College Guide

Did You Graduate in Four Years? Congratulations

2013-05-22T16:18:14Z

For the U.S. college students who will be paying for a four-year bachelor’s degree long after graduation day, here’s some consolation: At least it didn’t take you six or eight years.

College is expensive, yet unpredictably so. Some students pay little for degrees from elite private institutions, after tuition discounts and financial aid. Many of their peers, however, will pay far more than they expected for lower-cost universities.

A big reason for this is the increasing number of years it takes to earn a degree. Instead of doing something about this troubling trend, presidents of many public universities are encouraging it. Four-year degrees are passe. More and more often, administrators want to draw attention to six- or even eight-year graduation rates, as if this was the new normal.

The U.S. Education Department reports the percentage of college students who graduate within four, five or six years. The national data are embarrassing -- 34 percent of those who earn a bachelor’s degree need a fifth or sixth year to do it.

Many schools, ashamed by their low numbers, have pressed for a more liberal definition of graduation. And the Education Department, seemingly more interested in placating colleges than providing useful information to students, has now dropped the somewhat-useful five-year graduation standard on its College Navigator website and included an eight-year rate. Why stop there -- why not a 25- or 50-year graduation rate? If you tell an applicant that “70 percent of our students graduate in eight years,” is that really useful information?

Cheaper Ivies

Elite private schools can cost far less relative to public schools, not only because of the top schools’ generous aid, but also because the students mostly graduate in the advertised four years, while those at state schools don’t.

I looked at 20 elite private schools (the Ivy League colleges and others, including Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and calculated that 87 percent of the students in the median Class of 2011 had graduated in four years, and 95 percent in six years. I then took an unbiased sample of 20 lower-quality state universities (one of every 12 from the 248 state schools that Forbes magazine ranks). At the state schools, 25 percent of students typically graduated in four years, and 55 percent in six. More strikingly, the probability of dropping out was vastly greater at the state schools.

Seven years of tuition costs roughly 75 percent more than four years’ worth does, and the income lost from not graduating in four years probably exceeds $100,000.

The implicit flouting of the time-is-money rule is starting to be more obvious. Total university enrollments have stopped growing as perceived costs rise relative to perceived benefits. Talk of three-year bachelor degrees has grown. They are the standard in Europe now.

(Even more bold talk of shortening the degree is occurring at law schools. I attended an American Bar Association meeting recently where serious mention was made of the possibility of a two-year law degree. The basic elements of a U.S. legal education can be taught in two years, and the extra year of theoretical or highly specialized courses may not be necessary. Could we not offer a five-year combined undergraduate and law degree?)

While the Education Department moves to provide less useful real-world data, a bipartisan congressional effort is growing to force colleges to give prospective students more helpful information than eight-year graduation rates.

More Openness

A measure in the Senate would give students post-graduation salary information by major and even provide a federal “unit record” database -- tracking students from college into the workforce -- that would provide much better analysis of the performance of individual schools.

Colleges have successfully warded off the unit-records approach, even getting it outlawed in 2008 on the bogus grounds that individuals’ privacy would be compromised. The schools’ real fear is of being explicitly compared with competitors. Universities want to keep living the good life, with lots of public subsidies, rising salaries for top administrators and little accountability or exposure to market forces. For evidence of this, look no further than the acceptance of an eight-year undergraduate degree.

Michelle Rhee's Blinders

2013-05-22T02:57:06Z

Former Washington, DC schools superintendent Michelle Rhee is a controversial figure. Originally touted (on both the left and right) as the person who could save the capital’s schools, her standardized test based decision making, and her apparent eagerness to fire educators, quickly earned the ire of the teachers unions. This fight with the Washington Teachers Union probably cost former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty his reelection, and it certainly cost Rhee her job. Since then she’s founded Student First, a nonprofit devoted to “reform[ing] America's public education and keep[ing] our best teachers in the classroom,” but closely identified with fairly transparent efforts to destroy collective bargaining rights for teachers. Rhee has a new book out, Radical. Nicholas Lemann, dean Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and a former Monthly editor, reviews it at The New Republic. An interesting point that Lemann makes about Rhee’s attitude, and by extension that of many school reformers in the 2000s, is that her take on school improvement ignores, practically on purpose, the real history of public schools. As he writes:

