Should We Tax Universities?

by Andrew Gillen

Felix Salmon begins a discussion that leads down an uncomfortable road by stating that university endowments should be taxed. The conversation quickly moves on from endowments to taxing secondary schools.

Matthew Yglesias:

But they’re certainly not charities. And as best one can tell, their main impact on the common weal is negative, drawing parents with resources and social capital out of the public school system and contributing to its neglect.

You’d have to believe that New York City’s public schools would be both better funded and free of this kind of nonsense if a larger portion of the city’s elite were sending their kids to them.

Felix Salmon agrees

There’s an analogy here to the studies showing the beneficial effects of homeownership... on the one hand, people who own their own homes do tend to live better lives. But on the other hand... by moving away from rental neighborhoods they effectively ghettoize those left behind.

Unless I'm missing something, that same argument holds for universities as well. If peer effects are present, then a case can be made that schools with high concentrations of desirable students should be taxed rather than subsidized.

******

PS - I was somewhat surprised to realize that my dog Pockets maintains a blog. But I was very pleased to realize that while I'm away, she apparently reads my econ books and blogs out of the UK. One of her more insightful points:

Pockets:

If you wanted to convince me of a private school which is acting charitably, not profit-maximising, then you’d have to describe a system where pupils take the entrance exam – and then the *low*-scoring poor children are offered bursaries. That’s a school which is gambling on its ability to raise standards among disadvantaged kids. But no private school does that, and with excellent reason: the cost could be lower league table results for the school

Edward Kennedy and Higher Education

By Richard Vedder

I have been asked, "will Senator Kennedy's passing materially impact American higher education." My answer, in a word, is "no." Life goes on, and the Senator's replacement on the Senate Education committee is not likely to be dramatically different than the late senator in his or her approach to the topic. Teddy Kennedy had some formidable skills at negotiating and reaching across the aisle to susceptible and cognitively challenged Republican senators like Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch, but at the margin that should not make too much difference.

We have twice mentioned Sen. Kennedy in CCAP blogs and, remarkably, both of those references were pretty positive. In 2006, the Senator wrote a good op-ed for Inside Higher Ed that spoke positively of the work of the Spellings Commission, but said it should have said more about student loans ---and I strongly agreed. The Senator was a quintessential liberal activist, and most of the money he successfully worked to throw at American higher education has been inefficiently used and some has had unintended adverse consequences. But in the absence of the senator, I doubt policy would have been all the much different.

I think commentators should be biased towards saying nice things about the deceased since, always, those commentators are going to be deceased themselves some day. In that spirit, I would note that Kennedy did make one important contribution that indirectly impacted higher education, in generally very positive ways. In his early days, Kennedy was a prime mover of the 1965 Immigration Act, that liberalized immigration into the U.S. In general, Kennedy favored policies consistent with the increased internationalization of higher education, a development on the whole I think has been good. The international flow in the creation of human capital is in keeping with the general liberalization of trade that has contributed to our postwar prosperity.

Senator Kennedy did a lot of bad things, both in his personal and his public life. His treatment of Robert Bork's nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court was shameful, for example. But he was generally fair and listened to other views, unlike some of his more strident colleagues. May he rest in peace.

Edupunks

by Daniel L. Bennett

One of my older siblings grew up in the 1980s punk rock era (complete with a mohawk) and to this day, he will from time-to-time refer to me as a "punk". I've been reading quite a bit about the transformative power of technology lately, finding myself more and more intrigued by the potential of technology to revolutionize education as we now know it. This article helped bring about some self-realization: My brother was right all along, I am a punk...an "edupunk" --

"a growing movement toward high-tech do-it-yourself education."

Some cool quotes from the article include:

Jim Groom -

"Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies"

"Edupunk...is about the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational institutions and the means by which they are financially cannibalizing their own mission."

David Wiley -

"If universities can't find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them, universities will be irrelevant by 2020."

"The challenge is not to bring technology into the classroom...the challenge is to capture the potential of technology to lower costs and improve learning for all."

"When you put materials online, they're different in that particular way; you can pay to produce them once and they can be used by an infinite number of people."

Richard Ludlow -

"My idea was to...do for educational content what Hulu has done [for TV]."

Bob Mendenhall -

"Technology has changed the productivity equation of every industry except education"

"We're simply trying to demonstrate that it can do it in education -- if you change the way you do education as opposed to just adding technology on top."

Race Is Not Always The Case

by Daniel L. Bennett

Marybeth Gasman wrote an essay for Inside Higher Ed yesterday describing the "disadvantages" of financially teetering Historically Black Colleges. Among these include:

institutions suffer from a history of unequal state and federal funding

foundation and corporate support has not been given at the same rate to black and white institutions

alumni giving...has been and continues to be lower on average than at historically white institutions...due in part to African Americans’ historic lack of access to wealth as a result of systemic forms of racism

I suspected that the race card would come to fruition in a discussion of HBCUs --as is typical with misguided objectives that play to emotions and feelings in presenting racism as the de facto explanation for social ills and justifying increased funding as the solution. According to this realm of thought, as a matter of public policy, we should reward failing institutions that actively practice segregation? (Note: Gasman doesn't directly advocate more funding, but the message is implied)

Gasman's essay comes at a time when several HBCUs, including Paul Quinn, are either facing loss of accreditation or in PQ's case, have had it revoked. A brief note about the power of accrediting agencies: they hold the key to the treasury chest of federal financial aid. If not accredited by a US Department of Education-approved accrediting body, then a college's students are not eligible for federal aid. In other words, hasta la vista if the gatekeepers of Title IV funding grant the kiss of death by denying or removing a school's accreditation. With several HBCUs under intense scrutiny by the accrediting boards, which rarely revoke accreditation, this suggests that these schools are either looming on financial insolvency or failing to meet a very low minimum of institutional quality standards.

Rather than extend their cups looking for handouts, perhaps financially struggling colleges such as HBCUs should take note on how other institutions have been able to turn themselves around when faced with fiscal insolvency. Edward Morris describes how his university was able to overcome near bankruptcy by diverting from the status quo in his book --the Lindenwood Model. It was able to go from "surviving to thriving" by changing the fundamental way that the university is managed -and it does so as a private college focused on teaching that offers tuition comparable to public universities.

This is not to say that every college can (or should) replicate the Lindenwood Model, but HBCUs offer a differentiated college experience for low-income and minority students and as such, should try to differentiate themselves from the pack of wannabe research universities and focus on adding value to the learning experience of their students. This may mean abandonment of an anachronistic model and adapting to realities of the 21st century that include constant change and cultural dynamism.

Will the Real Cornell University Please Stand Up?

By Richard Vedder

There used to be a TV show --To Tell the Truth-- where three individuals appeared claiming to be a certain individual --two were impostors. After each was questioned by the celebrity panel, the host asked them to pick the real person, followed by the request "Will the Real John Doe (or whoever) please stand up."

That show comes to mind somehow when I look at college rankings. Let us look at three of them with respect, first, to Cornell University. The rankings: US News & World Report, Forbes/CCAP, and the American College of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). US News ranks Cornell 15th on its National University list (a list, including the lower tiered schools, that exceeds 250 in number). Forbes ranks Cornell 207 of 600 schools on its list that includes liberal arts colleges and other institutions besides national universities --but it is only 51 among the schools that US News evaluates as national universities, well below its US News ranking. Moreover, Cornell ranks well below Cornell College, a liberal arts college Forbes (and CCAP, which did the rankings) puts 105th. But Forbes assesses Cornell U well compared to ACTA --which uses letter grades and gives Cornell U. an "F".

This illustrates two things. First, tastes and subjective judgments on higher education differ in important ways from one individual to another. Second, and related, the lack of consensus on what constitutes excellence makes assessing things like productivity and efficiency very, very difficult. We cannot agree on what "the bottom line" is and how to measure it. US News stresses inputs into the process of delivering educational services and academic reputation as determined by university officials. Forbes/CCAP stresses student course satisfaction, vocational success, and student finances. ACTA stresses curriculum, and whether students have a good grounding in our heritage and the external verities of a civilized society.

Forbes/CCAP has a great feature (if I may say so myself) that illustrates this point. It has a do-it-yourself feature that lets persons do their own ranking, stressing those variables that they think are important. Perhaps some potential student is worried about campus crime and wants to be with kids with high SAT scores, factors not included in the Forbes/CCAP published rankings, for example. It took me less than three minutes to find a combination of factors that placed Cornell U in the top 10 American universities --well above the US News ranking.

