As Bill Clinton prepared to become president eight years ago, most college officials glowed with excitement. During 12 years of Republican control of the White
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House, they had endured countless proposed budget cuts and plenty of biting ideological attacks.
At last, they felt, they would have a real “education president.” After all, Mr. Clinton was a Rhodes scholar, had pushed far-reaching education reforms as Arkansas’s governor, surrounded himself with wonkish friends from academe (and actually read their books), and talked constantly about education. In October of 1992, more than 200 college presidents, administrators, and trustees took the unusual step of endorsing Mr. Clinton in an advertisement published in The Chronicle.
Today, many of those educators are again singing his praises, grateful for new programs, huge infusions of money for student aid and research, and the attention he showered on higher education during the past eight years. But a close look at the Clinton record in the White House reveals a more complicated picture.
Although college lobbyists may be feeling nostalgic for Mr. Clinton a year from now, many of them felt betrayed during his first two years in office. Many of his education achievements came about because of one of his worst political defeats: the Republican takeover of Congress in the 1994 elections. And educators remain divided over some of Mr. Clinton’s priorities.
The first two years of Mr. Clinton’s tenure in Washington set the stage for his higher-education record in a way none at the time would have predicted. During that time, Mr. Clinton focused on health care (disastrously) and deficit reduction (successfully), and the results weren’t good for student aid.
After two years of working with a Democratic Congress, President Clinton had raised the maximum Pell Grant by only $40, to $2,340, and had not added any new money to the three campus-based student-aid programs. And while he expressed support for affirmative action, he kept college leaders waiting for more than a year before overturning a Bush-administration ban on minority scholarships.
This is “what we are used to seeing from Reagan and Bush,” Julianne Still Thrift, president of Salem College and a strong supporter of Mr. Clinton, complained to The Chronicle in 1993. “But a kick in the teeth hurts a lot more from a friend.”
When Republicans in Congress, armed with the “Contract With America,” swept into power in January 1995, college leaders figured things would only get worse. The Republicans threatened to cut the budgets of the student-aid programs and close down the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. In addition, they introduced legislation that would have made college loans more expensive and dismantled federal affirmative-action programs.
But in the end, the G.O.P. victory was a blessing in disguise for higher education: Mr. Clinton was forced to focus his agenda, and turn his rhetoric on education into action. While he agreed with the Republicans on the importance of balancing the budget, he drew the line on cutting education programs, including those important to colleges. And he stood firmly behind affirmative action during the bleakest moments for racial-preference policies.
In 1996, the public sided with the president, sending Mr. Clinton on to a second term and taking seats away from the Republicans in the House of Representatives.
Stung by the election fallout, Republican lawmakers changed their tone. Today, affirmative action faces an uncertain future in the courts, but it has faded as a campaign issue, and no significant legislation has been introduced on the topic since 1998. And instead of fighting Mr. Clinton’s proposals on student aid, Republicans now seek to outbid him.
While in office, President Clinton has created a slew of higher-education programs -- including AmeriCorps, direct lending, the Hope and Lifetime Learning tax credits, and GEAR UP -- to try to cement his legacy as a champion of education.
Yet his real legacy, many educators and lobbyists agree, is in reshaping the nature of the debate on higher education in Washington. One need look no further, they say, than the presidential campaign run by Gov. George W. Bush of Texas: Absent were the familiar Republican refrains of shutting down the Education Department, closing the arts and humanities endowments, and banning racial preferences. Instead, Mr. Bush vowed to put another $6-billion into Pell Grants and spend more money on historically black colleges.
“President Clinton helped make higher education a bipartisan issue,” says Corye Barbour, legislative director for the United States Student Association. “Both parties are clamoring to take credit for helping students pay for college. That is a fundamental change that will make things better for all of us.”
Gene B. Sperling, the president’s economic adviser, says Mr. Clinton has put a priority on higher education because he knows from his own experience how important it is to obtain a college degree.
“This is a president who was born fatherless, in a small town, with very few role models to push him to go to college,” Mr. Sperling says. “And yet, education transformed his possibilities, allowing him to become a Rhodes scholar and ultimately president of the United States.
“With each initiative he has introduced, he has tried to send the signal that college is necessary and can be universal for everyone.”
But as President Clinton prepares to depart the White House next month, it would be wrong to suggest that the early jeers have turned to all-out cheers.
On student aid, for example, he takes hits from both the right and the left.
Some fiscal conservatives criticize the tuition tax credits, which provide up to $1,500 per year, and the president’s rhetoric about making two years of college a universal entitlement. Ultimately, all citizens are subsidizing the college-goers -- to the tune of billions of dollars per year.
