Does the Availability of Student Loans Drive Up Tuition?

President Obama was here at CU recently taking some great pictures at a local hang-out and talking about student loans.  I'm not going to get into the political issues around student loan interest rates, but something from the discussion caught my interest - the idea that the availability of student loans has caused tuition to rise.  A survey released today shows that 47% of Americans believe that it has.  Clearly the idea behind making student loans more available is not to drive up the price of tuition but rather increase access to higher education, so if in fact easy access to student loans drives up prices then we have a serious problem.

I don't have an answer to this question, but here are a couple bits of data to mull over from the College Board's Trends in Higher Education reports. First, here is the average inflation-adjusted cost of college tuition relative to 1981. 

The fact that a college education today is somewhere near three times as expensive as it was 30 years ago even when adjusting for inflation is alarming, and the natural call is to find ways to make it more affordable, particularly for low-income families.  Student loans are often touted as ways to help many more students for less than it would cost to simply fund the university directly with state or federal funds.

The second graph shows the inflation-adjusted pool of money available for student grants (in blues) and loans (in reds and oranges) per student over the last decade.

From 2000 to the present, tuition has gone up by about 50% and the total financial aid per student has increased by almost exactly the same percentage from about $9,000 per student to a little over $14,000 per student.

Of course correlation does not imply causation and frankly it may be that the increase in tuition is driving the increased availability of financial aid, not the other way around, but I do find this idea intriguing.  As people that have spent a lot of time at colleges, I'm interested in your thoughts.  Does increased financial aid lead to higher tuition and if so how can the government help keep higher ed affordable?

The Breakdown Of Obama's Budget For Science.

I got an email today from the AAS that said this.  Thought some people would be interested:

SUMMARY: The President's budget request for FY 2011 has been released.
Overall, science funding will rise despite the proposed spending
freeze with most big investments in climate change research, renewable
energy, and STEM education. The doubling path for the three key
science agencies included in the American Competitiveness Initiative
(NSF, DOE, and NIST) is maintained by providing them a combined
$13.3B, an increase of $824M (6.6%) over the FY 2010 enacted total.

DETAILS:

The President has released his Administration's budget request for FY
2011. Science has fared well despite the spending freeze proposed by
the President on all non-discretionary spending. This budget request
asks for a 5.9% increase in non-defense R&D spending (an increase of
$3.7B for a total of $66B). The country's total R&D budget request for
FY 2011 is $147.7B once the defense R&D funding is included. This is
an increase of $343M or 0.2% over the enacted FY 2010 level. There is
also significant investment in programs to foster the next generation
of S&T workers, both at the NSF, DOE and the Department of Education.

The breakdown for the agencies relevant to our community is as follows:

NSF: The NSF request is for $7.4B, an increase of 8% over 2010 levels.
The Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate (MPS), which houses
the Astronomical Sciences (AST) within NSF, receives a 4.3% increase
and AST receives a 2.5% increase to $251.77M.

Of the facilities supported by MPS, the AST facilities have done very
well getting a majority of the funding increases. The requests and the
percent increase over FY2010 estimates are: ATST - $2M, ALMA - $23.5M
(33.8%), Gemini - 1$19.58M (2.5%), IceCube - $2.5M (16.3%) and LIGO -
$30.30 (6.3%).

The Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF) program sees a 16.4% increase
to $158.24M while the Faculty Early Career Development Program
(CAREER) sees a 6.5% increase to $209.16M. There is also an additional
investment of $103M to realign and consolidate existing programs to
broaden participation by under-represented groups in the S&T
workforce.

NASA: The biggest change at NASA is of course a new vision for the
manned space flight program. NASA's total budget request is for $19B
with $5B for the Science Mission Directorate. The biggest increase
within SMD goes to Earth Science in line with the Administration's
focus on renewed investment in global climate change research.

Planetary Science sees a small increase, targeted to identify and
catalog Near Earth Objects. Some really good news for planetary
science is that the Plutonium-238 production restart is called out
prominently. Members might recall that the Administration had
requested $30M in funds in the last budget for the Pu-238 production
restart required to power missions to explore other planets in the
solar system. Congress had zeroed out the request citing inadequate
detail. This request reopens the dialogue. Heliophysics sees a small
increase as well of roughly $13M. Astrophysics funding declines over
2010 levels by 2.5% (~$27M). The good news for the astronomy community
is that new money has been requested to fund the increased investment
in earth science and space science was not cut to fund that increase.