Or take Dartmouth College --ranked in the top dozen national universities by US News, it ranks a so-so 95th on the Forbes/CCAP 600 schools list, and gets a mediocre "C" from ACTA. Moreover, in a new US News category, it is considered the best school in America for undergraduate instruction. Finally, there is Centre College, which Forbes/CCAP places in the top dozen or so schools, and in the top half dozen top liberal arts colleges, well above US News. Why? Kids like their courses, get decent jobs, and do not amass a ton of debt --all non-factors to US News (or ACTA, or, for that matter, Princeton Review).

Speaking of Princeton Review, some kids do want to have fun in college --and that is an important part of going to school for them. College is a consumption item as much as an investment good for many, perhaps a majority of students. For such students who want to both party hard and work hard at a respectable school academically, perhaps DePauw University is a great option, ranking 15th on the Princeton Review party list and in the top 50 on the Forbes/CCAP 600 ranking (higher than Dartmouth or Cornell), and pretty strongly with US News as well.

Does all this variation mean rankings are meaningless, as some colleges allege? No. It means that the "best" ranking varies from individual to individual, and that widely varying tastes make it desirable for the prudent consumer to look at a range of rankings --and use the Forbes/CCAP screener (do-it-yourself ranking). It also shows the lack of consensus about what constitutes excellence, which adds to our difficulty in assessing collegiate performance and efficiency.

Comparing Identically Ranked US News Schools With Forbes/CCAP Ranking

by Matthew Denhart

When browsing the latest US News college rankings one thing immediately jumps out. It isn’t the schools that make the tops of each list—as those are the ones you see every year—but rather the large number of schools that tie for the same rank with one or more other schools. Of the 133 ranked ‘National Universities,’ 113 share a rank with at least one other school, leaving just 20 schools with a unique rank. Indeed, Harvard and Princeton share the top spot while no less than 8 schools all come in as America’s 88th best university. It is a similar story with the list of the best liberal arts schools where 110 of the 126 ranked schools tie with at least one other; leaving just 16 uniquely ranked institutions.

Two schools sharing the exact same ranking suggests that both are of exactly the same quality. This obviously cannot be the case. While this would seem to be a point of criticism for US News, my friend and former colleague Luke Myers (who just recently moved on from CCAP to work for Senator Sherrod Brown) reminds me that the imprecise nature of college rankings in the first place somewhat justifies it. Any ranking methodology is bound to fail in capturing all elements of an institution to provide perfectly precise rankings. A personal taste of students makes this an even more impossible task. For example, a school with a small enrollment may be desirable for one student and undesirable for another. To account for this we worked hard with Forbes to allow students to build their own ranking criteria weighting various factors according to one’s own preferences.

What is interesting however is to examine the deviation among same-ranked US News schools using the Forbes/CCAP ranking. What does the Forbes/CCAP ranking say about the similarities—or lack thereof—among identically ranked US News schools? Do the two ranking methodologies agree that such schools are of highly similar quality?

For both the national and liberal arts college lists there are some similarities, but mostly differences. The variations in the Forbes/CCAP rank of schools ranked identically by US News are somewhat large. On the national university list, the average deviation in the Forbes/CCAP rank among schools US News considers to be of equal quality is around 27 ranks. For liberal arts colleges, it’s slightly less than 25 ranks. This suggests that according to the Forbes/CCAP ranking methodology there are rather distinct differences in the quality of many schools that US News ranks identically. On the national universities list consider Southern Methodist University, the University of Delaware and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. While all share a rank of 68 by US News, they are ranked 31, 53 and 203 respectively on the Forbes/CCAP list of top national research universities (note this is a sub-set of the overall Forbes/CCAP rankings that list both national and liberal arts schools together).

Jonathan Leirer showed the relatively high correlation between the two rankings in a blog post last week. Despite the correlation, this shows that there are many important differences as well. Prospective students should be somewhat cautious when reading the US News rankings before assuming that identically ranked schools are of identical, or even highly similar, quality. The Forbes/CCAP rankings offer an alternative approach that offers a valuable perspective on what makes a quality institution. We hope that students will use both rankings as an aid in selecting the college that best fits them.

Turning Heads in the Rankings Game

by Daniel L. Bennett

The Forbes/CCAP college rankings are making an impact in helping achieve one of our goals: to make more information about colleges publicly available so that students can make better decisions.

While we still have some critics, here are some positive remarks about the rankings from around the blogosphere:

Tim Griffin at ESPN

"All of the Big 12 schools were ranked among the 600 after using a complex formula that would make developers of the BCS nod their heads in agreement."

Lynn O'Shaughnessy at CBS Moneywatch:

"...plenty of higher-ed pretty boys didn’t earn the sort of blue-ribbon college rankings they usually win."

"Here’s a big reason why a significant number of obscure schools on the list of the nation’s 600 top colleges and universities fared so well: the Forbes’ methodology ignores reputation. Instead it attempts to measure the quality of learning that takes place at these institutions. And that’s a monumental improvement over the popular rankings that..."

Richard Holmes at University Rankings Watch:

"The CCAP (Center for College Affordability and Productivity)/Forbes rankings are rather different from the rest, being emphatically based on outcomes rather than spending."

With several thousand media mentions (and still growing), including OpEd placements in the Columbus Dispatch and Richmond Times Dispatch, the Forbes/CCAP rankings have turned some heads in helping prospective students choose a college that is best for them.

Initial Comparison of College Rankings

By Jonathan Leirer

The USNWR rankings of America’s Best Colleges were released yesterday. We at CCAP have spent some time digesting these rankings and comparing them to our own college rankings. Direct comparisons are somewhat encumbered due to categorical differences. First, USNWR does not rank all colleges in one list but rather categorizes them into groups; namely National Universities and Liberal Arts Colleges. While there are further rankings and categories, we will, for the time being, restrict our analysis to only these two groups. Second, the Forbes/CCAP rankings include a much broader set of schools. To facilitate meaningful comparisons, we have selected a subset of our schools to match that of the USNWR rankings, and computed relative ranks consistent with our methodology, within that subset.

The figure below plots the relationship between the USNWR rankings of Liberal Arts Colleges and the comparably modified Forbes/CCAP rankings of Liberal Arts Colleges. We can easily observe that there is a large degree of correlation between the two rankings (actual correlation value is p=.71), particularly at the top, although the two become increasingly disparate as you move farther down the rankings. However, even within the top 20 there is significant deviation from the blue 45 degree line (which would correspond to a perfect correlation between the two rankings).


We can generate a similar plot with the National University list, creating the figure below. Compared to the Liberal Arts Colleges, there is a slightly lesser degree of overall correlation between the two rankings (actual correlation is .64 versus .71 for Liberal Arts College). However, what is striking is the high correlation among the highest ranked schools and the low correlation among the lower ranked schools. Some notable exceptions of the high correlation among the highest ranks include University of Pennsylvania, Duke, and Dartmouth (this cluster is circled in red) --all of whom rank very highly in USNWR but do not crack the top 20 in the modified Forbes/CCAP list-- and Boston College, Brandeis University, Tufts and College of William and Mary (this cluster is circled in green), all of whom rank much higher in the Forbes/CCAP rankings then they do in the USNWR.

This is the first in a series of analyses that probe the USNWR ranking, compare and contrast the Forbes/CCAP ranking with the USNWR rankings, and explore the possible implications for Higher Education stemming the two rankings systems.

Education Technology Hype Cycle

by Daniel L. Bennett

Times Higher Education reported yesterday on Gartner Technology's analysis of the "hype cycle" of technology in education.



"The cycle ranges from over-enthusiasm as technology is hyped, through a period of disillusionment when it fails to deliver, via a slope of enlightenment to a "plateau of productivity", as users learn how best to employ it."

(HT: Keith Hampson)

Students Loan Forgiveness is Not Stimulative

by Andrew Gillen

I’ve gotten several calls in the past few months about the idea of student loan forgiveness as a stimulus to the economy. The Consuming Interests blog of the Baltimore Sun has aired an interview that should be sufficient to kill the idea (HT: Tim Ranzetta).*

Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org, crunched some numbers. Kantrowitz says there is $730 billion in outstanding student loans… But to have an immediate impact on the economy, Kantrowitz notes, you have to consider only loans that are in repayment because that’s money now going to loans and not other consumer spending.

