Washington Monthly - September/October 2015 - 50
ity proceeds, it becomes clear that things aren't going as he
might have liked. The problem is that the Democrats' star
witness, the Louisiana State University president F. King Alexander, is stealing the show. Dressed in a suit with an LSU
pin and a tie of LSU purple, King Alexander not only shares a
last name with the senator (though they are not related), he's
also a southerner from the Tennessee Valley who has thought
deeply about the effects of federal policy on higher education.
Yet King's ideas for ensuring college affordability are the polar opposite of Lamar's: the LSU president wants more federal
regulation-including on his own state and university.
The "greatest challenge facing public universities," King
Alexander explains, is that states today spend about half as
much on higher education on a per capita income basis as
they did in 1981. This is a direct result, he says, of a regulatory
failure built into federal law. In other areas of federal policy,
The plate tectonics of higher
education are rumbling.
With $1.2 trillion in
outstanding federal student
loan debt and continued
state disinvestment in public
higher education, Democrats
are quickly coming around to
the view that pumping evermore resources into federal
student aid is a mug's game.
such as transportation and health care, federal dollars come
with strings attached-states have to pitch in a set amount
of money too. That's not the case for higher education, where
money follows the student to private and public colleges alike,
and states have no requirements to fund public universities at
a certain (or indeed any) level. The result is that when states
are under budget pressure, as they have been in the years since
the financial crisis, they slash spending on higher ed. The burden of those cuts then gets shifted to students, in the form
of higher tuition, and to the federal government, in greater
spending on grants, tax credits, and subsidized student loans.
On the current course, King continues, within twenty
years at least eight states-including Colorado, Louisiana,
Massachusetts, and South Carolina-will spend no public
money on their state universities, and in the rest of the country public higher education will be a shell of its former self.
Lamar listens, rocking back and forth in his chair.
50
September/October 2015
When it comes time for questions, the Republicans mostly ignore King, focusing on the other witnesses, but nearly
every Democrat calls on him. Patty Murray and Al Franken
ask King about specific ways the federal government can use
regulations-they prefer the term "leverage"-to encourage
states to fund public higher education. Sheldon Whitehouse
argues that there's no reason to "flood" the higher education
system with federal dollars if the government doesn't stop
states from disinvesting in public higher education-a surprising statement considering that another Democratic senator from his state of Rhode Island created the modern aid system and the party has historically favored flooding it.
One committee Republican, however, does engage with
King. Bill Cassidy, a freshman senator from Louisiana who
was sworn in just seven months ago and obtained both his
undergraduate and medical degrees from LSU, confesses to a
conflicted view about King's argument. "I'm against states being mandated to do something, but it appears unless states
are mandated to do something they're not going to do so."
King replies that if the federal government doesn't force
states to do something, then the costs will shift onto the federal government and the individual students. Lamar, appearing to grow more upset with the turn the hearing is taking,
walks over as Cassidy gets up to leave the hearing room and
whispers into his ear for more than a minute.
After all the senators have had their chance to ask questions, Lamar delays the conclusion of the hearing to spar specifically with King. How could he want more federal mandates
when it's federal mandates in other policy areas, like Medicaid, that force states to divert funding from higher education? King perches forward in his chair as Lamar speaks, ready
to counter. Yes, it's true, King replies, that governors very
much oppose federal mandates, but they certainly respond
to the incentives they create. During the recession, a federal
mandate within stimulus funding prevented states from cutting higher education; only when the stimulus money ran out
did states slash those budgets. That, says King, is proof that
federal mandates work, whether governors like it or not.
Lamar shoots back that he is completely opposed to federal mandates. "I think that if you have that you might as
well just have the federal government take over all the states.
Wouldn't be anything left for governors or legislators to decide, and so I would respectfully disagree." With that, Lamar
ends the hearing.
The plate tectonics of higher education are rumbling. Fiscal and ideological pressures are pushing toward a clash over
the role of the federal government in higher education. For
many years, the Democrats were primarily focused on making the existing student aid program more generous. But with
$1.2 trillion in outstanding federal student loan debt and continued state disinvestment in public higher education, Democrats are quickly coming around, as the hearing suggests, to
King's view that pumping ever-more resources into federal
student aid is a mug's game. The basic rules need to change.
HEA reauthorization is one vehicle for that change, but giv-
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