Canadians have few – if any – original ideas when it comes to education.  Generally speaking, we tend to reuse American ideas a few years after the’ve gone viral down south.  But what with all these interwebs and the Twitter these days, the lag time on this is getting shorter and shorter.  That’s why it’s definitely worth paying close attention to the recent Obama initiative on college costs: there are a lot of themes in that plan which have resonance here, and it’s likely that we’ll be hearing about them from both sides of the border soon enough.

Basically, Obama wants to keep the price of higher education down.  For years, Washington has tried to do this by increasing student aid, or providing tax credits, or what have you.  And they’ve actually been largely successful in doing so, at least for lower-income students, as the data from Matt Bruenig shows, here.  But this strategy is costing the US Government loadsadough, and it has started to dawn on them that Reagan-era Education Secretary, William Bennett, might have been right when he said that student aid just ends up raising tuition (as a side note, one of the most fascinating things in the US scene over the last two years has been the conversion of all the lefty education types into believers of the Bennett hypothesis).  So they’ve moved on to bigger fry.  They don’t just want to get prices down.  They want to get costs down.

This, as Joe Biden once almost said, is a big freaking deal.  No higher education system in the western world has ever succeeded in getting its costs down.  What with the cost disease and all, the only way costs go is up.  Unless of course you start reducing the price of labour.

So, how does he plan on getting costs down?  Well, he wants more experimentation with delivery methods.  MOOCs and Competency-based learning (CBL) are clearly big parts of that.  And he’s prepared to spend a quarter of a billion to fund this kind of experimentation in order to find out what works and what doesn’t (some governments still do believe in evidence-based policy, apparently).

That’s the easy bit.  The trickier stuff involves penalizing institutions that do not provide “value-for-money”.  The US Government plans to come up with a rating system for institutions, based on: Accessibility (the percentage of its students receiving Pell Grants), Affordability (some combination of tuition, scholarships, and financial aid), and Outcomes (graduation rates, advanced degrees, and the salaries earned by graduates).  Institutions that don’t score well on this rating will see federal funding reduced via a decrease in their students’ eligibility for student aid.

Sound crazy?  It kind of is.  More on this tomorrow.