But a little less than 4 percent of outstanding debt — or $28.8 billion a year —is now being repaid, Kantrowitz says.

“So assuming that the borrowers would spend this windfall instead of saving it or using it to pay down other debt, this proposal would involve the government spending $730 billion now in order to increase consumer spending by $28 billion… it will clearly not have the “immediate stimulating effect” claimed by the proposal’s proponents.”

Kantrowitz adds: “Forgiving all debt provides a financial windfall to borrowers who are capable of making their monthly loan payments, such as wealthy doctors and lawyers, and not just to borrowers who are experiencing financial difficulty. There are more effective and better-targeted ways of spending taxpayer money.”

They also included a vote after the story, and when I checked, the votes for the questions “Do you think student loans should be forgiven to stimulate the economy?” Were 485 "Yes" to 163 "No." (Another 34 voted “Only Mine”). This tells me one of two things. Either close to three quarters of the voters can’t read, or there is a strong tendency to simply take a pre-existing agenda, and relabel it as “stimulus.” And why not, it worked for Congress.

*For the record, I have thousands of dollars in student loans. Even though I personally would benefit greatly from it, I think student loan forgiveness would be terrible public policy.

Clickers and Online Note Sharing

By: Matthew Denhart

CCAP has long supported the use of technology to enhance the dissemination of knowledge and lower costs of education. While full online courses and other online supplements for traditional classes (such as Blackboard, Aplia, and LON-CAPA) have gained in popularity and credibility, other innovations have not gotten as much recognition. Two that we have failed to discuss in any great detail are in-class ‘clickers’ and peer-to-peer note sharing. Both are exciting new approaches that could help increase student learning.

Clickers are small hand-held devices that allow instructors to gain instant feedback from students while in class. A professor incorporates a multiple choice question into a power-point type projection and then gives students 10 seconds or so to click the corresponding button for which they believe is the correct answer. The results from the entire class are instantly generated and displayed on the screen as bar graphs showing the percentage of students responding to each possible answer choice. Since each clicker is programmed specifically to an individual student, clickers can be used to give in-class quizzes or take attendance. This could save on costs for things like paper and wasted time handing out and grading quizzes.

However, this technology seemed to be used best in a geography class I had a few years back. The professor would post 5 or so questions at the beginning and end of the lecture. This allowed both the class and our professor to discern areas of misunderstanding or confusion. Questions that I had missed were areas that I dedicated some extra review before the following class; and questions that a large portion of the class missed were areas that the professor would cover again in class. This is an example of a simple technology both enhancing learning outcomes and saving money.

Peer-to-peer note sharing is another interesting technological innovation. Websites such as Gradeguru.com and islepththroughclass.com (soon to be renamed Wise Campus) allow students to upload class notes to be downloaded by others. This promotes the democratization of higher education by allowing anyone to access new knowledge. While some argue that this exacerbates an already unacceptable level of laziness in today’s college kids, others believe that it actually helps make better students. I would tend to agree with the latter group. Gradeguru.com is run by McGraw-Hill and pays students for uploading their class notes based on their quality as determined by ratings from other users. This system creates incentives for students to take better notes themselves. Far from aiding students in their evil quest to skip class, being able to download another’s notes could be a helpful supplement to one’s own notes and useful in reviewing material and studying for exams. Those too lazy to attend class are unlikely to be the one’s using this service anyway. And even if they do it would seem to be a desirable thing—if your goal is to have an educated public why would you not want students taking advantage of any resource possible to learn? So long as having notes available does not lead students who normally do attend class to start skipping there seems to be no problem.

Others argue that posting one’s own notes for public use is a violation of a professor’s intellectual property rights. This argument fails to recognize that the notes belong to the students. They have paid to acquire the information and notes are never a direct translation of a professor’s words anyway. Rather they are a new product created as combination of a professor’s information and a student’s own interpretation of that information. Others worry about the increased potential for plagiarism or false information. These arguments have a striking similarity to complaints about Wikipedia. Gradeguru.com guards against plagiarism by teaming with plagiarism detector website turnitin.com. Furthermore, note sharing is not intended to be a source to be officially documented in say a research paper, but rather as a study aid or a way to help one begin to find information on a subject.

Opponents of educational reform continually formulate largely unfounded criticisms of new approaches. Greater uses of technology seem to be a particularly fierce area of opposition. However, both clickers and online notes demonstrate the enormous potential for increased savings and enhanced learning. For those that actually care about improving education to America’s youth, these new technologies are an exciting and promising way to do so.

Schooling and Latin American Growth

by Andrew Gillen

Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann:

In 1960, adult school attainment in Latin America was surpassed only by OECD countries... Still, economic growth in Latin America over the four decades since 1960 lagged...

The poor growth performance of Latin America despite its relatively high initial schooling level remains a puzzle by conventional thinking...

we suggest that...the level of cognitive skills is a crucial component of the long-run growth picture. What has been missing is a focus on the quality, rather than quantity, of education – ensuring that students actually learn. While Latin America has had reasonable school attainment, what students in fact know is comparatively very poor...

Figure 1 provides an aggregate picture of what this bleak performance of Latin America on the worldwide student achievement tests means for economic growth. It is based on a regional measure of performance derived from all the international math and science tests performed between 1964 and 2003...

As the figure makes patently clear, considering this low level of cognitive skills is sufficient to reconcile the poor growth performance of Latin America with outcomes in the rest of the world over the past four decades. Our interpretation is simple. Even though many things enter into economic growth and development, the cognitive skills of the population are extremely important for long-run growth.

Importantly, attending school affects economic outcomes only insofar as it actually adds to students’ learning. School attainment does not even have a significant relationship with economic growth after one accounts for cognitive skills...

The crucial missing link in explaining why Latin America went from reasonably rich in the early post-war period to relatively poor today is its low cognitive skills...

But can the cross-country association between cognitive skills and growth be interpreted as a causal effect?...

analysis of causality... results support a causal interpretation...

What Will They Learn?

by Daniel L. Bennett

Our friends at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni released a new report today, effectively titled What Will They Learn?, that looks at and assigns grades to 100 U.S. colleges and universities based on their general education requirements. They've also launched a corresponding website that features a comparison tool that allows users to compare school's GE requirements side-by-side and offers an expanded list of schools.

In compiling the project, ACTA identified seven subjects (Composition, Literature, Foreign Language, US Government or History, Economics, Mathematics, Natural or Physical Science) that it considers essential to a liberal arts education and reviewed each college's catalog to determine whether each subject is a GE requirement. The schools were assigned a grade based on the number of compulsory GE requirements. Of the more than 100 colleges included thus far, only 7 made the "A List", which required at least 6 of the 7 GE requirements. I'll single out the US Military Academy as one of the 7 to make the "A List" because we recently ranked it the best college in the nation. Another important finding is that public colleges received better grades than private ones - probably due to the fact that public schools give up a bit of autonomy in curriculum decisions in return for subsidies.

With WhatWillTheyLearn.com, ACTA has developed a very useful tool for students and their parents to easily identify and compare what subjects students are expected to learn at various colleges. It also brings us a little closer to the goal of making more information about colleges publicly available and easily digestible so that students can make better decisions about where to attend college. This project will likely stir things up a bit in the higher ed establishment, as college officials (like students) don't like to receive failing grades. At the press release, Mel Elfin candidly remarked about the probable response of the establishment, stating that "their anger and passion is probably a sign that you are on the right track [to reform]".

More On Rankings

by Jonathan Leirer

On the eve of the release of the infamous US News and World Reports Rankings of America’s Best Colleges, Inside Higher Ed has an article criticizing the use of reputation surveys in the ranking methodology. The issues raised are nothing new; indeed, it seems that every year these complaints are reissued. While we have a great respect for Bob Morse, and applaud the idea of trying to give students more information with which to make such a monumental life choice, we agree that there are some serious flaws in the methodology. However, instead of merely adding our voice to the chorus, we at CCAP took our criticism one step further.

Taking to heart the criticisms and pitfalls of the USNWR rankings, CCAP, in conjunction with Forbes, created their own college rankings – rankings that would not add to the so-called “academic arms race” nor encourage the precipitous increases in costs. Rather than relying on the dubious responses of college presidents and provost (or, as the article shows, other administrators such as the vice provost for teaching and learning) we decided to rely on outcome based variables. As such, our rankings are largely insulated from the noteworthy “gaming”, where institutions invest in activities that will increase their USNWR ranking but not actual quality or outcomes, sometimes bordering on deceitful or immoral practices.

