For Release: Carey Testifies at Senate Committee on Innovations in College Affordability

Washington D.C. – This morning, Education Sector Policy Director Kevin Carey testified at a hearing on innovations in college affordability conducted by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. “Over the past 10 years, public university tuition grew by an average of 5.6 percent above inflation every year,” Carey reminded the committee. “As a result, student loan debt is at an all-time high and access to college is threatened. Students and families can’t afford to pay these bills and, increasingly, neither can the American taxpayer.  Annual federal financial aid to higher education has increased by over $100 billion in just the past decade.”

Carey highlighted some of the ways that colleges are innovating to hold down both college costs—what colleges spend to educate students—and college prices—what students pay to attend school.

For example, Virginia Tech, one of the nation’s leading finest engineering schools, has used technology to change the way students learn introductory mathematics. This approach, which Education Sector highlighted in the 2010 report The Course of Innovation: Using Technology to Transform Higher Education, has resulted in lower costs to the university and higher rates of success for students.

Carey also highlighted steps that university systems like the University of Maryland have taken to reduce costs. The result was millions of dollars saved “through joint purchasing, improving classes where many students were dropping out, and working with faculty to increase the number of credit hours professors teach.”

But Carey also notes that action at the state level are partly responsible for rising college costs. “There is no doubt that colleges have raised their prices in recent years because states reduced their subsidies for higher education,” he said.  “When state funding goes down, college gets more expensive. When state funding goes up, college gets more expensive.”

Read Carey’s full testimony, as well as Education Sector’s full body of work on college affordability and innovation.

Education Sector is an independent think tank that challenges conventional thinking in education policy. We are a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization committed to achieving measurable impact in education, both by improving existing reform initiatives and by developing new, innovative solutions to our nation's most pressing education problems.

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