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• July 30, 2010 04:05 PM Magical Solutions to California’s Higher Education Problems

  

  California gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown has some big ideas about how to improve public higher education in his state. According to an article by Seema Mehta in the Los Angeles Times:

  Brown said the state’s master plan for higher education, which was created in 1960 to assure every high school graduate would have access to higher education, needs to be revisited. He called for increasing the amount of spending on colleges…. He also proposed aligning community colleges with the UC and Cal State schools to ease transfers.

  How will he accomplish these goals? While Brown, a Democrat, cautions that “there is no silver bullet that will fix everything,” he also appears to provide the silver bullet. According to the article, Brown wants to increase spending on colleges by “pursuing savings in the state’s prisons.”

  This idea, as I’ve pointed out before, is terrible. It’s also very difficult.

  The reason California prisons are so expensive has a lot to do with the fact that California prison guards are the highest-paid in the country. This is due to the strength of their unions. How does Brown plan to take care of that little problem? That leaves what, privatizing prisons?

  Meanwhile, his Republican opponent, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, has another magical “we will save colleges without raising taxes” plan for the Golden State. According to Whitman’s website, she “will invest $1 billion of the savings from her welfare and other budgetary reforms into the UC and CSU systems.” Whitman claims she can save $15 billion by cutting 40000 state jobs and spending less on social welfare programs. [Image via]

  by Daniel Luzer tags California, political, state universities

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• July 30, 2010 03:12 PM Regret the Error?

  From the department of Things the Journalists Got Wrong comes news of the latest higher education lie. That’s the one about the decline in the number of low-income students going to college. It’s actually not true. The error comes from a July 7 Wall Street Journal article by Emmeline Zhao that warned,

  Fewer low- and moderate-income high school graduates are attending college in America, and fewer are graduating.

  Enrollment in four-year colleges was 40% in 2004 for low-income students, down from 54% in 1992, and 53% in 2004 for moderate-income students, down from 59% over the same period, according to a report recently submitted to Congress by the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance.

  Eh, not really. As low-income students are going to college at higher rates than they ever were, and the rate is increasing. Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson set the record straight in an article they wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education:

  The Advisory Committee reported that among those who had taken Algebra II, the proportion of low- and moderate-income students enrolling in four-year colleges immediately after high school was much lower in 2004 than in 1992. The percentages enrolling in two-year and other institutions were up, so the overall college enrollment rate was down only slightly.

  Census data reveal that the immediate enrollment rate for all high school graduates from the lowest-income quartile was 41% in 1992, 53% in 2003, 48% in 2004, 54% in 2005, and 56% in 2008. These figures include two-year colleges and other postsecondary institutions, and of course include students with lower levels of academic preparation.

  As Baum and McPherson point out, it’s obviously difficult to summarize a complicated report in a catchy headline, but come on. The bigger trouble here appears to be that the actual study revealed something that’s maybe not so interesting or surprising. While there does appear to be a shift away from four-year schools, college attendance rates among low-income Americans go up a little bit every year.

  Read the actual report from the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance here.

  by Daniel Luzer tags college attendance, journalism

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• July 30, 2010 11:00 AM No MCATs for McGill

  The Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) is pretty much essential for admission to medical school. Virtually all medical schools in the U.S. and Canada require applicants to submit MCAT scores for admission. Well not the Faculty of Medicine at Montreal’s McGill University. According to an article by Karen Seidman in the Montreal Gazette

  Beginning this month, Canadian students who studied at a Canadian university before applying to McGill medical school will no longer be required to write the MCAT -the widely used admissions test that measures students in physical sciences, verbal reasoning, biological sciences and a written sample. Students typically spend about three months studying for the exam.

  The university apparently made this decision in an effort to recruit more French-speaking students. There is no French-language equivalent of the MCAT.

  Despite the fact that it’s located in Canada’s French-speaking province, McGill, founded in 1821 with a bequest from a Scottish-born businessman, is essentially an English-language institution. Less than 18 percent of McGill students speak French as their first language.

  by Daniel Luzer tags international, medical school, standardized testing

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• July 30, 2010 10:00 AM College Administrators Not Worried About Binge Drinking

  

  American college students are total drunks. That’s not news but, according to an article by Robert Preidt in USA Today, colleges don’t seem too worried about it. As Preidt writes, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota, Toben Nelson, recently conducted a survey of university administrators and,

  asked if they were following recommendations from the U.S. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s college drinking task force 2002 report on the best strategies for reducing student drinking.

  [Nelson’s] 2008 survey showed there was “very little action on the task force recommendations and very little implementation,” Nelson said in a news release from the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. “Very few had even had conversations in the communities.” Nelson and colleagues found that only one-third of college communities performed compliance checks for illegal alcohol sales, only 15% mandated server training, only 7% restricted the number of alcohol outlets, and only 2% raised alcohol prices.

