Links for 11/30/09

Ofer Malamud

I find that individuals from Scotland, where specialization occurs relatively late, are less likely to switch to an unrelated occupation compared to their English counterparts who specialize early. This implies that the benefits to increased match quality are sufficiently large to outweigh the greater loss in skills from specializing early, and thus confirms the important role of higher education in helping students discover their own tastes and talents.

Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob

Our results indicate that NCLB generated statistically significant increases in the average math performance of 4th graders (effect size = 0.22 by 2007) as well as improvements at the lower and top percentiles. There is also evidence of improvements in 8th grade math achievement, particularly among traditionally low-achieving groups and at the lower percentiles. However, we find no evidence that NCLB increased reading achievement in either 4th or 8th grade.

HAROLD E. FORD JR., LOUIS V. GERSTNER JR. AND ELI BROAD

The administration is resisting the temptation to award funds to as many states as possible. And that's good…

If the administration were to simply spread the funds around, Race to the Top would end up supporting incremental, not transformational, change. The time is right for bold, comprehensive reform—even if only in a handful of states…

Quick Takes

The student union of the University of British Columbia has filed a complaint with the United Nations, seeking to have it declare that tuition increases in Canada violate the country's commitment to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Mary Sheehy Moe

...graduates of the Montana university system's two-year schools are borrowing more per degree year than graduates of the state's public four-year universities, statistics show. That's despite the fact that tuition at two-year schools averages 30 percent lower than four-year schools

Suck It Up, Berkeley Students

By Richard Vedder

This blog will demonstrate definitively what many readers already know --I am a grumpy old man. I wrote a little something in the New York Times on-line edition last Monday that has engendered lots of indignant emails to me privately, so let me comment more fully on the University of California tuition increase.

1. Most people attending the University of California schools are not poverty-stricken kids on Pell Grants. I would be surprised if the median family income of those attending Berkeley or UCLA is under $100,000 a year and bet is closer to $125,000. The proposed tuition hikes will put UC's tuition in line with other top-flight flagship universities. Like the others, UC acts more like an elite private school than a public one anyway. It is not outrageous to ask families to pay the equivalent of 10 percent of their income in tuition fees, maybe forcing them to cut down on vacations, drive their cars a few years longer, and eat out less. Big whoop.

2. Of course, there are some low income students at the UC schools --maybe as much as 20 percent or so on some campuses. UC gives essentially a zero tuition for the poorest of those --from families with less than $60,000 income. The kids with families with, say, $90,000 income will get pinched some by the new tuition increase, but there should be financial sacrifice and pain involved in utilizing expensive resources that cost several times the stated tuition cost.

3. I stick to my guns ---the big gainers from attending Berkeley or UCLA or, God forbid, Santa Cruz, are the students themselves. Sure, kids who go to college don't smoke as much, commit fewer robberies, and are more likely to be a community leader as an adult, but I think that has little or nothing to do with attending college per se. Evidence we have accumulated show no positive relationship between state higher education support and economic growth --indeed the opposite. There may be as many negative spillover effects from colleges as positive ones.

4. Speaking of negative spillover effects, let me say something about the spoiled children of affluent Californians who are demonstrating over having smaller subsidies from other honest taxpayers and having to pay more themselves for their education. If their demonstrations interfere with the business of the university, they should be arrested, jailed (if a severe enough infraction), and/or dismissed from the university. Make room for students who abide by the law. And if that batters the self esteem of the kids, that is good, not bad. A lesson in civics and the rule of law needs to be taught using Tough Love.

5. Getting to my New York Times comments, I said that while I am sympathetic to Mark Yudof and other senior UC officials in this situation, a honest review of all non-instructional spending is warranted. Does the central office of the UC system still have close to 2,000 employees, for example? Why not make that number, say, 100--saving over $100 million a year? And research should not be sacrosanct. I am not anti-research, and federally funded research grants often serve useful purposes. But there are low teaching loads for faculty in the social sciences, humanities, and some vocational areas, ostensibly to support research. Is the research that is being done truly justifiable on any rational cost-benefit basis?

Links for 11/25/09

Neil Shephard

I think the Government should allow universities to charge their graduating students additional …“deferred fees” or income-contingent tuition fees…

If the graduate’s income is not sufficient to make the repayments during their career, the fee is forgiven.

David Henderson

Milton Friedman used to remark that the California government, with its state funding of higher education, taxed the residents of Watts to pay for the residents of Beverly Hills.

