Higher Education Today

The roots of our current system were laid down over a half century ago. The belief was that our nation has the best higher education system in the world. We just need to ensure students have the money to cover the costs they face. Then everyone would have access. 

To provide this money, policymakers dramatically expanded access to student loans. The belief was that higher education will make students better off. As a result, they will be able to repay their loans. Students and society would be made better off -- all in a cost-effective way. 

There is truth here. Higher education--whether college or some type of workforce training--is a critical gateway to economic and personal well-being. It is an investment that benefits all of us by ensuring everyone can access opportunities for growth and opportunity. 

But this view is incomplete. First, it fails to recognize that even as pursuing education is the right option for most students, many students will face setbacks along the way. Sometimes your chosen career doesn’t work out. Sometimes family issues arise unexpectedly. And sometimes you graduate into a global pandemic. Students should not be forced to bear these risks -- and when bad events occur, it is not fair to say that students should have simply been more financially responsible or literate. 

Second, this view fails to recognize that not all institutions and programs are serving students well. Too often, institutions fail to provide the support that students need to graduate and make a successful transition to their career. Others are simply too expensive. Students need access to high-quality, cost-effective programs and the support to succeed in them. 

To be sure, many well-intentioned people have been working for decades to address these shortcomings of the current system. Policymakers have introduced repayment plans that let students tie their payments to their income and offer forgiveness after a set time. They have also attempted to protect students from low-value programs. There has been value in these reforms, and they should be strengthened. 

But these efforts have also been extremely slow and incremental. They have been undertaken without enough clarity around the core challenges they are trying to address. They have been done through top-down approaches that aren’t built around listening and engaging students. And each effort has layered upon prior ones, creating a byzantine, maze-like system that even policy wonks struggle to keep up with. 

As a result, even with decades of incremental changes, the system still falls dramatically short of what is needed. A low-income student attending a public institution still faces out of pocket costs of roughly $7,500. The Department of Education estimates that one-fifth of student borrowers with federal student loans will go into default. And 40 percent of students who pursue higher education don’t graduate. 

It is time to try new models -- models built from the ground up with a clear articulation of the challenges they are trying to solve and an iterative, student-centered approach to how to get there. And critically, these new models must be centered around equity -- designing around the challenges and needs of underserved populations first rather than the other way around.

This is why BFF exists.