State of the Union: What can Obama do about college tuition?

President Obama hit hard on issues of college affordability in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, and continued to emphasize the importance of excellent teaching in K-12 education.

He called on states to raise the compulsory age of education to 18; called on Congress to extend the tuition tax credit, to stop the interest on student loans from doubling in July, and to pass the DREAM Act; and issued a threat to higher education institutions who fail to keep costs in check and keep tuition down.

“Let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down,” Obama said. “Higher education can’t be a luxury – it is an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.”

It was unclear, however, from Obama’s speech – and in the blueprint that his administration sent out afterward – exactly how he plans to carry out this threat.

“Unlike K-12 where lots of money pours into programs, there’s much less [Federal] money pouring into higher-education programs,” says Rita Kirshstein, director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability. Most of the money that does go to schools is in the form of research funds, she says, along with Pell Grants and subsidized loans for students.

While Ms. Kirshstein says withholding student grant and loan money could be disastrous for some students, she believes withholding research dollars might cause faculty to put pressure on administrators to look hard at their costs. Kirshstein hopes the plan would be placed in a broader context, looking at how much various states have cut back their higher-ed funding, for instance.

“The devil is in the details if it’s going to be done effectively,” she says.

As for Obama’s other proposals, Kirshstein says she was glad to see him sound the dual themes of states making higher ed a higher priority in their budgets, and colleges and universities doing more with less.

These aren’t new themes for the administration, which has worked to improve student aid by increasing the maximum Pell Grant size last year and moving to a system of direct government loans, and which hosted a summit on higher education productivity and cost in December. But the ideas seem to be getting increased attention now.

“Those of us in higher education are always happy when higher ed issues are recognized because so much of the attention typically goes to K-12,” says Kirshstein. Obama, she believes, “is indeed serious about this issue.”

Not that he neglected K-12 topics in his speech.

Some themes that he has hit before, like calling on Congress to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (sometimes better known in its current incarnation as No Child Left Behind), were notably absent – perhaps a reflection of the impossibility of getting such a bill passed in an election year.

But in his speech Obama continued to preach the importance of teaching and accountability. His education agenda so far has defied typical partisan lines: Some of its most frequent critics are loyal Democrats, including the teachers’ unions, while some Republicans have praised it.

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