Center for College Affordability and Productivity

College Entitlement

noreply@blogger.com (Center for College Affordability and Productivity) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:30:00 +0000

by Anthony Hennen

In a recent article, Stanislaus Hamid Shirvani, president of California State University, promotes the need for pragmatism to save higher education.

“Cutting costs is not enough. We need to break down expectations based on entitlement and focus on educational productivity and outcomes. Institutions should review redundancies, rethink staffing models, and streamline business practices. Productivity measures should be applied in all areas. In the same way that secondary schools are being challenged to consider longer school days and an extended academic year, we in higher education need to revisit basic assumptions about how we deliver higher education to students. We should not be tied to any one model or structure.”

Amen. Cutting costs and improving productivity does not always have to come at the expense of services or payrolls. Increasing employee benefits can attract better employees and make employees more efficient. State mandates on how universities can organize will more than likely stifle innovative approaches. College costs have been consistently rising, as has federal financing for postsecondary education. The rising cost of college may also be a reason for increased borrowing, which has been encouraged by the government increasing student loan availability.

Shirvani’s article elucidates the largest factor: the sense of entitlement many students feel in college. “Pragmatism must prevail” and some luxuries must be eliminated or universities must produce an alternative model to provide for the funding.

“In an era when pragmatism must prevail, those of us in higher education must come to grips with the idea that we can opt out of college rankings and national recognition without doing damage to the fundamental value of the education that we offer to the students whom we serve.”

The focus of higher-education institutions needs to shift back toward students and outcomes rather than reputation and prestige.

President Shirvani continues:

“Government, of course, needs to be a part of this process, and taxpayers must be reminded of their shared responsibility for public education. But the only way that we can persuade them to invest in higher education is to demonstrate our commitment to efficiency, openness, and accountability.”

He hits the nail on the head in suggesting that efficiency, openness and accountability should be a prerequisite for funding, not the other way around. It is refreshing to hear a major university president making these arguments. The question now is whether any others will join his call?

The Market as Corrector

noreply@blogger.com (Center for College Affordability and Productivity) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:00:00 +0000

by Anthony Hennen

Sociologist Gaye Tuchman has published Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University, a criticism of a new trend she sees rising in American universities. The article reads,

"Higher education should be seen as a public good" and supported accordingly, she said. When states spend so much money on criminal justice, and when the health care system is so flawed, she said, it's not surprising that there's not enough money to adequately fund higher education.

Another passage states, "It’s not simply a question of how you fix the universities, but what happens in the country that has put the universities in this position," she said. "It's a combination of factors, including the assumption that everything can be fixed by market forces."

Why should the market be distrusted to fix the universities? We trust the market to grow enough food and keep it safe for consumption, yet it cannot be trusted to educate the masses? It is a better approach to try many different methods rather than forcing institutions to adhere to one method. While numerous methods are tried within a government education system, some methods are encouraged over others through funding from the state, putting different or new methods at a disadvantage.

Few people, if any, claim market forces will fix everything. It is silly to believe such. The advantage of market forces is market forces cause sectors or industries to be more efficient and effective, rewarding improvement and punishing failure instead of subsidizing it. A government system perpetually advocates for more funding to fix problems, while a market system places blame on the structure or organization of a failing method, rather than lack of funding.

Universities aren’t interested in greatly increasing enrollment, public and private; they are more concerned about prestige. Funding increases to universities would have a negligible effect on student enrollment. A market-based approach would encourage universities to expand enrollment; concerns about prestige and reputation would change to concerns about the quality of education. A market-based approach would force universities to focus, as they should, on the students above all else.

Links for 11/9/09

noreply@blogger.com (~) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:03:00 +0000

Michael W. Kirst

In a new paper Carolyn Hoxby, Professor of Economics at Stanford demonstates while a few selective colleges have become more difficult to get into over past 5 decades, most colleges are easier to get into. For example, since 1955 the number of high school graduates is up 132%, but the number of freshman seats rose by 297%.

Arnold Kling on the above referenced Hoxby paper:

I suspect that high school graduates nowadays are the product of assortive mating, and college has become the ultimate status good for their parents. Affluent parents want their children to attend the colleges that the children of other affluent parents attend. This creates a highly skewed equilibrium.

Think of Harvard as like the Yankees. Enough money to buy whatever it needs to be a contender every year. Think of the typical college as like the Orioles or the Blue Jays. If they are fortunate, they can groom a few stars, but they will have too many weaknesses to be able to compete with the Yankees.

Goldie Blumenstyk

"Public higher education has done it to itself with generic state institutions" that all try to do the same thing, Mr. Crow told the gathering

The Chronicle asks some scholars about various HE issues.

Links for 11/6/09

noreply@blogger.com (~) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:44:00 +0000

Barbara Kiviat

Because whether or not you want everything you're paying for is a different question. State-of-the art classrooms and more professors for each student sound great—but are you interested in tossing in another $10K to pay to build luxury dorms and Olympic-quality athletic facilities? For $50,000, you get a whole lot more than an education.

