The Center for College Affordability and Productivity View RSS

Reminder: We've Moved 24 Mar 2011 11:12 AM (14 years ago)

This site has moved to http://blog.centerforcollegeaffordability.org.

Reminder: CCAP Blog Has Moved 18 Mar 2011 8:34 AM (14 years ago)

Our new and revamped site is now live: http://centerforcollegeaffordability.org/ (alternatively, if you want a much shorter url, use http://theccap.org/. We have migrated our blog, which you can access at http://centerforcollegeaffordability.org/blog, over to our new site; we will cease posting our blogs on out blogger account. Please update your bookmarks as necessary.

If you use our RSS feed, please note that you must now use our Feedburner Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/theCCAP.

Thank you so much for your patience and we look forward to continuing to engage in discussions related to higher education policy.

The CCAP Blog Has Moved 3 Mar 2011 9:43 AM (14 years ago)

Our new and revamped site is now live: http://centerforcollegeaffordability.org/ (alternatively, if you want a much shorter url, use http://theccap.org/. We have migrated our blog, which you can access at http://centerforcollegeaffordability.org/blog, over to our new site; we will cease posting our blogs on out blogger account. Please update your bookmarks as necessary.

If you use our RSS feed, please note that you must now use our Feedburner Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/theCCAP.

Thank you so much for your patience and we look forward to continuing to engage in discussions related to higher education policy.

Links for 3/3/11 3 Mar 2011 4:00 AM (14 years ago)

Andrew Ferguson

Like most parents with kids about to apply to college, I’d heard how the process had descended into Absurdistan. But it wasn’t until I saw the feral squint of parental ambition in the faces of these well-to-do moms and dads that I realized how weirdly competitive and confused the whole thing had become…

the Principle of Constant Contradiction, a law of nature as ironclad as anything Newton came up with: for every piece of college admissions advice you receive, you will soon receive an equally plausible piece of advice that directly contradicts it…

Higher education is a highly competitive industry run by people who 1) won’t admit it’s an industry and 2) won’t admit they’re in competition with one another…

There’s no consensus about what American higher education is for. Some of us cling like Matthew Arnold or Cardinal Newman to the idea of the university as a place to nurture the young into the glories of civilization -- to furnish their minds with the best that’s been thought and said, as a preparation for a spiritually fulfilling life. Others of us in buck-hustling America see a college education in purely utilitarian terms, as a way to train for a high-paying job. Still others see it as a tool of social transformation, righting the inequities of society. And a very large number of people, particularly those under the age of 22, see it as a four-year booze cruise.
The result is a system of higher education that’s neither one thing nor the other -- a perfect recipe for frustration and disappointment…

San Diego Community College district… colleges don’t set their own fees, and don’t get to keep the money. Therefore, the only way they can stay within their budgets when their allocations get cut is to turn students away…

I hadn’t realized just how badly the California system was designed until that moment. When revenue is completely decoupled from services, then growing your way out of the problem is off the table. My sympathies to the citizens of California, who are trapped in a system that makes absolutely no sense…

We know that of all the variables under a school's control, the single most decisive factor in student achievement is excellent teaching. It is astonishing what great teachers can do for their students.

Yet compared with the countries that outperform us in education, we do very little to measure, develop and reward excellent teaching. We have been expecting teachers to be effective without giving them feedback and training…

Compared with other countries, America has spent more and achieved less. If there's any good news in that, it's that we've had a chance to see what works and what doesn't. That sets the stage for a big change that everyone knows we need: building exceptional teacher personnel systems that identify great teaching, reward it and help every teacher get better…

Actually Going to Class, for a Specific Course? How 20th-Century.

Links for 3/2/11 2 Mar 2011 8:24 AM (14 years ago)

Michael Finnegan and Gale Holland

In one respect, trouble was inevitable: Voters had put $2.2 billion under the control of seven of the region's most obscure elected officials. They would be spending it with almost no public scrutiny — despite their promise of "strict oversight"

[P.S. You won’t believe what they did.]

This is not the profile of a profession that deserves the public trust. And yet academe has far fewer checks and balances than other peer review professions. Doctors can lose their licenses. Lawyers can be disbarred. But incompetent or dishonest professors are often forever...