But if the world of the more than fifty million Americans who attend or work in public schools is terra incognita to you, then the narrative of a system caught in a death spiral unless something is done right now will be appealing, and the reform movement’s blowtorch language of moral urgency will feel like an unavoidable and principled choice, given the circumstances. It is a measure of the larger social and economic chasm that has opened in the United States over the last generation that the movement has so little ability to establish a civil interaction with public-school teachers, a group made up of millions of people mainly from blue-collar backgrounds, some of whose leadership (such as Albert Shanker, Randi Weingarten’s mentor) was working aggressively and decades ago on the issues that concern education reformers now. The quasi-essentialist idea that teachers are either “great” or should be fired, which pervades Rhee’s book and the movement generally, may be emotionally satisfying, but it utterly fails to capture what would really help in an enormous system. Making most good teachers better, in the manner of Rhee when she was teaching, would be far more useful than focusing exclusively on the tails of the bell curve.

All of this has little to do with whether or not her reforms worked—I’ve pointed out before that she ran the DC school system for such a brief period of time that we’ll really never know whether or not she did a good job—but Lemann provides an important look at what her reforms are really about. And it looks essentially like an effort of carpet bomb America’s school system. It’s worth checking out the whole review above, since it touches on many aspects of school reform, in a way that seems essentially fair to what Rhee is really trying to do. But an important point to emphasize is that today’s school reform movement is essentially ahistorical. As Lemann explains:

You’d never know from most education-reform discourse that anybody before the current movement came along ever cared about the quality of public education. (Remember that the reason both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush became president was that, as governors, they successfully established teacher-accountability regimes that were accomplished in ways that got them reelected and established them as plausible national figures. Rhee treats Clinton as someone who doesn’t have the guts to embrace the cause, and doesn’t even mention Bush.) You’d never know that unionization and school quality are consistent in most of the country (including Washington’s affluent Ward 3) and the world. You’d never know that the research results on charter schools are decidedly mixed. You’d never know that empowered and generally anti-union parents’ and employers’ organizations have been around for decades.

And yet, somehow, these people are all consigned in the Rhee storyline of school quality as just “the status quo” opposed to making meaningful reform. In fact, the history of American public schools has been one of continual reform in the hopes of achieving something better. Rhee, in fact, is just another one of those reformers, but is there any reason to think her tactics will be any more effective?

Fashion College, for Fun and Profit (and Just for Fun and Profit)

2013-05-20T19:25:54Z

Among the more controversial aspects of young adult training, two things stick out as particularly offensive, and perhaps mutually reinforcing: overpriced schools and the scarcity of good jobs. And now, at long last, we’ve got an institution of higher learning that seems to combine both of these things, pretty overtly. From the New York Times comes news of a school, of sorts, that offers really high-priced training that doesn’t seem to train one for anything:

[Zuzanna] Ciszewska Ciszewska is one of the first 45 students at the Conde Nast College of Fashion and Design, enrolled in a 10-week course meant to introduce them to topics like the fashion calendar, the history of fashion, important designers, fashion journalism, retail, business, marketing and public relations.

Also offered is the Conde Nast name and the promise of an association with the company responsible for such fashion bibles as Vogue, Glamour, Allure, GQ and Women’s Wear Daily.

But that’s it, just “the promise of an association.” Conde Nast editor Susie Forbes, who is the college’s principal, explained to the Times that,

It was important for prospective students to understand that while their tuition bought them a front-row seat in the world of fashion, it would not buy them a job or even an internship at a Conde Nast publication. “We’re not a feeder school for Conde Nast. Our editors and publishers don’t want to feel obliged to take our students,” Ms. Forbes said.

For a 10-week course CNCFD costs $8,500. Farhana Nazir, a blogger for My Fashion Life, wrote that the high tuition (from which the company is totally earning a profit) seemed hard to justify and wondered if the fashion school “further reinforce[d] the idea that a fashion education is only for the privileged?” Well of course a fashion education is only for the privileged. This is hardly a debatable point. What seems to be particularly troublesome about this one is that the college appears to be fashion education for no specific vocational purpose at all. An education for the privileged is one thing, but even the privileged want real careers.