  Most of the administrators did say they had heard of the task force report but apparently most didn’t read it or deem it worthy of implementation.

  Still, there seems to be something missing here. How about the colleges that did implement the recommendations. Did things get better?

  Read the abstract of Nelson’s research paper here.[Image via]

  by Daniel Luzer tags alcohol, Minnesota

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• July 29, 2010 03:59 PM Prison College

  Prisoners are anxious to get college degrees, too. From Oklahoma comes news of a surprisingly interest in higher education. According to an article by Sara Plummer in Tulsa World:

  About 40 offenders are enrolled in college courses this summer in both minimum- and medium-security units, and that number will rise to more than 100 in the fall. The students spend about six hours a day in class, and different subjects are taught each day. At least one of those classes, algebra, is funded completely by Tulsa Community College’s Second Chance Scholarship Foundation, which raises money to fund classes and scholarships for offenders, [Dick Conner Correctional Center college coordinator Ida] Doyle said.

  Generous funding is necessary because prisoners, while perhaps theoretically the sort people who might most benefit from additional vocational training, aren’t eligible for financial aid like Pell grants. While the prisoner interviewed for the Plummer story admitted that he first started to take classes in computer information systems simply because he was bored, there’s another reason prisons offer college-level classes: it’s supposed to make prison more effective. As Plummer explains:

  With degrees, the men’s chances of finding work when they are released increase and the chances of them returning to prison decrease, Dyer said. “They’ll be contributing to the economic base, not taking away from it,” she said. “The foundation is helping make these guys not become reoffenders but become taxpayers.

  It’s no doubt a very good thing to offer education to prisoners. Simply providing people with an opportunity to learn and develop new skills should be commended. But the accuracy of Dyer’s assertion is questionable. Being in prison at all tends to act as a major barrier to even the dirtiest and most dangerous forms of employment, whether or not one went to college.

  Unemployment in the United States currently stands at 9.5 percent and news outlets everywhere are running stories about jobless people with master’s degrees. In an economy like this, does getting a college degree while incarcerated even help?

  by Daniel Luzer tags jobs training, Oklahoma, prison

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• July 29, 2010 02:22 PM The End of Sallie Mae?

  

  Sallie Mae, the publicly-traded corporation that makes money servicing more than $180 billion worth of student debt, is considering getting out of the whole education loan business altogether. According to an article by Mark DeCambre in the New York Post:

  Sallie Mae… has tapped Goldman Sachs to help it consider a possible breakup of the company, The Post has learned. The Reston, Va.-based loan originator is working with Goldman to possibly sell or spin off its student-loan servicing business and do the same with its $145 billion government-subsidized loan portfolio. Sallie… also has considered converting part of its platform into a traditional deposit-taking bank, one source told The Post.

  America’s largest student lender, Sallie Mae (its cute, little-old-lady name actually derives from the acronym of the name of the original corporation: Student Loan Marketing Association, or SLMA) received its charter from the federal government in 1972. Back then it was a government-backed entity designed to “help originate affordable student loans.” It later branched out to offer private loans. Sallie Mae became a private company in 2004.

  Though not, it turns out, an entirely successful company. Despite receiving very generous government subsidies, according to the DeCambre article:

  On July 21, the company, offically known as SLM Corp., reported its provision for private credit loan losses in the second quarter jumped 7.4 percent to $349 million and that its private credit charge-offs rose 18.3 percent to $336 million from its first-quarter numbers. Its loan originations fell 16 percent to $3.1 billion.

  This briefly caused stock prices to fall. The company also fought with the Obama administration over direct lending.

  Looks like maybe those student loans aren’t so lucrative anymore. [Image via]

  by Daniel Luzer tags economy, Sallie Mae, student loan industry

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• July 29, 2010 01:39 PM State College University

  

  Yesterday Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick signed a bill to change his state’s colleges, a little bit. According to an article in the Boston Globe:

  Governor Deval Patrick signed a bill today that rebrands the state’s nine public colleges as universities. Supporters of the bill say the change will enable schools to earn more grants, draw more applicants, and make students more attractive to employers.

  As a result of the bill Bridgewater State College, Fitchburg State College, Framingham State College, Salem State College, Westfield State College, and Worcester State College—all of which were founded as normal schools and offered only pedagogy programs until the 1960s—are now universities and have changed their names accordingly.

  Aside from the names, it appears that nothing whatsoever has changed at these schools, which remain structurally identical to the institutions they were before the governor’s signature.