Many districts turn merit pay into a small across-the-board pay boost, write Green and Buck. In Houston, 88 percent of teachers qualified for a small “merit” bonus. That’s nothing compared to Minnesota, where 22 school districts gave Q Comp bonuses to more than 99 percent of teachers…

The New Teacher Project (TNTP) reports that 14 states actually have laws on the books that force quality-blind layoffs…

The rhetoric generally tells us that the crisis in American higher education is a financial one, not an educational one. However, it seems increasingly clear that the educational goals we have set for ourselves and our students are the goals appropriate to 20th century United States that had few real economic competitors. Much of our education has assumed that our graduates would go into a profession, and work in that profession for one, or at most a few, companies during their lifetime. That assumption is increasingly incorrect. Many of the professions for which we train students are in a decline as their functions move overseas. Graduates are increasingly required to change the focus of their work (not just jobs) several times in their working lifetime. As has been noted before, the offshoring phenomenon continues to move up the educational scale. Consequently, more traditional education - which was the answer to many problems in the 20th century - is not necessarily the correct answer in the 21st century…

Update on CCAP Website Redesign 1 Mar 2011 10:07 AM (14 years ago)

CCAP will be launching its revamped website within the next day or so. When it does go live, we will complete the process of transitioning our blog from blogger over to our new server. For those of you who use our blog's rss feed, we will provide you with the new rss information as soon as we go live. Thank you for your patience.

Links for 3/1/11 1 Mar 2011 4:00 AM (14 years ago)

Publius Audax

the total bill (at UT-Austin) runs to at least $95,000.

Can we really reduce that cost by nearly 90%, while maintaining or even improving quality? Yes, we can, if we do two things: intelligently exploit the huge economies of scale in higher education in Texas, with 950,000 students in college; and take full advantage of technology…

The showdown in Wisconsin over fringe benefits for public employees boils down to one number: 74.2. That's how many cents the public pays Milwaukee public-school teachers and other employees for retirement and health benefits for every dollar they receive in salary. The corresponding rate for employees of private firms is 24.3 cents…

Of all the potential merits of for-profit colleges, perhaps the most useful is simply the role they serve in upsetting the status quo…

Problem: College degrees are poorly understood in terms of the learning they represent.

Solution: Develop a degree qualifications profile (DQP) to define the specific learning outcomes of every degree issued by accredited colleges and universities.

Problem: Higher education programs and degrees are defined by seat time rather than learning outcomes.

Solution: Develop a new system of learning credits that are based on outcomes, not time…

With $10 million from hedge-fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin, List will track the results of more than 600 students-- including 150 at this school. His goal is to find out whether investing in teachers or, alternatively, in parents, leads to more gains in kids’ educational performance…

On New Jersey Taxes and Pensions 28 Feb 2011 8:55 AM (14 years ago)

by Andrew Gillen

Over at Quick and the Ed, Kevin Carey bashes on past and current New Jersey Governors. I’m all for bashing politicians, but the story Kevin tells is a bit… skewed.

Kevin’s version is that [evil] past Republicans cut taxes, and as a result did not fund teacher pensions. Fast forward to today, and [evil] current Republicans point to the underfunded pension and say we can’t afford to pay teachers their pensions.

There is just one little problem with this story. In 1997, when the tax cuts happened, the tax burden in New Jersey was 11% (total state and local taxes paid as a percent of total income). This was the fifth highest tax burden in the country. In 2009, their tax burden was 12.2%, the highest in the country.

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to blame tax cuts for the state of teachers’ pension funds when taxes went up. Moreover, if the state with the highest tax burden is unable/unwilling to fund pensions, then it doesn't seem like even higher taxes are going to remedy the situation.

More Information = Better Schools 28 Feb 2011 5:00 AM (14 years ago)

by Andrew Gillen

Our focus on the 3 I’s of higher ed reform (incentives, information, and innovation), just got another boost today. From the Economic Logician:

Publish school performance information!

Simon Burgess, Deborah Wilson and Jack Worth exploit a natural experiment in Britain: Wales suppressed the publication of school rankings in 2001, while England kept it. Using a difference-in-difference analysis, they show, oh surprise, that the performance of Welsh students regressed significantly, based on national exams… What is then a good argument for withholding school performance information?