College Enrollment Declines, and That's a Good Thing

2013-05-20T18:59:56Z

Fewer people are attending college. From the Huffington Post comes news that college enrollment has declined, dramatically, from last year. According to the article:

A report released by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center Thursday revealed a 2.3 percent dip in students choosing to attend college during the spring of 2013. This year’s numbers represent a big leap from last spring, when enrollment only declined 0.3 percent from the previous year.

But this does not mean that high school students are deciding to skip college. In fact, this enrollment decline is probably a sign that things are improving.

The decline in college enrollment can be attributed to the improving economy, which has allowed more students to return to the workforce, according to a press release from the organization.

That’s because it appears to be a drop in attendance of nontraditional students, who are actually the majority of those enrolled in college. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center explains that

Enrollment declined for every type of university besides four-year nonprofit universities, which had an enrollment increase of 0.5 percent since spring of last year. Four-year for-profit colleges experienced the biggest decline in enrollment, with 8.7 percent fewer students matriculating.

Community colleges reported an enrollment decline of 3.6 percent. Community colleges and for-profit schools are the institutions sought out by older students looking to improve their skills to get better jobs. But traditional students just out of high school still seem to be flocking to attend college.

The Importance of What You Measure

2013-05-17T19:42:39Z

Check out this piece today by Robert Reischauer and Michael McPherson. Reischauer, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, and McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation, argued that one of the major problems for education reform is the way we collect data. It's important to measure outcomes, they write--

If you don’t track your performance, you can’t tell whether you’re improving, and you have no reliable way to know if your improvement strategies are having the desired effects. Resistance to measurement can often reflect reluctance to face up to the need for sometimes difficult, but vitally important, institutional change.

--but just because you're measuring something doesn't mean that thing is valid or useful. A big problem arises in attempts to measure college performance. The college graduation rate is low, so it makes sense to evaluate (and presumably reward and punish) institutions of higher learning on their graduation rates. But such performance measures could be very tricky:

Some have suggested that federal and state policy should provide financial incentives for colleges that improve their graduation rates. But if we reward colleges for improving their graduation rates, college administrators may respond by simply reducing admissions of students who face significant academic challenges. If all colleges were to follow such a policy, they all might wind up with higher graduation rates, but the total number of students graduating would be smaller and many young people would be denied an opportunity for economic and social mobility.

Another risk in rewarding colleges for graduating more students is that such a policy may induce them to lower their standards. Most colleges have strong internal checks and balances to guard against that response, but nonetheless there is a real risk of erosion over time.

There are ways around these problems, for sure--Reischauer and McPherson recommend adjusting the graduation rate to account student background and tracking average earnings graduates and admissions rates to graduate school--but it's important to design measurement systems to keep such things in mind. Measurement is only useful if it leads to real performance improvement. Anything else is pretty much a waste of effort.

You Want to Know What Competition in Education Will Do? Look at Chile.

2013-05-17T17:51:06Z

One of the major themes in American education reform of the last 20 years is the idea of improving education quality by introducing more competition. Business-style freemarketism will force schools to improve, because, if people have more options they’ll demand better performance. This is the theory behind primary and secondary reform initiatives like vouchers and charter schools, and also higher education ideas like for-profit colleges and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). As Brian Mitchell writes at Today’s Campus:

Within higher education, technology has introduced an entirely new level of competition whose outcomes are not yet fully understood. Cash-strapped families find the strategy behind Coursera, Udacity and edX enormously appealing.

While it’s true that the outcomes of completion “are not fully understood”, it shouldn’t be that big a mystery. In fact, one country made an enthusiastic attempt to introduce market forces in its education system. It didn’t work out very well. Lili Loofbourow has a fascinating piece in the latest issue of Boston Review looking at Chile’s policy of privatizing education. It’s really pretty scary:

During the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, education, previously considered a public good, was commodified and repackaged as a private investment yielding purely private gains. But since student protests began in 2006, Chileans have been trying to get their education back.

Pinochet’s neoliberal dream was that the free market would optimize education and wean educational institutions off state support. Military “rectors” were appointed to the universities and charged with purging them of dissenting faculty and students. Over time, funding for public education was systematically slashed in order to create an educational vacuum that could be filled by private enterprise.

