Student Debt Burden

College student enrollment across the United States has steadily increased over the past decade, with more than 17 million citizens participating in higher education today. The good news is that thousands of newly trained workers are moving our social and economic enterprises forward each year. The bad news is that tens of thousands more students are accumulating record levels of debt. As state and federal support for higher education continues to tighten, students are increasingly picking up the slack. This trend is not slowing down; in fact, student debt has risen significantly over the past decade.

These rising debt levels present important policy implications related to access and affordability. To keep higher education as the primary means of upward mobility and to keep our economy competitive, colleges must remain affordable and accessible to all students. Higher education officials must be aware of the long-term impact borrowing has on students’ futures and students need better information to help them graduate with manageable debt levels.

AASCU endorses the recommendations in the report of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education.

The recommendations are solid and worthy of our support; they are good for higher education and good for the country. AASCU acknowledges the Commissions’ concerns and will work to address them.

The recommendations are:

1. Improve student preparation and persistence, address non-academic barriers and provide significant increases in aid to low-income students to expand access to and success in higher education.

2. The entire student financial aid system needs to be restructured and new incentives put in place to improve the measurement and management of costs and institutional productivity to address the cost of a college education and the long term ability of government’s financing higher education.

3.Higher education needs to create and embrace a robust culture of accountability and transparency thereby changing from a system primarily based on reputation to one based on performance.

• More and better information on the quality and cost of higher education need to be collected for the database. A privacy-protected information system that collects, analyzes and uses student-level data is needed to help consumers determine how colleges and universities are serving their students. Through accurate retention and graduation rates and net tuition prices for different categories of students, institutions that serve the growing proportion of nontraditional students will be more accurately portrayed.

4. Colleges and universities need to embrace a culture of continuous innovation and improvements through pedagogies, curricula and technologies to improve learning, especially in science and mathematics. Institutions should share educational resources among institutions and use distance learning to meet the needs of rural students and adult learners.

5. A national strategy for lifelong learning needs to be developed so that all citizens understand the importance of higher education throughout their lives. Institutions need to offer more distance learning, workplace learning and alternative scheduling programs to reach out to adults.

6. Federal investment in areas critical to global competitiveness must be increased and a renewed commitment to attract the best and brightest to lead American innovation.