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• October 1, 2013 05:21 PM How Apprenticeships Work in Switzerland

  Some conservative critics argue that the problem with American higher education is that too many high school students are going to college. College is something where they may not be prepared to succeed and the education will end up costing parents more than they can really afford.

  As such, they opposed the effort of the Obama administration to reduce the cost of college and make it so that “everyone can go to college.” A recent piece at Quartz looks at another way to do this. It’s maybe worth taking a look at Switzerland.

  In Switzerland, small and large companies, state of the art factories and insurance agencies, banks, hospitals, and retail stores host apprentices who greet customers, work on complex machines, carry out basic medical procedures, and even advise investors—in short, they do everything an entry level employee would do, albeit under the wings of credentialed teachers within the company. Percentages of “educational” employees are similar in the 30% of Swiss companies that participate in the vocational education system.

  This is the sort of training many American interns wish they had. But it’s not, like in the U.S. some vaguely exploitative shadow economy, where people toil for limited pay and vague suggestions that there might be a real job somewhere. No, this is the actual economy of Switzerland.

  Seventy percent of teenagers in Switzerland spend their week moving between a workplace, a sector organization, and school. They’re paid a monthly starting wage of around $800, rising to around $1,000 by the time they are in their third year. In return, the Swiss have a “talent pipeline of young professionals,” how fledging bankers actually refer to themselves at Credit Suisse.

  It also integrates well into Switzerland’s educational system, which is strong because of high-quality vocational training.

  At 16, the majority of young people enter the vocational upper secondary system. (In most developed countries, compulsory school ends at 15, and students enter either academic or vocational programs—the latter are like a combo of high school and community college.) The primary component of the Swiss system is the workplace; students sign a contract with an employer at age 15 or 16. The second component is a sectoral organization. The banking sector’s organization is the Center for Young Professionals (CYP), where students receive industry orientation and some technical training, is funded by the Swiss banking industry. The third component is school, where 16 to 19 year olds generally study languages, mathematics, history, ethics, and law.

  Although Germany is more widely known for its apprenticeship system, Switzerland arguably has the best so-called “dual system” in the world. Students can move between academic and VET [vocational education and training] systems, and can chose among six postsecondary occupational fields (technical, business, design, commercial, natural sciences, and health and social work) after completing their upper secondary training.

  This is a vocational and collegiate system that works.

  It provides workers with direct training for good jobs that actually exist. It keeps education costs low, and, what’s most interesting here, it’s fairly cheap to administer.

  The government needs provide no special tax or business incentives for companies to participate; according to the article businesses want to do this because they actually benefit from having the young people work for them.

  by Daniel Luzer tags interns, jobs training, vocational education

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• October 1, 2013 04:04 PM Jesus Would Not Do Online Courses

  Massive Open Online Courses, the online classes designed to be offered for free to thousands of students over the Internet, are popular among many education advocates.

  But Catholic colleges should oppose them, argues King’s College theology professor Jonathan Malesic. Because they’re wrong. As he writes in a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education

  But I do know that by banding together in a principled stand against producing MOOCs or offering students credit for completing them, Catholic universities can be true leaders in higher education. Instead of following the hype, they can reassert the belief that education is a moral enterprise that develops human dignity and promotes social justice.

  Why? Well basically it comes down to this. MOOCs just aren’t very good.

  Catholic organizations have known for a long time that to educate the poor, you have to go to them. In fact, to educate anyone fully—addressing their moral and spiritual development as well as their intellect—teachers and students must be present to each other.

  The question of what makes education personal is where we see the biggest gap between MOOCs and Catholic educational principles. Coursera’s co-founder, Daphne Koller, promotes the “personalized” learning that a MOOC can offer. Coursera can track how each learner uses the course material and how his or her quiz performance correlates with given in-course behaviors. With that information, Coursera can guide students toward the activities that will best help them to learn: additional video lectures or a specific discussion-forum thread. I cannot customize each student’s education as precisely as Coursera claims it can. But I can personalize it, in the sense that I can help students connect what they learn in my class to who they are as people—their biographies, aspirations, shortcomings.

  It’s a pretty interesting argument. Catholic colleges exist to do good in the world. We have Catholic colleges in America to educate and improve students. There’s no reason such schools should be particularly concerned about efficiency of delivery, which is the primary benefit of online courses.