Moreover, colleges may be swiping some of the benefits of the tax credits from students, by continuing to raise tuition at a rate that exceeds inflation. “The more feed you put in the trough, the fatter the pig gets,” says Jay A. Diskey, a former Republican spokesman for the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
The tax credits are also disliked by liberals in Mr. Clinton’s own party. They say the tax credits do little to increase access to college for students from low-income families, which typically do not earn enough to owe taxes. President Clinton should have focused on getting more money for the need-based Pell Grants, they say.
“Under Clinton, there has been a massive expansion of assistance to middle-income students,” says Gary Orfield, a professor of education and social policy at Harvard University. “But in terms of helping those with the greatest need, there has been a real failure of leadership.”
On affirmative action, some educators praise Mr. Clinton for effectively defending the policy while preventing conservative Republicans from turning it into a wedge issue. But others say the president missed a chance to engage the country in a candid discussion about the differences between racial preferences and other methods of creating diverse campuses, such as outreach to low-income communities.
On science, Mr. Clinton’s record is less controversial. He leaves office with strong support from academic scientists, largely because of an unprecedented spurt in financing for the National Institutes of Health in the last two years. Scientists give equal credit to the Republican-controlled Congress, which saw and raised Mr. Clinton’s bids for increased spending on science in almost every year of his tenure.
“This has been one of the few areas where it has been possible for genuine bipartisanship in what has really been a horribly polarized time,” says Lewis M. Branscomb, a professor emeritus of public policy and corporate management at Harvard, who has specialized in federal science policy.
In education policy, much of the debate during the Clinton administration has been about priorities. Facing a $300-billion deficit, President Clinton’s first budget proposal called for cutting the campus-based student-aid programs by $200-million and leaving the maximum Pell Grant at its 1992 level of $2,300. At the same time, the president requested $7.4-billion over four years for AmeriCorps, a new program that would provide students with grants for college in exchange for one or two years of community service.
Many student-aid administrators and lobbyists complained that the administration was trying to shift money away from the federal need-based aid programs to finance a pet program that would mostly benefit the middle class. Their concerns were allayed when Congress scaled back AmeriCorps. The program’s budget has never exceeded $500-million.
Similar objections to other “legacy programs” have been voiced throughout the Clinton era. In recent years, higher-education lobbyists have been annoyed by GEAR UP, a Clinton program that helps disadvantaged middle-school students prepare for college. Some believe that the hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to GEAR UP would be better spent on the federal TRIO programs, which have been helping disadvantaged students enter and complete college since 1965.
“When this administration has been distracted by its own legacy initiatives, we have had to publicly and noisily remind them to keep up funding for the proven aid programs,” says David L. Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.
The greatest concern about Mr. Clinton’s priorities arose in 1997, when he pushed through his most significant college-related legislation. In a bill to balance the federal budget, the president persuaded Republican Congressional leaders to include about $35-billion over five years in tuition tax credits.
The tax breaks had been a popular campaign promise during his bid for a second term, but many people viewed the credits merely as pandering to the middle class.
“There is always the temptation to do something to help the people who vote,” says Paul Simon, the former U.S. senator from Illinois who is now director of the Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. “But it is the people who don’t vote who often need the most help.”
Supporters of the tax credits say the critics are politically naive. “Politics is the art of the possible,” says Sen. Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island. “The president was trying to find new sources of support for colleges, and with the Republicans controlling Congress, the only way to achieve his goal was through using the tax code.”
Mr. Sperling, Mr. Clinton’s economic adviser, says that the administration never saw the tax credits as “a silver bullet” but as one component in a larger strategy to make college more affordable. “We felt that we were fighting for higher education on all fronts, and not as a tradeoff between tax credits and Pell Grants.”
The United States Student Association was among the vocal critics of the tax credits. But Ms. Barbour, the group’s legislative director, believes it would be “unfortunate” to judge the president’s higher-education legacy simply on the basis of the tax credits. She especially praises the president for introducing direct lending, which provides loans directly to students through their colleges, eliminating the role of banks and student-loan-guarantee agencies.
In 1993, the Clinton administration persuaded Congress to phase in direct lending -- and phase out the guaranteed-loan program -- as a way to lower costs to the government and to improve the delivery of loans to students. But after the G.O.P. took control of Congress, in 1995, the administration consented to demands from Republican lawmakers to allow the two loan programs to coexist and compete.
The competition has sharply improved services for students and colleges, as banks and guarantee agencies have slashed fees and streamlined loan delivery in the hope of beating out direct lending. “Student loans are much more affordable and a lot less scary now,” Ms. Barbour says.