And filled it was. But private enterprise didn’t, it turned out, result in higher quality. But more on that later.

[Private enterprise] makes sense if one regards education as a privilege rather than a need, and Pinochet did: he recast secondary and higher education as non-essential, matters for individual choice. His 1979 Presidential Directive on National Education, which set out his entire educational program, stipulates that while primary education is necessary, secondary and university education should be regarded as atypical and even luxurious: these are “the exception for young people,” Pinochet wrote, “and those who enjoy [secondary or higher education] must earn it with effort and pay for it” or compensate the “national community” in some other way.

Wow. There’s really nothing like hearing American education reformers’ talking points regurgitated by a brutal foreign dictatorship. And so what happened? First, Pinochet gutted the public university system. As one of his advisors explained “None of the existing eight universities find themselves subject to competitive challenges between themselves since they are assured financial support by the state budget.” Despite Pinochet stepping down in the 90s, his reform plan is still essentially in place.

Three decades later, Pinochet’s neoliberal model has gone mostly unchecked, and “indirect control” still aptly describes the relationship between the state and higher education in Chile. The government has delegated regulation and oversight to the market and minimized legal obstacles to the establishment of private universities. The country is now awash in universities, institutes, and centers for technical learning. Their number exploded from eight in 1980 to a peak of 310 in 1990. In 2012 there were 174.

But completion doesn’t really appear to have improved quality.

These institutions certainly compete for students’ money. Private universities advertise on television, in newspapers, on the subway, on billboards; their ads are as familiar as Coca-Cola’s. But the schools don’t compete in the way Guzmán envisioned. The institutions producing the best research and maintaining the highest academic standards continued to be Chile’s traditional universities, most of which are public and pre-date the neoliberal model.

Sound familiar? Adjusted for income Chile now has the most expensive higher education system in the world. We have the second most expensive system.

In 1980 the military regime implemented vouchers. The vouchers would theoretically empower any student to choose between a public school or any of a large number of government-subsidized private schools. The new system was intended to promote competition between schools and to stimulate the public schools to improve.

But that’s not what happened. What occurred was that the professional families basically exited the public school system altogether.

Poorer students, for whom the vouchers were primarily intended, were much less likely to attend the subsidized private schools. Some couldn’t get to schools across town, some couldn’t afford the supplementary fee, and some students or their families simply didn’t understand or act on the opportunity. Swamped with applications, many subsidized schools started “creaming off” and accepting only the highest-achieving students—those who were easiest and cheapest to teach and who most likely could afford to pay. Government funding that had previously gone to public schools was diverted to subsidized private schools, leaving public schools with shrinking budgets to educate the country’s most vulnerable and disadvantaged students.

What’s more, this privatization didn’t seem to make the actual quality of education much better. According to the article, the World Economic Forum ranked Chile’s higher education system 91st out of 144 countries; and math and science education rank 117th. And now, fed up with this complicated, class-reinforcing and overpriced system, the students have started to revolt.

When ongoing university student protests began in May 2011, the demands for change had grown: the students want nothing less than the elimination of the voucher system and the formation of public education. Their slogan is “¡No al lucro!”—“No to profit!” The slogan is explicitly aimed at the private universities and banks profiting from high interest rates and exorbitant surcharges on risk-free government-backed student loans, but it also bluntly rejects the intensely neoliberal foundation on which Chilean society is based.

The student protesters demanded that the universities be investigated for profiteering. They demanded that municipalization be reversed. They demanded free education. They shut down several universities for an entire academic year. They took over government buildings. On June 30, 2011 some 100,000 Chileans turned out in the streets of Santiago and were joined by another 300,000 or so in solidarity marches in the rest of the country.

Chile hasn’t fixed this problem yet, though the government has made some effort to introduce reforms. There is some question, presented in the article, about why this privatization effort has proved so unpopular with the country’s students. Former Chilean president Ricardo Lagos argues that this is simply a stage of development. First Chile needed more access, which the system provided: “The educational problem was coverage. Now the question is quality, and quality is quite different.” No, it’s not that complicated, argues University of Chile sociologist Alberto Mayol. The problem is simply that all this market enthusiasm destroyed the country

We are Chileans of an age in which ideas . . . are ‘bought,’ where ‘to cooperate’ means to be dim or naïve (because to be intelligent is to be selfish), where achieving an object regardless of the means is ‘making it,’ and where being a millionaire is synonymous with a high intellectual capacity.