  While this is a compelling point it’s unlikely to impact policy. Certainly few independent religious observers have indicated that online colleges are any particular moral problem. Indeed, schools like the evangelical Liberty University have enthusiastically embraced online education. Almost 90 percent of Liberty students study online only. There’s not, apparently, much worry there about making sure the students are physically around to address “their moral and spiritual development as well as their intellect.”

  There is no specific Catholic or Christian prohibition against online education, but Malesic does have a point about how online is getting pretty far away from the principles that led Catholic leaders to create colleges in the first place.

  by Daniel Luzer tags online education, religion

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• September 30, 2013 09:15 AM Associate Degree Recipients are College Graduates

  Like most faculty members, I have my fair share of quirks, preferences, and pet peeves. While some of them are fairly minor and come from my training (such as referring to Pell Grant recipients as students from low-income families instead of low-income students, since most students have very little income of their own), others are more important because of the way they incorrectly classify students and fail to recognize their accomplishments.

  With that in mind, I’m particularly annoyed by a Demos piece with the headline “Since 1991, Only College Graduates Have Seen Their Income Rise.” This claim comes from Pew data showing that only households headed by someone with a bachelor’s degree or more had a real income gain between 1991 and 2012, while households headed by those with less education lost ground. However, this headline implies that students who graduate with associate degrees are not college graduates—a value judgment that comes off as elitist.

  According to the Current Population Survey, over 21 million Americans have an associate degree, with about 60% of them being academic degrees and the rest classified as occupational. This is nearly half the size of the 43 million Americans whose highest degree is a bachelor’s degree. Many of these students are the first in their families to even attend college, so an associate degree represents a significant accomplishment with meaning in the labor market.

  Although most people in the higher education world have an abundance of degrees, let’s not forget that our college experiences are becoming the exception rather than the norm. I urge writers to clarify their language and recognize that associate degree holders are most certainly college graduates.

  [Cross-posted at Kelchen on Education]

  by Robert Kelchen tags community college

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• September 27, 2013 12:59 PM In Praise of the Shabby, Free, Public University

  

  The education unit of the American Enterprise Institute has decided to push back against the idea of free public colleges. I’m not really sure why this is necessary, since free college is not exactly a growing policy reform movement, but whatever. The points Andrew Kelly, director of the AEI Center on Higher Education Reform, makes are actually rather interesting and get at some important assumptions about idea of how much education costs and how pays for it. But no, he’s wrong. Free college would be great for America.

  As Kelly writes, “shifting tuition to taxpayers may derail promising innovations,” because, as he puts it:

  While it’s tempting to assume that tuition-free public colleges would solve our higher education problems overnight, merely moving resources around is no panacea for rising costs and low rates of student success.

  A public option would change who pays for higher education, but not necessarily how much it costs to provide it. …While existing federal and state investments might cover the cost of a public option today, those same sums won’t go as far next year or the year after unless colleges also make changes to their cost structure. Taxpayers would have to foot an increasingly large bill.

  Kelly’s fundamental point is worth addressing. He’s getting this wrong because if the money doesn’t go as far from year to year, that’s a good thing. The declining funding, coupled with an inability to charge tuition, would induce colleges to find innovative ways to save money. Which is exactly what we want to do.

  If the United States were to make one-time payment covering all costs and shift the burden to the public sector, this would dramatically change the whole equation for how public colleges work.

  Policymakers would then provide the same money, or some defined percentage increase from year to year to account for inflation, every year and that will be all the money colleges could get, aside from whatever they can derive from research grants or alumni donations. No tuition allowed. Granted, colleges would sure find this new funding stream difficult (indeed, many colleges are now going in the opposite direction, trying to get freedom to hike tuition in exchange for less money from their legislatures) but a limited, defined funding stream, coupled with an evaluation system that measured colleges on their completion rates and other student outcomes, would force colleges to quickly figure out where to make cuts in their budgets.

  And that would be a very good thing, making public colleges operate on the cheap. Two years ago Malcolm Gladwell wrote an interesting piece about academic prestige and his own higher education experience in Canada:

  In Canada in that era [the early 1980s] there were, say, 10 colleges in the province. The top seven were considered to roughly equal. Waterloo is a little better for math. Toronto is in Toronto is in Toronto so, you know, it’s kind of good but no would look askance at someone with a degree from Calgary and think that he was inferior to someone with a degree from Western, which is in London, Ontario.

  There are some of these schools where one can receive an education that’s quite excellent it seems to me. Very often what better means in the American context is… that it has nice amenities, that it’s fancy. Mine wasn’t like that. It was kind of run down. Tuition the University of Toronto was like $900 a year. You can’t have a fancy campus with that.

