--- title: Arne Duncan: Making Universities Affordable for the Middle Class | TIME description: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Jon Meacham discuss the affordability of college and how to accurately rate schools at the 2013 TIME Summit on Higher Education canonical: https://time.com/video/owYJiYFU/ og:title: Arne Duncan: Making Universities Affordable for the Middle Class og:description: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Jon Meacham discuss the affordability of college and how to accurately rate schools at the 2013 TIME Summit on Higher Education og:url: https://time.com/video/owYJiYFU/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/owYJiYFU/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Arne Duncan: Making Universities Affordable for the Middle Class twitter:description: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Jon Meacham discuss the affordability of college and how to accurately rate schools at the 2013 TIME Summit on Higher Education twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/owYJiYFU/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Arne Duncan: Making Universities Affordable for the Middle Class > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Arne Duncan: Making Universities Affordable for the Middle Class [Watch (HLS stream): Arne Duncan: Making Universities Affordable for the Middle Class](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/owYJiYFU.m3u8) (27:57)  _Published 2013-09-20. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Jon Meacham discuss the affordability of college and how to accurately rate schools at the 2013 TIME Summit on Higher Education_ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:47 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [The University of California Strike Could Reshape Higher Education](/video/1tnuTiJA/) ### The University of California Strike Could Reshape Higher Education [Speak Up: Stop Bullying I Secretary of Education Arne Duncan I Cartoon Network](/video/TH1k64wn/) ### Speak Up: Stop Bullying I Secretary of Education Arne Duncan I Cartoon Network [The Challenges of Basic Research in Higher Education](/video/jhrUlLZX/) ### The Challenges of Basic Research in Higher Education --- ## Transcript This is going to be a sophisticated introduction. Mr. Secretary. Best introduction I've ever had. Thank you so much. And I'm going to be fairly brief today. I'm really looking forward to have a great, great conversation with all of you. As all of you know, last month President Obama unveiled a landmark plan to address our country's crisis of college affordability and student debt. This panel will tackle that crisis on 3 fronts. By encouraging innovation and competition in higher ed, to improve institutional performance. Secondly, by helping people responsibly manage their debt. And third, by empowering students and families to select schools and provide the best value for their hard earned dollars. Expanding innovation and higher ed is so critical to our nation's future. Many of the outstanding college leaders here today are driving those innovations. That boosts institutional performance while maintaining and even enhancing quality. And yet I think we all know that innovation is rarely taken to scale in higher education. And President Obama wants to address that gap, and that's one reason he's proposed both the $ 1 billion " race to the top" for high ed. And a new $ 260 million first in the world fund. In addition to promoting innovation, helping people responsibly manage their debt is just as critical. In a knowledge based globally competitive economy, higher education can't become a luxury. Every hard working family in America should be able to afford to go to college. As all of you know, too often today, middle class families are starting to believe that college is not for them. It's only for rich folks. But today, I want to talk primarily about the last and easily the most controversial of the 3 prongs of President Obama's plan.. And that is creating better incentives for colleges to do more with less. And deliver better value for students and their families. As you know, the President has assigned our department to develop a college rating systems for the start of the 2015 school year. Under his plan, the college rating systems would be used to transform the way that Federal Student Aid is awarded to students, starting in 2018. When the President unveiled his plan, he proposed a new idea that marks a, a major break from the past. It's an idea that has been talked about in Washington for a long, long time, but no one has had the courage to act upon it. President Obama said that the Federal Government should rate colleges based on opportunity. I'll be helping students from all kinds of backgrounds succeed. And that we should rate colleges on outcomes, on their value to students and their parents. And I want to speak today about some of the early reaction to the President's announcement and give some prelim, preliminary thoughts as to how we should be thinking about the development of a college rating system. To be absolutely clear, we have not even begun to develop the college rating systems yet. And we are only in the very beginning stages of soliciting input, from a wide range of stakeholders about metrics that should, and should not be used in such a rating system. Not quite sure how this is possible, but a few critics have already gone on the attack against a rating system that they don't like. But that doesn't exist yet. That is obviously I think a little premature and more than a little silly. In fact, over the course of the next year, we're going to solicit input on the rating system from literally hundreds and hundreds of stakeholders and many of you in this room. We'll be holding hearings, town hall meetings, and round tables. We'll be traveling across the country to engage with everyone who can help us to design an effective rating system, one that is useful to students and sensitive to the veering of educational missions and vast differences among our nations