  “This is an historic day for our colleges,” said Frederick Clark of the Council of Presidents of the Massachusetts State Colleges. “As comprehensive institutions offering undergraduate and graduate degrees in a wide range of disciplines, the state colleges all meet nationally recognized criteria of being universities. Now the state has recognized us for what we are.”

  In fact, there is no nationally recognized definition of the term university in the United States. Hell, why not start calling all the public high schools “colleges”? [Image via]

  by Daniel Luzer tags funny, Massachusetts, teacher training

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• July 29, 2010 11:00 AM The Right to Swear

  There’s an update to the truly weird case of a Mississippi community college student suspended from a course for swearing, outside of class. It’s all over.

  On March 29, 2010, Isaac Rosenbloom, an emergency medical technician and student at Hinds Community College in Pearl, Miss., stayed after class with several other students to speak with a professor, Barbara Pyle, a speech instructor. At some point during the discussion Rosenbloom said to another student that his grade in Pyle’s class was “going to fuck up my entire GPA.”

  Pyle began a disciplinary complaint against Rosenbloom. The school found Rosenbloom, who is 31 years old, guilty of “flagrant disrespect” and gave him 12 demerits, three short of suspension. He was also removed from Pyle’s class, which caused him to lose his financial aid. Rosenbloom, who was now effectively no longer a student, contacted the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), an academic free speech advocacy organization. According to FIRE:

  After [HCC President Clyde] Muse failed to respond to FIRE, FIRE obtained the assistance of attorneys Robert B. McDuff and Sibyl Byrd, who took up Rosenbloom’s case and secured a settlement in his favor. HCC has removed the finding and demerits from Rosenbloom’s record and has restored his financial aid. McDuff is a civil rights and criminal defense attorney practicing in Jackson.

  Well good for Rosenbloom. FIRE’s complaint, however, was:

  not only that HCC’s policy is unconstitutional but also that it was applied unconstitutionally to punish Rosenbloom for his protected speech outside of class. In contravention of the First Amendment, HCC bans “public profanity, cursing and vulgarity,” assessing a fine of $25 for the first offense, $50 plus ten to fifteen demerits for the second offense, and suspension for the third offense.

  Rosenbloom got his financial aid back, but the rule against swearing, or something, remains in place at HCC.

  by Daniel Luzer tags community college, free speech, Mississippi

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• July 29, 2010 10:00 AM How Colleges Save Money

  

  Apparently some Ohio state schools are so cash strapped that they’ve decided to outsource crucial functions.

  Crucial functions like photocopying. According to an Associated Press article in Community College Week:

  Cuyahoga Community College said Xerox Corp. will operate its campus copy centers and provide new copying and printing equipment, following a similar move by Cleveland State University.

  Cleveland State estimates that the copy center switch will save the school $500,000 per year, said Jack Boyle, the school’s vice president for business affairs and finance. The school won’t have to budget for new printers or copy machine maintenance because Xerox will provide new equipment every five years.

  It may be a little puzzling as to how contracting out to a gigantic, multi-billion dollar business management company can save a community college any money. Anyone who’s ever tried to print out his resume at Kinkos knows that business companies are generally no bargain.

  The reason the outsourcing saves money actually doesn’t have much to do with the direct cost of the copy center. Eliminating the copy center saves money because it trim downs the number of people employed by the school, who are, as the Associated Press piece pointed out, entitled to “benefits like free tuition for family members,” and, you know, health care and retirement plans.

  “The 11 copy-center employees at Cuyahoga Community College likely will move to other positions, said school spokesman Al Moran,” according to the article.

  Yea, sure they will.

  This reassurance seems questionable. If the college continues to employ everyone who currently works in the copy center, it wouldn’t really save any money by contracting the operation out to a private company, would it? [Image via]

  by Daniel Luzer tags campus, college costs, Ohio

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• July 28, 2010 04:36 PM Pell Shortfall

  There’s not going to be enough money to fully fund Pell Grants, the government program that provides money to help low-income students to attend college. According to an article by Jennifer Epstein in Inside Higher Ed:

  The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies approved a bill that provides $169.6 billion in discretionary funding, including $66.4 billion for the Education Department. As it stands, the bill includes just short of $19.5 billion for student financial aid programs, including $17.6 billion for the Pell program, which would maintain maximum discretionary Pell funding at $4,860 per student.

  That means Pell is still about $5.7 billion short. Something’s going to come out of the budget process without money. The Senate bill also proposes eliminating funding for the Perkins loan program, the federal government’s fixed interest rate, need-based loan available for education.

  But realistically the bill won’t actually be complete until about January, according to Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the appropriations subcommittee. That might be enough time to fix the problem.

  by Daniel Luzer tags college costs, Pell Grants, political

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