Headline Rewrite

First of all, the current availability of STATE financial aid is a joke. For most students, the only type of state financial aid they've ever received was the Ohio Instructional Grant.

How giving that directly to the student or parent instead of to the school to apply to the cost of higher education helps anyone is completely unanswered by Blackwell. Nor does he address the real issue, why is Ohio tuition at state-supported schools higher and rising at higher rates than other states? After all, one reasons kids like Secretary Blackwell's son have left the State is because they're forced to go to another state for a more affordable or as afforadable education. Once there, they tend not to return to Ohio. Leading Ohio to having one of the worst levels of college education people in the workforce in the nation.

Then Blackwell returns back to his rather bizarre statement about tuition increases. Blackwell's lack of familarity of the issue shines here. He talks as if tuition, which has raised several times faster than the rate of inflation in Ohio, is somehow nothing more than a product of free market forces.

Hey, idiot, tuition isn't about market forces, it's the fee (or tax) that people have to pay to receive a government-sponsored service. If state funding for higher education covered more of the universities operating and capital budgets, there would not be a need to raise tuition. Surprising to Blackwell, tuition has risen as state support for universities has declined. Could that mean that government, and not the free market, has forced universities to raise tuition to recoup lost revenue streams? Nah!

As the article points out, Strickland has proposed an actual way for aid to go to subsize students and not universities and Blackwell doesn't support it, nor does he offer any articulated alternative.

What Blackwell did offer is a Governor who opposes tuition rate caps and will allow tuition to rise freely and just wash his hands and say its the result of "market forces."

He also offered his typical union busting philosophy by promising to remove requirements that university construction projects must pay prevailing wage or that universities do business with more than one competition.

So Ken Blackwell's higher education platform: * University projects will be assigned with less competition and no competitive building meaning that they'll be built using cheap labor with no real savings because there's less competition to get such projects. * Unending tuition increases. * Students will get their state financial check that they'll be able to walk through these new, cheaply constructed building to pay their skyrocketing tuition....

In other words, more of Ohioans college-bound kids will be moving out-of-state for college and unlikely to return leading Ohio to slide further and further economically.

I don't think you can completely dismiss the market aspect of tuition prices. Colleges increase tuition when they think they can get away with it. When I was in college, my school raised its tuition so that it had a price tag similar to elite east coast liberal arts colleges, in hopes that people would think we offered a similarly elite education, all based on price. And it worked. Then when we got a top ranking in US News and World Report, tuition went up again. They knew demand would increase and they charged accordingly. Enrollment didn't go down, and in fact, we got even more selective in our admissions. I know public schools are slightly different but I wouldn't be surprised if they don't to some extent charge what they think the market will bear.

Seems like what Blackwell is proposing is akin to school vouchers, but at the college level. In other words, make the schools compete for students, and the funding follows based on enrollment. That was my read of the newspaper coverage, anyway.