Diminishing Returns on Research Investments

by Daniel L. Bennett

Inside Higher Ed and the CHE both reported on a NBER working paper by James Adams yesterday. Both publications highlighted Adams' finding that scientific research output has declined among public universities. Adams' regression results suggest that

"Research output rises, usually significantly, with tuition plus state appropriations"

However, and perhaps more importantly, he also notes that

"universities are subject to decreasing returns to scale in research, since the sum of the output elasticities of R&D stock, graduate students, and financial resources is less than one"

and that

"Since this is the definition of decreasing returns, one might suppose that beyond the efficient scale, more growth could be obtained at less cost by spreading research funds over a wider range of universities"

Given diminishing returns to scale on research, one might also consider abandonment of the research university model that is one of the drivers of rapid tuition inflation in favor of an old-fashioned teaching university model. Edward Morris -whose employer, Lindenwood University, has been able to offer a private school education at a cost comparable to its Missouri public school counterparts because it focuses on teaching - suggested that "with faculties of hundreds of lesser-known universities jumping into research in recent years, there may be too much research chasing too few good ideas."

Thomas Sowell, remarked on the one of the adverse affects of the research model, in Inside American Education, stating that

"over the past half-century, one of the most striking results has been that professors have taught fewer and fewer classes, and have done more research."

and that

"More money for higher education will never mean more teaching -much less better teaching - as long as that money goes into reducing teaching loads and financing more research."

A friend of mine - who works for a national public research university as a grant administrator -exemplified this matter by informing me that the stimulus bill nearly doubled the size of the grant that his employer received from a federal agency for research and that, not surprisingly, all of the administrators have since received substantial raises, with no expected increase in research output as a result of the increase in funding. So the mere suggestion that more public subsidies are needed to enhance research output sickens me.

The research emphasis has already provided a major distraction from the "education" portion of higher education, as well as contributed to soaring undergraduate costs --aided significantly by a publish or perish tenure policy and the pursuit of prestige. The focus of higher ed reform should be on increasing the quality of our college grads so that they can compete in the dynamic global world. This can only be achieved by plugging "education" back into the equation of higher education.

It’s a Pity They Can’t Both Lose

by Andrew Gillen

Many of you have been following the brawl over student loans, with the Obama administration favoring switching all lending over to Direct Loans (DL), and the banks resisting, favoring the FFEL program where they are subsidized to lend to students. As I watch the fight between the pro-DL side and the pro-FFEL side (fueled in part by the intense lobbying of Sallie Mae), I channel Henry Kissinger and think “It’s a pity they can’t both lose.”

While I won’t go into it again here, I’ve been pointing out the problems with the pro-DL side, mostly because they are using some really wrongheaded arguments - bordering on sheer fantasy - to advance their case. Some apparently think this means I’m pro-FFEL in spite of the fact that I’ve written things like “the FFEL subsidies are a waste of taxpayer money, [so] I can certainly appreciate the goals of [pro-DL] proponents.” Anyway, since this issue doesn’t seem to be going away, I thought I’d spell out my thoughts in a bit more detail.

1. FFEL should be taken out back and killed with a shovel

It has repeatedly shown that it is a corrupting program, both for the financial aid administrators and the lenders. Moreover, Congress can't keep it's hands off it.

2. DL should not be the monopoly lender

The same logic that would imply the government should be the only lender in student loans implies that they should be the only lender in any market. People seem to intuitively grasp that this is a really bad idea for their mortgage and auto loan, but think it will be just fine for other people's children.

Ideally what will happen is this. Democrats will kill off FFEL. It deserves to die, and it is unlikely that Republicans would be able to bring themselves to do it, so it might be now or never. Unfortunately, the Democrats will then impose a DL monopoly. This will suck, but in another 4, 8, or 12 years, Republicans will probably come back into power. When that happens, three things make it very likely that DL will in turn be killed. First, Republicans won’t be operating under the assumption that the government is both good at, and should be doing, just about everything.

Second, the longer the program is in operation, the more evident it will be that the huge piles of money that Democrats are now promising were based on fantasy. The program will make money, but nowhere near the 94b or 80b figures that they keep throwing around. This is problematic because they are going to spend all 94b or 80b, and then act surprised when much of the savings don't materialize. There is even a good chance that any money the program would have made will not materialize as Congress tries to buy votes by continually lowering the interest rate charged.

Third, the structural deficit of the country will be in crisis stage. Social Security expenses will exceed revenues by 2016, and our current health programs are already a massive drain on the Treasury, let alone whatever new health programs will be added in the near future. Thus the government will be desperate for cash. Switching from a DL to a private lending model will be a great way to improve the cash position of the government. The payments from the old loans will still be coming in, but new loans will be provided by private financial institutions, freeing up that money for other uses.

Thus, it is my hope and prediction that within a decade or so, both FFEL and DL will be consigned to the dustbin of history, replaced by a new, better, private lending program. I’ll lay out my thoughts on what that program should look like eventually, but this post is already a bit long, and I’m in no rush since I reckon I’ve got a few years before all this plays out.

Interesting Sentences

by Andrew Gillen

From Clark Kerr circa 1963:

An almost ideal location for a modern university is to be sandwiched between a middle-class district on its way to becoming a slum and an ultramodern industrial park – so that students may live in the one and the faculty consult in the other.

and

Universities seeking to rise in the academic hierarchy… a mad scramble for football stars and professorial luminaries. The former do little studying and the latter little teaching, and so they form a neat combination of muscle and intellect.

and

I once said in the 1950's as Chancellor at Berkeley that the great administrative problems of the day were sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty; but it could better be said now that the problems are, instead, athletics for the students who have gone "straight," sex for the professors with some of whom the counter-culture still finds support, and parking for the alumni as they return for thier refresher courses.

Paging Anti-DL Fighters

by Andrew Gillen

I’m hoping that the people who are against the looming Direct Loan monopoly in student loans can implement the idea below. As I’ve noted several times, most of the savings from switching to DL comes from turning the federal government into a loan shark. The bulk of the savings come from borrowing money at very low interest rates and then lending it to students at higher rates.

That business model (borrowing cheaply, lending more expensively) will generate the same savings in any lending market. If someone in Congress were to get the CBO to issue a comparable analysis for say the mortgage, auto, or the commercial lending market, the CBO, using the same methodology and assumptions as they did for student loans, will report massive “savings” if the government took over any of these.

This would put the pro-DL folk in a pickle. They could either come out in favor of having the federal government become the only lender in every single lending market, explain in tedious detail why student loans are somehow different (I don’t see how), or come up with a new rationale for imposing a DL monopoly.

Higher Ed in India

by Andrew Gillen

Rakesh Vohra:

… This multitude of private organizations offering a tertiary education is reflection of a severe shortage of Universities in India. One estimate pegs the available supply at only 7% of India’s college age population. The private sector has stepped in… The size of the market has attracted many entrants all of whom advertise aggressively…

… The focus on technology and management reflects a view that education is only useful insofar as it leads to a lucrative job…

... The upshot is that India offers only three varieties of higher education.

First, low price and low quality for a select few. These are the IIT’s and the IIM’s...

Second, high price and low quality offered by private institutions; here one pays for infrastructure. If one must attend college, it might as well be pleasant. So, tennis courts, air-conditioned class rooms etc.

Third, low price and zero quality for the rest. These are the government run Universities bedeviled by student strikes and chronic faculty absenteeism. I know, very French.

It suggests graduating from a tertiary institution in India is nothing more than signaling device to potential employers. This seems to be particularly true of the institutions in the first category. Collectively they admit less than 2 % of those who apply (and even the group that apply is screened before hand) through a joint entrance exam…

…Amongst the private institutions one finds a range of ambitions. One, with a billion dollar endowment, seeks to rival Stanford and Harvard. At the other extreme are diploma mills with classrooms, classes and warm bodies to staff them...

HT: Al Roth

Links for 8/17/09

by Andrew Gillen

Al Roth points us to a UK finding that

Law, medicine and other professions have become more exclusive in the past 30 years, drawing recruits from better off, middle-class families, a government report has found

Other former trades, such as journalism, have evolved into “modern professions”. They are increasingly colonised by middle-class graduates and offer fewer opportunities for young people with lesser qualifications to get a foot on the ladder.

