It’s one thing to entice promising students to stay in Massachusetts by giving them free tuition at state colleges. But making sure those colleges serve them well is a much harder problem. The Commonwealth has yet to solve that problem, and the deficiencies of a popular scholarship program point to the enormous challenges facing public higher education in Massachusetts.
In theory, who could find fault with the Adams Scholarship program, which waives tuition at in-state public colleges for students who do well on the state-mandated MCAS test? But according to new research by Sarah Cohodes and my colleague Joshua Goodman, Adams Scholarship winners go to less-competitive colleges, with lower average SAT scores, than they might otherwise have attended. Worse yet, they don’t save much money.
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Sadly, in lean economic times it is unlikely that the public universities will receive any additional public support. I have always found it ironic that in-state tuition, fees, and room and board at U-Mass Amherst is roughly the same as the out-of-state equivalent at the N.Y. State Universities (I have had children at both). Despite having schools like Cornell and Columbia, N.Y. has funded its higher education system so that its residents can obtain a high-quality college education at a reasonable cost. Had U-Mass been less expensive my child might have stayed there despite some unhappiness, but given that it was already costly he had no real inscentive to stick it out, and transferred to an out-of-state school where he is happier.