What DeVos’s Singular Focus on School Choice Could Mean for Higher-Ed Policy

Last month Betsy DeVos said in prepared remarks that historically black colleges were “real pioneers when it comes to school choice” and “living proof that when more options are provided to students, they are afforded greater access and greater quality.”

The education secretary was quickly pilloried for understating the legal and systematic racism that led to a separate and unequal system of education for African-Americans. A day later she clarified her remarks, saying that the colleges were “born, not out of mere choice, but out of necessity, in the face of racism, and in the aftermath of the Civil War.”

Even as the secretary sought the proper historical frame, her comments remained focused on the imperatives of “choice” — giving students and parents more options to pursue their educational goals.

Ms. DeVos’s approach was not new: She has, even during her short tenure in the Trump administration, consistently framed higher-education policy in the terms of the school-choice policies she has long championed.

Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor of education leadership, management, and policy at Seton Hall University, said choice advocates should feel good about much of what is happening in higher-education policy. That’s because higher education is already “pretty aligned with some of the basic tenets of school choice,” he said in an email.

But higher-education experts and some conservative advocates point to several policy changes that could gain prominence thanks in part to Ms. DeVos’s singular focus on school choice. They include allowing more flexibility in student aid, and opening up access to those dollars at new kinds of institutions.

At the same time, there are limits to how far the choice model can be applied to higher education, said Joshua S. Goodman, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard University. For example, the geographic constraints that plague choice for elementary and secondary schools apply just as much to higher education, he said.

Most problematic, Mr. Goodman said, is the lack of widespread information about higher-education outcomes to guide students and parents in choosing a college. The College Scorecard, begun during the Obama administration, was a good start, he said, but even with that information students are not well informed about how to evaluate a college they’re considering attending.

“One thing that’s always striking to me about choice discussions,” he said, “is that folks who put a lot of stock in choice operate under the belief that students are informed consumers about the choices they’re making.”

New Places to Go?

Ms. DeVos’s focus is hardly surprising, considering the amount of money and personal time she has spent promoting alternatives to traditional public schools. Such alternatives include charter schools and vouchers, paid with tax dollars, for private-school tuition.

The Turbulent Nomination of Betsy DeVos

President Trump’s choice of Betsy DeVos, a philanthropist and generous donor to many conservative causes, to be his secretary of education aroused some of the strongest opposition of any nominee for the Trump cabinet.

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In the case of elementary and secondary education, the secretary has blasted teachers’ unions and the education establishment for blocking meaningful reforms in public schools.

In higher education, Ms. DeVos has questioned the value of a four-year college degree and called out faculty members for telling students “what to do, what to say, and more ominously, what to think.”

“For too long a college degree has been pushed as the only avenue for a better life,” she continued in her prepared remarks. “The old and expensive brick-mortar-and-ivy model is not the only one that will lead to a prosperous future.”

The alternatives she has promoted, so far, involve expanding vocational and career education. At a speech for community-college trustees, for example, the secretary praised two-year colleges as “essential engines of work-force and economic development.”

About half of the nation’s undergraduates are already studying at community colleges, according to the American Association of Community Colleges. And several states, such as Minnesota, New York, Oregon, and Tennessee, have begun encouraging enrollment at such institutions with programs to fully cover the cost of tuition and fees.

The Trump administration is unlikely to support a measure like President Barack Obama’s call for two years of free community-college tuition. But several groups are urging Congress to reauthorize the Carl D. Perkins Act, which provides federal money to support career education.

Roslyn Clark Artis, president of Florida Memorial University, a historically black institution near Miami, said it’s fine to promote career education, but that approach can’t simply become a way to push low-income and minority students into two-year programs. Disadvantaged students also should be able to choose a four-year college that is affordable, she said.

Matthew M. Chingos, a senior fellow on education policy at the Urban Institute, said that just as in elementary and secondary education, geography is a big factor in determining how much choice most students enjoy in higher education.