But many college leaders and lobbyists say that the administration’s greatest accomplishment has been to remove the federal student-aid programs from the partisan fray by showing Republicans how damaging it is to attack them. The G.O.P. won’t soon forget the public furor that erupted in 1995, when House Republicans threatened to cut student aid and raise the cost of loans for students and their parents.
Indeed, in recent months Congressional Republicans have been trying to one-up Democratic lawmakers on the 2001 budget for Pell Grants. As a result, the Clinton administration and Congress have tentatively agreed to increase the maximum Pell Grant by $500, to $3,800, the greatest single-year raise the program has ever received.
“The student-aid programs are a lot safer now than they have been for a long time,” says Jack F. Jennings, director of the Center on Education Policy and a former Democratic Congressional aide.
Affirmative action was already on the defensive in 1993, when Mr. Clinton took office. Two years into his term, the floodgates broke. In 1995, the Board of Regents of the University of California voted to eliminate the use of racial preferences in hiring and admissions decisions. A year later, California voters approved Proposition 209, taking the ban statewide.
The policy fared no better in the courts. In 1994, a federal appeals court shot down minority scholarships at the University of Maryland. A year later, another federal appeals court barred the law school at the University of Texas from considering race in admissions. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear appeals of either case.
College leaders were stunned, and sought a rousing defense of affirmative action from Mr. Clinton. While the Justice Department weighed in on the court cases with briefs defending affirmative action, Mr. Clinton’s own comments were supportive but low key -- an apparent attempt to steer the debate away from the combustible topic of racial preferences. In 1995, he concluded a review of federal affirmative-action programs with a vow to “mend, not end” them.
Advocates of affirmative action don’t fault Mr. Clinton for that approach. “If he had taken a strong stance, he probably would have turned even more people off” to affirmative action, says Henry Ponder, the president of the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, which represents historically black colleges and universities.
But in 1997, when flagship institutions in Georgia, Michigan, and Washington were all hit with lawsuits over racial preferences, Mr. Clinton turned up the rhetoric. In a speech at the University of California at San Diego, he warned that minority enrollment would plummet without affirmative action. “We will weaken our greatest universities, and it will be more difficult to build the society we need in the 21st century,” he said.
As the challenges to affirmative action spread, Mr. Clinton ended most talk of mending affirmative action. A panel that he appointed to study racial issues released a report in 1998 that offered few novel ideas. It recommended, for example, that educators more clearly explain the value of diversity on college campuses. “The decision was made by the White House staff that the report should be incremental rather than dramatic,” says Thomas H. Kean, president of Drew University and a member of the panel.
According to Mr. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, the White House was reluctant to discuss alternatives to affirmative action, given that its future is in the hands of the courts.
“There’s nothing President Clinton believes in so strongly as civil rights and affirmative action,” Mr. Kean says. “He believes it to the core of his being. I suspect in this area he did everything that he felt that he could.”
Even some critics of affirmative action, such as Ward Connerly, a University of California regent, concede that Mr. Clinton was an able advocate of the policy. The president’s rhetoric “effectively derailed that train coming down the track that was going to do away with preferences,” Mr. Connerly says.
But Mr. Connerly adds that Mr. Clinton’s panel on race missed an opportunity to educate people about the differences between racial preferences and what he describes as “legitimate forms of affirmative action,” such as outreach.
With little leadership from Mr. Clinton, states in which racial preferences have been banned have had to find alternatives on their own. California, Florida, and Texas have turned to systems that admit some students based solely on their class rank in high school. Mr. Connerly contends that such scaled-down assessments of college preparation are taking a toll on the quality of students entering those states’ flagship institutions.
“Some states are trying to find a way out of this morass on their own,” Mr. Connerly says. “Other states are blithely waiting for the Supreme Court to provide guidance. In short, we have paralysis, and Clinton has to take some responsibility for that.”
When the Clinton administration has tackled the question of race in admissions, controversy has resulted. In 1999, for example, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights prepared a draft memorandum warning that colleges might be violating federal anti-bias laws by relying heavily on standardized-test scores in admissions decisions. The office cited as evidence that minority students have lower average scores on such tests than do white students. After college officials criticized the guidelines as a federal intrusion into their own policymaking, the Education Department toned down the document.
The head of the civil-rights office, Norma V. Cantu, also has been a key player in the Clinton administration’s efforts to ensure that women have equal opportunities in athletics, to conform with a law known as Title IX. The number of female college athletes has surged 46 percent during the Clinton years, to 353,000, but some athletics officials say her strong-arm approach has led many universities to cut men’s teams.