Tim Ranzetta

"There is no way to escape being a slave to the quarterly report. Quality education and higher education are two masters. You can't serve both."

School president quoted in 1991 Report "Abuses in Federal Student Aid Programs" made by the Permanent Subcomittee on Investigations of the Committee on Governmental Affairs

Doug Lederman

When the country's two major associations of public universities were trying to craft a new accountability system three years ago, they found that many of their member institutions (and especially their faculties) were deadset against the idea of choosing one measure of student learning outcomes…

In response, the groups settled on three possible options…

the groups released a federally funded analysis of a "test validity study" conducted by the makers of the three tests showing that the three tests produced comparable outcomes…

A picture from Jake

Measuring Student Learning Outcomes to Increase Value-Based Competition

noreply@blogger.com (Center for College Affordability and Productivity) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:16:00 +0000

by Daniel L. Bennett

A new report, Interpretation of Findings of the Test Validity Study, was released today that presents evidence that the 3 major tests (CLA, CAAP and MAPP) used by colleges to measure student learning outcomes are comparable.

The results suggest that when the analysis is conducted at the school level, all the tests order schools similarly, regardless of which constructs they are designed to measure or which response format is used...

This finding is significant, as it should help the accountability movement in higher ed because it allays some of the concern that the various tests currently in use are not comparable. This would be a positive for college affordability if it helps lead to more and better information on student learning outcomes by institution being made publicly available in a digestible manner.

Doing so would allow the consumers of higher education (students, parents, taxpayers) to be able to efficiently decipher which schools are adding value to the student learning experience. This would go a long ways towards improving affordability, as it would invoke institutional competition based on value rather than reputation because consumers would have better information about the value of what they are buying. The latter (reputation competition) is widely believed to drive expenditures and thus, is positively associated with costs, while the former (value competition) is a market-based mechanism that would lead to more price-based competition. This would help alleviate some of the market distortion and direct us closer to an equilibrium price.

Of course, all of this is probably wishful thinking, but that does not obscure the importance of the findings of the report.

The Winters of Our Discontent

noreply@blogger.com (Center for College Affordability and Productivity) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:00:00 +0000

By Richard Vedder

Borrowing from Shakespeare's Richard the Third somehow seems appropriate for today's blog. A former student, Marcus Winters, got started at the Manhattan Institute a number of years ago with some assistance from me, and has become an important writer on American education. Most of what Marcus writes is perceptive, incisive, innovative. The world needs more Marcus Winters, and I am pleased to have played at least a modest role in the intellectual development of this fine young contributor to research that points the way towards the rationalization of American education.

But recently Marcus wrote a column attacking the notion promoted by Charles Murray, Matthew Crawford and yours truly, namely that there is a significant portion of the American population that should not go to traditional colleges and universities. His most important points seem to be that:

1) There are remarkable examples of students from disadvantaged backgrounds attending inner city schools who show a capacity to excel academically, developing the intellectual capacity and drive to succeed in college. Let us not simply write off a subset of the American population that has remarkable potential.

2) The continued rise in the college/high school wage differential demonstrates that college provides ever growing potential productivity gains for students and subsequent rising economic advantages. (The article makes other points, but let us comment on these two).

I will concede the first point; indeed, anyone who saw the 1988 movie Stand and Deliver about the remarkable math teaching of Jaime Escalante in the ghettos of Los Angeles knows that very often current approaches to teaching fail to push students to achieve their potential. Charter schools have improved the academic performances of meaningful numbers of students, as Marcus notes. But the reality is that the bulk of secondary education, particularly in low income areas, does not deliver these kinds of results. If the world were filled with great charter or private schools where Jaime Escalante-like teachers prevailed, I might reconsider my position on the suitability of students attending college. But that is not the way it is. Moreover, the 45 percent college dropout rate ---after six, not four years --is a sign that there are an awful lot of kids entering college who fail to achieve the objective of a degree.

I agree with Marcus that we need to restructure K-12 education, need to deep six the colleges of education, and perhaps do a few other things as well, but that is not the current world in which we operate.

In general, the gap between high school and college wages is greater than 30 years ago, as Marcus observes. But I think at least part of the reason for that is that the credentialing advantages of higher education received a huge boost from the 1960s civil rights legislation and subsequent court cases (e.g., Griggs v. Duke Power). As former sidekick Bryan O'Keefe and I observed in a study published in cooperation with the Pope Center in North Carolina, the differential started to surge within a few years of the Griggs decision. The differential increasingly reflects less real education-induced productivity gains and more the traits of college graduates that they genetically inherited or acquired through the family and K-12 education.

Also, a careful look at the data suggests that it is doubtful that there has been any significant upturn in the wage differential for women over the last 20 years --a group that constitutes a majority of college students. Also, even if the college/high school differential is increasing, the positive economic effects of that are offset at least in part, and very likely in whole, by sharply rising college costs. The rate of return on college depends not only on the income differential generated, but also on the cost (including opportunity cost of lost work) of the college investment.

