Higher Education Quick Takes

Stanford University researchers are using MRI images to study the brain patterns of literary Ph.D. candidates while they read Jane Austen. The early results suggest a very high level of brain activity prompted by close reading of the novelist.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — In a speech accepting his nomination for re-election Thursday night, President Obama laid out an ambitious higher education goal for his second term: he said he’d “work with colleges and universities” to slow the rise in college tuition by half over the next decade -- but gave no details on how he would accomplish that. It was the first discussion at the Democratic National Convention of what education policy might look like in a second Obama term.

During the State of the Union speech in January, Obama proposed expanding campus-based financial aid programs -- such as the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant and the Perkins Loan -- and using the extra money to reward colleges that keep tuition low or provide “good value” (and punish those that do not).

Early attempts by the Education Department to implement parts of that plan, such as a new competitive grant program for higher education, went nowhere in the Senate in next year’s budget negotiations. But Thursday night’s speech appeared to signal that the president, if re-elected, intends to keep pushing colleges to keep tuition prices low -- or at least slow their growth.

Representative Roscoe Bartlett, a Maryland Republican running for re-election, said in a recent town hall meeting that student loans -- while potentially doing good -- may be unconstitutional, The Washington Post reported. Bartlett said that he had searched the U.S. Constitution and found no justification for a federal role in education, including student loans. "Not that it’s not a good idea to give students loans, it certainly is a good idea to give them loans,” Bartlett said. “But if you can ignore the Constitution to do something good today, tomorrow you will be ignoring the Constitution to do something bad. You could. There are more people in our, in America today of German ancestry than any other [inaudible]. The Holocaust that occurred in Germany — how in the heck could that happen? And when you start down the wrong road, it can be a very slippery slope."

Asked about the statement on Thursday, a spokesman for Bartlett said that he "is also a strong supporter of making college accessible to all Americans, and unlike most politicians he has put his money where his mouth is by donating a substantial portion of his salary to help underprivileged students attend college.”

A study from the MetLife Mature Institute found that 29 percent of grandparents have given their grandchildren financial support for education, spending an average of $8,276 over five years. Of those grandparents who did fund their grandchildren’s education, 32 percent helped with tuition or loan payments, 29 percent donated to a college savings plan, and 7 percent helped pay for graduate school.

“It seems to be a change from earlier generations where we all graduated from college and pretty much felt we were on our own,” said Sandra Timmermann, a gerontologist and the director of the MetLife Mature Market Institute. Timmermann noted that whereas people used to be concerned about leaving money for their children and grandchildren in their wills, there is now more of a tendency for that money to be given earlier.

When MetLife conducted a similar survey in 2009, it found that 26 percent of all grandparents helped pay for their grandchildren’s education, but of those, the largest proportion, 46 percent, put their money in a college fund. The 2009 survey, however, was administered only to grandparents with grandchildren 25 or younger, while the 2012 iteration surveyed all grandparents.