  But the University of Toronto was still a really good school. That’s how public institutions works. They don’t have lavish funding so they have to focus on the essentials. That means they look kind of shabby. They have long lines and sometimes things are uncomfortable for people using the services. Students have to live in break dorms like the one shown above. And that’s just fine if we want to do what public institutions are supposed to do: provide a high-quality education at low cost to students.

  This will straight-up never happen. Despite occasional progressive suggestions that free college is the answer, there is no movement whatsoever in that direction, policy-wise.

  But let’s be honest here. Free college is not a “risky” venture that would “derail promising innovations.” This has been done before, quite successfully. Perhaps we’ve decided we’re not willing to target resources in this direction (though the United States totally can afford to do this), that it costs too much money to educate our citizens, but there’s no risk here to education quality. Free public colleges would not “derail promising innovations”; they would compel colleges to make promising innovations.

  by Daniel Luzer tags free college, media, state universities

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• September 26, 2013 04:38 PM Life in the Red: the Future of College Graduates

  

  According to a new report by American Student Assistance debt plays a very important role in Americans lives. Some 66 percent of college graduates now have student loan debt. The average debt is about $27,000.

  And it’s impacting how young people make decisions. As the paper puts it:

  Student loans were created to be an engine for social mobility, but they are, in fact, limiting young people’s ability to achieve financial success:

  • 27% of respondents to ASA’s survey said that they found it difficult to buy daily necessities because of their student loans;
  • 63% said their debt affected their ability to make larger purchase such as a car;
  • 73% said they have put off saving for retirement or other investments; and
  • The vast majority—75% indicated that student loan debt affected their decision or ability to purchase a home.

  Survey respondents indicated that in addition to limiting their ability to make major purchases, student loan debtals impacts their important life decisions:

  • 30% responded that their student loan debt was the deciding factor, or had considerable impact, on their choice of career field;
  • 47% indicated it was the deciding factor, or had considerable impact, on their decision or ability to start a small business;
  • 29% indicated that they have put off marriage as a result of their student loans;
  • 43% said that student debt has delayed their decision to start a family.

  The solution to problems like these remains sort of remote. As even the paper puts it “there is unlikely to be a seismic shift in the way higher education is funded,” and suggests mild and ambiguous reforms like “control continuously escalating tuition and fees,” “keep federal student loan interest rates low,” and “prepare students to be smarter borrowers.”

  Things like these might help a little, but the reality is that, without any changes in how America pays for college, difficulty buying daily necessities, later marriages and families, and limited homeownership may just be the future for college graduates in this country.

  by Daniel Luzer tags student debt

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• September 26, 2013 02:50 PM SAT Scores Always Go Down

  Once again, American SAT scores have gone down. Again, people write that this is evidence that American schools are declining.

  No, SAT scores are supposed to go down. That’s just how the standardized test works.

  As Julie Ryan writes at the Atlantic:

  Of the 1.66 million high school students in the class of 2013 who took the SAT, only 43 percent were academically prepared for college-level work, according to this year’s SAT Report on College & Career Readiness. For the fifth year in a row, fewer than half of SAT-takers received scores that qualified them as “college-ready.”

  The College Board considers a score of 1550 to be the “College and Career Readiness Benchmark.” Students who meet the benchmark are more likely to enroll in a four-year college, more likely to earn a GPA of a B- or higher their freshman year, and more likely to complete their degree.

  Get out the smelling salts, American schools are worse than ever!

  No, not really. As I wrote last year when this exact same thing happened:

  SAT scores have declined dramatically since the College Board first administered the test. In the early days of the SAT the only people who took it were a few few students planning to go to American’s most prestigious colleges. The average score was about 1000 (on the original scale). The more high schools encouraged students to take the test, the lower the average score went. This is why the College Board re-centered the examination in 1995, to bring the average back to 1000.

  SAT scoring was historically designed so that about half of students taking the examination scored above 1000, and half of students scored below 1000. By adding a new section, the scoring system changed in 2005, largely in response to the University of California system’s threat to stop using the test, so that 2400 became the new top score.

  And the center, the score at which about half of students are below and half are above, appears to have moved from 1000 to 1500.

  And as I wrote two years ago, when again SAT scores went down:

  The SAT scores… [are] not meant to be an indication of the intelligence of American students, or the quality of American public high schools. The SAT is vaguely an intelligence test but the way the test is administered about half of American students score above 500 on each section. About half score below.