colleges and universities. In fact just yesterday, our team had its very first outreach meeting with student groups and they expressed their grave concern about the rising costs of college. We also will be consulting with parents, college faculty and administrators, state education leaders, business and industry, researchers, associations, innovators, philanthropies, consumer interest groups and many other pub -, public advocates. And next month, we plan to release a request for information to solicit comments from technical experts about the metrics we should and should not use in the rating system. And later in 2014, around a year from now, we plan to release a first draft of our proposal for public comment and review. No later than December of next year, we'll use that feedback we receive to finalize the college ratings system. So with the huge caveat, this is barely yet a work in progress, let me lay out a few guiding principles for thinking about the design of a college rating system. First, even though were don't begin to know yet all the metrics that will form the rating system, we do know that it will rely on multiple measures. Not 1 or 2 crude measures of college value, and President Obama has already indicated that the rating system will already be looking at 3 big performance buckets. We'll be looking at access, such as the percentage of students receiving Pell grants. We'll be looking at affordability, like average tuition, scholarships and loan debt. And we'll be looking at outcomes, such as graduation and chance for rates, alumni satisfaction surveys, graduate earnings, and the advanced degrees of college graduates. Second, we'll be working hard to make apples to apples comparisons of like institutions, not apples to oranges comparisons. This is hugely important. The ratings, in other words, will compare colleges with similar missions and similar student populations. And identify colleges that do the most to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds. And colleges that are improving their performance. We're very, very interested in the progress the schools are making. We'll be looking, for example at how successful colleges are at enrolling and graduating students who benefit from the Pell Grant program. As the President stated, his firm principal is that our rates have to be carefully designed to increase, and not decrease. The opportunities in higher education for students who face economic, or other disadvantages. We want to reward institutions who are performing well and demonstrating their commitment to continuous improvement. Lastly, unlike some other co, college rankings, we will offer rating systems. Rating system not a ranking system. The rating system won't highlight trivial differences between elite institutions. Or heavily reward schools based on the number of students an institution turns away. Our goal is inclusion, not exclusion. We will begin by initially looking at metrics for which data are already available. That tell consumers about critical student outcomes, how many students at an institution graduate at a reasonable cost without a lot of debt and get a job in a field they choose, public or private sector, that enables them to support themselves and their families. Now these are obviously some very broad parameters for our college rating system. And believe me, we are very, very aware that this is not done well, a college rating system could create unintended consequences and allow gaming of the system. We're beginning this work with a great sense of humility. Designing a good rating system is a big, difficult complex challenge. And there're a lot of tough questions that we all need to answer together. To site just a couple of examples, what metric should be used to measure institutions where performance has improved and how should this be reflected. I'm much more interested in where you are going than where you have been. Should we especially highlight how changes in state aid increase or decrease the price paid by students at public institutions. States have a critical role to play, and their collective disinvestment in higher ed is not helpful, strategic or in our nation's best interests. How do we design a college rating system that recognizes the tremendous benefits associated with studying the humanities at liberal arts colleges and universities? As a proud sociology major this was important to me. And how do we design a college rating system that supports public service? Even if graduates may earn lower salaries after graduating from college in professions like teaching, the military, public service in jobs like the Peace Corp. With a million of our countries teacher retiring over the next 4 to 6 years we have literately a once in a generation opportunity both in a challenge and an opportunity to transform the entire teaching profession. And if any of you have observed the dysfunctional Congress lately, we all know the their is a tremendous need to attract the next generation of talent into the public sector. These are obviously only a few of the difficult nuanced questions that we'll need to look at very carefully over the course of the next year. And frankly, that's one reason I'm so eager to have this conversation here today. And to continue to solicit the input and guidance and great thoughts of the higer education community throughout the entire year. Now despite these difficult questions I wanna be clear that I absolutely reject the idea that it's impossible to create a meaningful college rating system for students and families. I reject the idea that the value of a college education is so elusive that no rating system can ever meaningfully help consumers determine its value. After president Obama released his plan, one higher education lobbyist warned that if the President wanted to condition the receipt of student aid on ratings, he had an obligation to have perfect data. Of course, no college rating system can be perfect, and no rating system will ever have perfect data. But frankly, the lobbyist was starting from exactly the wrong premise. The