The Price of Admission: Rethinking How Americans Pay for College [Paperback]

Thomas J. Kane (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1999 | ISBN-10: 0815750137 | ISBN-13: 978-0815750130

An overview of the many indirect ways in which Americans pay for college - as taxpayers, students and parents - and description of the sometimes perverse ways in which the state and federal financial aid policies interact. Thomas J. Kane evaluates alternative explanations for the rise in public and private college costs, weighing the role of federal financial aid policy, higher input costs, and competitive pressures on individual colleges. He analyzes how far we have come in ensuring access to all. Evidence suggests that large differences in college enrolment remain between high and low income students, even those with similar test scores and attending the same high schools. Kane promotes a package of reforms intended to squeeze more social bang from the many public bucks devoted to higher education. For example, he advocates "front-loading" the Pell grant programme, limiting eligibility to those in their first two years of college, and providing a larger share of federal subsidies by assessing student resources after college rather than evaluating a single year of parents income and assets before college.

Product Details

• Paperback: 180 pages
• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press (October 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0815750137
• ISBN-13: 978-0815750130
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,722,057 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Price" is worth the price, January 4, 2000

By 

Jon H. Oberg (Rockville, Maryland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Price of Admission: Rethinking How Americans Pay for College (Paperback)

"Price of Admission" is a book to read along with McPherson and Schapiro's "The Student Aid Game." Together they make up a two volume library on federal higher education policy the likes of which could not be collected in a hundred lesser titles.

Thomas Kane writes four easy-reading chapters on "How We Pay for College," "Rising Costs in Higher Education," "Has Financial Aid Policy Succeeded in Ensuring Access to College?", and "Rethinking How Americans Pay for College." To each chapter he brings empirical research and impressive analysis.

Kane's last two chapters are the most provocative. Repeating the findings of his earlier works, Kane is not convinced that federal student financial aid has done much to ensure college access. He offers both modest and ambitious policy suggestions: dropping asset tests to simplify financial aid applications, front-loading Pell Grants during the first two years of college, raising federal student loan program limits, experimenting with various forms of financial aid, and basing means-tests on future earnings through income contingent tax credits.

Some experts in higher education policy may react to the book with a yawn because none of these policy prescriptions is new, and none original with Kane. But if so, they are missing the essence of the book. Like few others, Kane prods the U.S. Department of Education to begin more ambititous evaluations of its student financial aid programs, and challenges the Congress to think beyond dividing up the billions of dollars of bounty among narrow interests of banks and higher education institutions.

Careful readers of Kane, as well as of McPherson and Schapiro, will notice a growing recognition that the behavior of higher education institutions, more than federal policy, determines how access is distributed. Kane is troubled, as we all should be, by the fact that "the gaps in college entry by family income have widened" despite the efforts of federal need-based student financial aid. He notes that "aid packaging and the marketing of federal financial aid programs remain largely in the hands of college student financial aid administrators [and] as a result, the process remains shrouded in mystery."

Kane suggests that lowering the barriers involved in the process may have a larger payoff for some students than increasing federal aid.