Links for 2/28/11 28 Feb 2011 4:00 AM (14 years ago)

DAVID LEONHARDT

If policy makers began to tie funding to performance — both graduation rates and measures of actual learning — we might not drive down the cost of the good colleges. But I bet we’d stop wasting so much money on colleges that are doing their students a disservice. And I bet there are more of these colleges than we care to admit. With better data on learning, we could also figure out how to evaluate new kinds of schools that may indeed be cheaper than traditional colleges are…

there are a few dirty little secrets about online learning at traditional universities. Here are two: 1) Not many courses have any form of content online whatsoever (even when the university promotes a policy of minimum online presence). 2) When a course does have online content it is invariably rubbish…

In any organization that is serious about effectiveness quality-blind layoffs are nothing short of insane…

WikiLeaks, scourge of governments worldwide, now has a copycat for academe. And the new group is itching to publish your university’s deepest secrets…

most academics resist assessment in general and on principle. Some professors dislike the scrutiny. Others feel that assessment reflects corporate encroachment and a threat to academic freedom. Still others fear a homogenization of the educational experience…

Executed well, assessment encourages faculty members to articulate their course and assignment goals more clearly and to develop sound rubrics. That helps them think more broadly about overarching program goals, and how to measure students' success in reaching those goals. That, in turn, typically leads to greater faculty interest in how classroom activities connect with academic performance. Asking what is important leads us to ask about what works, and both contribute to good-quality assessment, better teaching, and greater learning…

Links for 2/25/11 25 Feb 2011 7:00 AM (14 years ago)

Dean Dad

“measure student learning.” Historiann dismisses this one out of hand, with a quick reference to No Child Left Behind and the following: “Let’s just strangle this one in its crib unless and until we get some evidence that more testing = more education.”

It’s a fascinating response, because it encapsulates so cleanly the unthought impulse that many of us have. Testing equals Republicans equals bullshit; now shut the hell up and write us large checks. Trust us, we’re experts.

It’s written a little more carefully than that, of course, but written specifically to defeat verification. It rejects any sort of “measurement,” but does so by calling for “evidence” that measurement works.

What would that evidence look like? Might it involve, say, measurement?...

The knee-jerk response to any sort of accountability rests on a tautology. We know better than anyone else because we’re experts; we’re experts because we know better than anyone else. Screw measurement, accountability, or assessment; we already know we’re the best. Just ask us!...

Aristocratic pretensions aren’t gonna cut it; the “appeal to authority” isn’t terribly appealing. We need to show, rather than tell, the public that we’re worth supporting…

Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va., today announced a Four-Year Degree Guarantee: Students who follow a few institutional policies are promised a degree in four years, or else the college will waive tuition until the student has finished…

Younger professors have fallen into place. Indeed, they are also products of the corporate university; many have been narrowly “trained” rather than broadly educated…

The corporate model treats students like customers, and as customers they expect services and products for their tuition fees. The services include high grades in return for little effort…

“Creative destruction” is a bitch, but it beats destruction.

Back to the Future: The Need for Apprenticeships and Post-Secondary Certificates 25 Feb 2011 4:30 AM (14 years ago)

by: Onnalee Kelley

There are broadly three ways to approach post-secondary learning. Some colleges—mainly Liberal Arts institutions—teach their students by providing them with the ability to adapt to many different skill sets. Other universities teach students by focusing intensely upon one particular field that corresponds with a student’s major. Lastly, training from certificates and apprentices immerse the student in a particular skill set and teach him or her kinesthetically as well as didactically.

At the American Enterprise Institute’s Conference on Higher Education last week, Diane Auer Jones argued for advancement of these post-secondary alternatives by providing information about the benefits of certificates and apprenticeship programs. The three different approaches to learning are all imperative for our society and are individually needed, given the various demands of the labor market. However, President Obama’s goal to have America produce the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020 seems unfeasible and impractical partly because of labor demands. If we look at where the current labor demands are, we notice that there are people who hold BAs and are unemployed or underemployed. CCAP’s study From Wall Street to Wal-Mart identifies that even though proportionately more Americans are achieving college degrees, the college-level job creation has not kept pace. This mismatch leaves 34% of college graduates underemployed. Therefore, I believe President Obama’s goal reinforces this disparity and I do not think we can benefit from having 60% of our population holding a BA degree when many workers already do not need a degree to competently perform their jobs.

