Executive Summary
Today, costs loom large in public discussions about the problems in higher education. Tuition at four-year private colleges has grown at an average annual rate of 2.3% above inflation over the past 10 years. Four-year public and two-year institutions have seen similar trends, with tuition growing at an annual rate of 3.1% and 3.0% beyond inflation, respectively. Many students borrow to meet the cost of attending college. In doing so, they assume the risk that their earnings after graduation will be sufficient to enable repayment or, even more fundamentally, to justify the cost of attending college in the first place, regardless of how the college education was paid for.
There are a number of initiatives that postsecondary education institutions are undertaking to lower student financial risks. Some colleges, for example, offer on-time graduation guarantees or, failing that, no-cost continuing enrollment. Some coding academies guarantee job placement. Other colleges offer income-share agreements, which lower the future burden of debt repayment. The focus of this paper is loan repayment guarantees-which as many as 120 undergraduate colleges are currently offering their students.
Introduction
I first became interested in the idea of guarantees in higher education in 2015 at a meeting of Michigan Independent Colleges & Universities, which represents the state’s private, not-for-profit colleges. After a presentation of my research on student loans, Jeffrey Docking, president of Adrian College, explained that his institution had launched a program that would help graduates make their student loan payments if they didn’t land a high-enough-paying job after graduation.Continue reading