Recipients of these entitlements should be required to pass an academic-skills test to prove they are ready for college. This would reward responsible students who work hard in high school; it would challenge high schools to provide better-qualified graduates, and the billions of federal, state and local tax dollars now being wasted on unprepared college students could be put to better use.
Until recently, I was a federal grant coordinator and an instructor in state community colleges in the East, Midwest and Southwest. Over a period of 20 years, I saw many students – their tuition paid by federal grants or loans – who were unprepared and couldn’t handle college studies. Ironically, their federal tuition entitlements were actually allowing some of these students to remain unemployed.
To mention one specific case: I was the adviser to a student in a two-year state community college with a total enrollment of several thousand. He had been on a federal tuition grant for more than three years in this upscale rural college with dormitories, dining hall and Olympic swimming pool. This student told me he’d tried, but he had never been able to graduate. As a high-school dropout, he simply hadn’t completed the prerequisite high-school studies necessary to take college-credit courses.
This student had been put on probation from time to time because of a low grade-point average, then suspended for a semester, then allowed to re-enroll and begin the cycle all over again. But, as he said at the time, going to college “beats working for a living.”
In another case, as an instructor in an inner-city state community college with a total enrollment of close to 10,000, I was advising a student on welfare who was receiving a federal tuition grant plus a state subsidy grant. When I counseled her on the difficulty of passing the courses for which she had registered, she said she had no intention of graduating and getting a job anyway – because then she’d lose Medicaid and Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
Since the U.S. Department of Education has no minimum test to qualify for financial aid, academic eligibility is left up to the admissions policy of individual colleges. (If a college does not require high-school graduation for enrollment, its students can get federal tuition grants and loans without having a high-school diploma or equivalency degree.) While four-year colleges generally have adequate standards, many, if not most, state community-college admissions policies are lenient – partly because easy access to a local two-year college education has always been a basic principle of the junior-college movement.
Having worked in state community-college recruitment, however, I believe the major motive for lenient admissions policies is maximization of revenues. These revenues come from four main sources: federal Higher Education Act grants, state grants, local appropriations and student tuition. All of these revenue sources are related, more or less, to total student head count. The more lenient the admissions policy of a state community college, the higher its head count and revenues.
Colleges with lenient admissions policies attract unprepared students on federal tuition grants and loans. I found that these students tend to be unappreciative of higher education. They are usually the ones most likely to start a course late and drop the course before the final exam, thus reducing their chances of ever graduating. Paradoxically, colleges I worked for that had lenient admissions policies still had strict standards for graduation in order to maintain their accreditation. Unprepared students on federal grants or loans found it easy to enroll in these colleges, but receiving a diploma was another matter.
Twenty-five years ago – when America was growing richer – such federal social policies as entitlement to a college education, regardless of academic achievement in high school, could perhaps be afforded. But today, with the government borrowing to pay interest on what it has already borrowed, these social policies are no longer feasible.
To help those unable to pass a standardized academic-skills test – or unable to maintain a passing grade-point average while in college – there could be a federal assistance program for alternative training, like a trade school. In advising a student who had been suspended several times for failing college-credit courses, I suggested she try another line of training. A year later she came back, very pleased with her success, to tell me that she had graduated from a cosmetology school and found a good job.
From 1988 to 1993, $14 billion was lost to student-loan defaults. The default rate of students without a high-school diploma has been more than 50 percent. Conditioning these loans on merit, by requiring students to pass a minimum test to qualify, would reduce loan defaults among the less serious and least prepared students.
Most people would probably agree that the federal government should attempt to expand higher-education opportunities for all Americans, but not by providing tuition entitlements to students regardless of their merit. That just increases tax-supported college payments for unprepared students, who can go to college without demonstrating college-level work.
A standardized minimum-skills test to qualify for federal grants and loans (a kind of Scholastic Assessment Test) would be consistent with the new Goals 2000: Educate America Act, which is meant to nationally increase teaching and learning accountability in public education. If students knew they would have to pass a test to get a tuition grant or loan, it would prod them to greater effort while in high school.
