This morning I caught Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, addressing the National Press Club on CSPAN 3. Among other topics, he said that the Government was supplying $150 billion a year in educational grants and loans. He said both the government and the individual should be getting the most value for these investments and debts. This means giving these to students at institutions with high graduation rates, and from which graduates get well paying jobs. I have previously blogged about the graduation rates of Universities and of the results from a PayScale poll of starting and midlife salaries of students with bachelors degrees. It sounds like the administration is going to implement this, and that they have justification for it.
When asked about for-profit universities, (where some do not deliver but exist on absorbing student grants and loans), he said some were good and some were not good values, and that the government shouldn’t be funding those that were bad. (I would comment that for-profit universities seem to have good lobbying.)