“The Department of Education certainly was more active during the Clinton years than during previous administrations in enforcing Title IX,” says Doris Dixon, director of federal relations for the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
University scientists were optimistic when Mr. Clinton took office. They hoped that his talk of the links between technological advancement and economic development would translate into bigger budgets for research.
Eight years later, university scientists are largely pleased with his efforts -- but do not uniformly call him their champion.
Throughout Mr. Clinton’s tenure, Republican leaders in Congress have approved larger budget increases for the N.I.H. -- the largest single federal source of funds for university research -- than he has requested. Lawmakers gave the agency unprecedented raises of 15 percent each year in 1999 and 2000, after Mr. Clinton had proposed increases of 8 percent and 2 percent.
University officials concede that Mr. Clinton’s focus on deficit reduction helped generate the surpluses that made the larger increases possible. Some suspect that gamesmanship was at work in the budget numbers. Under that view, Mr. Clinton deliberately proposed modest increases for the N.I.H., knowing that the Republicans would add more. That practice allowed Mr. Clinton to focus on other priorities in his budget proposals.
“The president has won on the budget by a very sophisticated strategy,” says Donna E. Shalala, secretary of health and human services. “All of his budget numbers are proposed with a full understanding that Republicans have to take ownership of some programs, and get credit themselves. You don’t look at just the numbers he sent up [to Congress]; you have to look at what we ended up with.”
University leaders credit Mr. Clinton with taking other actions that fostered a supportive climate for science. One of his first acts as president, for example, was to lift a ban on the federal financing of research using fetal tissue. And this year, he supported a policy allowing federal research on embryonic stem cells. Both actions were opposed by anti-abortion advocates and some religious leaders.
Scientists also praise Mr. Clinton for the quality of his science appointments -- especially Harold E. Varmus, who served as N.I.H. director from 1993 to 1999. The Nobel laureate brought top talent to work at the agency, and is regarded as one of its most-effective ambassadors to Congress ever.
Others argue that Mr. Clinton showed support for science by sparing it from budget cuts as he sought to eliminate the deficit. But not all scientific disciplines have thrived.
Budgets for federal agencies that support the physical sciences rose only slightly faster than inflation, and more slowly than that of the politically popular N.I.H., although they did keep pace with increases in other civilian programs.
Somewhat belatedly to some researchers, Mr. Clinton this year attempted to restore some parity by proposing a 17-percent budget increase for the National Science Foundation for the 2001 fiscal year. The N.S.F. is the federal agency most dedicated to financing all of the basic sciences. Although the 1990’s were hailed as an era of biological advances, many scientists argue that further progress will be speeded by increased financing of the physical sciences. For example, magnetic-resonance imaging was developed with N.S.F. funds.
“History is not going to regard this as a president that advanced the cause of science greatly,” says Robert L. Park, director of the Washington office of the American Physical Society. “There was no trip to the moon, no really grand initiatives.” Researchers do praise Mr. Clinton for supporting the human-genome project, but Mr. Park contends that the effort has been so popular and successful that no president would have opposed it.
Scientists have split over Mr. Clinton’s handling of two other expensive, “big science” projects: the International Space Station, which the administration has supported, and the Superconducting Supercollider, which the president canceled in 1993. The supercollider was a giant, $10-billion accelerator in Texas that researchers would have used to study the fundamental nature of matter. Some scientists have called both projects wasteful, while others describe them as essential tools to advance science.
Nevertheless, researchers have praised Mr. Clinton for fostering the development of information technology. His administration did that partly by encouraging private telecommunications companies to take over key segments of the Internet. During his tenure, the World Wide Web transformed the Internet from a little-known tool for scholars into a global communications utility in which fortunes are being made and lost.
At the same time, the Clinton administration turned its sights to advanced network projects that may benefit scholars greatly. In 1996, the administration started a multi-agency research project, called the Next Generation Internet, which aims to develop networks that are 1,000 times as fast as the current Internet.
Some scholars suggest that it has taken time for Mr. Clinton to come to appreciate the importance of basic research.
Early in his administration, Mr. Clinton focused more on support for applied research that could lead to commercially viable products. It was part of his plan to pull the nation out of recession and to close trade deficits with other nations, like Japan, that were seen as having a technological edge.
The administration played down that approach after the recession ended and criticism arose from Congressional Republicans. They argued that private corporations were better suited than government officials to pick and develop commercial spinoffs, and that the federal government should stick to supporting basic research.