There is a popular statistic from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) that has become the basis for arguments, like President Obama’s, that we need more college graduates. The data show that almost all of the fastest growing jobs require a college degree. However, as Auer Jones mentioned, our focus should actually be on which jobs are seeing the largest absolute growth, because that is where the most new jobs will be. From this list, only one-fifth of the largest growing jobs require a bachelor degree. Examples of jobs that are on this list are home and personal health aides, customer service representatives, office clerks, and truck drivers. The full BLS list is available here.

The Employment and Training Administration (ETA) is trying to ensure American workers receive high-quality training. While the ETA is looking for new ways to train workers efficiently and effectively, the Department of Education (ED) is trying to get people more Bachelor’s degrees, even though a Bachelor’s degree might not be the best way to train these future workers. These two government bureaucracies are not working together with a common goal. Along with this troublesome dichotomy, the market calls for workers in jobs that do not require Bachelor’s degrees. Do we need retail salespeople to be educated at an elite East Coast school? Do we need truck drivers to major in philosophy at a 4 year college? From an economic and practical stand point, the answer to those questions is no. These examples represent imbalanced and mismatched post-secondary education.

Certificates and apprenticeships are effective, productive, and quite affordable. They provide a pathway for students to be educated efficiently and a way for businesses to hire quality employees. Both the employee and the business make a well-informed decision to work or hire, which would drastically decrease mismatched pairs. Currently, there are only about 28,000 registered apprenticeship programs which are poorly advertised and many students are uninformed of this as a post-secondary option. Certificates that take a year or more to obtain are slightly fewer than 400,000. These are growing at a slow rate because of the community colleges are shifting the programs from long-term to short-term certificates. Certificates that are over a year have a great sustainability rate for the career at hand. The ETA and the ED should focus more on the advancement of apprenticeship programs and long-term certificates instead of aiming for more people to get BAs. Once the focus is shifted, these types of education programs will create a more productive, educated, and market-based society.

Richard Vedder on Lowering College Tuition 24 Feb 2011 1:25 PM (14 years ago)

Richard Vedder recently contributed to The New York Times "Room for Debate" forum on the recently announced move by the University of the South (also known as Sewanee) to cut their published tuition by 10% (an absolute reduction in price by nearly $5,000. Here's a little snippet:

This will be a great test of two rival perspectives. The traditional view is that students are not terribly price conscious, and, indeed, increasing tuition sometimes even raises enrollments because of perceived improvements in school quality. The alternative view, embraced by Sewanee, is that increasingly students, even those from prosperous families (only 12 percent of Sewanee students are on Pell Grants), are becoming sensitive to rising prices.

Links for 2/24/11 24 Feb 2011 4:00 AM (14 years ago)

Stephen Joel Trachtenberg

True reform of the cost of higher education will only come when the convergence of faculty, administrators and trustees recognize that the present model is broken and needs a major overhaul.

1) Allow all student loans to be discharged at bankruptcy…
2) Accreditation should be done at the course level in addition to the institutional level…
3) Equivalent courses should receive equivalent credit…
4) State higher ed funding should be voucher based…

incorporating experimental, untidy open-ended exercises in their classes.

This request is not an arbitrary one. To the contrary, it germinates from a belief that the liberal arts and sciences, and the students who take such courses, often thrive by appreciating complex questions that do not have easy answers. Precisely because students can retrieve facts instantaneously at their finger tips, I am asking faculty to revise their syllabuses to discuss and, yes, teach, ambiguity…

the new report from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)…

Apparently it is well within the standards of academic fairness to investigate, report on, and censure institutions of higher education from a certain distance, but not faculty members. Alternatively, it is appropriate when the AAUP does it, but not when some other organization such as the National Association of Scholars does it…

Quality HBCUs? 23 Feb 2011 9:10 AM (14 years ago)

By Christopher Matgouranis

Over at the New York Times’s Economix Blog, an interesting piece ran yesterday discussing Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and the benefits (or lack thereof) of attending such an institution. According to the post, there is a growing amount of evidence suggesting that all else equal, attending an HBCU, instead of a traditional (white) college, adversely impacts a black student's future financial success. Citing data mostly from a paper by MIT’s Michael Greenstone and Harvard’s Roland Fryer, himself an African-American, the piece indicates that this was not the case in the past (circa early 1970s and prior), but rather that the wage premium began to decline in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Interestingly, the blog also mentions that evidence exists suggesting that traditional (white) colleges have become much more effective over time at educating African American students. Also, it should be noted that it did mention that in general, there are some non-economic benefits to attending an HBCU, such as enhanced socio-political engagement.