right question to ask is not whether the ratings are perfect. Instead, we should ask whether the ratings would constitute a big step forward in making college costs and outcomes more transparent for students and their families. And whether they would better insure that institutions reaping the benefits of our taxpayer dollars through federal financial aid are providing good value compared to the existing system. Unfortunately, in education policy, we all too often let the perfect become the enemy of the good. And that leads to paralysis, to inaction, and a, and a protection of the status quo. We must remember that when it comes to improving college affordability and value, we are not operating in a historical vacuum or on a blank slate. Everyone here knows that the current system, for dispensing Federal aid, is not only highly imperfect. It has serious shortcomings and in fact, is ultimately unsustainable. We have a moral, economic and educational obligation to challenge that status quo. The Federal Government today makes available over a $ 150 billion dollars in student aids every single years in grants and loans. But our existing model, essentially on, only provides incentives for enrollment. And the more students you have, the more money you get. It doesn't support excellence. It doesn't encourage people to stay in college and earn their degrees. And it doesn't enhance productivity or help with desperately needed transparency. The difficulty family's have today trying to figure out basic things like grants versus loans, and 1 year cost versus 4 year costs, is absolutely mind- boggling. Our annual $ 150 billion investment is driven by inputs, not important outcomes like what students know and can do. Students, taxpayers and out country all deserve, I think, something better. The truth, as we have painfully seen in the last few years, is that our funding system for higher education provides few long term incentives to constrain college cost, reduce student debt, and to improve performance. That has to change, and as President Obama has said, we're going to have to do things differently, we can't just go about business as usual. So instead of propping up the status quo, I'm asking higher education leaders to shake it up. You can't price the middle class and everybody working to get into the middle class. You can't price them out of a college education. We also can't retain our global leadership and enhance our nation's economic competitiveness when so many students never graduate and are left with steep student loan debts, but no degree to show for it. Higher education leaders cannot tackle this problem alone. None of us can do that. The challenges to our higher education system can only be met through a sha, through a shared partnership, with clear responsibilities. Involving the Federal Government, each of our 50 states, local governments, institutions, and students, as well as the business, labor, and philanthropic communities. We know there are no silver bullets here, or easy solutions. But we also know, you can't let the difficulty of the challenges facing higher education become a discussion ending excuse for inaction. We are better than that. We're smarter than that. We are more committed than that. We very much want and need the benefit of your collective guidance and wisdom about how to design a college rating system that ensures America's extraordinary system of, of higher education continues to thrive, grow, and strengthen our entire nation. Thank you so much, I look forward to your questions. [ SOUND ] It was a kind of florid introduction. [ LAUGH ] So I want to apologize for that We are, there's a term in journalism called the tick- tock which is the, the narrative short hand for how did something come to be. You talked about the administration having the courage to act upon that had been kicking around for a long time. Can you walk us through what were the forces that lead you to announce this initiative? What was the moment you realized we got to make this appeal, we've gotta take this step? I don't know if there's one moment, but I will say it's the experience that I've had like a visit to an Iowa High School where a young girl came up to me, who's a Senior in High School she told me she has a twin brother and her family's deciding which twin to send to college. It's virtually every time I go to the grocery store, the dry cleaners, every, you know, every plane I'm on you have middle class families begging, pleading for help. For the President it's very personal. He's talked a lot about. You know, barely getting out of debt when, by the time you got to the Senate. College has never been more important. It's never been more expensive. We have to work together to figure out how to do something better for the country. So this is a classic market regulation philosophy that if the ratings, not rankings, if the ratings do not underscore or illustrate a fairly quick, a, an, an economical education and the fairly quickly realized desirable outcome. Consumers will choose something else. It's so interesting to me. Beyond a doubt we have the best system of higher education in the world, not even close. 7, 000 institutions of higher Ed, 4 year, 2 year, public, private, non- profit, for- profit, whatever it might be. What's interesting to me is how inefficient the marketplace is and how difficult it is for a young people and their families to make the right choice for them. And the lack of knowledge, the difficulty, the opaqueness is pretty staggering. And parents desperately want the right thing for their kids. They don't know how to make their choices. Just give you a quick example. When I lead the Chicago public schools we tried to you know, increase our graduation rates and track very carefully our graduates going on to higher education. In Chicago, lots of different institutions of higher education. We saw kids with identical GPA's and identical ACT scores going to different local institutions, and some were graduating like 80 % rates and some are graduating like 20 % rates. It's this massive swing. Same