On Wednesday morning at 10 am, a bill titled the “Higher Education, Lower Debt Act” will receive a hearing before the Wisconsin Legislature’s Senate Committee on Universities and Technical Colleges.
I have spent the last decade studying the impacts of higher education financing on current, prospective, and former students throughout Wisconsin and nationwide. In the most relevant effort, the Wisconsin Scholars Longitudinal Study, my team and I tracked a cohort of 3,000 Pell Grant recipients through the state’s public 2-year and 4-year colleges. We carefully surveyed and interviewed them repeatedly to understand how college costs affected decision-making, stress and health and, of course, their education. When some left school without degrees, we continued to talk with them, learning about how debt has affected their post-college lives. We witnessed the challenges that rising debt brings to them and their families, and are deeply empathetic to the crisis that confronts them now.
In addition, I have also been very involved with policy debates at both the state and national level about what to do to make the situation better, improving our economy and collective health and well-being. Last spring, I testified to the United States Senate on the challenge of college affordability. These discussions are fraught with disagreements about right and wrong, and are further confused by the relative lack of empirical data indicating both the effects of debt and delineating the effective pathways forward. People on both the Left and Right are struggling to find good ideas that are also politically feasible. Over the last 18 months, I worked through these challenges with my friend Andrew Kelly of the American Enterprise Institute, not because he and I agree on everything (I’m on the far Left most of the time, and he’s more towards the Right), but because we share a commitment to doing something effective for students, rather than something that is merely (or solely) ideological. In a forthcoming book from Harvard Education Press, due out next year, we describe a range of approaches to achieving greater college affordability through innovations in college financing. We recently hosted an event in Wisconsin, which can be viewed on Wisconsin Eye.