Obama Outlines Plan To Curb College Tuition
President puts schools "on notice" that they must find ways to make higher education cheaper.
| Posted Friday, Jan. 27, 2012, at 3:07 PM ET
Photograph by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images.
Speaking to students at the University of Michigan, President Obama on Friday outlined his plans to curb the growing cost of college tuition and warned universities that they must find a way to make higher education more affordable or risk losing federal funding.
“We’re putting colleges on notice, that you can’t assume you’ll just jack up tuition every single year,” Obama told a crowd of roughly 4,000 students. "If you can’t stop tuition going up, your funding from taxpayers will go down. We should push colleges to do better; we should hold them accountable if they don’t."
The Washington Post explains Obama's plan is to boost the amount of federal grant money available in low-interest loans and tethering such funding directly to universities' ability to cut tuition.
The proposal would increase federal investment in the Perkins loan program from $1 billion to $8 billion and change how the money is handed out so that schools would be rewarded based on their ability to offer relatively lower tuition prices. White House officials stress that the plan wouldn't cost taxpayers any more because the students pay off the federal loans with interest.