I know of very bright college graduates today who are restaurant servers, tree trimmers (with a master's degree, yet), and mail carriers. There is nothing wrong with that, although one can question using public funds to promote such education. The notion that college degrees are needed to efficiently provide those tasks is simply not true. I also believe the expansion of college attendance has been accompanied by a watering down in college standards (a point made in a new book coming out authored by Rutgers scholar Jackson Toby), but one does not even need that argument to make the point that I have made, as have several others.

Links for 11/4/09

noreply@blogger.com (~) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:00:00 +0000

Scott Carlson, Kathryn Masterson, and Jeffrey Brainard

Fifty-eight private colleges now charge at least that much for tuition, fees, room, and board, a Chronicle analysis of College Board data shows. Last year only five colleges did.

Neal McCluskey

China has been cranking out college graduates at a breakneak pace, but the quality of the education has become highly suspect and, perhaps more importantly, there haven’t been nearly enough jobs to employ all the newly credentialed.

Edward L. Glaeser

there are basically no countries with very low levels of education that have managed to be democratic over the long term, and almost every country with a high level of education has remained a stable democracy…

Why do I think that the chain of causality runs from education to democracy rather than the reverse? Democracy in 1960 is essentially uncorrelated with subsequent growth in the levels of education. Education in 1960, on the other hand, does an extremely good job of predicting increases in democracy.

The ability of education to predict the durability of democracy is well illustrated by the paths of former Communist bloc countries. Initially well-educated places, like the Czech Republic and Poland, have managed to transition toward being well-governed republics. Poorly educated places have not.

The Economist

Modern education systems deserve much of the blame, both for fostering the belief that education ends when a person leaves school and for its emphasis on being right rather than on how to learn from mistakes. This has encouraged caution rather than risk-taking, with individuals preferring to avoid mistakes when possible and hide them if necessary. The world’s four greatest statisticians never took a course in statistics, Mr Ackoff would point out

Links for 11/3/09

noreply@blogger.com (~) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:00:00 +0000

Doug Lederman on priorities:

But to the consternation of some faculty members at Berkeley, the university's sports program is running multimillion-dollar deficits -- on top of the annual institutional subsidies -- that are requiring the university to make short-term loans to the sports program...

There's probably never a good time for professors to find out that their athletics programs are draining university funds. But it's hard to imagine a worse time for such revelations at Berkeley, given that faculty and staff members are being furloughed and students are being shut out of enrolling.

David McNeill reports on trouble in Japan:

According to the ministry of education, 47 percent of Japan's roughly 550 private four-year universities are falling below their government-set recruitment targets, the highest ever figure. Over 40 percent are reportedly in debt, and many are a bank loan away from the fate of St. Thomas, one of five Japanese colleges to stop accepting students this year.

Steve Kolowich on a necessary step in devising value added measures in education:

Rio Salado College… has devised a system of predictive modeling that officials believe can forecast, with 70 percent accuracy, how likely it is that a student will achieve a “C” grade or higher (the threshold for transferable credits) in a given course. The tool -- one of several of its kind -- is intended to help instructors to identify at-risk students early enough that they can intervene…

Rio Salado uses more than two dozen metrics during that first week to predict how well that student stands to fare over the entire course, but some of the most effective are the most basic: Has the student logged into the course home page during that first week? Did she log in prior to the first day of class? Other predictive metrics, such as whether a student is taking other classes at the same time, whether she has been successful in previous courses, and whether she is retaking the course, are culled from the college's student information system.

Emma L. Carew and Paul Fain on presidential pay:

Ms. Jackson joins 22 other private-college presidents with compensation above $1-million

Charles Wheelan on the adverse selection of teachers:

The most pernicious aspect of the public education pay structure is that it discourages motivated, productive, energetic people from entering the profession in the first place.

If you are a really talented person, where would you prefer to work: At Company A, where the success you anticipate will be rewarded? Or Company B, where your promotions and pay raises are linked primarily to staying alive? (Company B is public education)

More importantly, who is going to play in the alternative league? It's going to be players who are less talented and more concerned about being cut...Economists refer to this phenomenon as adverse selection. Individuals use private information (their expected productivity in this case) to sort themselves into a job with a compensation structure that suits them best...We compound that problem with ridiculous teacher certification laws...a huge deterrent for bright young people who might otherwise be attracted to teaching.

CCAP in the News

noreply@blogger.com (Center for College Affordability and Productivity) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:44:00 +0000

by Daniel L. Bennett

CCAP has been cited in the major media quite frequently during the past week. In an effort to keep our readers up-to-date on the impact that CCAP is having on higher education reform, here are some of the links.

Richard Vedder is quoted in the Boston Globe today on the continual rise of college presidential salaries.

“I find it bordering on scandalous...trustees are just wasting valuable assets"

"paying presidents such handsome sums run counter to colleges’ nonprofit mission and exploits their many tax advantages"

CCAP was cited on the Lou Dobbs Tonight TV show on CNN last night.

KITTY PILGRIM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The Center for College Affordability and Productivity found that from 1987 to 2007, many colleges became bloated bureaucracies, hiring legions of what they call paper pushers, driving up college costs...

