studentaid net price or the average gross tuition of an institutional sector. The Bureau of Census results are not in terms of the aggregate relationship between enrollment composition and institutional price, and they do control or account for the admittedly unequal access of low-income groups. These data do not argue that all individuals go to the institution of their highest preference or that individuals of each income group are spread evenly among all institutions.

For middle income parents, or alumni who have to dig deep into their pockets to pay a student's expenses of $4,000 to $6,000 per year at many of our private institutions, the suggestion of relative equality of choice must provide cold comfort. In my opinion, these results do not obscure the sacrifice of middle-income parents; rather they reflect the impact of the more than $5 billion of public funds made available in direct student aid which is packaged for eligible students in some mix of grants, work and loans.

As a result of its analysis, the Commission offered four general and very simple observations. After one becomes comfortable with these observations, they are embarrassingly simplistic and almost tautologically true; but they are sufficiently counterintuitive at first glance that I believe it is worth emphasizing them here.

If student access is defined in terms of the rate of participation of low-income individuals in postsecondary education and if low-income individuals respond at all to changes in the net price of attendance, then targeting a given amount of money solely on low-income individuals such as need-based grants or need-based programs, will increase their participation rate more than spreading the same amount of money over low-, middle-, and high-income individuals-for example lowering tuition.

This is one of the key points in the public-private tuition debate which has recently received so much attention. And the logical argument is very simple. If individuals did not respond to price changes, then neither the level of student aid nor the level of tuition would have any impact on enrollments; but both empirical research and our own personal experience suggest the contrary.

Current evidence indicates that individuals respond to changes in the net price of attending postsecondary education, with $100 decrease in price resulting in a 1-percent to 3-percent increase in enrollments depending upon parental income level and vice versa.

The basic assumption underlying need-based financial aid—and needs tests for financial aid-is that individuals from low-income families do attend postsecondary education with greater likelihood when they receive financial aid than when they do not.

Therefore, focusing resources on the group of greatest concern will have a greater impact on their enrollment than diffusely providing the same amount of money to a broad audience.

The second generalization was, among all recipients, need-based grants have the greatest effect on enrollments of individuals of low income or individuals attending high cost institutional sectors, which isn't surprising. However, as shown in figure 2, $2 billion in additional need-based grants would increase low-income enrollment nationally by

« iepriekšējāTurpināt »