George Mitchell

It’s simply not possible to sort through the RTTT morass and conclude that anything positive will result, except by chance.

Rankings of top universities by country.

Ayres v. Trujillo

by Andrew Gillen

The 32% increase in tuition in California is spurring quite a bit of discussion. One tangent that keeps coming up the idea of using price discrimination to fund discounts for low income students.

Ian Ayres thinks that this is a good idea.

Higher education is the very rare market where the seller says “Tell me in detail about your ability to pay, and I’ll tell you what your (net) price will be.” But instead of maximizing firm revenue, the goal is to enhance equity.

Alfonso Trujillo doesn't.

Subsidizing top-tier universities in the hope of getting more underprivileged students to attend is tantamount to subsidizing top-tier department stores in the hope that some underprivileged consumers will be clothed. In the end, both results are predictable: higher prices, higher status for those who purchase the product, and an inefficient method of helping the poor.

Links for 11/24/09

Michael J. Offerman

The idea that the most exclusive colleges represent quality actually begs the question of the real value added by colleges that take only the best and the brightest. The idea that cost equals quality is just as questionable. Exclusivity and cost have served as proxies for quality because higher education has argued that it is just not possible to measure learning. I find this argument to be ridiculous. To think that organizations designed to teach and prepare researchers cannot figure out how to assess their own work borders on the absurd.

Adam Kotsko

unless we want to cultivate students who believe that their every utterance is intrinsically worthwhile due to their precious snowflake-hood, it would probably be good to get them to a point where their confidence is earned, where it’s based in actual knowledge…

The goals of critical thinking are the only possible goals of a liberal arts education, and I support them without reservation. Yet you can’t jump straight to them, and I think that a lot of the ways people talk about pedagogy assume that you can

Tim Ranzetta on the Canadian student loan program.

Barry Ritholtz

That millions of slightly clever, pants wearing primates can combine their collective ignorance, their intellectual foibles, biases and false beliefs somehow into something resembling intelligence was one of the false beliefs of the era.

Kudos to Northeastern University

by Daniel L. Bennett

Northeastern is a private University with a nearly $34k price tag. So what do students get for this? Not a football team as of next year. Today, Northeastern announced that it will discontinue its intercollegiate football team after the season, which ended this past weekend with a 3-8 win-loss record that included a 54-0 blowout loss to Boston College and a 56-7 beating at the hands of Villanova. Since it began fielding a team in the 1933 season, NU has won only 44.7 percent of its games. Its last winning season was in 2003.

Non-competitive in a Colonial Athletic Association (not exactly a football powerhouse conference) this bold move by university officials is laudable. An article appearing this morning in IHE suggested that:

Northeastern officials stressed that the decision was not simply about saving money, but about where the university should spend money.

The press release from the University indicated that:

The decision is consistent with the university’s strategic approach to prioritize programs and invest in signature strengths

These statements confirm what CCAP and other critics of college sports have long suspected, that the proliferation of "big-time" sports had been at the expense of education. Northeastern deserves a pat on the back for being audacious enough to admit this through its actions.

Hopefully this is the beginning of a trend in which universities realize that their conglomerate operating model is a failure, and begin to re-focus their priorities (expenditures) on areas that they have a comparative advantage, rather than trying to be all things for all people. Individuals, firms and even entire countries have long abandoned the conglomerate (generalist) model in favor of specialization, it is time that higher education hop on the train. Northeastern President Joseph Aoun appears ready to embrace this concept:

“At a time when higher education is critically important to rebuilding our knowledge-based economy...universities have an obligation to invest resources in areas of strength—whether they are competitive athletic programs or cutting-edge academics."

What Should Public Universities do to Balance Fiscal Responsibility and Equal Opportunity?

The NY Times Room for Debate Blog poses this question today. Richard Vedder chimes in, along with reputed higher ed voices such as Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, Ronald Ehrenberg and Jane Wellman.

Here's what Dr. Vedder had to say:

What Taxpayers Deserve to Know

Since most of the financial benefits of college go to the student, he or she should pay a large portion of college costs. Even with the large tuition increase, University of California fees are well below those of many other prestigious flagship public universities.

The U.C. bureaucracy is bloated, teaching loads are low, and most of the budget goes for noninstructional expenses.
Most attendees come from moderately to very prosperous families that can shoulder this extra burden. Lower income students are largely protected by U.C. financial aid policies and by an increasingly generous federal student assistance program.