DOE: The Office of Science at DOE receives a 4.4% ($217.7M) increase
for a total of $5.1B. The High Energy Physics program, which supports
astronomical programs such as Fermi, receives a 2.3% increase for a
total of $829M. Fusion energy sciences are down 10.8% to $380M. Of
some interest to our community might be that the U.S. ITER project
sees a decrease of $55M compared to FY 2010 levels. This is a
reflection of the pace of construction and W.F. Brinkman, the Office
of Science Director, is quoted as saying that the DOE was not willing
to provide money for ITER until it had solved some underlying problems
and the funding reduction was intended to "send a message."

The President's budget request reflects the priorities of the
Administration. It is very supportive of science, including
curiosity-based science, but has focused its big investments in
climate change research, renewable energy sources, and STEM education.
There is also a substantial investment in technology development at
NASA. We must now engage Congress about the role astronomy plays in
the national agenda and what our community can contribute to the
nation. Everyone is awaiting the report from the Decadal Survey to set
funding priorities for astrophysics. But we need to start talking to
lawmakers now about the role of astronomy in the innovation agenda.

Obama Was Born in Kenya and Other Masterpeices of Irrational Thought

Many of you have probably heard of the "birthers". If you haven't, I suggest this blog as it seems to be an excellent example of the standard delusion that these people live in. These people, despite all evidence to the contrary, argue that Barak Obama is ineligible to be President because (a) he wasn't born in the US, (b) his father wasn't an American citizen, and/or (c) he lived in Indonesia as a child. The US Constitution, Article II, Section 1 states:

"No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President..."

The birthers argue that Obama doesn't meet the definition of a natural born citizen for one of the three reasons I listed above.

These people are determined to prove their point despite the fact that they don't seem to have a logical leg to stand on. The state of Hawaii has validated Barak Obama's original birth certificate and there is no legal definition of a "natural born citizen" as that term is not used anywhere else in US legal codes. Barak Obama has been shown to be a citizen just as well as George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, or any other president has been. In fact, John McCain was born on a US army base in Panama and nobody made a fuss about that, so one has to suspect some motive other than a desire to interpret the Constitution as narrowly as possible for these people. Despite the large amount of evidence that their claims are totally unprovable, these people keep insisting that Obama should be thrown out of office.

This reminds me of a little exercise that I did in 10th grade biology class. One day our teacher started class by explaining her theory that light bulbs worked because they had magical elves inside of them that made light with tiny hammers. She then challenged us to disprove her claim. Our little sophomore brains began spitting out how light bulbs really work. She countered that elves had magically made it look like that's how light bulbs worked to fool us. We countered that we could control the light bulbs with a switch. She claimed that the switch was simply part of the elves trick - they magically knew when we flipped the switch and stopped making light at exactly the same instant. She countered every attempt we made to logically disprove her claim with appeals to conspiracies and magic. After about 15 minutes, we became very frustrated and told her she was being irrational. In fact, that was the point of the lesson - if someone is determined to believe something no amount of logic, reason, or argument can force them to change their minds.

The small but vocal group of birthers are exactly the group of people my teacher was trying to warn us about. There is no way to reason with them. They have made up their minds for whatever reason and only they can ultimately choose to change their minds.

It Comes Up in the Strangest Places

Some of you may have heard the latest in international news: Obama and Biden went out to lunch and ate hamburgers. Yes it is true, this is the height of international news. I'm sure that the regular media more than adequately analyzed this latest development, so I will just mention one thing that everyone else in the media missed. If you watch the video very closely Vice-President Biden is holding their serving number and it so happens to be...42! Here's a scree shot to prove it (if you don't want to actually watch the video):How ironic is that! It must be a conspiracy (Douglas Adams is influencing American Policy from beyond the grave). Somehow the mainstream media missed this minor detail. And they thought the important thing was Obama going to lunch with Biden, nope, it was showing who is really in power;-)