Opinion

The right way to cut college costs

President Obama will probably get the “College Scorecard” he proposed in last week’s State of the Union address. Too bad it won’t do much to combat the problem it’s supposed to address, what he called the “soaring cost of higher education.”

He’ll get it because Republicans are also pushing for more disclosure from colleges. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor recently praised Sen. Marco Rubio’s Student Right to Know Before You Go Act. The bill would require each college to link data about its graduates’ salaries with their majors.

But if information did the trick, college costs would already be down. After all, US News has done its college rankings for decades, and many others have joined in. In fact, Forbes magazine’s ranking already does exactly what Obama wants his scorecard to do: It tells you “where you can get the most educational bang for your buck” by comparing tuition and starting salaries of graduates at schools around the country.

The problem of soaring college costs isn’t a lack of consumer information — it’s that schools have zero incentive to reign in their costs.

Campuses nationwide are constantly adding new buildings, though classrooms sit unoccupied for much of the week (Friday classes are so uncool) and most of the year (most schools have two 13-week semesters — you do the math).

Administrations continue to grow unchecked, too. From 1993 to 2007, inflation-adjusted spending on administration per student jumped nearly 66 percent, according to a Goldwater Institute study.

Universities also spend billions on research — some of it important, much of it silly, and very little of it benefiting undergrads. Research professors pull in a full salary for teaching only half a load — and private colleges hike tuition for undergraduates to subsidize their research budgets.

In other words, college administrators behave like someone else is footing the bill. And guess what? They are.

Or rather, we are.

“As long as the federal government is dropping money out of airplanes over universities, costs will continue to rise,” says Richard Vedder of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.The rise in tuition directly tracks the rise in federal student aid. Taxpayers have essentially been rewarding college administrators for raising their prices every year.

And the way we distribute the aid is, as Vedder puts it, “unintelligent.” If you opt for a more expensive college like Skidmore ($44,020 for tuition, room and board), you get more federal cash than someone who chooses a less expensive school like SUNY Albany ($18,145 out-of-state, $7,525 in-state).

This is like giving people who buy handbags at Coach more money than those who buy them at Century 21. It doesn’t make the shoppers good financial stewards, and it rewards Coach for charging more.

Instead, we should be giving each student a set amount of support (depending on financial need), and letting her use the data out there to decide on the place where she thinks she’ll get the best value.

Would-be freshmen need to look at the value of the degree they’re aiming for. While college graduates are about twice as likely to be employed, the degree is no guarantee of a job these days — certainly not a good job. A recent report from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity found that nearly half of all working college graduates held jobs that the US Labor Department says you don’t need a college degree for.

About one in eight college grads has a job you don’t even need a high-school degree for. The report found that 15 percent of American cab drivers have a college degree.

It’s perfectly fine if someone with a BA wants to drive a cab, but does the federal government need to subsidize it?

Washington doesn’t need more information about colleges. It needs some lessons in basic economics.