kids, same, trying to make it. Some universities were serious, not just about access but around completion and mentoring. Obviously so many of my kids are first generation college- goers and summer bridge programs. In other places, you didn't have a hope. So we started, very publicly, steering kids toward certain institutions and away from others. Families who are trying to live the American dream, trying to enter the middle class, they have to go to college. But they go to a place where they don't have a chance at being successful. We're part of the problem, not part of the solution. You just use an interesting phrase. We are, we have a great system, but it's inefficient. The, the market place is inefficient. The, the lack of clear choice, the lack of transparency. At present when we announces, we did the bus tour. And met with a couple of young people who had just graduated who were seniors from the University of Buffalo Bayer and these were actually middle class families. Parents were nurses, one was a lawyer, one taught at community college. Their difficulty in trying to figure out why they picked their school, what the 4 year costs were. One was graduating and said, I have $ 26, 000 in loans and I don't know how I got those loans. And this is a young man whose mom was a lawyer. This stuff is, it's too hard, it's too hard. And so we just have to make it easier for people to try and figure out what's the right university, what's the right major, what do I want to do. And, without that I think people who are good, and who are trying to do the right thing, we're leaving too many of them in a worse position than when they started. And I'm gonna be really clear. I think we, at the federal government, I think we've been a huge part of the problem. Again, we have funded the status quo. We have funded inputs. The rest of the world doesn't fund inputs. And we want to think about doing that in a better way. So in terms of measuring outcomes, is something that's in the mix here, for instance, asking college, asking universities, asking colleges to report the, at different points, the salaries of their graduates? That could be a metric, and I'm not too hung up. Again, I wanna be clear and look mu -, look at multiple things. But I just don't look at, you know. Or is the university serving Pell grant recipients over time or less? Are they not just admitting them or are they helping them graduate? Our young people salaries are young people able to find jobs? Again if you want to work in Wallstreet great. If you want to go in the Peace Corps great. No value judgement there but do you have the skills and abilities to take that next step on what you want to do? So we have to look at a whole list a set of things and try to get the right balance of them. Right. But we, we just to push a little bit, when you start to talk about holistic and yes there is Wallstreet but there is also Teach for America or whatever. You are immediately in the soup. Aren't you? In terms of trying to figure out the metrics that will allow for this extraordinary range of experience. That why this is hard. That's why this is hard. But its not a reason not to try. Can we talk about tuition for just a second? It continues to rise, any sense if I pressed you, what do you think the future of that is? Where is the arch? All this stuff is hard so I would start over the past couple years, 40 states, Republican, Democrat, 8 % of the country, they cut funding to higher education. That's a huge problem. I keep asking the question how many of those 40 states cut funding for prisons, for incarcerating people? I promise you 40 didn't. And budgets reflect our values. So why do we prefer to lock people up than to fund higher ed and K to 12 and early childhood. So how we challenge states to step up and be part of the solution when states cut funding? Obviously university jack up tuition but how do universities do a better job at containing costs and using technology and other things to become more productive. That is hard to do. And it is difficult. But you have some universities that are increasing Pell access, that are making sure their young people are graduating, that there's quality, young people can pursue their dreams afterwards. And their doing it in constraining cost at the same time. That's the kind, none of this is easy, but that's the kind of package of behaviors that we think help lead the country in the right way. So this is, you used the word efficient before. I mean, one way I've always thought about higher education is it's not unlike healthcare in that it's largely an irrational market. I think that's fair. I think people go to what's close. They go to where their cousin went or where their neighbor went, and sometimes those are good choices. But I think there's a body of, you know, I'm a big believer in transparency. I think there's a lot of information. Again, I look at, you know, those young people whose parents were a lawyer and a nurse, and a community college president. I think about first generation college goers. I think about English language learners and people new to this country. How do they navigate the system? How do we help isn't? You know, you basically have to have a PhD to go to college. The problem is you don't have a PhD before you gone to college. Right We got to make it a little bit easier for them. You used an interesting phrase. You talked about a knowledge based economy. And, and you had raised the question also. What should graduates know? What should an American college graduate know? I think people in this room would be much smarter on that than me. But, the ability to think creatively. The ability to be part of a group. The ability to be a life long learner The ability to challenge your peers and help make the team better. Its a series of things that would be hard to measure and some folks are starting to do that. I just want to make sure that young people in a world where high wage high school jobs increasingly are requiring some form of higher education 4 year, 2 year, trade technical, what ever it is. I want young