PILGRIM: Now the Center for College Affordability and Productivity finds that for every new freshman entering college on average, two administrators were added. That's been going on for two decades. Senator Grassley and some education watchdogs say the nonprofit status of universities makes them very indifferent to the rising costs and they've been able to pass those costs on to students for decades...

DOBBS: That is insane. Fascinating -- it is absolutely mind- boggling. Universities teaching young people presumably dispensing knowledge and behaving like idiots. I mean I'm not sure that's a great thing for

PILGRIM: Hiring is out of control apparently.

DOBBS: Well, again, you know it's really amazing when you think what we're facing in this country during a period of economic weakness. We've got 30 million people unemployed. Wages are declining. In fact, they've been stagnant for years...

Richard Vedder wrote an OpEd for the Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota last week to discuss the findings of a recent study that CCAP completed for the North Dakota Policy Policy Council, entitled "Higher Education and North Dakota's Economic Future."

Richard Vedder was cited in a NY Times article last week discussing for-profit higher education providers.

“The for-profits are concentrating 100 percent of their effort on teaching students what they want to be taught, when they want to be taught

Golden Parachutes - Academic Edition

noreply@blogger.com (~) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:00:00 +0000

by Andrew Gillen

I was a bit surprised to read this (HT: AR):

Richard Herman, chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has resigned in the wake of an admissions scandal in which well-connected applicants were put on a "clout list" and given preferential treatment… Mr. Herman… will join the university's faculty…

So if I’ve got this straight, if you screw up in academia, you’re punished by being made the “closest thing in our age to being landed gentry.”

On a related note, Paul Fain and Emma L. Carew report that

A Chronicle analysis found that 85 of the 419 private colleges included in this year's review of federal tax forms were paying at least one former official or key employee more than $200,000 in compensation in 2007-8

Links for 11/2/09

noreply@blogger.com (~) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:00:00 +0000

Eric Kelderman

Critics have sometimes blamed the accreditation standards of the American Bar Association for driving up the cost of law school and making it more difficult for students of color to be admitted to those programs.

But a report released on Monday by the Government Accountability Office says that most law schools surveyed instead blamed competition for better rankings and a more hands-on approach to educating students for the increased price of a law degree.

John F. Cullinan

While Yale's financial woes mount (its endowment dropped by 30 percent last year), Al-Waleed bin Talal's generosity proceeds apace, with £8 million gifts in May 2008 for both Cambridge University and the University of Edinburgh, also for Islamic studies. It's in precisely this context that Yale's incomplete and unconvincing explanations of its own actions in the Klausen debacle have inevitably fueled speculation on campus about what Yale's really up to.

Arnold Kling

I think we already know that the value of research in some fields is close to zero, but the taxpayers and patrons funding the research do not seem to mind.

I think that if value added in research and/or teaching become more measurable, the entire credentialist model could unravel. That would be huge. It would wipe out 90 percent of the present education industry, if not more.

Goldie Blumenstyk

The financial meltdown that has caused seismic upheavals in many other corners of the economy hasn't changed much about how colleges operate…

The challenge, says Mr. Lingenfelter, is for higher education's leadership to recognize that aiming to get back to pre-crash levels of financing or educational effectiveness is not enough. "We come across to the public as totally insatiable and resistant to change," he says. "We've got to improve productivity."

Links for 10/30/09

noreply@blogger.com (~) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Paul Basken

For as long as most people can remember, at least as far back as the Sputnik launch in 1957, Americans have feared that their nation's schools and colleges weren't giving companies enough good scientists and engineers.

But in fact the number of talented college graduates in the sciences is "quite in excess of the demand," said Harold Salzman, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University. In a new paper, he and a colleague argue that the real problem is at the employment end of the pipeline.
Fewer than half of all college graduates in science and engineering actually take jobs in those fields, with the percentage who do actually dropping in more-recent years among the top-scoring students. The United States could largely resolve any industry shortfalls by simply convincing more of those elite graduates just to stay in their field, they say.

George Soros

papers that don’t conform to the prevailing dogma are not accepted by the periodicals which are used to give tenure. So there is a self-perpetuating quality about … I think reality will push its way in, in the form of the students who will not want to study a dogma whose time has passed. It’s like a little bit like Marxist dogma. The collapse of the Soviet Union did not bring an end to Marxism. There are still Marxists at universities, maybe more in Europe than in America, and eventually they’ll die out, but until then, they will be there. But they may not have any students listening to them.

Andy Smarick

Looking back on the history of school turnaround efforts, the first and most important lesson is the “Law of Incessant Inertia.” Once persistently low performing, the majority of schools will remain low performing despite being acted upon in innumerable ways…

The second important lesson is the “Law of Ongoing Ignorance.” Despite years of experience and great expenditures of time, money, and energy, we still lack basic information about which tactics will make a struggling school excellent…

Zubin Jelveh on Hoxby's new paper:

the change in selectivity is driven largely by smarter students choosing to go to universities with similarly smart students.