The post left out some interesting findings from the Greenstone/Fryer paper. There are vast disparities in institutional quality across the field of HBCUs. There are many of acknowledged poor quality, for example Paul Quinn College (four year graduation rate of 3%) or Central State University (20.8% student loan default rate), but there are those that are widely considered “better” (e.g. Howard, Spellman, Morehouse, Xavier). Greenstone and Fryer isolated these more prestigious HBCUs in this study and examined their labor market outcomes. Their findings: all else constant, even attending an elite HBCU has a negative impact on students’ future earnings. This effect has also become much stronger over time. Also an interesting finding, graduates of these elite HBCUs have experienced a decline, or in some cases a complete reversal, of the social/lifestyle benefits attributed to attending such a school.

The paper/blog post, along with others examine something important with regard to colleges in general: what are the outcomes? With HBCUs it seems that they are simply not delivering the goods, or as Greenstone/Fryer succinctly put it, are appearing to “retard black progress.” Setting aside arguments on whether racially cached institutions such as HBCUs should even exist in this age, one needs to consider whether it is prudent to fund (often federally in the case of HBCUs) and support institutions of inferior educational quality. To be sure, there are bigger problems in American higher education today than HBCUs (HBCUs make up only about 2% of total enrollment), but that shouldn’t give them a get out of jail free pass. If HBCUs are stifling African-American achievement, it may well be sensible public policy to rethink their continued public support. However, until we start to see more standardized and comprehensive measure of outcomes, both learning and financial, across all types of institutions, don’t hold your breath for much change on this front.

Links for 2/23/11 23 Feb 2011 4:00 AM (14 years ago)

Kevin Carey

the 180 or so regional public universities that were founded, often in the 19th century, as “normal schools” to train teachers. Over time, they’ve all followed the same pattern, first becoming “Teachers Colleges,” then dropping the “Teachers,” then trading the “College” for “University.” Now they have, or are trying to get, all the trappings of a research university: multiple colleges and academic departments, stadiums named after corporate sponsors, $20 million gymnasiums–sorry, “Integrated Wellness Centers”–and so forth.

The problem is that they’re not actually research universities. Most of them don’t train graduate students in significant number or conduct much funded research. So they’ve adopted the most expensive and student-indifferent organizational model available even though many of them are still responsible for what they were founded to do: training the state’s teachers. This makes them low-hanging fruit for future disruptive innovation…

2) Stop trying to make individual institutions be all things to all people…

3) Find ways to use technology to both improve the quality of teaching and reduce the cost of educating large numbers of students…

6) Collect better data so we can really understand what is happening…

7) Simplify pricing and student aid systems…

8) Loosen the anti-trust restrictions on colleges and universities so they can work together…

Students are adrift almost everywhere…

Here are some reasons:…

college professors routinely encounter students who have never written anything more than short answers on exams, who do not read much at all, who lack foundational skills in math and science, yet are completely convinced of their abilities and resist any criticism of their work… Such a combination makes some students nearly unteachable…

It has become difficult to give students honest feedback…

some majors have become an almost incoherent grab bag of marketable topics combined with required courses that have no uniform standards…

The median base salary increase for senior administrators in 2010 was 1.4 percent, up from no increase at all in 2009…

Links for 2/22/11 22 Feb 2011 6:23 AM (14 years ago)

Tyler Cowen

David Leonhardt serves up a dialogue with Robert B. Archibald, and also David H. Feldman. Archibald starts by citing the cost disease and also the heavy use of skilled labor in the sector. I don't think they get to the heart of the matter, as there is no mention of entry barriers, whether legal, cultural, or economic. The price of higher education is rising -- rapidly -- and yet a) individual universities do not have strong incentives to take in larger classes, and b) it is hard to start a new, good college or university. The key question is how much a) and b) are remediable in the longer run and if so then there is some chance that the current structure of higher education is a bubble of sorts.

I never see the authors utter the sentence: "There are plenty wanna-bee professors discarded on the compost heap of academic history." Yet the best discard should not be much worse, and may even be better, than the marginally accepted professor. Such a large pool of surplus labor would play a significant role in an economic analysis of virtually any other sector.