  SAT decline is a sign of the success of the College Board’s marketing efforts, not of the failure of the U.S. educational system. The only way to stop this decline, in a long-term sense, would be fewer students taking the test, not better education.

  The more students take the test, the more scores go down.

  There are many indications of real problems in American education. There’s a high dropout rate. College costs too much. We’re underperforming on standardized tests relative to other developed countries. The SAT score declines, however, are not an indication of any problems in American education. Stop saying this.

  by Daniel Luzer tags SAT

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• September 25, 2013 01:48 PM Who Cares What Works?

  

  The Department of Education has decided to suspend its “Doing What Works” website, which provided information (“videos, slideshows, and tools”) designed for teachers to learn about effective education strategies.

  According to an article in the Washington Post :

  [Spokesman] Massie Ritsch [said] the department had no money for Doing What Works. He said in an e-mail: The ED office managing Doing What Works did not have sufficient funding to continue operating the website and producing new material.

  When I contacted the Department the spokesman declined to say how much money it costs the Department to operate the website.

  Some sources initially reported that the Department was suspending the What Works Clearinghouse, the general website where interested parties can check out research on various different programs, products, practices, and policies in education. WWC is still alive and well.

  Doing What Works was a smaller component of WWC, providing more teacher-friendly materials.

  This is, of course, a budgeting decision. Organizations make these kinds of choices all the time based on priorities and expenses. It’s also unclear how useful teachers actually found the site.

  Still, as Diane Ravitch writes:

  I’m quite sad that the piece that was actually useful to teachers is no longer being supported. DWW had been contracted out to AIR and WestEd — not sure if they just lost the contract, or if this is a result of the sequestration, or what.

  The Department is apparently “working to place the archive of resources on another site for educators to use.”

  by Daniel Luzer tags Department of Education, research

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• September 25, 2013 01:09 PM One College President’s Creative Whistleblower Strategy

  

  Evan Dobelle (right), president of Massachusetts’s Westfield State University, is in trouble for extravagant spending. But he might be able to get out of punishment because Dobelle argues he’s a whistleblower, on himself.

  According to an article in Boston Globe:

  The boosters at Westfield State University wanted to support their ambitious new president in his quest to make the former teachers college into an educational powerhouse. So the school’s private foundation gave Evan S. Dobelle a credit card to pay what were meant to be “generally small amounts” for fund-raising expenses, such as meals with donors.

  Then, in the fall of 2008, they started getting Dobelle’s bills: $8,000 for a four-night stay at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Bangkok; $883 from the upscale clothing store Louis Boston; $10,000 for tickets to shows at Tanglewood; more than $4,000 for limousine rides.

  Westfield State College Foundation closed Dobelle’s credit card after two years, but by then he’d apparently charged more than $200,000 to the foundation, equivalent to more than 80 percent of his annual $240,000 salary. He eventually agreed to pay back about $20,000 of the cost, though he apparently kept spending, using his executive assistant’s university credit card.

  Some state education officials are asking the college’s board of trustees to punish the president for his spending.

  But now, according to a piece in The Republican:

  Amid mounting criticism of his travel expenses, Dobelle has repeatedly said he “self-reported” billing the university for dozens of airline, hotel and restaurant bills for himself and his family.

  Dobelle has retained a lawyer and is exploring using the state Whistleblower Act to shield him from possible punishment by school trustees or state investigators, two sources confirmed Thursday.

  Under Massachusetts law public employees are “protected from firing suspension, demotion, and any adverse employment action being taken as a reprisal” for “disclosing, threatening to disclose, providing information, [about] any activity, practice, or policy that the employee reasonably believes is in violation of law, rule, or regulation, or poses a risk to public health, safety, or the environment.”

  Makes sense, right? It appears the Westfield State vice president of administration and finance, Gerald Hayes, noticed the gigantic credit card spending but, because Dobelle then subsequently informed the board of trustees, Dobelle thinks he might be immune from punishment. “I self-reported,” Dobelle said to The Republican.

  I might be missing something here, but if Massachusetts law actually protects public employees from punishment for “violation[s] of law, rule, or regulation” the employees actually commit themselves (just because they admitted to the violation before everyone discovered it) that’s a pretty serious weakness in the law.

  by Daniel Luzer tags scandal

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• September 24, 2013 03:57 PM Higher Ed’s Mysterious Tipping Point

  A common background worry many education policy analysts have is that college costs are rising so rapidly that the country may be reaching a “tipping point.” Students and their families may conclude that college just isn’t worth it anymore. They haven’t, but they may also not realize how much they’re paying.