DAVID BROOKS

Ninety-four percent of college professors believe they are above average teachers

Another 3 cheers for Duncan

noreply@blogger.com (~) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:00:00 +0000

by Andrew Gillen

I'd like to second Rich's three cheers for Duncan after stumbling accross this very encouraging anecdote about Secretary Duncan from Steven D. Levitt.

it strikes me just how differently he is reacting to a challenge than Arne Duncan (now the Secretary of Education) did when I first told him about my work on teacher cheating when Duncan was in charge of the Chicago Public Schools. I expected Duncan to do what LaHood did: dismiss the findings, circle the wagons, etc. But Duncan surprised me. He said that all he cared about was making sure the children were learning as much as possible, and teacher cheating was getting in the way of that. He invited me into a dialogue, and we ultimately made a difference.

Links for 10/29/09

noreply@blogger.com (~) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Alex Tabarrok on how more data leads to better health care:

providing information does seem to drive change if only from the shame that a hospital receives when it is found not to be following best practices. It's true that report cards can cause problems when the drive to get a better score causes hospitals to be more reluctant to treat sicker patients but better data on patient characteristics (stage of cancer etc.) and better process/treatment information can alleviate this problem. In fact, all hospitals should be required to provide standardized information for all patients on patient characteristics, treatments and outcomes. Only by making outcome information public will hospitals have the incentive and researchers have the ability to develop more accurate report cards. In short, I cannot think of a simpler change that would improve health care to as great an extent as freeing the data.

Rob Manwaring

Education will receive $100 billion in stimulus funds in total. According to the report, almost $68 billion of that funding has already been obligated... those 250,000 education jobs saved for the next two year would cost around $34 billion. That is about half of the education stimulus funding. What happened to the other half? Schools were suppose to do a lot with these funds – both saving jobs and supporting education reforms. But most antidotes on how the funding has been spent was that the funding was used to maintain the status quo.

John Leo

many colleges and universities will fight hard for freedom of expression, unless it's inconvenient or threatens to bring bad publicity

Daniel Hamermesh

Students apparently consume mass quantities of the performance-enhancing drug Adderall during exam time. Normally the price is $3 for 10 mg, but it rises during exam week to at least $5.

One student reports that in his suburban Dallas hometown, drug dealers, realizing this price variation, speculated by buying up large supplies of the drug at $3 and dumping them on the market during exam time, hoping to sell at $5.

They didn’t realize that this large increase in supply would cause the price to drop below $5...

Three Cheers for Duncan

noreply@blogger.com (Center for College Affordability and Productivity) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:30:00 +0000

By Richard Vedder

It is no secret that I am not wild about the Obama Administration, and that skepticism extends to higher education policy. For example, I think the proposed changes in student lending are more bad than good, that it is wrong to force borrowers into the direct lending program, and that the notion that virtually every student should have a postsecondary education is questionable.

However, I want to applaud Secretary of Education Duncan for his recent remarks on colleges of education. On the typical campus, the education school has the reputation for being the least respectable unit academically, with mediocre students studying mush from so-so faculty, but nonetheless receiving high grades (because of the prevailing college of education teaching philosophy, namely that we should not lower student self-esteem). Education schools have promoted anti-intellectual, anti-knowledge fashions. They think rote memorization is bad but "critical thinking" is good, but fail to realize critical thinking occurs only when people know what to think about.

Only one of every five students who enters an American high school gets a four year college degree within a decade --a big obstacle to the Obama dream of increasing college attainment. Higher education spokespersons rightly note that much of the attrition occurs at the K-12 levels, with students either not graduating from high school, or performing so poorly that college does not appear to be a viable option. As the K-12 people note, however, the teachers of the high school students who fail to perform were educated at America's college and universities --typically in a college of education.

Do we need colleges of education? I think not. I think teachers of young or special needs students may need several courses offering insight into disseminating knowledge to their students; high school teachers may need a couple of courses at most. All teachers could benefit from practice teaching that is monitored by experienced, successful teachers. But most teachers above all need good grounding in the subjects they are teaching. Thus future teachers should major in an academic discipline and take up to a year or so of work that might be considered courses in "education."

Admittedly, I am biased. I am in a university where elementary education majors earned above a 3.9 average in their education courses last year, I am told. I myself never took an education course yet have won numerous awards for good teaching. My wife was an English major who became a superb high school teacher and guidance counselor. Neither of my children, both teachers, had a single education course when they started teaching high school -- yet one was nominated for Teacher of the Year in his first year. I think mandatory study of dozens of semester hours of education college mush or worse is a bad idea. I think states should not subsidize attendance in education schools. Once I even suggested to legislators that they should make it a felony for a school principal or superintendent to knowingly hire a graduate of a college of education. I didn't really mean that, but I do think we need to stop using public funding to support mediocre educational outcomes.

Links for 10/28/09

noreply@blogger.com (~) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:14:00 +0000

Kevin Carey

The College Board announced today that the price of higher education increased significantly in 2009…

Following past practice, the College Board presented the findings in a light most favorable to its members, the colleges and universities that increased prices. Comparing this year’s announcement with last year shows this pretty clearly.

