On Tuition Flexibility
This Wednesday the Wisconsin Special Task Force on UW Restructuring and Operational Flexibilities will hear from the chancellors of Madison and Milwaukee on several issues, including flexibility for tuition-setting. I'm on the record as having numerous concerns about the unintended consequences of giving institutional administrators more say over tuition, since they operate under intense local and political pressures to generate more resources which lead them to raise tuition even when it comes at the expense of access commitments. The latter are far more difficult to uphold, since even when people feel strongly about supporting college opportunities for disadvantaged families, the fact is that those families are quite distant from the lives of decision-makers, and thus easy to neglect. A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research by Columbia economist Judith Scott-Clayton offers important reminders for this task force and the chancellors. The access commitment is...