‘Down and Dirty on the Policy Side’ of Higher Ed

How did you get into your line of work? 

I’m a believer that higher education can give people opportunities they wouldn’t have had otherwise — opportunities to broaden their futures and enjoy well-paying careers. But those opportunities are so outrageously unequally spread. I wanted to work on higher education policy because it’s one way that I can help to level the playing field by improving access to the kinds of colleges and programs where students will actually be able to succeed.

What was your experience with higher education like?

I went to George Washington, a very traditional selective school, and my career path has been really good since then. But I think most people would agree that the education was overpriced. In a lot of ways, GW is a caricature of college bloat, especially when I was there. The school’s former president, Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, was the unabashed pioneer of raising tuition as a way to signal that education is high-quality.

You focus a lot on return on investment in your work. Did your education provide a good ROI, in your opinion?

I think my investment was too high, but the returns were good. I’m grateful that by going to school in Washington, D.C., I had access to tons of internships and work opportunities. It was actually through an internship at the Education Department that I first became interested in higher education policy.

Let’s talk about those policies. What are the biggest problems today that student debt cancellation doesn’t address?

Return on investment for students. Students are being asked to take on more debt than they can afford to repay, and it’s really concerning when we see concentrations of students being left worse off than if they had never gone to college. 

To take an example, the University of Southern California offers a more-than-$100,000 program for a master’s in social work. Realistically, the earnings for that degree are never going to be adequate to repay the amount of debt that borrowers take on. That’s fairly typical in graduate programs.

In the for-profit sector, we see a disproportionate share of students being left with burdensome loan debt. A number of certificate programs — many in medical assisting, cosmetology, and culinary arts — perform especially poorly, leaving their graduates without well-paying jobs. In general, debt cancellation doesn’t hold institutions accountable to provide a quality education at a cost students are able to afford after they receive their degree.

Why do people continue going into debt for degrees that don’t pay off?

Students don’t pursue education in order to go into debt, and they don’t imagine that the debt they take on will be burdensome. Still, either through misleading claims by predatory schools or because of a lack of thorough information about program quality, earnings potential, accreditation, and other accountability measures, lots of borrowers find themselves in a predicament. They enrolled in a program, they took on debt to pay for it, and it didn’t pay off for them. The federal government needs to make better information available, and it also needs to put institutions on the hook through stronger accountability measures. That way, students and their families will be able to make better choices from a quality pool of schools and programs that provide a decent return on investment.

What are the areas where federal higher education reform could have the biggest impact?

The Department of Education is tackling this in some pockets with gainful employment regulations. Those rules will hold for-profit and non-degree programs accountable to provide students with an education that leads to earnings sufficient to repay their student loans. We need to see similar kinds of reform across the higher education system. 

We’re certainly long overdue for a rethinking of the Higher Education Act, which Congress should have reauthorized in 2014. But sometimes it takes a long time to get to a full reauthorization. The reality is that these problems can’t wait, and Congress needs to tackle them with whatever vehicle it can find. 

The Department of Education is doing what it can through the regulatory process, but future administrations can roll back regulations — they don’t have staying power like the law. The next frontier in higher education reform is accountability that goes across the higher education system, so that all schools share the risks that their students are taking on. 

Partisan divide can be a big problem when trying to address these issues. What are the areas of common ground between the parties?

Republicans and Democrats can agree that taxpayer dollars should be spent wisely, and that institutions should be responsible for making sure their programs are connected to good jobs. Everyone agrees that costs have spiraled out of control, and that steps need to be taken to rein that in and prevent a continuation of the student loan challenges we’ve seen. Another area of bipartisan agreement is the need for better data. 

More broadly, for all the disagreement over the student loan system, there’s a lot of agreement that it’s much too complex. It’s hard for borrowers to navigate, and it could work a lot better, so that it’s actually serving the borrowers who need it — as well as taxpayers.

What gives you hope for better higher education accountability measures in the near term? 

Americans have never paid more attention to higher education as a policy matter. We’re hearing from policymakers and the public that they feel the student loan program has resulted in problems for borrowers. There’s a widespread interest in getting to the root of the problems and not simply papering over them or using a Band-Aid. That gives me a lot of hope that there will be opportunities for compromise and agreement. We’ve seen Rep. Virginia Foxx, the ranking member on the House Education and Labor Committee, come forward with her own proposals recently, as well as Rep. Bobby Scott, the chair of the same committee. These are starting points for compromise. I’m hopeful that there will be real progress on these issues in the coming months and years.

All this sounds extremely challenging. When you’re not thinking about the thorniest problems of higher education policy, what do you do to unwind?

I love to travel, I love to eat, I love reading. The last place I went was Maine, and before that Munich. Maine is my happy place. I especially love Deer Isle, which is an island that is connected to the mainland by a bridge. I’m all about a quiet vacation in a place where I have a book and a glass of wine.

And are there any books you would recommend to readers who are interested in your work?

“The State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal ― and How to Set Them Right,” by Adam Harris. I’ve read it twice since it came out, and it’s a really incredible look at historically black colleges and universities and the state and federal government’s failure to adequately invest in those schools.

And then the book I’m reading right now is James Q. Wilson’s ​“Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do And Why They Do It.”

A page-turner.

Yes, definitely. It dives deep into the culture of a bunch of different federal agencies. It’s probably a book I should have reread before I went into the Education Department again, rather than when I left, but it definitely hits differently once you’ve been in the thick of it.