In 2008… The message: Tuition increased substantially but so did inflation so it’s not our fault…

[In 2009] The message: Tuition increased substantially but there was an economic crisis so it’s not our fault…

Trends in College Pricing is, along with the accompanying Trends in Student Aid, an invaluable, up-to-date compendium of vital information about how much college costs and how much students pay for it. It is the principal source of the data that informs the public dialogue about college price and affordability. Which is exactly why the College Board shouldn’t use its position as the holder of this data to annually spin the results to the advantage of its members.

Steve Kolowich

After several years of experimenting with “hybrid” Spanish courses that mix online and classroom instruction, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has decided to begin conducting its introductory Spanish course exclusively on the Web.

KC Johnson

In an era when the AAUP has essentially confined its mission of protecting academic freedom to issues involving the interests of the groupthink-immersed faculty majority, FIRE is all the more important. That the organization still has so many battles is cause for concern about the state of the academy, but FIRE's extraordinary record of accomplishment in fighting those battles is cause for celebration.

Sara Goldrick-Rab

the incentives colleges have to maintain the status quo-- that is, to continue making their current and former students and staff feel good with liberal actions, garnering attention in elite venues such as the New York Times, without fundamentally changing their overall enrollment demographics or costing too much money. Call me cynical, but as a sociologist it strikes me that this is exactly how power is effectively maintained in the face of pressure for socially responsible actions from powerful institutions.

Links for 10/21/09

noreply@blogger.com (~) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Tim Ranzetta

Warning: This education can be hazardous to your financial health. At this institution, you have a higher probability of defaulting on your student loan than you do of completing this program.

Edward L. Glaeser

But that just pushes the puzzle one step back. Why is the cross-country relationship between income and education levels so strong?...

The wealth of well-educated countries is far higher than one would expect based on the private returns to schooling…
Historic educational enrollments predict subsequent income growth quite well, even when holding past income constant, which seems to reject the view that education is just following income….
If the link between country level income and education is real, then we need to understand why the link between schooling and education gets magnified at the country level…

One hypothesis is that there are spillovers from education, and that human capital enables places to gain access to better technologies…

But country-level income and education may also be closely linked because of politics. There is a very strong correlation between quality of government and education…

Links for 10/20/09

noreply@blogger.com (~) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:36:00 +0000

Lexington

In other words, freed from the dead hand of bureaucracy, schools can actually educate children. Even in a city that is poor, violent and recently submerged.

Thom Hartmann on the invention of grades.

While grades didn't help students a bit - and, in fact, had the now well-known effect of "dumbing down" entire nations - they vastly simplified the work of teachers and schools. So they spread across Europe and to America with startling speed, arriving here in the early 1800s.

Without grades, the assembly-line-classroom would not be possible.

Tim Harford

As long as patients have no way to demand better value instead of simply better quality, cost inflation seems inescapable.

[AG: he was speaking in terms of health care, but this seems equally applicable to education.]

Tim Ranzetta has a list of information that career colleges should have to provide (and students sign after receiving):

• Completion rates
• Placement rates
• Average starting wages upon completion (with high and low ranges, too)
• Average student debt at completion
• Accreditation of school and explanation of differences between national and regional
• Student loan default rates
• Student satisfaction levels based on one question: Would you recommend this institution's program to a friend?
• Job retention (did the student still have job 6-12 months after completion)

Why Do Private Schools Have Higher Graduation Rates?

noreply@blogger.com (Center for College Affordability and Productivity) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:25:00 +0000

By Richard Vedder

It is well known that the graduation rates of students from private colleges and universities is significantly higher than is the case at public institutions. Of course, a huge part of the reason is that the private schools, on average, get better students --higher SAT scores, higher rank in their high school class, etc. Yet even when these factors are controlled for, usually researchers find that graduation rates are still higher at private institutions?

Why? My own hunch is that the differences between "public" and "private" universities with respect to the way they operate and do business are relatively small. I have not found a huge difference between the private schools with which I have been associated (as a student and parent, Northwestern, as a professor, Claremont McKenna College and Washington University in St. Louis) and the public ones (University of Illinois, University of Colorado, Ohio University), except in one vital respect --personal attention to student needs.

On average, in schools which are more tuition-intensive in terms of revenue sources, there is a sense that the student is indeed a paying customer who needs to be treated with respect, kindness, and even affection. I sense that, on average, advising students is taken a bit more seriously at private schools, especially liberal arts colleges. Many students get lost between the cracks, and some personal attention from a relatively senior faculty member can often get them back on track. I am working more closely than usual with a student who has failed to earn his degree, helping him through the hoops of completing his academic work in a satisfactory fashion. But it takes a bit of time and effort on my part, and many professors don't want to make the effort --publishing articles is much more rewarding in a pecuniary and career sense. When I visit a good liberal arts college (Kenyon College comes immediately to mind), I feel that the faculty have a greater sense that their duties include attentiveness to student needs, come of which extend beyond the narrow classroom experience.