people to be graduating with those skills and able to keep those high wage, high skilled jobs in this country. And if we don't they will increasingly go to India, China, Singapore, and South Korea. So this is about trying to strengthen our country's, economic competitiveness. Do you see, is there a historical point in the last 50 years or so, that you would like, that we should, where we should be, and we have fallen from that point? This is not exact right answer, but a generation ago we led the world in college graduation rates, and today we're twelfth. So, our challenge is to lead the world in college graduation rates again. Talk about the causes, what are the factors driving it from one to twelve. It's really interesting, we didn't drop. We flat lined. We stagnated. The other countries out innovated, they're out invested, and they passed us by. And I think the challenge we have as a nation, this is at every level, we're not just higher ed, but at every level definitely K to 12 twelve, I've spent a lot of time in early childhood as you know. As a country, we've become very complacent. We're living off our past and we need to understand the challenge. We need to understand how serious this is. I was thinking, you know, when I was in high school, it wasn't great. But if my friends dropped out of high school, they could get a job in a stockyards or steel mills on the south side of Chicago and do okay. Those jobs are gone and not coming back, and we as a country haven't changed fast enough. And other countries are just taking this much more seriously. And moving with a sense of urgency that we frankly lack. And when you say a generation ago, put a number on that. I, I, I don't have the exact, 25, 30 years ago, we, we were first in the world in college graduation. We're just gone just like this. And other countries have gone like that. And your sense is that an emphasis on assessment will drive the kinds of reform that will be necessary to reinvigorate our innovation within these institutions. I think a, I think having our $ 150 billion each year go more strategically to those universities that are really doing the right thing is the right thing to do. Empowering parents and students with better information, they will vote with their feet. And what I think we want is we want more good actors to get more students. We want bad actors to get less students or change behavior. And we may want a set of new players that don't exist today to come in and, and help, help us, again, lead the world in college graduation rights. Who are your best allies in this? I hope everyone in this room, we'll see. [ LAUGH ] I believe, of course, everyone here is on board, so we'll leave that. Well, they maybe not be, and again, so it's a really important debate to have, but Parents, families are looking for this. Families are looking for help, and again I can't tell you how often randomly I'm stopped for people begging for help. And, they know what they want. They're working hard to get there. It's just a little too hard. It's a little too difficult. I worry about the, you know, trillion dollars of debt out there. Some manageable debt is not the end of the world, but when that debt gets to the point that you can't, you know, buy a car, or buy a home, or start your business, that starts to have an impact on the economy. So how do we make this more affordable, more accessible, and how do we significantly increase graduation rates? And to be clear, this isn't all, I don't want to oversimplify anything. A big reason why college graduation rates are low is so many students come to college and need remedial classes. They're constantly playing catch up so we're doing a lot of work to fix K to 12 and higher standards and Common Core are part of that solution. So we have to fix the pipeline. Again, this can't be, you know, just higher eds issues. This has to be about shared responsibility and having honest conversations all the way up that pipeline. And your experience with race to the top gives you what lessons for this next argument? There's never a perfect analogy in higher ed clearly as different and arguably more complex maybe than K to 12, but we saw were a couple of things. We saw, for all the money we put out, we saw as much change in States that didn't get a nickel and States that received a hundred of million of dollars. And it was really about providing the opportunity in the space and frankly, political cover to make hard choices, but they were the right thing. So we initially in raise the top funded 2 States? But we saw 46 states raise standards, wildly disproportionate impact. And we have some states in higher ed, Tennessee being one of them that are starting to move to more, more performance based funding. And I don't think any of this is perfect. But people have talked about these, the idea of you know? Just funding inputs, not outputs. No one can defend that but, to date, that's what every state and the federal government has done for the past whatever, 100, 150 year. You know, however long it's been. That has to change so we can create a structure and opportunity for all of us to move together. And to be clear whatever we do will be imperfect and we'll have to continue to improve and learn. But to just keep doing the same thing for me would be irresponsible. And what's your time frame? So we're gonna work over the course of the next year, again, meet with hundreds and hundreds of folks. My goal would be to come out with a draft of this, about a year from now. Again, just a simple draft. Get a lots of you know, feedback from that. And then to move forward from that point because it's gonna be a very serious endeavor over the next 12 months. Now, not that any of this would follow the political calendar at all but you've got 36 months or so in this administration. Yeah. Do you, is it your expectation this will be in place and working before. That's absolutely my expectation. So, base to be clear, follow up 2015. Mr. Secretary. Thank you sir. Thank you, appreciate it. Thank you. 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