When it comes to solving the access problem, the word which pops up is "financial aid," not "increased competition." Why might that be?...

A decade ago, two economists — Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger — published a research paper arguing that elite colleges did not seem to give most graduates an earnings boost. As you might expect, the paper received a ton of attention. Ms. Dale and Mr. Krueger have just finished a new version of the study — with vastly more and better data, covering people into their 40s and 50s, as well as looking at a set of more recent college graduates — and the new version comes to the same conclusion.

Given how counterintuitive that conclusion is and, that some other economists have been skeptical of it, I want to devote a post to the new paper…

Eight ways to get higher education into shape:

1. Measure student learning
2. End merit aid
3. Three-year degrees
4. Core curriculum
5. More homework
6. Encourage completion
7. Cap athletic subsidies
8. Rethink remediation

every state has its own rules and requirements for the chartering, authorization and oversight of institutions of higher education. And that oversight has been notable for its inconsistency across jurisdictions: states such as New York have long exercised very close control over every aspect of institutional operations for both public and independent colleges and universities, while other states have had a history of minimal regulation…

It was assumed, naively as it turned out, that as the technologies for distributing higher education services matured the barriers would fall in the face of interstate cooperation and the acceptance of "home" State recognition as sufficient regulatory oversight…

States and Student Loan Default Rates 21 Feb 2011 11:20 AM (14 years ago)

By Christopher Matgouranis

This chart depicts the ten U.S. states with the highest student loan default rates from fiscal year 2008 (the last year of data availability). There were several characteristics that these high default rate states had in common. First, on average the states with higher default rates were poorer, with 8 out of 10 having a per capita personal income below the U.S. average. Secondly, these states typically had higher unemployment rates. Neither of these two results are surprising since both low income levels and high unemployment would suggest that students would typically have a more difficult time earning enough to repay their loans. However, the high default states had more affordable colleges (that is, lower than average public tuition and fees) than the states with lower default rates.

Links for 2/21/11 21 Feb 2011 4:00 AM (14 years ago)

Doug Bennett via Daniel de Vise

tell colleges and universities they cannot award any federal financial aid (Title IV) if they award merit aid. That is, tell them they can award need-based federal financial aid only if they award only need-based aid. We need to be sure that as much financial aid as possible is being devoted to meet need. Every dollar of merit aid is a wasted dollar with regard to the national problem of access…

the higher education marketplace is much too dominated by considerations of prestige and much too little dominated by considerations of real value or effectiveness…

(1) that we do not have nearly enough instruments for assessing student learning, and (2) that too few institutions are prepared to publicly disclose what they know about whether and what students are learning…

evidence of success has never been important in decisions to keep or kill programs...

students testing into the lowest levels of developmental education have virtually no chance of ever moving beyond remedial work and achieving their educational goals. For those students and their families, developmental education is expensive and demoralizing…

the realization that we cannot help every student…

Chinese universities have been accused of copying American models as they seek to evolve, but there is evidence that they are also altering our models in original and effective ways. One noteworthy example is tenure, recently introduced in China but in a slightly different form from what we know in America. Contracts are granted not for life but for three-year periods, and while tenured professors are largely assured sustained employment, they undergo regular review. There are obvious political reasons for that approach, but it also has clear benefits, prodding faculty to remain engaged and productive for the length of their careers…

A related innovation has to do with teaching. Those university professors not judged to be good teachers are placed on a research track, which, far from being a reward as in the United States, prevents those assigned to it from achieving the highest rank in their fields. The result is to create good researchers who work hard to become good teachers…

Links for 2/18/11 18 Feb 2011 1:14 PM (14 years ago)

Weird tax avoidance by universities.

This is not from The Onion.

Links for 2/17/11 17 Feb 2011 1:12 PM (14 years ago)

Kevin Carey

If people talk about the budget in a way that identifies certain very broad categories of expenditure like “education” as inherently virtuous and all Obama proposals to cut programs within that category as, by definition, a betrayal of the progressive cause, we’re basically doomed to waste large amounts of scarce public resources forever. And in the future when there’s no money to support some vital new cause, this will be one of the reasons why…

Inside most public policy wonks is a mini-dictator, waiting to come out. They dream about how things ought to be organized… if only they were in charge…

The University of the South on Wednesday announced that it is cutting total student charges (tuition, fees and room and board) by 10 percent -- one of the more dramatic shifts in tuition policy announced by a competitive private college in recent years…