****

How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education HT: TR

****

Olivia Judson: HT: MT

Ecology is one of the hardest branches of biology, possibly of all science. Real ecological communities are fantastically complex — think of a rainforest, or a coral reef — and hard to dissect and understand. Experiments in the wild are difficult to control, and important variables are often hard to measure. Imagine trying to measure the impact that, say, earthworms have on oak trees: it’s damnably difficult.

Experiments in the laboratory are problematic too.

Seems like ecology and economics have a lot in common.

****

Tim Ranzetta:

By changing the economics of the business, the College Cost Reduction Act (which could also be known as the Borrower Benefit Elimination Act) led lenders to rein in benefits previously offered to borrowers

****
This is fiendishly clever.

Don't Do It

by Andrew Gillen

Could someone please explain to me why adjusting Pell grants and other federal aid for the cost of living is even being contemplated? The consensus is that there is not enough aid money, and the solution to this problem is… to encourage students to go to school in expensive locales, increasing the funding shortfall even more. I must be missing something.

Economist Envy and the IT Revolution

By Richard Vedder

This is a two for one blog, like the old motion picture double features.

First, I had a good laugh over the wailing of sociologists reported in yesterday's Inside Higher Ed. It seems sociologists are disappointed, even mad, that economists are dominating the key policy positions in the Obama Administration. There is not a sociologist in sight.

This is amusing on several levels. First, economists often are accused of having physics envy, and trying to emulate the physical sciences with their pretensions of being "scientific", the use of math and models, etc., etc., etc. Yet deep down many of those economists have the same subjective, value-laden agendas that the sociologists have, but they disguise them in techno-babble. There may be a hierarchy of disciplines in terms of academic prestige, starting with the hard sciences and going down to the bottom (professors of education?) This is my amateurish sociological analysis of the situation.

On a second level, I am trying to think what sociologists could bring to major issues of our day --what impact will massive government borrowing have on America, or a huge increase in the money supply? How could sociologists have handled the crisis in confidence underlying last September's financial crisis? Urged a consideration of the race/class/gender implications of bank closings? Sociology is given less credence by politicians because they have little important to say about most of the truly important issues in the world. Whether economists are correct in what they propose, at least they are dealing with a foundation of some factual knowledge about important issues of the day.

One Nobel Prize winner in economics, Doug North, once told me that one of his proudest academic moments was convincing Washington U. in St. Louis to get rid of its sociology department. Jim Dorn, estimable editor of the Cato Journal, told me at lunch that Bill Meckling did the same thing at the University of Rochester, where the administration reallocated funds away from sociology towards economics and business. Whether Doug's and Bill's position was correct or not is debatable, but I think public policy has too many, not too few, experts guiding it, and adding sociologists to the mix would not be useful.

At a broader level, the issue of the importance of disciplines is an issue in resource allocation. Our good friend Joshua Hall of Beloit College told me that looking at majors at his college relative to faculty size over time, he was astonished at the huge variation, suggesting, probably, that there are too many resources allocated to some disciplines, and perhaps not enough to others. Where non-market forces dictate allocation decisions, that happens frequently and to a high degree.


*****************

We at CCAP believe that technology should be used to lower, not raise, higher education costs. Thousands of libraries buy printed copies of expensive academic journals. Why? Resources can be saved by simply sharing the issues on-line. A great resource has been JSTOR, which puts hundreds of journals on-line, but only after a multiple year lag, which compels libraries (or so they think) to still subscribe to printed versions. Now JSTOR is reaching agreement with the University of California Press to eliminate the time lag for scores of journals it publishes. If other publishers follow, the potential exists for importantly improving the way research is conducted and save some money for universities as well. Let us hope that happens.

McCluskey on SAFRA

by Daniel L. Bennett

CATO's Neal McCluskey has an OpEd in Forbes this week discussing the eminent problem of the SAFRA bill that is making its way through Congress relatively unscathed. McCluskey points out:

SAFRA's major problem isn't that it would kill guaranteed lending. It's that it would replace it with federal direct lending--which currently amounts to about a quarter of FFEL's size--and completely cut out private capital markets, making Uncle Sam your sole choice of lender. With the government acting as lender, there is no reason for economic realities to constrain student loans.

Something that Mr. McCluskey didn't mention in his piece, but perhaps should have is the evidence of the role that government student loans have played in contributing to the arms race in academic spending, leading to higher tuition.

This has harmed those in the lower income ranks the most --whose ability to pay is constrained by financial aid. With ever-rising tuition, these students increasingly rely on student loans that generate piles of debt. While such students arguably increase their earnings power through "credentialing", amassing exorbitant amounts of debt to the federal government is no way to jump social strata. This reduces the chance of enterprising young graduates taking the risk to start their own businesses, as the reality of paying back their loans often creates a constraint on a student's dreams --taking backseat to a job that will pay the bills.

Simplify the FAFSA - Just Do It

by Andrew Gillen

IHE brings our attention to a National Association of State Student Grant and Aid Programs survey whose point is that simplifying the FAFSA will leave many states without the data they want to use to make their own awards.

The correct response to this is: too bad. A Lumina funded project that should be released in the coming months lead me to look into FAFSA simplification, and this objection is one of the main barriers that have consistently thwarted reform. As I wrote (see here for a current draft, comments welcome)

One of the main obstacles to reform is the notion that a simplified FAFSA would not serve the needs of all states, schools, and scholarship organizations. After all, the FAFSA was intended to be a universal, catch-all form. Some argue that there is little point in having a very simple FAFSA if the students are required to fill out numerous other forms.

Given what we know today, these goals are misguided. Even the current monstrosity is not sufficient for many schools, whose students are required to fill out the College Boards’ CCS Financial Aid Profile. This form goes even further than the FAFSA in trying to determine ability to pay by requiring even more detail, particularly family assets.

The desire to be everything to everybody has lead to a least common denominator situation. For instance, all “students today are required to answer the approximately 20 non-financial questions on the FAFSA required by various state aid agencies, regardless of their own state’s data requirements.” In other words, the goal of universality has not been achieved, and the catch-all goal, to the extent it has been achieved, is achieved only by burdening every student in the country with irrelevant questions. A better FAFSA would focus on one thing and one thing only – determining eligibility for means-tested federal financial aid. If states and schools want something else, then they are free to try and impose those costs on their applicants.

Later on, I note that this combined with the other barriers

hints that it may be easier to scrap the entire system and start over from scratch, since the new system could be presented as a complete package, and compared to the existing dysfunctional system as a whole. This would avoid the problem of only looking at one small piece at a time, each typically unobjectionable in isolation, but combining to give us the extremely complicated, costly, and inefficient system we have today.

Arne Duncan and Robert Shireman have been absolutely terrific on this issue. Hopefully they will be able to overcome the obstacles in their way and achieve truly fundamental changes instead of having to settle for cosmetic tweaks.

Links for 8/12/09

by Andrew Gillen

Kevin Carey:

it'd be easy enough to use this merely as a point for Illinois in the Great American Corrupt-o-Thon it seems to be contesting against the state of New Jersey , or to chuckle at the inevitable appearance of the words "whose law firm donated $105,000 to Blagojevich's campaigns."

But really, isn't the only out-of-the-ordinary thing here that the people in Illinois were dumb enough to give their list an official name?

Tim Ranzetta loves the New Zealand financial literacy site http://www.sorted.org.nz/

Mark Bauerlein on the Sokal affair (where Sokal got a paper with intentional mistakes and incoherent reasoning published)

the paper itself was certainly not an "elaborate hoax." It was outright blather, and it should have rendered the credentials of the author irrelevant.

That his credentials could, in fact, succeed as "cover" underscores another symptom of a discipline in decline. Why do people resort to credentials when judging a work of scholarship? Because they don't believe in objective standards by which to judge the work itself.

Someone should tell Harvard that going after “a college in Singapore that not only was calling itself Harvard Business School but also selling the rights for the name all over Asia” is good, but that trying to trademark “Ask what you can do’’, “Lessons learned’’, and “The world’s thinking’’ is a bit arrogant. Not to mention it goes against the whole free flow of ideas that we are always told is a hallmark of HE.