In a 2016 study, Mr. Chingos and a colleague, Kristin Blagg, found that a significant majority of potential college students in Virginia lived in areas where there was only one program or no programs in their preferred field of study.

“Nearly two-thirds of Virginia students live in an ‘education desert,’ where no programs are accessible, or in a ‘choice desert,’ where there is only a single program,” they concluded.

Other research has shown that the vast majority of students attend college within a short driving distance of their homes because of the cost of travel as well as work or family commitments. So areas with few institutions give students little choice about where to attend.

“Not all students have the luxury of shopping around, and in many cases … there are no alternatives from which to choose,” said another 2016 study on “education deserts,” by Nicholas Hillman and Taylor Weichman, researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

The White House and the Education Department are also widely expected to roll back regulations on for-profit colleges, many of which focus on career and vocational training. Less regulation could lead to renewed growth of the for-profit sector, where enrollment has plunged in recent years.

Harvard’s Mr. Goodman, however, warned that the financial failures and incidents of fraud by several large, online proprietary colleges should be a warning to the Trump administration.

“We have now a growing body of evidence,” he said, “that the online for-profit sector doesn’t do good things for students and doesn’t justify the total investment of student funds and taxpayer dollars.”

New Ways to Pay?

Other proposals for increasing options in higher education include developing new ways to help students pay for college.

The federal Pell Grant, for low-income students, is already considered very much like a school voucher, because it follows the student and can be used at public, private, religious, and even for-profit colleges.

But the National Association of Scholars, which takes a traditionalist view of higher education, has proposed that both Pell Grants and federal student loans go directly to students to give them more “ownership” of the process, said Peter Wood, the group’s president. The recommendation is one of many the association has made for the reauthorization of the federal Higher Education Act.

“It’s essentially a psychological tactic to get young people to think more carefully about the choices they are making,” said Mr. Wood.

Beth Akers, a senior fellow who researches higher-education policy at the Manhattan Institute, said “giving Pell Grant dollars directly to students rather than to the institution would be a semantic change more than a substantive one.”

Another approach is to offer tax benefits to encourage spending on tuition. A bill recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives would allow employers to pay off $5,250 of an employee’s student loans without paying taxes on that money. The legislation’s odds of passage are uncertain, but it has garnered support from a bipartisan group of about 30 members.

Writing in EducationNext, a publication focused on education reform, Mr. Chingos said such legislation, if enacted, would “provide a regressive handout to the wealthiest borrowers and do nothing to help those who are truly struggling to repay their loans.”

Purdue University has developed income-share agreements that allow students to receive money for college by agreeing to pay back a portion of their income after they graduate. The plan is, in some cases, less costly than federal loans are, the university says, and the payback period is finished within 10 years.

The Education Department is also experimenting with allowing new kinds of institutions — including companies, like StraighterLine, that offer low-cost courses but are not full-blown traditional colleges — to receive federal student aid.

Such an approach could lead to student aid for a wider variety of nontraditional institutions, including short-term skills training at coding boot camps, though it would also require Congress and the Education Department to make significant changes in the accreditation system, said Van L. Davis, associate vice president for higher-education policy and research at Blackboard.

Despite efforts to encourage more options for students, some education scholars say real choice in higher education is hard to imagine because of the lack of consistent information on student learning and other outcomes.

Richard M. Ingersoll, a professor of education and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, said that even though standardized-test scores are reviled by many in elementary and secondary education, they provide some valuable baseline of performance. But there are few widespread, accessible measures for colleges.

“In a sense,” he said, “choice doesn’t work for higher education because of the lack of performance data.”

Mr. Goodman said the federal government could do a much better job of collecting and distributing such information. But just increasing the number of options for students is not enough.

“No one objects to the idea of choice — it’s one of the reasons we have a vibrant higher-education sector,” he said. “But if you rely only on choice to provide quality improvements, you will neglect large numbers of students.”

Eric Kelderman writes about money and accountability in higher education, including such areas as state policy, accreditation, and legal affairs. You can find him on Twitter @etkeld, or email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com.