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A while back, our President had a plan to reduce cost of college by tying the institution’s efforts to reduce growth of tuition to federal education funds.  He also proposed a plan for colleges to cut costs in January last year wherein the success of the institution in enhancing value and affordability for students will be tied to campus-based aid program eligibility for work-study jobs, Perkins loans and low-income student supplemental grants. So, what happened to all these forward-thinking, interesting plans?

These plans have gone nowhere even as our President is a year into his re-elected term. All the more interesting is the fact that these are ideas that are not likely to see opposition from the Republicans in terms of ideologies and that they are relatively sensible.

If we view the situation practically what we can see is that price controls were asked to be imposed by our President to the Congress on a sector that contributes at least three per cent towards our GDP.
During the election year, naturally the media was focusing on these interesting and sensible policies put forth by Obama to get one up against his opponent Mitt Romney. This became very easy since Romney was obviously not interested in any issue to do with education.

This year, when our President again called for price control in tuition, even in his recent State of Union address, our press did not do much to highlight this considering it to be an old issue. Our bright and smart press accurately perceived our President’s support for higher education especially since he doubled low-income Pell grant funding. Reporters were not willing to try digesting complicated issues such as punitive actions against erring institutions.

Our country did not seem to care. The proposal failed to generate traction among the Republicans whose sole aim is to curb any government waste. The proposal was studied extensively by the Senate committee HELP controlled by the Democrats.

There was intense lobbying by the higher education industry and this combined with HELP’s leaning towards for-profit colleges side lined the proposal which was put aside by them claiming more deliberation was required in Congress.

This is one of the proposals by our President that makes a lot of sense and it is unfortunate that it is not being given the attention it deserves. Against a moneyed, organized minority, the unfunded majority stands negligent chances, this being an established political science principle that works even if the President of our country favors the former.

What is needed is for our President to initiate a political movement if he wants to succeed in his efforts. Otherwise, all he will be doing in the foreseeable future is to continue talking about this and other proposals that do not see the light of the day.

Another interesting observation is that changes in policy that could bring down education costs will not benefit our current students directly and therefore they would not be direct supporters of this idea for reform. After implementation, it may take years for the policy to take shape which means it will benefit some students in the future.