Aside: In a similar vein, Brad DeLong taunts the Associated Press.

In Defense of RateMyProfessor.com

By Jonathan Leirer

After the release of the Forbes/CCAP rankings last week, one issue regarding the methodology has been consistently raised: the validity of using RateMyProfessor.com data to compile the rankings. This post will address and hopefully resolve some of these issues.

First, a little abstract statistical theory. One of the primary objections to using RateMyProfessor.com is that only students that are extremely (dis)satisfied bother to use the site. Let’s assume that if all students evaluated a given professor, their votes would be normally distributed with a mean of 3.5 and a standard deviation of 0.5. (For simplicity, let’s assume that there is a latent continuous rating that maps to the actual rating set {1,2,3,4,5}.) Now, let’s assume that a student only votes on RateMyProfessor.com (RMP) if their personal rating of the professor is more than 2 standard deviations away from the mean; that is, only students who rate the professor lower than 3.5-(2*0.5)= 2.5 or greater than 3.5+(2*0.5)= 4.5. What would the average rating be for this professor? Well, the expected value of the rating is equal to the initial mean, 3.5. Click here for a formal proof. Thus, given a sufficiently large sample, we would expect to see the same average rating as we would if all students participate. (Note, these results hold with all distributions containing a mean and variance such that a) the distribution is symmetric about the mean and b) the censoring decision is also symmetric about the mean). So, even if only disgruntled or exceptionally satisfied students rate their professors, the averages are consistent.

Now, let’s look at the actual data for a bit. One common criticism of the RMP variable is that easy professors get higher overall scores. Let’s check the validity of such a statement. As you can see by the graph, there is actually a positive relationship between the rigor score and overall score, at the institutional level, suggesting that schools which have generally more difficult instruction also have generally better (more helpful and more clear) instruction. However, if you recall from our methodology, we were concerned that some schools with small sample sizes could have inaccurate results. To address this issue we took a Bayesian approach, and obtained updates overall and rigor scores accounting for sample size. However, the sample sizes were sufficiently large that no score changed more than 1/5 a standard deviation.

Still, some are worried about low response rates biasing the results. First, a low number of responses do not bias results, given that the responses are still random and uncorrelated that with systematic tendencies to rate. They may be more unreliable (that is, have higher standard errors), but the Bayes approach helps correct for the lack of information in low response schools. Still, it may be worth examining what relationships, if any, exist between the number of responses, and overall and rigor score and between the response rate (number of responses in proportion to the size of the school) and the overall and rigor scores. As figures 2 and 3 show, there is no strong relationship between the number of responses or response rate and the final bayes score although there is an apparent convergence of scores as the response rate (and number of responses) increases. This is potentially troubling and is something that will be taken into account in the future but is likely an artifact of less variability in larger schools (there is a strong positive correlation between the number of ratings and the response rate).


In addition we would like to call attention to our response last year, found here, that discusses the strengths and weaknesses of using RMP, citing recent publications on this very issue. We hope this brief analysis can help answer some of the question readers may have on the usefulness and appropriateness of the RMP variable.

Educating the Masses

by Daniel L. Bennett

Jonathan Kaplan (President of Walden College) revamps the important findings of a recent US Dept. of Education report concerning online education in a piece that he wrote for Inside Higher Ed today. I blogged about the report last month. To recap, the key finding of the DOE's meta analysis was:

...on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.

From reading Kaplan's essay, it appears that Walden University has embraced the dynamic world that we live with innovative online degree programs. Walden, along with other innovators, are helping to push the boundary of delivering education in the most efficient manner. The DOE's finding that online learning is as effective, if not more so, than traditional instruction provides ammunition for real reform of education --reform that is void of special interests and political thwarting --technological.

With a marginal cost trending towards zero for online education, technology has the potential to offer education to the masses - even in remote parts of the world. This possibility has to excite Bill Gates and his call for creative capitalism.

If students are willing to put in effort to learn, then online courses will become the prevalent method of delivery in due time. The train has already left the yard and is gaining inertia. Educrats will only be able to impede this movement if they are able to influence the government to impose artificial barriers to thwart the creative destruction of an anachronistic education system.

Links for 8/11/09

by Andrew Gillen

Frederick M. Hess and Michael J. Petrilli on Race to the Top efforts:

The Bush administration learned the hard way that while Uncle Sam can force states and school districts to do things they don’t want to do, he can’t force them to do those things well…

It’s easy to predict what will happen now. States will check as many boxes as they can, make many promises they can’t live up to, get the money, and then go through the motions. We have seen all this before…

Obama has enormous credibility on education, has used it to push the envelope on important issues like charter schooling and merit pay, and is striking promising chords. It would be a waste for those efforts to be undermined. More important, we’d hate to see the potential for ideas like merit pay and charter schools compromised by the familiar cycle of overselling, over-prescription, disappointment, and backlash…

Tim Ranzetta on the new student loan information requirements from the Fed.


Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Ed on the new accountability website
http://www.collegechoicesforadults.org/ for online schools. It’s definitely better than nothing, but a far cry from providing nationally comparable information on the things that matter to students. But it holds promise.


Ben Miller details a pork filled little program called the Fund for Improvement of Postseondary Education, or FIPSE.

Originally intended as a way to fund innovative reform projects through a competitive grant process, FIPSE instead became the main vehicle for Congressmen to direct a few hundred thousand dollars toward their favorite colleges and universities each year.

Clunkers in Higher Ed

by Andrew Gillen

One of the most amazing things about the cash for clunkers program is the division it has caused among the econobloggers.

The pro side is represented by Alan Blinder and Justin Fox, the con side by Steven Levitt and James Hamilton. (For the record, I’m with Levitt and Hamilton. I just don’t see how “destroying useful goods could somehow make the nation wealthier.”)

For those of you not familiar with the program here is my somewhat biased summary:

• Americans used to like buying big gas guzzling cars, and American car companies specialized in making them.
• Congress wasn’t happy with the environmental impact of gas guzzlers, and mandated that some sales had to be of fuel efficient cars.
• Consumers resisted buying the fuel efficient cars.
• Gas prices went up, consumers wanted fuel efficient cars, but foreign companies are better at making them. American companies still couldn’t sell theirs.
• Since American companies couldn’t sell cars, they needed to be bailed out, meaning the US government now largely owns them (except Ford)
• But people still aren’t buying the cars, so we tell them if they turn in their old gas guzzler to be destroyed, we’ll give them some money to buy a new, more fuel efficient car.
• Thus the government is giving people money to buy things from... the government. Which somehow makes us better off, or so I'm told.
  

As you can see, this is all a very complex and convoluted way to transfer money from one government run program to another. That makes me glad I work in the higher ed industry. When we want to do something we just do it in a straightforward manner. For instance, suppose we want more teachers.

• We make it very difficult to become a teacher by imposing lots of barriers, most with very little evidence that they actually improve student learning.
• The best way to deal with these barriers is to go to major in education at an American college.
• American colleges take money from the students and various governments and compete in a wasteful arms race. Because the arms race is never ending, the need of colleges for money is essentially a black hole, sucking up all available money.
• Students are asked to come up with some of the extra money to give to colleges.
• This is problematic, because we don’t pay teachers much, so they really shouldn’t be taking out huge loans to enter a low paying profession.
• We come up with loan forgiveness and income based repayment programs.
• Thinking they can realistically repay all these loans thanks to these programs, lots of students take on lots of debt and enter a low paying profession.
• Surprised that lots of students are using these programs and that it’s costing lots of money, we cancel them.

Mission Accomplished: We’ve funneled lots of people through ridiculously expensive programs with the help of loans they couldn’t afford to take out, and that they only took out because we told them they wouldn’t have to repay them. We get lots of new teachers. Later, once they’ve anchored their future into a low paying profession, we tell them we lied and they will have to repay the loans. Everybody wins, with the minor exceptions of a) the teachers, who have to repay all the loans, and b) the students (since lots of really good teachers aren’t willing to play along with this and other crazy schemes).

Administrative Bloat Questioned - Public Discussion & Additional Research Is Welcome

by Daniel L. Bennett

Robert Archibald and David Feldman have an article in the the CHE today that is critical of my report on the Higher Ed Labor Force. They contest that college staffs have become bloated, suggesting that colleges have instead responded to demand for a more educated workforce - a trend that has affected a large number of industries in the US. Yet, prices for most goods, with health care being the exception (worth noting is the similarly high degree of 3rd party payments in both health care and higher education), have grown at rates substantially less than tuition.