Jonathan Leirer and I are playing around with statistical models trying to explain variations in graduation rates. We do find, other things equal, that student performance varies positively with tuition levels, consistent with the discussion above. Clearly, as Bowen, Chingos and McPherson argue at length in their new book, socioeconomic status matters also in any discussion of graduation rates --the more Pell Grant oriented a school is, the lower the graduation rate (especially the four year rate). But I have seen some results that hint that high amounts of research activity, other things equal, may lower graduation rates, as research activity crowds out the advising of students.

The incentive systems are all out of whack. Publication in obscure journals on topics of tangential interest to the human race that few even bother to read can reap significant rewards --worth thousands of dollars per article. Time spent helping a struggling undergraduate yields nothing in the way of rewards-- or even less, denial of tenure for example, if student concern leads to publication rates below the accepted minimum.

Here would be an interesting proposition, the kind Jeff Sandefer might enact at his Acton School of Business. Set up a large bonus pool that goes to faculty members in each department if, and only if, the department raises the three year moving average of the graduation rate over time upward, subject to the constraint that the department's accumulative grade point average cannot move up at all (indeed, a second bonus should be awarded if higher graduation rates are achieved with falling average grades). This, plus coupling salary increases more to teaching performance and less to research, could lead to improved student outcomes. Will it happen? Not without some fundamental change in the way the academic game is played in the U.S.

Links for 10/19/09

noreply@blogger.com (~) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:32:00 +0000

William D. Henderson and Andrew P. Morriss on law school.

Below school No. 26 (Emory), a graduate has a less than one in five probability of starting his or her career at a large law firm. If 80 percent of law school applicants are convinced that they will make that 20 percent cutoff, three out of four are destined to be disappointed.

Justin Fox: “American college grads: Homebodies with worthless degrees”

I had a somewhat disturbing conversation yesterday with Steve Fussell, the senior VP of human resources at pharmaceutical maker Abbott… His basic message… was that Abbott is going to be hiring tons of people for high-paying jobs over the next decade, but not many of them will be Americans because we study the wrong things in college and we're not willing to work overseas.

1) "I hate to say we don't have the world's best universities. We may have the best minds, the best liberal arts education. The problem is it doesn't match the work anymore." (That is to say, not enough students are getting science and math degrees.)

Tim Ranzetta

[Ability-To-Benefit] tests have been around for a while with no proof of efficacy…

If the career colleges are concerned enough to "cut way back" on this population, perhaps it might be time for the U.S. taxpayer to make a similar decision…

If the hurdle of requiring a GED for federal aid weeds out the less serious, less committed and less prepared students, what is so bad about that? Is it good public policy to continue to provide post-secondary access to all, load up the most likely not to succeed with large amounts of debt, and then pretend we are surprised when cumulative default rates are projected to exceed 40% for certain types of borrowers?

These are two great examples of how to respond to ill-thought out comments.

Links for 10/16/09

noreply@blogger.com (~) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Mike Konczal

we are currently asking children, 17, 18 or 19 years old, to try and assess how much of a student loan debt burden they can handle vis-a-vis their future income over their entire lives.

Jeffrey J. Williams on student debt as indentured servitude

College student-loan debt has revived the spirit of indenture for a sizable proportion of contemporary Americans… it is a major constraint that looms over the lives of those so contracted, binding individuals for a significant part of their future work lives...

Although it seems as if it crept up on us, student-loan indebtedness is not an accident but a policy. It is a bad policy, corrupting the goals of higher education.

Don Heller

The biggest problem is that not enough grant aid is given to financially-needy students, as more and more financial aid is being funneled to wealthier students who do not need the money to attend college. But it is politically very popular to give money to these wealthier families, so many states do this and many institutions follow suit because it helps them achieve their enrollment management goals of improving their standing in rankings such as those published by U.S. News & World Report. We also need to do much more to simplify the financial aid system…

don’t assume that more expensive is better. Just because one university charges more than another doesn’t make the former a better option for postsecondary education.

Brad DeLong

being a tenured professor at a research university is still an amazing deal. It’s the closest thing in our age to being landed gentry.

Xenia Markowitt

To some degree, we have institutionalized social protest…

the nature of campus activism had changed. After all, sit-ins, or building takeovers, were staged in order to get the attention of the administration. But getting the attention of the administration can be done on my campus with a phone call—even directly to the president himself...

I told her: "If you hold a sit-in, the deans are going to order pizza and sit down next to you and ask what your concerns are. Will you be ready to answer them? You can make an appointment anytime you want to see the president and voice your concerns directly to him. So what is the purpose behind your sit-in? What do you hope to achieve?"

Open Course Ware Is Not Going to Die

noreply@blogger.com (~) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:02:00 +0000

by Andrew Gillen

The good news, as relayed by Jeffrey R. Young

Students Find Free Online Lectures Better Than What They're Paying For

The bad news as relayed by Marc Parry

According to David Wiley, "Every OCW [open course ware] initiative at a university that does not offer distance courses for credit will be dead by the end of calendar 2012."

