@Dave_N actually, that is why I specifically said at the beginning of my first comment “I know my sample size is very small.” I specifically said that because I do not “assume a lot more people do.”
Yes, this is often a good way of thinking about policy decisions that will have some amount of failure either way. I.e. which type of failure is less bad?
A similar line of thought can be applied to such things as whether/how to consider the non-custodial parent finances for college financial aid for students with divorced parents. I.e. cost of cheating/abuse versus cost of shutting out students whom you would otherwise consider worthy of getting financial aid.
Should someone who receives a Pell grant, finishes a degree, then fails to use that degree by never entering the work force (ie. becomes a stay at home parent) be asked to pay it back?
Why stop at Pell grants? Should you pay back all the subsidies you got as a student? Including the invisible ones that ALL students get?
Why stop there? Should we make you pay back the year after 16 when in many states education is no longer compulsory?
I think the right decision has already been made here by the CSS people. If someone can gain tens of thousands of dollars in financial aid for their non-custodial child by simply pretending not to care, there will be a lot more people “not caring” about their non-custodial child.
Another way of thinking about the same thing is “Why should you penalize a married couple who disagrees about spending for their kid, relative to a divorced couple?”
Given they’ll probably need loans as well, it’s a positive thing for them to think long and hard about completion prior to spending other people’s money *as well as assuming a significant debt obligation. Likewise, if you don’t have a real parental safety net, you should probably wait until you are more ready/mature. As someone who had an ROTC scholarship with its multiple obligations (time or repayment), nothing focuses like the potential of owing something to someone else.
Beyond being means-tested, I’d recommend ensuring our money is well spent by requiring Pell grants to include an academic qualification component and make it available for low-income people scoring in the top 30% test takers (2017: >= 24/1200). Furthermore, I’d keep it revenue neutral and redirect the “good money after bad” dollars from more marginal, low-income students to the highest-potential low-income students.
*I’ll stipulate that there are a few capable people who would be hurt by an arbitrary 70% cutoff and get mislabeled weak. I’d argue that worrying about anomalies when crafting a general policy doesn’t really make sense as long as you put together an appeal mechanism. Likewise, for those who hate the SAT/ACT idea, I’d argue a standardized test is by far the easiest thing to administer and the only practical, scalable and cheap differentiation mechanism currently available.
I don’t know if you’re being serious or pulling our leg ala Colbert Report…
Are you saying that if you’re not top 30% compared to middle income and upper income peers, you must work in minimum wage jobs out of high school, period? That 70% students whose family makes 45K and under (ie., a large number of people in this country) would be automatically labelled “weak”?
Are you serious or are you trying to pretend you’re some kind of dystopian ruler about to be toppled? That sounds so… apartheid-y to me. A system fashioned after Soviet occupied lands. (Their system was that if you weren’t top 30% and you were upper class, you couldn’t go to high school) or Old-world, pre-WW2 selection (if you were poor, you had to rank #1 or 2 to get a scholarship and go further with your education), with Reaping-level hypocrisy (only Legacy Districts have a shot).
You realize that many lower income high schools have ACT scores of 16 or 17 average, right? Or that most colleges out there admit students with much lower scores than 24?
Chuckle, I went to one of them.
Here’s the crux of the issue. What’s the probability that students with scores that abysmal can do college level work and will graduate? I’d argue that for the vast majority of these students putting them in college wastes their time, our resources and, most importantly (assumption: they’ll augment the Pell grants with loans*), they’ll end up with onerous debt with little hope of paying it off since they didn’t graduate. If you don’t like 24/1200, is there a percentage where you’d cut things off? Or are you advocating they give it the ole college try regardless of outcomes?
It’s probably more accurately called a European or Asian model…not just Soviet. Thanks for the response. I enjoyed it.
*you can argue that the solution is to make the Pell grant bigger. That’s what I effectively did–same amount of $$$ spread out more generously across the higher payoff bets.
Re: #127
If you want to set a threshold of high school / test score performance for Pell grant eligibility (like what some states do for state grant eligibility), then you need to determine what the threshold level is where there is a positive net benefit (i.e. aggregate gains (both to the individuals and to the greater economy/society) from those who upgrade their standing in the labor market minus losses from those who do not, or whose labor market upgrades do not even reach the level of the cost of the Pell grants) and set the threshold there.
Even then, you also need to figure out how to handle non-traditional students who may have been goof-offs in high school years ago but have matured enough to be capable of attending college and significantly upgrading their labor market standing to contribute far more than what a Pell grant for them would cost.
The existence of open admission public community colleges with transfer pathways to four year schools is an implicit statement that everyone can have the opportunity to try college, even though not all who try will succeed. That seems to be more consistent with the idea of the US wanting to be a “land of opportunity” rather than a place where doors are easily closed forever to late bloomers.
To my knowledge, Pell Grants can be used for vocational/trade school training and things like a CNA. Those programs still have value and help prepare people for career options thereby reducing their future need for government support.
In my view, the Pell grants pay for the education which the students receive. If a student stops short of a degree, the education does not become worthless. Presumably the students get the Pell grants on a year-by-year basis, so if they are not enrolled, they aren’t getting the money.
I really dislike the view that what people are paying for is the diploma.
^Unfortunately that is also the view of many of the students themselves.