Bankrupt

"We're looking into whether California can renege on its commitment"

--Diana Fuentes-Michel, executive director of the California Student Aid Commission, in regards to a state program to repay the college loans of nurses and teachers who agree to work in-state.

The programs sound like a win-win for all sides. A student gets a portion of his or her student loans written off if he or she agrees to work in a high-need field. A state gets to direct students into fields that otherwise might not be filled, while they simultaneously reduce general fund support for colleges and universities. It's a win-win all around, except when states go broke and decide to backtrack on their promises.

Similar programs exist for other professions, but teachers are the primary targets. Teacher participants in Alabama, Alaska, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Virginia face either partial cuts or worse. Many more states are considering freezing their programs from new applicants.

Success or failure of these types of programs depends largely on their durability. A state is asking a participant to begin a career they might not otherwise pursue and, in turn, the state promises some financial assistance to do so. If states fail to uphold these promises, future students will be far less likely to participate. This is important, because if the programs are designed to attract the marginal students--the ones who need a little extra push into a given field--and not just supplement the salaries of ones who would do so anyway, the programs need prospective applicants to believe the money will actually exist down the road.

That, in fact, is the real problem with these programs: they're not really designed to affect the overall supply of teachers, even for specialty areas. They're just too small. Really they're designed to show the public that state leaders are doing something for certain underpaid and under-supplied professions. State leaders can't force school districts to modify their salary schedules to accommodate the laws of supply and demand. Legislatures have been unwilling to throw more money at colleges and universities and dubious that the postsecondary institutions would use additional money to follow state priorities. What we're left with are boutique programs that made their political point and now can fall by the wayside and only harm a few thousand teachers. That's not just financial bankruptcy; it's of the moral variety as well.