Quick question: what exactly is the advantage of having every school try and do it’s own OCW? We simply don’t need 4k different versions, and having that many has a number of drawbacks, not to mention invalidating the main advantages of such efforts – specialization and economies of scale.

Bottom line, the demise of OCW at Utah State is not a sign of things to come, but rather the part of the natural growing pains of a new way of doing things. OCW will see lots of things come and go, but it’s going to continue to get better and better, and will never die, for the following reasons.

Students today are much more comfortable doing everything online. And given how much cheaper it is, there will be continued demand for OCW.
It is an extremely cost effective way to reach large numbers of students – something that the big foundations know and will increasingly be involved in providing support for. Even the government is trying to get involved.
For elite schools this it is perhaps the most philanthropic thing they do. As such, it provides a degree of protection. While the endowment tax issue has disappeared for now, you can be sure it will come roaring back. When it does, those elite schools that can point to OCW programs that reach thousands or millions of students have an iron clad case that they are indeed using the money for the public good and are therefore deserving of tax exemption.

Given that OCW is a product that consumers demand, some producers have an incentive to produce, and foundations and governments have an interest in seeing survive, predictions of it's demise seem somewhat strange. I certainly don't know what OCW will look like 10 years from now. If I had to guess I'd say that it would be dominated by the schools with the biggest endowments and/or foundation initiatives. But OCW will certainly still be around.

Links for 10/15/09

noreply@blogger.com (~) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:54:00 +0000

SLA

for the purposes of the [cohort default rate] calculation, borrowers in forbearance and deferment are considered as borrowers in repayment. This flies in the face of common sense and the standards used by publicly-traded companies…
more than 1 in 3 borrowers struggling with their federal loans…

the cohort default rate used to inform policymakers today so understates the magnitude of this issue to be irrelevant.

Paul Romer on Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom:

Most economists think that they are building cranes that suspend important theoretical structures from a base that is firmly grounded in first principles. In fact, they almost always invoke a skyhook, some unexplained result without which the entire structure collapses. Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics because she works from the ground up, building a crane that can support the full range of economic behavior…

Economists who have become addicted to skyhooks, who think that they are doing deep theory but are really just assuming their conclusions, find it hard to even understand what it would mean to make the rules that humans follow the object of scientific inquiry…

Cheers to the Nobel committee for recognizing work on one of the deepest issues in economics. Bravo to the political scientist who showed that she was a better economist than the economic imperialists who can’t tell the difference between assuming and understanding.

Steve Kolowich

the state-based approval system is centered around the notion that colleges are fixed in a single location that necessarily falls within the borders of a state. Since online colleges aim to teach students in multiple states, they have to go through multiple accreditation processes to achieve a nationwide presence, then satisfy various bureaucratic requirements in each state if they want to keep teaching students there.

John F. Ebersole, president of Excelsior College …[says] it forces online institutions to devote a lot of time and resources to acquiring and maintaining licensure in different states. This, the task force argues, “increasingly may act to inhibit student access to essential learning opportunities and at an unnecessarily high cost.”

637 applications for 2 positions!

Links for 10/14/09

noreply@blogger.com (~) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:25:00 +0000

Reihan Salam

My fear is that we'll instead encourage students to pursue college degrees and then post-graduate degrees as a way of fattening up the education-industrial complex. Just as mass incarceration masks unemployment in the United States, mass higher-education increasingly masks unemployment in Germany and South Korea: Students take years to complete useless degrees, and once they're out, they find themselves loaded up with debt. This will work wonders for administrators but not for students. If we really want to encourage change, we need to look to educational entrepreneurs.

In Sweden, the educational landscape has been transformed by the advent of a sweeping choice program that allows anyone--groups of parents, civil society groups, and, most important, for-profit enterprises--to establish their own schools that would then receive per-pupil funding at roughly the same rate as state-run schools. If this sounds like the familiar idea of universal school vouchers, championed by American libertarians and conservatives, you're on the right track.

But it turns out that the solidarity-minded Scandinavians have gone far further in this direction than any American jurisdiction. The results have been a stunning success, one that has delighted students and parents alike. As Anders Hultin, one of the creators of Sweden's system of "free schools," has argued, the profit motive has encouraged successful schools to clone themselves, not unlike a fast-food franchise. One can easily imagine such schools touting their success in placing graduates in good jobs. The beauty of this approach is that it doesn't demand that school administrators in some central office divine the one best way to encourage spontaneity; rather, it allows hundreds, if not thousands, of free-thinkers to experiment.

Looks like Britain is on stage three of my predicted trajectory.

What is going on in English departments? HT: AR

Doug Lederman on for-profit institutions.

Pell Grant Testimony

noreply@blogger.com (Center for College Affordability and Productivity) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:29:00 +0000

Andrew Gillen testified before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee last week in Philadelphia. The field hearing was organized by Senator Robert Casey (PA) to discuss

Access and Affordability: How Expanding Pell Grants Will Offer Higher Education to More Americans

You can read Dr. Gillen's official written testimony here.