More recently, Mr. Clinton has given several speeches ardently backing basic science. “As time went on, he got religion,” says Mr. Branscomb, the public-policy professor at Harvard.
With the end of Mr. Clinton’s second term near, and the odds increasing that Governor Bush will replace him, it is unclear which of the president’s legacy programs will survive.
AmeriCorps may still have life in it, as the program has picked up some Republican support in recent years. Direct lending could be in trouble, although it would be politically difficult for banks and guarantee agencies to undo the changes they have made to help borrowers.
But even if Mr. Clinton’s pet projects flounder, the programs that colleges care about most should continue to thrive. In what will be an almost evenly divided Congress, higher-education programs -- including those that provide student aid and money for research -- could be among the few areas in which Republicans and Democrats see eye to eye. And President Clinton deserves no small measure of credit for that.
“Higher education seems to be an area in which an otherwise divided city can come together,” says Stanley O. Ikenberry, president of the American Council on Education. “It wasn’t like that in 1995, and it certainly was not like that prior to Mr. Clinton’s presidency.”
Vincent Kiernan contributed to this article.
HIGHER EDUCATION’S WINNERS AND LOSERS DURING THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION
Winners
MIDDLE-CLASS STUDENTS. College students and their families received the biggest infusion of federal tuition aid in a generation. The bulk of the aid came in the form of President Clinton’s Hope and Lifetime Learning tax credits, which tend to benefit students from middle-class rather than low-income families.
STUDENT BORROWERS. Spurred on by competition from the Clinton administration’s direct-loan program, banks and student-loan guarantee agencies were forced to cut their fees and improve their services.
COLLEGE COFFERS. The new tax credits, combined with growth in knowledge-based industries, pushed enrollments -- and tuition revenue -- at many institutions to record levels. The booming stock market, meanwhile, ushered in an era of unprecedented gains in the values of endowments.
COLLEGES WITH LARGE MINORITY ENROLLMENTS. Historically black colleges and colleges with large Hispanic enrollments saw federal programs for their institutions increase substantially in the Clinton administration -- with backing from both the White House and Congress.
BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH. The National Institutes of Health is on track to double its budget in five years, due to a combination of factors, including the political savvy of Harold E. Varmus, who served as director from 1993 to 1999; strong bipartisan support from members of Congress; and expectations that the agency is poised to promote an acceleration of medical discovery.
TECHNOLOGY AND THE INTERNET. Vice President Al Gore was an influential player in the development of the Internet, and the Clinton administration has been a driving force behind Internet 2, a national computer network that can carry even more data than its vaunted predecessor.
FEMALE ATHLETES. The Clinton administration’s rigorous enforcement of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the law banning gender discrimination at institutions that receive federal funds, was a boon for women’s athletics. The number of female college athletes shot up 46 percent from 1992-93 to 1998-99, compared with an 11-percent gain for men.
Losers
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION. Clinton-administration officials strongly backed the use of racial preferences in higher education, but federal courts, state boards, and state referendums led to the most significant rollback of affirmative action in its history.
NON-REVENUE MEN’S TEAMS. Big-money programs like football and basketball thrived, but several universities cut men’s teams in sports such as swimming, track, and wrestling to comply with the Office for Civil Rights’ interpretation of Title IX.
SOCIAL CONSERVATIVES. Despite repeated efforts by conservative Republicans to eliminate the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities during much of the Clinton administration, the cultural agencies survived, and their budgets are now growing modestly. And, over the objections of anti-abortion activists, Mr. Clinton approved federal financing for medical research involving fetal tissue and stem cells.
Survivors
CLINTON’S PET PROJECTS. The Clinton administration championed new programs that aimed to promote volunteerism (AmeriCorps), prepare students from low-income families for college (GEAR UP), and improve the graduation rates of disadvantaged college students (College Completion Challenge Grants). College lobbyists worry that the administration’s enthusiasm for these “legacy programs” has come at the expense of support for the core student-aid programs. Some of the pet projects may not survive for long once the Clinton administration ends.
NEED-BASED FINANCIAL AID. Although some of the core student-aid programs, like the Pell Grant and College Work-Study Programs, received significant budget increases during the Clinton administration, most student-aid experts agree that the budgets did not grow enough to boost the college-going rates of students from the poorest families.
STUDENT-LOAN INDUSTRY. The creation of direct lending in 1993 threatened to run banks and guarantee agencies out of the federal student-loan program. Seven years later, these entities continue to control two-thirds of student-loan volume. Now, the direct-loan program is facing an uncertain future.
SOURCE: Chronicle reporting
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