And that’s what Chilean students might be protesting. It’s not necessarily that access comes before quality and now it’s time to work on quality. Maybe the problem is that neoliberalism in education is the cause of low quality. Let’s keep this in mind, education reformers. In theory more competition offers all sorts of potential to improve quality. But we can move beyond theory here; we know how this story goes.

The Government's Student Loan "Profit"

2013-05-16T19:32:24Z

Is the federal government making a huge profit on student loans? Are students going broke sending hard-earned cash to the Department of Education? That’s the allegation made by many pundits in reaction to Congressional Budget Office report. As Mandi Woodruff over at Business Insider puts it:

Student loan debt is now one of the Obama Administration's biggest cash cows.

The government is poised to pocket a record $51 billion profit from federal student loan borrowers this year…. That's roughly 40% higher than the CBO's original forecast in February, $35.5 billion.

Well technically, yes, but it’s not a revelation of some huge government scam. The federal government is supposed to make money off student loan interest; that’s how it can keep loaning out money to allow students to pay for college. The reason the government is taking in more money in student loans than the CBO projected is probably because more former students are making payments on their loans than projected, because the economy improved. Part of the reason government appears to make such an awesome profit, Andrew Kelly at The Atlantic points out, is that the federal government has to take on substantial risk in loaning out money for education. That’s because it must loan to everyone, regardless of his ability to pay. So sure, the federal government is making a huge profit lately, but that's because it also has the potential to take such a huge loss.

The Sexual Harassment Police

2013-05-16T18:56:21Z

In an effort to curtail sexual abuse on campus the Obama administration is working on a new policy on harassment. This comes after widespread revelations of colleges (e.g. the University of Montana and Yale) failing to address or report sexual crimes. The new policy, according to a piece at The Atlantic by Wendy Kaminer (right), looks like this:

In a joint letter to the University of Montana, (intended as "a blueprint" for campus administrators nationwide) the Justice Department (DOJ) and the Education's Department's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) define sexual harassment as "unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature," verbal or nonverbal, including "unwelcome sexual advances or acts of sexual assaults." Conduct (verbal or non-verbal) need not be "objectively offensive" to constitute harassment, the letter warns, ignoring federal court rulings on harassment, as well as common sense. If a student feels harassed, she may be harassed, regardless of the reasonableness of her feelings, and school administrators may be legally required to discipline her "harasser."

This definition is far too broad, according to Kaminer, because such a permissive policy would potentially deem things like a campus performance of "The Vagina Monologues," a classroom lecture on Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and a request for a date that is not welcomed by the recipient “sexual harassment.” There’s a reason such a policy might seem like a positive step. Real sexual harassment is an incredibly destructive and humiliating thing, and shuts down campus discourse and the real proliferation of ideas. But this new definition is troublesome, Kaminer writes, because,

The stated goal of this policy is stemming discrimination, but the inevitable result will be advancing it, in the form of content based prohibitions on speech. When people demand censorship of "unwelcome" speech, they're usually demanding censorship of the speech that they find unwelcome. They usually seek to silence their political or ideological opponents, not their friends—all in the name of some greater good.

What’s more, college students and administrators aren’t stupid, and they all probably have some idea what real sexual harassment looks like. Enacting such a broad and absurd definition could well cause real sexual harassment to go unnoticed, since the policy would prove so difficult to enforce. If everything is defined as harassment, after all, nothing really is.

Understanding Niall Ferguson

2013-05-16T15:39:41Z

Niall Ferguson is a history professor who also gives paid lectures, including a notorious recent event where he made an offhand commend dissing John Maynard Keynes for being gay, marrying a ballerina, and talking about poetry. Ferguson later characterized his own remarks as “stupid.”

