David Brooks on College Aid

Someday, David Brooks will write a tight, well-reasoned column on education policy, and we will praise it here on the Quick and the Ed.

Today is not that day.

In today's NYTimes piece($), Brooks critiques a recent proposal to increase college financial aid from Hillary Clinton and the DLC, making the familiar Brooksian argument that it's all about culture, stupid. He says:

Over the past three decades there has been a gigantic effort to increase the share of Americans who graduate from college. The federal government has spent roughly $750 billion on financial aid. Yet the percentage of Americans who graduate has barely budged. The number of Americans who drop out of college leaps from year to year.

There are two basic challenges to increasing the percentage of people who earn college degrees: getting more students to go to college, and getting more students to graduate once they get there. Brooks mixes and muddles these issues throughout the column, but as it happens he's got his facts wrong no matter how you look at it.

According to the U.S. Department of Education and the Census Bureau, the percent of high school graduates who immediately enrolled in college the fall after graduation increased from 49% in 1972 to 67% in 2004.

The percent of 25- to 29-year olds who completed at least some college increased from 36% to 57%.

The percent of 25- to 29-year olds who earned a bachelor's degree increased from 19% to 29%.

All of those numbers can and should be better. But it's foolish to say that the federal student aid money spent during that time did no good.

Brooks criticizes the DLC proposal for new tuition tax credits by citing Harvard Professor (and Education Sector research advisory board member) Bridget Terry Long's research questioning the effectiveness of the Clinton administration's HOPE and lifetime learning tax credis. But the whole point of the DLC proposal is to reform those credits by making them more generous, streamlined, and targeted.

Brooks notes, correctly, that the college completion problem isn't all about money, that we need to do a better job of preparing students for college and engaging them once they get there. But that's why the DLC ties funding for its program to state success in getting students into and through college, to create incentives to fix those problems.

There's one area where both Brooks and the DLC miss the mark: asserting that college dropouts are a growing problem. Way too many students drop out of college, hundreds of thousands every year. It's a terrible problem and a huge waste of opportunity and talent. But the percentage of students who enter college and don't finish isn't going up; the best research suggests it's actually gone down slightly in recent years. College dropouts are a bigger percentage of the population than they once were, but only because more people go to college in the first place.

In the end there are a lot problems to tackle when it comes to getting more students through college. Preparation, attitude, engagement, culture--these things matter. But money matters too. An extra $5,000 for college might not seem like a lot of money if you're a rich guy from suburban Maryland. For a lot of students, that kind of money makes all the difference in the world.