However, all students and their parents, not to mention taxpayers, have a right to know why the vast majority of the U.C. budget goes for non-instructional expenses, why teaching loads are so low, and why there is a bloated central administrative bureaucracy. If they want the students to pay more, the University of California administration should be more fully accountable to those who are increasingly paying the bills.

Links for 11/20/09 - Graphics Edition

Some very cool graphics for a late Friday afternoon.

Ben Miller has the chart of the day.

This reminds me of that scene in Outbreak where the virus spreads uncontrollably.

Paul Kedrosky finds a empire one.

Free Exchange on health care.

Biting the Hand That Feeds You

by Daniel L. Bennett

Inside Higher Ed has a story this morning discussing how business and college leaders collaborate on many things, but differ on tax policy. This comes as no surprise as taxes have a negative impact on profitability and the ability to expand for the former, but a positive affect on the ability to expand for the latter (public universities in particular).

Both parties obviously have an interest in state-level tax policy. Colleges make the case that they are engines of economic growth and that they provide a public service a la research and education. Businesses are undoubtedly engines of economic growth (employing a far greater share of citizens than the public sector) and providing the taxable profits and employee salaries that are needed to support the public sector, including colleges. There is an added dynamic at play in which private businesses provide the income by which parents use to pay for their children's tuition.

State budget's are struggling in the current recession and unlike the federal government, have to balance their budget every year - forcing them to make tough decisions. The two primary options to balance the budget are to reducing expenditures or to raise revenues (i.e. tax hikes). The public sector prefers to avoid the former scenario, and the current downturn has made the former option less viable, as the nationwide unemployment rate has surged to double digits (nearly 17% if you count the underemployed). Businesses have scaled way back in order to survive the crisis and need an environment that fosters economic growth before they can resume hiring. By imposing additional taxes, it further squeezes businesses and private consumers, reducing the likelihood of a quick recovery and a decline in unemployment. The private sector needs incentives to grow, not disincentives.

Increasing taxes in a recession is a zero sum game that makes to the recipients of public funds (e.g. colleges) the winners in the short run, while possibly imperiling their long-term viability, as businesses downsize or relocate to more business-friendly locales, and the public resentment of and willingness to support fiscal irresponsibility grows.

A report this week revealed that colleges continued to hire non-instructional employees during the recession, adding fuel to the fire. While many businesses and families are struggling to keep the heat on and put food on the table, colleges are taking advantage of public support to engage in rent-seeking behavior and expand their regimes, while at the same time squeezing increasing amounts from the students and their families through tuition hikes. Effectively biting the hand that feeds them. This is fiscally irresponsible, morally inappropriate, self-serving behavior that needs to come to an end.

CCAP in the News: November 20, 2009

The WCF Courier cited CCAP's study on the higher ed labor force last week:

“According to the Center for College Affordability and Productivity the number of administrative staff at universities nearly doubled between 1987 and 2007. During that same time, the study shows full-time equivalent instructional positions grew by only 50 percent, with many of the new positions being part-time.“

The NY Times Choice blog quoted Richard Vedder's remarks in a recent CHE article.

“A large subset of our population should not go to college, or at least not at public expense.” Mr. Vedder’s argument centers on the diminishing number of jobs that require a college degree.

The Daily Texan quoted Richard Vedder in an article last week:

college is a waste of time and money for most students. Vedder said not everyone who goes to college is qualified, and some of the jobs in highest demand do not require a four-year degree.
Vedder also said he sees a mismatch between the types of jobs in demand and those in supply. Many graduates will end up with jobs that have nothing to do with their college majors and do not require the critical thinking skills learned in college, he said.

“There’s a lot of mail carriers in the United States with bachelor’s degrees, and there are a lot with a high school education, and I don’t think the college graduates do a better job of delivering the mail than high school graduates,” Vedder said.

Of the jobs in greatest demand, Vedder said the top 30 or so do not require a college degree. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, of the top 10 occupations with the largest job growth, only one requires at least a four-year bachelor’s degree.

Andrew Gillen was quoted in an article in the Staten Island Advance this week:

Like homeowners who took subprime loans they could not pay when the housing market crashed, the number of college graduates defaulting on loans is rising nationally in one of the worst job markets in 25 years.

"It's not the same kind of financial implosion, but there are definitely parallels," said Andrew Gillen, research director for the nonprofit Center for College Affordability and Productivity in Washington.

"If you've maxed out your loans through the government and you've taken out some private loans, you are looking at a significant chunk of your salary or wages that will be eaten up by this," he said.

