VP Biden talks tuition decreases

For many college students across the nation, the most pressing question surrounding their college educations is not if they are learning enough, but if they are paying too much for their degree.

President Barack Obama recently unveiled a new college affordability initiative during his State of the Union address. The administration outlined a plan to increase the value of individual Pell Grants, create a provision that will prevent graduates from paying more than 10 percent of their disposable income toward loans and double the number of work-study programs available to students.

"It is in the overwhelming interest of this country that everybody who is able to get a college degree get one," said

Vice President Joe Biden in a conference call with college newspapers Thursday.

Biden said he and the president made the decision to allocate $40 billion to Pell Grants and another $20 billion to $10,00 lifetime tax credits during the first few months of the Obama administration.

"Right now, at a time when we're competing in the world and 62 percent of all the jobs in the next decade are going to require a degree beyond high school, it makes no sense to price kids out of school," Biden said.

The price of tuition at public universities has risen nearly 300 percent in the last 20 years, Biden said. The average cost of tuition and fees for a four-year college is $8,244 per year for in-state students, and the average surcharge for full-time out-of-state students is $12,526. The in-state tuition cost of WVU is $5,674, and out-of-state students are charged $17,884 per year.

"We just can't keep up if we keep escalating the price that much, no matter what aid we give," Biden said. "We also need universities like each of yours to become more efficient, think more creatively about how to cut costs, and we're ready to back that up by steering a portion of the federal dollars to schools."

The federal initiative will include an increase in campus-based Perkins loans, which are low-interest federal loans offered at 1,700 higher-education institutions in the U.S. The increase will be targeted at schools to stall the growth of tuition prices.

Biden said increases in the level of federal aid awarded through the new initiative will equal nearly $10 billion. The initiative will also promote a $1 billion "Race to the Top" competition to encourage states to promote college completion as well as developing a "scorecard" for colleges to determine the graduation rates, learning and post-graduation salaries of colleges.

"If you find there's a university where they're only graduating 45 percent of the people who are enrolled or 60 percent of the people who are enrolled, then something's going on," Biden said. "Either they're enrolling people who aren't qualified in the first place and taking their early money or they don't have a system by which they can encourage students to stay and help them get through."

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said the focus of the initiative was not only to increase the affordability and accessibility of education but also to continue to promote quality higher education standards.

"I think the key thing here is shared responsibility, and so we need universities to do the right thing in tough economic times and not just keep down costs but make sure students are getting a great value, that they're graduating," Duncan said. "It's not just access; it's all about attainment. We want to challenge states to continue to invest in education, and we have to be a political partner. We have to walk the walk here."