Sewanee's decision is based in part on competition with public flagship universities and in part on the conviction of the new president, John McCardell, that current economic trends for liberal arts colleges like his are "unsustainable" and may even represent "a slow death scenario."…

in the midst of reflecting on what our students should do and know, we found ourselves acting out a scene from George Orwell's 1984. Adopting the correct "assessment" language seemed to take priority, and we circulated lists of approved and forbidden action verbs…

Although the goal of assessment is to improve teaching and learning, some faculty members argued that, in an effort to articulate what we could most easily measure, our new learning objectives actually reduced and narrowed our expectations of students…

The public is not demanding evidence of learning as much as it is demanding evidence of efficiency…

But institutions of higher education have chosen to ignore the efficiency aspect of accountability…

Links for 2/16/11 16 Feb 2011 4:00 AM (14 years ago)

Doug Lederman

the administration had to make "tough choices" to sustain the maximum grant at $5,550, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a call with reporters Monday.

The department's 2012 budget calls for ending a three-year experiment that allows students to qualify for two Pell Grants in a calendar year, to allow them to attend college year-round, and for eliminating the subsidy in which the government pays the interest on student loans for graduate students while they are in school. (The subsidy for undergraduate students would remain in place.)...

The cat is finally out of the bag about what our students are learning, and it isn't pretty…

But shame can be good, if it gets us to do the right thing. And in this case, I think it can…

More than half of the students in Arum and Roksa's sample had not taken a single class in the semester before they were surveyed that required a total of 20 pages of writing. That's not a misprint; it's a scandal…

So how can we change any of that?...
a peer—ideally, a colleague in the same department or division—would take each of those professors out for coffee, inform them about the below-average scores, and offer to help.
Before you start scoffing, you should know that the "cup-of-coffee method" has already been tried with physicians, and it works…

Tenure was granted by the HR Department as breezily as sick days were accumulated or paychecks were mailed out...

Many of us are conflicted on the legacy issue. The case against legacy preferences presented by people like Kahlenberg, Golden, and Peter Sacks tugs at our meritocratic heart strings, but our pragmatic sense pulls in a different direction. There is something unseemly about lowering admissions standards to a highly competitive college because one's parents attended the college or because you have a billionaire father likely to make a seven-figure donation if you are admitted. In much of the rest of the world the American practice of granting preferences to the children of alumni is seen as indistinguishable from bribery.

But in those same places, colleges and universities are usually state-funded and don't have to go hat in hand looking for private money. Corrupt as the practice of legacy and wealthy donor preference clearly is, it may be one of those defensible corruptions that should be retained primarily because much good comes out of it and the alternatives, perhaps involving more state funding, are probably worse…

So my post on the liberal slant in academia has garnered what I believe to be a record number of comments…

Educated and Underemployed 15 Feb 2011 6:25 AM (14 years ago)

By Christopher Matgouranis

Relying on a unique data set from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, CCAP has written extensively (here, here and here ) about the growing trend of underemployment for our nation’s college graduates. We estimate that approximately 17 million Americans with college degrees are employed in jobs that do not require college-level skills. The majority of our previous work has examined college graduates in general, lumping together those with bachelor’s and graduate degrees. Recently, I disaggregated the data and found that rampant underemployment is not limited to those with just a bachelor’s degree.

In 2008 (the last year data are available), 7.87 million graduate degree holders were underemployed (that is, employed in jobs requiring less than a graduate degree). Further breaking the data down, 6.98 million held masters and another 1.18 million had PhDs or professional degrees. A full 59% of those employed holding a masters degree were classified as underemployed. PhD and Professional degree holders did better at 22% underemployed. Yet that is still a shockingly high figure considering the level of education that these individuals have attained. To further put things in perspective, the number of underemployed masters degree holders was more than the total number of masters degrees produced between 1998 and 2008 (5.75 million). Similarly for the PhDs/Professionals, 80% of the incremental increase in the total number of degree holders over that same period were considered underemployed.

It should be noted that the underemployment estimate for PhDs is on the conservative side. In calculating the totals, I did not count as underemployed the PhDs/Professionals working in jobs that the BLS classifies as requiring “a bachelor’s degree or higher” or “master’s degrees.” Workers in these fields were given the benefit of the doubt in whether or not they were truly underemployed because of the small ambiguities with these BLS classifications (i.e., are professional degree holders really underemployed if they work in a job requiring a master’s degree?). Had these two BLS classifications been included, PhD/Professional underemployment would have risen to 1.59 million.