Forbes features a story this week that ranks colleges in the Midwest based on the rankings compiled by CCAP and Forbes for its annual “America’s Best Colleges” rankings.

Educational Methods in the 21st century = Medicine in the 19th

by Andrew Gillen

Perhaps I’ve been reading too much Caplan lately, but I had my signaling theory glasses on when I read this story about health care by David Leonhardt

from the time of Hippocrates into the 19th century, medicine made scant progress. “The amount of death and disease would be less,” Jacob Bigelow, a prominent doctor, said in 1835, “if all disease were left to itself.”

Yet patients continued to go to doctors, and many continued to put great in faith in medicine. They did so in part because they had no good alternative and in part because… There was a strong intuitive logic behind those old treatments; they seemed to be ridding the body of its ills. They made a lot more sense on their face than the abstract theories about germs and viruses that began to appear in the late 19th century.

And this is signaling theory version applied to education:

Yet students continued to go to colleges (racking up astonishing levels of debt in the process), and many continued to put great in faith in higher education. They did so in part because they had no good alternative (employers like to use college as a screening device, hiring a college graduate regardless of their major, a practice that was encouraged by Griggs v. Duke Power) and in part because… There was a strong intuitive logic behind those old treatments; they seemed to be ridding the body of its ills (how could listening to smart people talk for 3 hours a week for 15 weeks not make you smarter). They made a lot more sense on their face than the abstract theories about active learning and standards paired with evaluations that began to appear in the late 20th century.

Are University Presidents Morally Superior to Prostitutes?

By Richard Vedder

Doug Lederman sent my blood pressure into the stratosphere this morning. I am not mad at Doug --who is arguably the best reporter covering higher education in America today. He is just the messenger. What was today's message? American universities added over 79,000 new employees last year, despite rising unemployment, the recession and, at the beginning of the academic year, a huge financial crisis. Worse, less than 12,000 of the jobs were for "instruction, research, and public service" ---and there are as many new executive/managerial/administrative additions as in the core areas mentioned above. Literally, a new administrator was hired for every new instructor.

That's not all. For every new instructor/research/public service employee addition, there were three new "other professional" persons added. Only 15 percent of incremental employment had anything to do with instruction. My university, for example, added people in the area of "sustainability" and "wellness", not to mention public relations, while more and more students cannot get into classes, in part because of poor resource allocation, and in part because the faculty don't want to teach them and continue to lower their teaching load.

This angers me but does not infuriate me. After all, it is the continuation of a trend that has gone one for decades. What infuriates me, beside the contempt shown for the customer (the student), is the hypocrisy and lying done by university presidents. They tell their legislatures and big donors that they are really being pushed against the wall financially, that they are doing all sorts of things to get greater efficiency, etc. Mostly out and out lies --or at least gross distortions. They say one thing and do another.

I got to thinking --who is morally more suspect: prostitutes, drug dealers, or university presidents? The two former occupations involve illegal activities, which gives a moral edge to the university presidents. Yet when the prostitute sells her (or his) wares, she or he usually delivers honest and reliable service for the funds provided --you get what you pay for. Can you say the same thing about universities? And the drug dealer who tells you he is giving you X but in fact delivers Y is held accountable --often ending up dead or maimed. What happens to the University president who tells the legislature that 'we are in tough times, things are tight" --and then turns around and hires more sustainability coordinators and multicultural specialists, meanwhile closing kids out of classes willfully so he or she can get another year's tuition (and possibly state subsidy) out of them? Who are bigger liars, cheats and scoundrels --drug dealers or university presidents?

The mayor of Pittsburgh has it right. It is time to move from subsidizing to taxing this type of behavior. The only question is: should we criminalize it like we do with drugs and prostitution?

Now, having said all of this, I want to say categorically that there are lots of good university presidents. Some are my good friends. They do have a tough job, not even knowing who their bosses are in some cases. They play a game by morally dubious and administratively ambiguous rules. Many of them -- maybe even most of them -- are kind, generous, humanitarian, thoughtful and, fundamentally, rather honest (however, I am sure the same thing can be said of some prostitutes and drug dealers). But the system encourages this shameful behavior. Higher ed is in need of an extreme makeover, and sooner rather than later.

Federal Accreditation is Not the Answer

by Peter Neiger

Few people with any knowledge on the subject would say that the current higher education accreditation system is flawless. It is a system filled with abuses, secrecy and is a lethargic process that rarely protects students from failing universities. This is the same problem that you will always find when a private entity is given a virtual government monopoly over an industry. We see the same thing in the current health-care debacle where private insurance companies are exempt from anti-trust laws and allowed to corner the market in a geographic region.