The bulk of their argument rests on the rise of technology and the need for a greater number of technology specialists - a point that I concede has some merit. The authors also briefly mention an increase in the number of staff providing auxiliary services (housing, food services, career advice, counseling, etc.), as well as the need for folks to administer research grants. Proponents often suggest that these services are provided because students demand them. Where is the data that shows how often and how many students are using the plethora of prepaid services that are bundled with tuition? Are students getting their money's worth? Does each service pass a cost-benefit analysis? Are public funds subsidizing education or bureaucratic expansion? These are the questions that should be addressed.

Along with other critics, I contend that colleges have lost focus of their primary mission of providing an education in lieu of trying to be all things for all people and trying to serve multiple missions that may not necessarily be harmonious. Edward Morris discusses this extensively in The Lindenwood Model, in which he cites the increasing focus of colleges on research as contributing to the burgeoning support staffs at colleges. The reason he explains is that in the past professors not only had teaching and research duties, but also were active in student engagement, offering both academic and life counseling.

Fast forward to today and we find that professors not only are increasingly disengaged from teaching (evident by lower teaching loads and an increase in the proportion of courses taught by adjuncts and grad students), but they've also had their student counseling activities outsourced to non-instruction related staff, so that they can focus on research. As CCAP has contended in the past, much academic research has little relevance to society as a whole and may only be read by the relatively few specialists in a field who subscribe to one of the many obscure academic journals. Is relinquishing the duties of professors to help students succeed in life in order to pursue obscure research, and substituting them with "professional" support staff that add to the cost of providing an education a productive use of resources? Probably not.

I'm glad that Archibald and Feldman have taken the time to conduct further research in response to my report. Intended as piece of basic research to draw public attention to the burgeoning administrative army on campus, the report has proved effective in stimulating public discussion and further research in the area. I consider this a benefit to society at large as it moves us closer to the goal of colleges providing more information to the public (so that students, parents and policy makers can make better decisions) without having to impose additional regulatory mandates. As the public becomes more aware of what they are paying for in higher education, I suspect that tuition will begin to stabilize.

Vive la Difference! A New Approach to College Rankings

By Richard Vedder

The most exciting dimension of this year's Forbes/CCAP rankings of colleges is a revolutionary new concept --the do it yourself ranking, available here. You first determine the region where you want to go to school, and the size of the institution. After that, you indicate which of 12 factors you think are important --and how important. Those factors include admissions selectivity, average freshman SAT scores, the student-faculty ratio, the four year graduation rate, crime rates on campus, student evaluations of their instruction (and instructors), incidence of listing in Who's Who in America, average post-graduate salary data, whether students or faculty won nationally competitive awards, average student debt loads, and net tuition costs. Then the screener gives you the top 20 schools, given your tastes and preferences.

Human differences in tastes lead to HUGE difference in the top schools for individuals. Let us take a rich kid who is only interested about getting out of college on time, getting fame (listing in Who's Who in America) and fortune (big salary). He is not worried about college debts or tuition levels, and could care less about the quality of instruction, campus crime rates, where the school is located or its size. What are the best schools for him? The standard prestigious private schools --Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale, M.I.T., Stanford, Duke, Cal Tech, Haverford College, and Columbia. But suppose the student is also interested in fame and money, but is poor, and thus is also interested in tuition costs and minimizing college debt. The top 10 list alters a good bit: Naval Academy, Cal Tech, West Point, Coast Guard Academy, Princeton, Williams, Harvard, Merchant Marine Academy (!) , Columbia, and Rice. Gone are Dartmouth, M.I.T., Stanford, Duke and Haverford.

Suppose the student lives in the Midwest, doesn't want to go too far away from home, and is fearful of going to a large school, with over 10,000 undergraduates. Suppose also of special importance is graduating on time, with little debt, and paying low tuition fees (the students ranks other considerations of moderate importance). Top schools: Hillsdale College, Northwestern U., Washington U. in St. Louis, Kenyon College, U. of Chicago, Lawrence U., Macalester College, Carleton College, Wheaton College, and the U. of Notre Dame. Alternatively, suppose the student wants to go to a bigger university (over 10,000 undergraduates), anywhere in the country but the East, but also with the same high interest in minimizing tuition costs and debt, and graduating on time, and going to a school with low crime rates. The screener gives her lots of state universities -- North Carolina, Flordia, George, Virginia, Cal-Berkeley, UCLA, Cal Poly, the University of Michigan, University of California at San Diego, and one private school, Brigham Young.

The point here is that the notion that West Point and Princeton are America's top schools is fine if you share the rather mainstream and reasonable perspective used by CCAP and Forbes, but those schools may be inappropriate for persons with specific tastes. For some kids, Hillsdale College is a "better" school than Princeton or West Point.

University president who decry rankings do so mostly for illegitimate reasons --they don't like the competition or the notion that they are somehow inferior to other schools, etc. They don't like the limelight, the transparency, etc. All bad. But they are right in suggesting that the rankings that are published may misguide some persons, individuals whose tastes and preferences are not in accord with the rankers'. I consider customized, do it yourself rankings to be the real innovation in this year's Forbes listings, and am proud to have helped make it happen.

The Big Ten Conference: Brains v. Brawn

by Michael Malesick

Is the Big Ten really the "biggest and the best?" Research has revealed that many Big Ten universities' academic rankings fall below the mean average for academic standards. Although most Big Ten institutions excel in athletics, this is not always the case academically. Furthermore, Big Ten schools typically sink enormous dollars into their athletic programs, yet even with these state-of-the-art facilities and big budgets, this has not guaranteed success.



Here at CCAP, we recently completed our undergraduate rankings for 2009. We decided to observe how Big Ten institutions rank academically, as opposed to athletically. Three schools that have fared rather poorly in football and basketball in recent years -- Northwestern University, University of Illinois, and University of Michigan --fare well (at the top) of the Big Ten in terms of the Forbes/CCAP Best College rankings. (see chart for details; a lower rank is a sign of good performance). For instance, Northwestern University is 17th in our undergraduate rankings (out of 600 schools) and easily tops the Big Ten; however, their 3-year athletic average (2006-2008 football and men's basketball) ranks them last in the Big Ten. Ohio State ranks 7th out of 11 academically, but is clearly leading the Big Ten in athletics as the premier athletic program.

Finally, the Big Ten is rich in tradition and proud of its athletic reputation, but the correlation between athletic and academic success is clearly not positive -- meaning perhaps schools need to rethink their priorities in allocating scarce resources. It will be interesting to apply similar analysis to other conferences, such as the Southeast Conference, where, again, the top school academically (Vanderbilt) is definitely at or near the bottom athletically. Is there more generally an athletics-academic trade-off, contrary to assertions of proponents of big-time intercollegiate athletics who argue that good performance in sports has positive benefits in terms of the academic side of the institutional mission?

Michael Malesick is a research associate of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and is an undergraduate student at Ohio University.

Forbes/CCAP Best Southern Schools

By Jonathan Leirer

While the South has a decent showing with 25 schools in the top 100 Forbes/CCAP list of the Best Colleges of America for 2009-2010, it falls short in the top 50 – with only five – and fails to place a single school into the top 10. It would appear that the nation’s premiere college and Universities are not located in the South. However, the area where the South throws some serious weight around is in the Best Buy Rankings. With 51 in the top 100, 26 in the top 50 and 9 in the top 15 Best Buy Schools located in the South, it is apparent that the South is the place to be if you’re looking for more “Bang for your Buck.”

Using the criteria determined by Forbes/CCAP, the best institution for undergraduate higher education in the South is Centre College, who also places 29th in the Best Buy – Southern, Colleges rankings. The distribution of top Colleges and Universities in the south is broad, with no state or urban area demonstrating a marked share in the rankings. Public universities also have a good showing in the South, especially in the Best Buy rankings. Sixteen of the top 25 Southern Best Buy schools are public, while all but 7 of the top 25 Best Southern Colleges are private. The best value in the south goes to Berea College, a vanguard in college affordability, Berea College charges no tuition and explicitly targets underprivileged Appalachian youth. One institution which ranks in the top 3 in both rankings for the south is the United States Naval Academy. Affordable and proficient, while the U.S. Naval Academy might not be for everyone, it is certainly a remarkable university.

