Of Dollars and Sense: Does College Cost Too Much? Followup

March 2-3, 2007- Chapel Hill, N.C.

This higher ed meeting was held March 2-3 in Chapel Hill, N.C. Panel topics included the debate of merit-based aid versus need-based aid, tuition discounting, why college costs so much and the effects, if any, of the report from the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Read the brochure here.Browse the agenda here.Biographies of the speakers are posted here.

Presentations:

• DennisJones of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems and Travis Reindl of Jobs for the Future presented "The Case for Improved Productivity."The presentation explains how the United States compares to other countries for the number of adults with college degrees, how states compare to each other, why it matters and how states could boost those numbers.
• Carolyn Jarmon of the National Center for Academic Transformation makes another case-- that colleges can use technology to spend less and teach more effectively in her presentation, "Improving Learning and Reducing Costs: The Case for Redesign."
• Willis Hulings, president and CEO of TERI, focuses on the trend of students using private loans to finance their education in his presentation, "Private Loans: A Market Perspective."
• Will Doyle of Vanderbilt University describes how state scholarship programs that award students based on merit rather than financialneed are faring in his presentation, "Lottery Scholarships: Lessons Learned."
• Tamera Briones, chief executive officer of Education Finance Partners, a San Francisco-based company that provides loans to students to cover their college costs, discussed the private loan process in "Bridging the Gap to Higher Education Financing: An Overview of the Private Student Loans."

Stories:

• Read "Putting Low Income Students at Risk,"a story that Stephen Burd posted on the Higher Ed Watch Blog about college students and private loans following this seminar. In it,Burd dispels the myth that such high-cost loans are only going to students from the middle- and upper-class families. Low-income students are taking the loans out, too, often as a result of deals between higher education institutions and private lenders.