It seems that the joint public-private system is unsustainable and many people have proposed moving towards a federal public system run by and monitored by the government. Unfortunately, this is not a viable solution and would create a different set of problems for the system in which the needs of the consumers of higher education - students and the tax-payers - would be neglected. A potential national accreditation system suffers from two potential problems: industry capture and a status quo bias.

When a government agency works to set the requirements for an industry that it seeks to regulate, it must turn to “professionals” in that industry. In all likelihood, a national accreditation system would turn to the very universities that it is monitoring for information on what to require. These lobbyists would continue to call for vague requirements that are not based on value-creation, but on the convenience of the universities. The education industry will capture the accreditation system to a greater extent than it already has. Just look to the U.S. Department of Agriculture that was created to regulate farming and now acts as an advocate for farmers. The needs of the special interests will be placed ahead of the general public.

There is also the strong possibility of a bias towards the status-quo and a low tolerance for change. Transparency is important to politics so the elected officials and bureaucrats will lean towards the status quo. Nobody wants to be the one in charge when a school is failing, it is much easier to either ignore the problem and pass it on to someone else or fight against any disruption of the system. The FDA is a prime example; in order to make sure that their political careers advance, the employees of the FDA are overly cautious. This overly-cautious nature brings drugs that could save lives to market too slowly. Government regulation of accreditation will have the same effect, it will only work to further hold back innovation and reduce the competitiveness of Americans on the global market.

The status quo is unsustainable, but nationalization is not the answer. A government run accreditation system will bring about all the negative aspects of the current system, possibly add a few more, and bring no solutions. This system will continue to restrict entrance into the higher education industry, do nothing to improve quality or lower costs, and cost the tax-payers bundles of money for another government bureaucracy.

Links for 11/19/09

Louis Menand HT: AR

English was one of the fields surveyed in the two studies of the Ph.D. It is useful to look at, in part because it is a large field where employment practices have a significance that goes beyond courses for English majors. What the surveys suggest is that if doctoral education in English were a cartoon character, then about 30 years ago, it zoomed straight off a cliff, went into a terrifying fall, grabbed a branch on the way down, and has been clinging to that branch ever since. Things went south very quickly, not gradually, and then they stabilized. Statistically, the state of the discipline has been fairly steady for about 25 years, and the result of this is a kind of normalization of what in any other context would seem to be a plainly inefficient and intolerable process. The profession has just gotten used to a serious imbalance between supply and demand…

Sol Stern

The “Massachusetts miracle,” in which Bay State students’ soaring test scores broke records, was the direct consequence of the state legislature’s passage of the 1993 Education Reform Act, which established knowledge-based standards for all grades and a rigorous testing system linked to the new

Paul Basken

Education Secretary Arne Duncan promised on Tuesday to work on reducing regulatory reporting burdens on colleges, saying he would gladly cut federal red tape if institutions, in return, showed greater progress on improving student performance...

Liam Goldrick on the Race (and here).

Morality and College Assistance

by Anthony Hennen
In a November 8 article, the Chronicle asked a panel of experts (including CCAP director Richard Vedder) a central question: are too many students going to college? Most of the commentary focused on economic benefits of a college education and whether it’s financially solvent, but soon shifted to the moral obligations society has to support higher education.

“We have a moral obligation as a society to create the opportunity for as many students as possible to go to college if they are so motivated. We have a moral obligation to make the financial aspects of college attendance manageable and to ensure that students get the financial, academic, and social supports necessary for success,” according to Sandy Baum of the College Board.

Social scientist Charles Murray countered “we have a moral obligation to destroy the current role of the B.A. in American life. It has become an emblem of first-class citizenship for no good reason.”

“We have both a moral and a political obligation to ensure all students and their families access to affordable higher education,” said Daniel Yankelovich, founder of Viewpoint Learning Inc.

Moral obligations are fulfilled in a variety of ways; political obligations are only fulfilled by redistributing money from one group to another. Political means are overused and usually accompanied by unintended consequences. The rising cost of college has been exacerbated by government intervention.

Government assistance for higher education is defended on the grounds that it helps low-income students acquire an education they would not obtain otherwise. What is overlooked in the justification for government assistance, though, is that money is redistributed not only from wealthy families who can absorb the cost, but also from families who struggle financially to put their son or daughter through college.