  As Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology President Bill Path wrote earlier this year:

  The general public watches helplessly as the cost of college tuition goes up every year. They have observed that more and more students are burdened with overwhelming school loan debt after college. They have seen unemployment lines growing longer across the country, and have noticed a rise in the number of recent college graduates waiting in these lines. Out of loyalty and respect to its many revered institutions, the public has been very slow to hold higher education accountable in such affairs. But make no mistake — if substantive changes do not take place, the tipping point of public opinion will shift to be against higher education. Even now, many college graduates are recognizing they have been ill-prepared for today’s workforce, and they are beginning to ask, “Was my college education worth it?”

  We’re not there, but a lot of the problem may have to do with just how complicated its become for students to discern how much education really costs, and how they might pay for it.

  According to recent article at Inside Higher Ed

  Has the rising cost of college reached a tipping point? Perhaps not, said three panelists at the National Association of College Admissions Counselors’ annual conference in here last week. They offered their analysis at a meeting where many private college officials were very worried their sticker prices are scaring away would-be students.

  Steven Graff, senior director of admissions and enrollment services at the College Board, said it’s become “knee jerk” to say college is too costly.

  This is surely true, but at what point would college become too costly, then?

  Graff and two consultants from the enrollment management firm Art & Science Group argued that there is a significant difference between college cost and college price, in part because of financial aid, and there are also rather significant differences among prices at different kinds of institutions.

  Okay, but that’s the problem, here.

  Graff is right, of course, that the rising published price of does not at all reflect what the average student really pays for school. But it’s not just the list price of college that’s rising. Net price, what people really pay, is rising too.

  Here’s a graph of the net cost of public colleges, which most American students attend, produced by Matt Bruenig:

  

  By not being clear about price and cost, and giving students ambiguous, complicated, and conflicting information about the cost of college, students appear to actually be taking on a lot more debt than they can perhaps afford.

  That’s the problem with “financial aid.” It’s obscures what college really costs. Because it means both loans and grants, it’s actually very difficult for students to figure out if they’re paying too much for college.

  We haven’t, at this point, reached an actual tipping point, which would mean a declining percentage of high school students actually applying to college. What we have seen is a number of students from poor families not applying to selective colleges where they might be admitted, probably because they’re intimidated by the published price.

  At the same time, low income students are lured to low quality, or even for-profit schools, because those institutions suggests they’re affordable because attending these schools will lead to better jobs.

  Surprise, if you make the system hard to understand, people don’t operate very well in that system.

  Path suggested that that the way to avoid the tipping point is for colleges to “make room for marketable and employable skills training.” Perhaps, but this tipping point is a financial thing. A far more effective strategy is to make college cheaper for students, and also to make it really clear how much college costs, and cease obscuring this information with complicated talk about “financial aid” and vaguely imporved life outcomes.

  by Daniel Luzer tags college costs, financial aid

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• September 24, 2013 02:14 PM You Should Trust Us; The Department of Education Always Does a Great Job at Everything

  Education Secretary Arne Duncan is annoyed with critics of the Obama Administration’s nascent plan to evaluate colleges on access (percentage of students receiving Pell Grants), affordability (tuition, scholarships and loan debt), and outcomes (graduation and transfer rates, graduate earnings, and advanced degrees of college graduates) and also begin to measure colleges to evaluate which ones provide students with the the best value.

  According to a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

  Secretary of Education Arne Duncan took critics of the Obama administration’s proposed college-rating system to task on Friday, saying that attacking a system before its details have been worked out is “more than a little silly.” He also emphasized that the proposal could represent a meaningful improvement over the current system for doling out federal aid.

  In a speech to more than 100 university presidents and higher-education leaders here at the Time Summit on Higher Education, Mr. Duncan acknowledged the difficulty of creating a comprehensive system, but he said that could not be a “discussion-ending excuse for inaction.”

  This is a good point, but it appears to be something of a straw man argument.

  The Chronicle article indicated that Duncan appeared to be responding to a recent quote from Terry Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, who said last month that if the Department is going to disperse out financial aid based on a new federal rating system “you have an obligation to have perfect data.”

  That doesn’t strike me as a “discussion-ending excuse for inaction.” It’s a recommendation to just do a really good job.

  by Daniel Luzer tags evaluation, Obama administration

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