On Monday, President Obama met with a dozen college presidents and leaders from two nonprofit education organizations about how to lower the rising costs of college tuition in America and how to improve graduation rates.
In the past few months, the cost of higher education has become an issue of the Occupy movement, and it’s an issue that President Obama has decided to tackle in response to the movement. According to the College Board, tuition and fees at public universities in the U.S. have increased by 8.3 percent this year to an average of $8,244 while the cost of private education has increased 4.5 percent, bringing those schools to an average tuition of $28,500.
In the meeting, Obama spent about an hour with the educators. The group included presidents from California State University, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, among others.
Jamie Merisotis, the president of the Lumina Foundation, which works to increase the number of college graduates, felt that the meeting was very productive. “We discussed three core issues,” Mr. Merisotis said. “One was responsibility for costs, and what the federal government can do to support innovation with incentive money. We talked a lot about increasing accountability in student aid. And third, there was conversation about what degrees mean.”
Many of the meeting’s participants also agreed that additional financing for education would be hard to come by in the next few years, meaning that it is important to improve the affordability and graduation rates of universities by using new and creative methods.
So what do you think? If you could meet with President Obama, what would you have to tell him? How can we make the system of higher education in America more affordable and more effective?
Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/education/obama-meets-with-college-lea…
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-05/obama-meets-with-college-leader…