Three years ago, the Education Department published the first of its annual College Affordability and Transparency Lists, a series of six rankings based on college tuition and net price.
The federal watch lists, dubbed the “wall of shame” by college lobbyists, are meant to pressure institutions to rein in their tuition, while enabling consumers to compare colleges based on costs.
But as President Obama moves forward with his broader college-rating plan, it is unclear whether the existing lists are working.
While colleges that appeared on the first “high tuition” list, published in the spring of 2011, have indeed raised their tuition at a lower rate than colleges that were not on the shame list, correlation does not imply causation; several institutions that appeared on the sector-based lists have denied that they were shamed into slowing their tuition growth. Instead, they cited factors like the recession, market forces, and accessibility concerns. Colleges that had large tuition hikes after they appeared on the list typically blamed state budget cuts.
And despite slower tuition growth at some colleges, more than 90 percent of the public four-year institutions that appeared on the original list are set to appear on it again this year, along with nearly 80 percent of the private four-years, according to a Chronicle analysis.
It is also unclear if prospective students and their parents are using the lists. David Hawkins, director of public policy and research at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, says he doesn’t “see a lot of awareness of this resource among students, families, or counselors,” and Maxwell Love, vice president of the United States Student Association, says the lists have never come up in his conversations with students.
As an accountability tool, the shame lists are pretty weak. Colleges with the highest percentage changes in tuition and fees and net price must submit reports to the secretary explaining their cost increases and detailing steps they will take to control costs, but they suffer no financial penalties.
Colleges on the “high tuition” and “high net price” lists face mostly embarrassment and bad publicity, while those that appear on the “low tuition” and “low net price” lists get only recognition—no financial rewards.
That’s a contrast with the president’s ratings plan, which would offer colleges a mixture of carrots and sticks to keep costs down.
Slower Tuition Growth
The wall of shame’s laxness is due largely to the strength of the college lobby.
Under the U.S. House of Representatives’ original watch-list proposal, colleges whose tuition and fees outpaced their sectors’ average would have been required to establish committees to identify “cost-reduction opportunities,” while cost-conscious colleges would have gotten more Pell Grant aid.
The approach, based on sector averages, would have put half of all colleges on the watch list, subject to its penalties.
College lobbyists fought the proposal tooth and nail, and lawmakers softened the plan, limiting its scope and sanctions. By the time the proposal cleared Congress, as part of the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act, the lists were redesigned so that only 5 to 10 percent of colleges would appear, and the only penalty was a report to the secretary.
Critics dismissed the new ratings as largely symbolic, predicting their impact would be blunted by competing pressures from ratings that reward spending increases, such as U.S. News and World Report’s.
The Education Department published the first ratings in June of 2011, too late to influence tuition setting for the coming academic year.
But in 2012-13, colleges that appeared on the first list raised tuition by less than their nonlisted peers across all sectors, a Chronicle analysis found. The difference was most pronounced at listed for-profit colleges, which decreased their tuition, on average, between 2011-12 and 2012-13.
Sarah A. Flanagan, vice president for government relations and policy at the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, one of the most vocal critics of the watch lists, said the rankings have “certainly gotten attention on campus.”
She noted that the private-college sector has recently posted the smallest tuition increases “in a long time.”
Still, she said it’s hard to decouple the impact of the lists from the impact of the recession, which forced many colleges to lower their tuition to attract and retain students. Indeed, several colleges that slowed their tuition growth after appearing on the list said the move was driven by macroeconomic factors.
As Lisa M. Powers, director of public information at Pennsylvania State University put it, “the list had nothing to do with it.”
“The Great Recession was the driver,” she said.
An Incomplete Picture
To keep tuition increases low in the face of flat state appropriations, Penn State postponed salary increases, trimmed benefits, and delayed capital expenditures, among other cost-saving measures.
The Penn State system, which accounted for 20 of the 32 public institutions on the first “high tuition” list, held tuition growth to between 1.9 and 2.9 percent in 2012-13.
At Santa Fe University of Art and Design, which appeared on the four-year for-profit list in 2011, the decision to cut tuition by 7.1 percent was “market based,” aimed at attracting aspiring students “from more economically diverse backgrounds,” said Laurence A. Hinz, the college’s president.
Likewise with Mt. Holyoke College, a four-year private women’s college that has held tuition flat for the last two years, based on “a desire to be more accessible to students of all economic backgrounds,” as well as a conviction that the existing economic model is unsustainable, according to Mary Jo Curtis, its director of media relations.
Colleges that raised tuition, meanwhile, tended to cite state spending cuts. The Colorado School of Mines, a four-year public college that increased tuition by 28 percent between 2009-10 (the year the first list is based on) and 2012-13, saw its state funding slashed by 30 percent during that time period.
State support for the University of New Hampshire system, whose flagship appeared on the first watch list, has dropped 28.1 percent over the past dozen years, including a one-year cut of nearly 50 percent—the deepest in the history of U.S. higher-education —in 2012-13 according to Erika Mantz, director of media relations.
Several colleges complained that the lists offer an incomplete picture of college affordability, calling out colleges that perform well on measures of “value.”
Charles Jackson, vice president for business and finance at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a four-year public institution on the high-tuition list, pointed out that its students graduate with the least amount of debt of any four-year college in the state, roughly $17,000. Ellen de Graffenreid, senior vice president for communications at Brandeis University, also on that list, noted that average borrowing at the four-year private college was $27,906 in 2012-13, roughly $2,000 below the sector average for the previous year, according to the College Board.
“The published tuition number is far from the whole story,” she said.
The Education Department also publishes college rankings based on net price, but net-price figures for 2012-13 are not yet available.
The Blame Game
Colleges contacted by The Chronicle said they haven’t heard from students, alumni, or donors about their appearance on the list, and it’s unclear how many students are using the lists to choose among colleges.
Still, some lobbyists worry that the high-tuition lists may be scaring low-income students away from colleges that are actually affordable, particularly once aid is taken into account.
Among public-college leaders, there’s concern that “all the talk and rhetoric about how college costs are through the roof dissuade and discourage low-income students from applying to or considering colleges,” said Jennifer Poulakidas, vice president for congressional and government affairs at the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities.
According to the Education Department, nearly 406,000 users visited the watch lists, though the department does not know how many were students.
Mark Kantrowitz, a student-aid expert, suspects it’s not too many.
He says the watch lists “are hard for consumers to use and largely invisible to students and parents,” and would be more effective if they were integrated into the department’s College Navigator, “perhaps as a kind of black-box warning label.”
He sees the watch list, and its spawn, college ratings, as part of an effort by Congress and the president to “deflect blame from themselves for anemic increases in the federal Pell Grant.”
“The blame for declines in college affordability is shared by Congress, the state legislatures, and the colleges,” he said. “Many of these proposals have more to do with assigning or shifting the blame than any real reform.”