I blogged a bit about this already, but I just wanted to repeat one point, after reading a couple of comments by some observers who, I think, misunderstood his remarks, taking them more seriously than was appropriate. Tyler Cowen wrote:

For all of the brouhaha over Niall Ferguson, everyone is forgetting what Robert Skidelsky wrote in 1977, Skidelsky too it seems. I don’t agree with either the immigration study or with Ferguson (at all, in either instance), but the response has been a case study in…something or other. There is a glee and also a selectivity to it all which I am uncomfortable with, to say the least.

and this from Eric Alterman:

The best reason to doubt the sincerity of Ferguson’s retraction, however, is his complete lack of any compelling explanation of why he would wish to say such a thing in the first place. He was not drunk or high or on pain medication or even careless in his wording. None of the reasons that can sometimes lead us to say the opposite of what we mean—save perhaps mere sniveling hypocrisy and dishonesty—can be said to apply in this case.

I think the key is this bit from Oliver Berkeman (quoted by Alterman):

There are really only two options. One is that Ferguson didn’t believe what he said, but just says whatever he thinks his audience wants to hear; the other is that he believed it then and still believes it now.

I think it’s mostly the first option. Of course Ferguson says what his audience wants to hear. That’s part of being a public speaker. The trick is to avoid going over the line and saying something that you do not believe. Here’s a simple (but, I think, not unreasonable) model. Suppose you believe 25 things and you have time to say 10 things. Then you can choose the subset of 10 that you will think the audience will most like. But there is the temptation to throw in a couple other juicy bits of red meat that you think will make the crowd happy.

In this case, my guess is that Ferguson thought that a bit of Keynes-bashing would go over well at a conference of financial advisors. But what about the homophobia, the presumably irrelevant bits about ballet and poetry? Here I have no idea. This could be coming from Ferguson’s gut, he may have internalized the fag-bashing attitudes that we were all exposed to in junior high school. Or maybe it was a failed attempt on Ferguson’s part to be a “regular guy.” Maybe it’s a bit of Oxford/Harvard snobbery on Ferguson’s part, that he thinks that a room full of businessmen will respond well to not-so-subtle locker-room-style allusions to sissy stuff? This time, however, rather than establishing Ferguson’s street-cred as a real man, it just embarrassed him. In retrospect, he would’ve been better off with some Henny Youngman-style zingers.

I don’t think Ferguson’s remark was entirely an attempt to please the crowd. As Cowen, Alterman, and others point out, he has a history of personally smearing his political opponents and, in particular, of attributing Keynes’s political and economic attitudes to his sexuality. And, indeed, it’s completely reasonable for a historian to consider such connections. In this case, however, I don’t think Ferguson was making such explorations. The bits about ballet and poetry give it away. He was making an “us vs. them” move. And then, to his dismay, he found out that most people are on the side of “them.”

I completely understand why Ferguson called the move “stupid” and I have every reason to think he was sincere in his regret. I think the commenters quoted above didn’t completely understand this because they treated Ferguson’s original remarks as serious statements by a historian rather than an attempt a crowd-pleasing by someone who was unsuccessfully trying to act like a “regular guy.”

P.S. In answer to the natural question, Why do I care about this?, my response is that I see something of myself in pop-academics such as Ferguson, researchers who also write and speak for popular audiences. Ferguson is of course much more successful at that than I am, but I am aware of the tradeoffs involved in balancing scholarship and communication. [Cross-posted at The Monkey Cage]

