Students cheered his oratory on the importance of a college degree, expanded student aid, affordable college costs — and, of course, his many references to Michigan, a key swing state.  But out in the world, the reaction to the president’s proposals — tying colleges’ eligibility for certain federal aid programs to their affordability and outcomes — was far more tempered.  Most people stressed that they, too, wanted to make college education more affordable. But when it came to the particulars of the plan — and paying for it — there was no consensus.  “The idea of helping students and families pay for college is very popular,” said Terry W. Hartle, vice president of the American Council on Education. “On the other hand, nobody would bet on Congress passing much of anything this year, given the poisonous political atmosphere we are living in. The problem is, many of the president’s ideas are fairly pricey.”  Briefing reporters on Friday afternoon, Department of Education officials said they would release information next month on how the plan could be financed, as part of the budget process.  Generally, in academia, there was strong support for the president’s plan to double work-study jobs and to expand the pool of money available for Perkins loans.  And some leaders, like Bill Powers, president of the University of Texas, liked the administration’s idea of tying aid to results.  “He’s proposing a form of performance funding for a portion of federal spending, and my view is that, whatever level of funding we’re talking about, that’s the approach we ought to take,” he said.  But others said they felt public higher education would suffer from tuition increases that were an inevitable result of state budget cuts. And while they appreciated the president’s advocacy for affordable higher education, many were wary of his plan.  “The answer is not going to come from more federal controls on colleges or states, or by telling families to judge the value of an education by the amount young graduates earn in the first few years after they graduate,” said David L. Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.  He warned of unintended consequences: If colleges are forced to cut corners, educational quality could decline.  In Congress, reaction to the plan seemed to divide along party lines.  “The president is saying that people can’t afford to go to college anymore, and that just simply is not true,” said Representative Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who is chairwoman of the House Higher Education subcommittee. “Tuition is too high at most schools, but it isn’t the job of the federal government to punish those schools. It’s very arbitrary, and the president sounds like a dictator.”  Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, a Republican and a former federal secretary of education, offered his own ideas of improving academic efficiency: “I’ve suggested that they could offer three-year degrees to some students. Colleges could also operate more in the summertime, which would make more efficient use of campuses and reduce their costs.”  Many Democrats offered only the blandest of statements praising the president for tackling the affordability issue. “The president’s higher education proposal rightly calls on colleges, universities and states to maintain a commitment to keep college costs low making it easier for American families and their children to afford a college education,” Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, said in a statement.  Past efforts to rein in college costs have not fared well on Capitol Hill. Nine years ago, Representative Howard P. McKeon, a California Republican, proposed to cap colleges’ tuition increases at twice the rate of inflation, with sanctions including the loss of federal aid, but colleges protested, and the bill died in committee.  At the American Council on Education, there are concerns that Mr. Obama’s proposal to track outcomes by collecting information on graduates’ debt and earnings would harm institutions that train Head Start teachers and other important but low-paid professionals, while rewarding business schools.  Molly Corbett Broad, the council’s president, said many complex questions remained to be answered, among them, how affordability should be judged, and what the effect would be on public institutions that had had to raise tuition because of deep state funding cuts.  Furthermore, she said, even if the administration’s Race to the Top grant competition may have worked in leveraging change in K-12 schools, higher education is so different that it is not clear that the president’s proposal for a similar competition to spur state higher-education reform would be a good tool.  “The devil’s in the details,” she said. “And we don’t know the details yet.”
While making college more affordable is a notion nearly everyone supports, consensus is more elusive on how to actually accomplish it.