A few thoughts come to mind when looking at this data. First, not all graduate degrees are created equal. Those with graduate degrees in finance, economics, and engineering for example likely have a better employment outlook (and are less likely to be underemployed) than those with graduate degrees in anthropology, English or sociology. This is not to say that no one should enter the latter type of fields, but that obtaining one of these degrees should be considered carefully. Secondly, as a recent book, has detailed, a significant number of undergraduates are learning little in college. A likely consequence of this is that more and more people are finding it “necessary” to get graduate degrees. The credential inflation problem associated with this issue could be alleviated somewhat if undergraduate education (and K-12 for that matter) was more rigorous and effective. Lastly, universities should take note of the employment opportunities for graduate degree holders. Graduate students are frequently subsidized (through tuition waivers, stipends, etc.) by their undergraduate counterparts. With an often bleak employment outlook for many graduate degrees/programs, universities should rethink their graduate degree subsidization. Reducing subsidies for graduate education will likely help realign the supply of graduate degree holders with realistic demand from employers.

This blog originally posted on CCAP's "Higher Education and the Economy" blog space at Forbes.com.

Links for 2/15/11 15 Feb 2011 4:22 AM (14 years ago)

Eduwonk

For my part I really don’t care what Michelle Rhee’s value-add or gain scores would or would not have been in Baltimore almost two decades ago. Why? It’s not just that this whole thing is unprovable given the data available today. Rather, it’s because today she is pushing an actual education agenda that has ideas – with varying amounts of evidence and/or proof of concept behind them – and we should have a lively debate about those proposals. And it should be obvious that those ideas don’t hinge on her value-add scores or really much of anything that happened almost two-decades ago…

If we have managed to be the world's most powerful country, politically, economically and militarily, for the last 47 years despite our less than impressive math and science scores, maybe that flaw is not as important as film documentaries and political party platforms claim…

Under federal law, borrowers who develop severe and lasting disabilities after taking out federal student loans are entitled to have their debts forgiven… But an investigation by ProPublica and the Center for Public Integrity has found that the process of discharging the loans of disabled borrowers is broken…

Perhaps the most telling sign that the House GOP is not serious about really cutting Washington down to size, though, is that the laughable Exchanges with Historic Whaling and Trading Partners program is not on their chopping block. If you won't pick off this ridiculous, almost-on-the-ground-it's-hanging-so-low fruit, you simply aren't really trying…

At some point Congress should consider a law that automatically eliminates any program that has been recommended for termination multiple times by presidents from different parties over a 10 year period. For example, the Historic Whaling Partners Program has been targeted for elimination in every one of the 10 budget requests that have been released since its creation–a period that spans both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Of the 13 education programs this year’s budget targets for elimination, six were also singled out in Bush’s 2009 fiscal year budget. The other eight weren’t signed into law after Bush had left office. There’s clear agreement across both parties to get rid of most of these programs, it’s a testament to the difficulty of the political process that they persist.

Is a $10,000 degree possible? Yes 14 Feb 2011 6:47 AM (14 years ago)

by Andrew Gillen

I’ve been a bit taken aback by the heat Texas Governor Rick Perry is taking for calling for $10,000 bachelor’s degrees. I’d like to make two points.

First, saying that the status quo is unable to achieve something is not the same as saying it can’t be achieved. For instance, we are currently unable to get 60% of young Americans to graduate with a degree. Yet most of the eduworld is aiming to do just that. Does that mean that they are naïve (as Gov. Perry has been called)? Of course not. The whole point of both proposals is to change the status quo in such a way that the new proposal can be achieved.

Second, even the status quo is within striking distance of delivering a $10,000 degree. To do so, they need to spend less than $2,500 per student per year. As Bob Samuels found, “the total average annual instructional cost per student is $1,456.” That leaves $1,000 per year for everything else. Of course, colleges currently spend much more than $1,000 on everything else, so while it wouldn’t be easy, it is certainly within the realm of possibility to lower that figure to $1,000. In fact, since you wouldn’t be touching instruction at all, the vast majority of students wouldn’t even notice the difference.