Measure What Matters in Education

2013-05-16T00:35:31Z

A hallmark of leading business management and public policy design today is an increased reliance on measuring results. If you don’t track your performance, you can’t tell whether you’re improving, and you have no reliable way to know if your improvement strategies are having the desired effects. Resistance to measurement can often reflect reluctance to face up to the need for sometimes difficult, but vitally important, institutional change. Measuring outcomes badly or incompletely, however, can bring risks and pitfalls of its own. Getting measurement wrong, whether because it is too narrow or too loosely connected to the outcome you really care about, can lead to disappointment or worse. This problem can be exacerbated when rewards or punishments are connected to performance on the measures you are using. In the early days of measuring hospital performance, hospitals were sometimes ranked according to the mortality rates of their patients. Hospital administrators quickly realized that an effective way to lower their mortality rates was simply to reduce the number of severely ill patients they admitted and increase the number in less dire condition. This was hardly the response sought from publicizing hospital mortality rates. Policy makers quickly realized that the smart thing to do was to adjust the mortality rates by the severity of the patient’s condition. A hospital that admits the most challenging late-stage cancer patients with complicating additional conditions will of course have a much higher mortality rate than a hospital that treats largely individuals with early stage cancers and few accompanying problems. The right comparisons are between the survival rates of hospitals whose patients are about equally ill or between hospitals’ risk-adjusted survival rates. An analogous problem arises in higher education. Most Americans would agree that the nation would benefit if more of our young people graduated from college. Some have suggested that federal and state policy should provide financial incentives for colleges that improve their graduation rates. But if we reward colleges for improving their graduation rates, college administrators may respond by simply reducing admissions of students who face significant academic challenges. If all colleges were to follow such a policy, they all might wind up with higher graduation rates, but the total number of students graduating would be smaller and many young people would be denied an opportunity for economic and social mobility. What we need to do is to adjust the graduation rate to account for the types of students entering a particular college. Of course, a college where the vast majority of students drop out, like a hospital where most admitted patients die, is in need of fundamental improvement; modest improvements in its graduation rate wouldn’t be enough to make the college viable. Another risk in rewarding colleges for graduating more students is that such a policy may induce them to lower their standards. Most colleges have strong internal checks and balances to guard against that response, but nonetheless there is a real risk of erosion over time. This is a genuinely challenging problem to deal with, but measures ranging from changes in the average earnings of the college’s graduates and admission rates to graduate school can be used to monitor and address this risk . Policies are clearly needed that make colleges, as well as students, take responsibility for dropouts. To do this we will need to measure more, and develop better measures. We also will need to be smart and innovative in determining where and how best to apply pressure for accountability. But as we go about this important work, we need to observe the same core principle that guides health care itself: “First, do no harm.”

Blaming the Coach for Everything

2013-05-15T19:15:36Z

An Oregon bill scheduled for public hearing today would hold coaches at state universities financially responsible for any damages that occur as a result of violations of National Collegiate Athletic Association rules. According to an article in The Oregonian :

House Bill 3524 provides that coach at public university who intentionally or recklessly commits or causes to be committed major violation of rules of National Collegiate Athletic Association is liable for university's actual damages and attorney fees.

This comes in the wake of an NCAA investigation into recruiting errors by the football program at the University of Oregon. Oregon's football coach, Chip Kelly left the school last year after the NCAA began looking into his program. This is an understandable law proposed, though the actual implications of this bill are a little questionable. Just because it’s a school’s athletic program that’s breaking the rules doesn’t mean it’s the coach who’s entirely at fault. In fact, a look at other colleges with questionable athletic program practices (e.g. Penn State, SUNY Binghamton) reveal that it’s not “rogue coaches” who break the rules; the university itself is often complicit in the scandal. That’s why, of course, the NCAA fines the school when it discovers sports violations; because the school is responsible for how its athletic program operates. [Image via]

Instead of Asking for Education Transparency, Maybe We’ll Just Ask for Another Study About It

2013-05-15T16:13:20Z

For years politicians and education pundits have called for more “transparency” in higher education. What programs graduate their students on time? What colleges produce graduates with the highest salaries? How are students paying back their education loans? Despite years of this stuff, it turns out Congress is still not going to demand that colleges provide this information. Instead, according to Amy Laitinen at the New America Foundation, there’s another call to “study” what data we should be collecting to promote transparency. Really.

Both political parties spent much of last year’s election cycle talking about the need for better college information for students and families. The GOP platform called for greater transparency around “completion rates, repayment rates, future earnings, and other factors that may affect their (college) decisions.” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) put “making it easier for parents and students to make informed decisions about what type of post-high school education is right for them” on his short legislative to-do list. Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC), chair of the House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training, said at a hearing on college data, “We have so much data, and we seem to know so little. What a tragedy for all the money that we’re spending in this country.” President Obama used his State of the Union to unveil a college scorecard that provides comparable, easy-to-understand indicators of college value. Organizations that represent business and students, including the Chamber of Commerce and Young Invincibles, have been calling for better information for students and employers.

So everyone agrees! Republicans and Democrats believe Americans need more information about the cost and outcomes of college. And yet…

But despite this rare bipartisan agreement on the need for better data, and on the already-identified ways to get the data, Representative Messer (R-IN) introduced a bill yesterday that would require the formation of yet another commission to conduct yet another study on what college information is needed, or whether anyone needs it.