25 Best Southern Colleges*

1. Centre College (14)
2. United States Naval Academy (30)
3. Washington and Lee University (34)
4. Rice University (43)
5. College of William and Mary (48)
6. Hampden-Sydney College (54)
7. Emory University (59)
8. Davidson College (60)
9. New College of Florida (61)
10. Rhodes College (62)
11. University of Virginia (64)
12. Salem College (67)
13. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (68))
14. Sweet Briar College (69)
15. Wofford College (71)
16. Vanderbilt University (77)
17. Virginia Military Institute (79)
18. Hendrix College (81)
19. Berea College (84)
20. Transylvania University (85)
21. St. John's College (89)
22. Centenary College of Louisiana (90)
23. St. Mary's College of Maryland (93)
24. Sewanee—University of the South (94)
25. Hollins University (95)

25 Best Buy - Southern Colleges*

1. Berea College (1)
2. New College of Florida (2)
3. United States Naval Academy (6)
4. University of Florida (7)
5. Florida State University (11)
6. University of Georgia (12)
7. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (13)
8. Salem College (14)
9. Wesleyan College (15)
10. The Citadel (16)
11. Mississippi State University (18)
12. University of Virginia (19)
13. Lyon College (20)
14. Virginia Military Institute (21)
15. University of Texas, Austin (22)
16. Mississippi College (24)
17. Georgia Institute of Technology (27)
18. Claflin University (31)
19. College of William and Mary (33)
20. Centenary College of Louisiana (38)
21. Millsaps College (39)
22. Texas A&M University, College Station (40)
23. Erskine College (42)
24. University of North Carolina, Asheville (43)
25. Middle Tennessee State University (47)



*Numbers in parenthesis are from the national ranking.

Forbes/CCAP Best Midwestern Schools

By Richard Vedder

The nation’s heartland is well represented on the Forbes/CCAP list of the Best Colleges of America for 2009-2010, with 21 of the top 100 schools located in the Midwest, roughly consistent with the region’s share of the U.S. population. However, Midwestern schools tend to be less good values than found in some other regions – only 15 of the top 100 Best Value schools are located in the Midwest. Moreover, private schools dominate –all top 25 top ranked schools in the Midwest are private –the only region in the country where that is so. Even 16 of the top 25 schools in terms of value are private, whereas in other regions public schools tend to dominate.

The best institution for higher education in the Midwest, using the Forbes/CCAP criteria emphasizing undergraduate student preferences and outcomes, is Northwestern University. Indeed, Chicago is the clear leading center of academic excellence in the Midwest, with the neighboring University of Chicago ranking number two, and two other top 25 schools (Lake Forest and Wheaton colleges) located in the Chicago suburbs, and two other relatively high ranked universities (Notre Dame and the University of Illinois) within a two hour drive. Interestingly, only four of the top 25 schools in our rankings are universities – beside the Chicago schools, there are Washington University in St. Louis and Notre Dame. Public universities do not crack our top 25, but at the top of our list of those schools are the University of Illinois, University of Michigan, and Indiana University.

The Midwest is littered with many excellent liberal arts colleges. In our calculations, Ohio’s Kenyon College leads the list, followed closely by Minnesota’s Carleton. Aside from these two, Wabash (an all men’s school) and Kalamazoo Colleges are in the top 10 schools (including universities), along with two other liberal arts institutions, DePauw and Lawrence universities. Five Midwestern schools are among a select group ranked both in the top 100 of the nation’s best colleges and in the top 100 best values (measuring, roughly, the quality of education per dollar spent) –Wabash, Hillsdale, Ripon, Principia, and Doane colleges.

However, along with the East, the Midwest is the worst major region in the country for providing schools that are adjudged good values. Indiana is the only Midwestern state to have two schools amongst the nation’s top 50 Best Values – Wabash College and Indiana University at Bloomington (by contrast, California has nine, New York five, and South Carolina four). In a quality-adjusted sense, higher education tends to be relatively more costly in the Midwest.

25 Best Midwestern Colleges*

1. Northwestern University (17)
2. University of Chicago (21)
3. Kenyon College (22)
4. Carleton College (23)
5. Wabash College (32)
6. Lawrence University (41)
7. DePauw University (42)
8. Washington U., St. Louis (45)
9. U. of Notre Dame (50)
10. Kalamazoo College (52)
11. Principia College (57)
12. Doane College (66)
13. College of Wooster (74)
14. Hillsdale College (76)
15. Macalester College (82)
16. Lake Forest College (86)
17. Nebraska Wesleyan C. (87)
18. Oberlin College (88)
19. Earlham College (91)
20. Huntington College (97)
21. Ripon College (101)
22. Wheaton College (103)
23. Grinnell College (106)
24. Knox College (111)
25. Marietta College (112)

25 Best Value Midwestern Colleges*

1. Wabash College (32)
2. University of Michigan- Ann Arbor (34)
3. Indiana University – Bloomington (49)
4. Clarke College (63)
5. Hillsdale College (71)
6. Hastings College (75)
7. Westminster College (76)
8. U. of Minnesota at Morris (78)
9. Ripon College (88)
10. U. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (90)
11. Principia College (91)
12. Coe College (94)
13. Doane College (95)
14. Albion College (96)
15. Truman State University (97)
16. Ohio State University –Columbus (110)
17. Kalamazoo College (119)
18. Wisconsin Lutheran College (124)
19. Cornell College (128)
20. Alma College (134)
21. Goshen College (138)
22. U. of Wisconsin, Madison (140)
23. Central College (141)
24. Michigan State University (144)
25. U. of Missouri, Columbia (155)

* Numbers in parentheses are from the national rankings.

CCAP at 1,000

By Richard Vedder

This is the 1,000th post on the CCAP web site. It took a bit over three years to reach that milestone, meaning, on average, that over one blog has been posted per work day on the site, or about six per week. At the beginning, a large majority were done by me, but recently I have encouraged more blog participation from our growing staff, and I have reduced my own participation a tad. I am gratified by the number of persons who have told me that they look at the blog and other CCAP activities, and take them seriously.

It is tempting to pat ourselves on the back and brag at all we have accomplished. Certainly, CCAP has grown from a minuscule organization with two staffers (Bryan O'Keefe and myself) into a larger organization. Andrew Gillen, Daniel Bennett, Todd Holbrook and Peter Neiger run the DC office. In Ohio, besides myself, we have the assistance of Jonathan Leirer, plus a formidable army of Whiz Kids --student interns who are the world's best. One, Matt Denhart, Chief Whiz Kid, has been with us from the beginning. So the organization has grown in size and scope. Our press citations are now rather lengthy, and we are consulted or involved in many leading stories about higher education.

But is higher education any better than it was three years ago? That is a harder question to answer. Of course, we do not have good measure of outcomes --so we cannot say whether "output" in higher education is rising or falling. On the cost side, there has been a huge amount of rhetoric, but I cannot say I have seen much in the way of a slowdown in the rise in the real cost of higher education. Although the rhetoric has intensified and even some real efforts have been made, I see at best modest improvement in increasing higher education efficiency, transparency and accountability.

The reason, of course, is that the fundamental operating environment of higher education remains unchanged. It is a largely a non-profit industry driven by third party payments. Until the role of first parties in financing higher education increases, and until the time that market-like incentives become commonplace, it is very unlikely that people in the system will be motivated to do necessary things: cut costs, use technology intelligently to improve quality per dollar spent, measure performance adequately, etc., etc.

Are there any promising signs on the horizon? Yes. One is that for profit higher education is growing. For profits are not a panacea for all the problems of higher education. But they operate with better incentive systems, are all about instruction, and introduce great competition. The fall in state government support, decried by many, is something I view positively. We are seeing the slow privatization of many of our great flagship schools.

The Obama Administration's socialist/big government agenda is not good for the American economy as a whole, and not good for higher education. The attempt to centralize authority, which has gone on for decades in American life, is accelerating. This threatens on of the unique strengths of U.S. postsecondary education --its diversity, its variety.

What is the future for CCAP specifically? I don't know. We have the building blocks for further expansion into being a major force for reform. We have the enthusiasm, the ideas, and the ability to raise needed resources. There are some organizational/administrative issues, some associated with getting big, that need to be resolved, and the resolution of these issues will influence the direction the organization moves. But the issues of higher education reform are likely to be present for a long time to come.