Messer’s bill bill, the Improving Postsecondary Education Data for Students Act (H.R. 1949), would not, despite its title, improve postsecondary education data. It would merely “direct the Department of Education to explore opportunities to enhance higher education transparency.” Messer’s bill would require the secretary of education to “convene an Advisory Committee on Improving Postsecondary Education Data to explore opportunities to enhance higher education transparency.” It would also require that committee to “review existing federal, state, institutional, and private-sector transparency initiatives to determine the information that is most helpful to both traditional and non-traditional students, including student veterans.” That magical advisory committee would also “explore whether information about college graduates’ earnings would serve as an effective measure of program quality for prospective students.” The point of this advisory committee is apparently to assist in the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. All of this sounds vaguely reasonable, even to progressive education reformers, but it’s actually useless. If you want better education transparency, demand the information. The last thing America needs is another advisory committee on education transparency.

Star Trek's Lesson for Students: Your Dissertation Topic Doesn't Matter

2013-05-15T13:50:17Z

I recently re-watched "Star Trek" (2009) with my kids. As many others have noted, one of the more clever plot devices in that film was having it begin with a futuristic Romulan vessel coming back through time to destroy an early Federation ship. This not only provided for a solid story but also created an alternate Trek reality, giving the new franchise a chance to build on old characters and plots without being bound by them. The Federation ship that was destroyed turned out to be the USS Kelvin, of course, and one of its victims was First Officer George Kirk, who was about to become James Kirk's father. So we see the effects that the timeline shift had on young Jim, who is now growing up fatherless. This may make him angrier, a bit less disciplined, maybe even more of a womanizer (if that's possible), but he still has his aptitude for command, and he still becomes the Enterprise's captain -- earlier than he would have in the original timeline. Here's another interesting twist: We learn that Christopher Pike (above), the Enterprise's captain prior to Kirk, wrote his dissertation at Starfleet Academy on the destruction of the Kelvin. I have no idea what his dissertation was about in the old timeline, but it was most assuredly on a different topic. And yet we still see him growing up to command Starfleet's flagship. All of which means that your dissertation topic doesn't matter. So don't worry about it. [Cross-posted at Mischiefs of Faction]

Community Colleges Focus on Jobs

2013-05-14T19:05:26Z

Back in 2010, Jamie Merisotis and Stan Jones wrote for this publication about the potential benefits of using community colleges, and federal money, to help get the unemployed back to work. The administration appeared to have listened and the next year the Department of Labor provided money to community colleges for skills development. It seems to have worked pretty well. According to a piece at Inside Higher Ed:

The colleges have also used the money to sharpen their focus on career services. Rather than just trying to help students find jobs as they finish degree programs, each one has hired a full-time “career and college navigator” to lend a hand to students throughout their time on campus.

Because the grants are implemented differently in different states it’s difficult to say exactly how the program has worked for the entire country. But part of what the grants were designed to do was facilitate reforms to get community colleges to focus on workforce development. That's exactly what they’re doing.

The project has led to far more than a smattering of new academic offerings. Over all, the colleges plan to create more than 85 new degree, certificate and noncredit programs in the six industry fields. About 2,000 students are currently enrolled in those programs.

Many of the new credentials are designed to be stackable. Freeman said the manufacturing and health care tracks in particular include a series of certificates and degrees for students to build upon as they progress in their jobs.

The programs certainly haven’t been implemented exactly as Merisotis and Jones recommended. They focused in particular on the scheduling of classes, suggesting that offering classes in all day blocks would improve completion and get students quickly into available jobs. The success of the scheduling plan is sort of difficult to determine now. The continuing sluggishness of the economy also means that employment hasn’t exactly improved dramatically. But as a program itself it looks like the work grants may help community colleges a great deal. Many students are in these institutions specifically to improve their skills to obtain better jobs. The fact that community colleges now see this as a priority means the program, so far, is working as intended.

The Daily Show Does “Scared Straight” on Student Loans

2013-05-14T18:11:00Z

This is hilarious: This might be rather personal. I'm pretty sure most of the Daily Show writers have degrees from liberal arts schools.