A political obligation to further higher education should not fall on individuals and families already burdened by economic hardship; the obligation would tend to harm the very people in need of help. C.S. Lewis said in God in the Dock: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

This is, of course, not to say that believing society has a moral obligation to further higher education is harmful and cruel. We should evaluate the methods used to further higher education and jettison the methods hindering higher education growth and affordability. When moral obligations become law, the law takes on a subjective, and usually harmful, role. Opinions of moral obligations vary greatly; why should an individual’s opinion dictate another individual’s obligation (moral and financial) to society?

Links for 11/18/09

Edububble

What does boosting tuition 32% in two years get you? A place in the list of best college presidents.

Mark Bauerlein

every tenured and tenure-track faculty member at a research university is paid every month out of regular salary and benefits to do the very research they claim is unsupported

WSJ

The biggest headline in education circles last week was that the Ford Foundation is making a whopping $100 million grant "to transform secondary education in the nation's most disadvantaged schools."…

Ford's formula for reform involves more money, less accountability and a bigger role for the unions…

Ford is supporting the unions—the biggest barrier to school reform in America…

Last Wednesday, by contrast, the Gates Foundation offered $10 million to help the wildly successful KIPP charter schools expand in Houston…

Erin Dillon

The authors were able to come to this conclusion only by constructing a straw man “free market” choice reform to use as a comparison. Never clearly defined, the “free market” reforms the authors discuss alternately take the form of charter schools, vouchers, and unregulated open enrollment programs…the authors argue against a vague “free-market reform” that doesn’t provide a useful basis for discussion.

Links for 11/17/09

Mark Kantrowitz

Education debt is a necessary evil… The bottom line is that college means debt, since student loans are unavoidable for all students except for those who come from the wealthiest of families.

If education debt is evil, then defaulting on your student loans is a one-way ticket to hell…

Clive Crook

transition to the middle class is all but guaranteed for poor children if they do three things: finish high school, work full time and marry before having children. The US underperforms as an opportunity society because so many of its young people fail at one or more

Bruce G. Hammond

the agents, who create or doctor transcripts, manufacture essays and letters of recommendation, and package everything in a neat bundle. Americans would call this fraud. In China it is simply the procedure for applying to U.S. institutions.

Piyush Srivastava

TEACHERS in government- run primary schools in Uttar Pradesh are bribing their seniors to issue suspension letters against them so that they would keep receiving 50 per cent of the monthly salary and pursue other lucrative jobs…

there are 132 teachers who have paid between Rs 25,000 and Rs 50,000 for their own suspension…

The average suspension period is one year. When reinstated, the teachers receive the other half of their salary in lump sum…

Links for 11/16/09

Bryan Caplan on the signaling theory of education.

Look at what people learn in the classroom. Look at what people do on the job. How much of a connection do you see?

JUSTIN LAHART

Engineering schools across the country report students are showing an enthusiasm for hands-on work that hasn't been seen in years.

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Is law school a good investment?

Not according to a new research paper entitled, “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be…Lawyers.”

Jennifer Gonzalez

for-profit colleges… say their sector must play a key role if President Obama is to meet his goal of having the world's highest number of college graduates by 2020.
The institutions are still viewed with skepticism by some consumers and policy makers, but for-profit colleges have grown steadily…

"For-profits are highly focused on completion," he says. "Completion is the main way they have to attract future students."

Tim Mann

generally absent from cost containment and revenue sustainability decisions are cost reallocation decisions regarding the relevance and viability of the academic portfolio…

are the traditions, political forces, mission arguments and ideological posturing within the academy trumping the ability to restructure the academic portfolio, and the decision making and resource allocation structures that currently exist?...

Edustimuli

by Andrew Gillen

I guess I'll weigh in on the Carey v Finn and Hess fight over whether saving teachers jobs was a good use of stimulus money. Finn and Hess said no, Carey said yes.

Luckily Kevin's co-worker Chad neatly summed up the big elephant in the room

It’s well known how difficult it is to fire a teacher

If in normal times it makes sense to get rid of ineffective teachers (see the Hanushek quote from this morning) but you can't (see the Chad quote above), then perhaps in abnormal times you should seize the opportunity to do so.

Moreover, that money was going to spent regardless of if it went to teachers - thus the economic benefit is a wash. The question is did spending that money saving teacher jobs put us in a better position for the long term than the alternative uses of the money. My initial reaction is no, but when you look at some of the other uses of stimulus money (like widening a road without moving the telephone poles first), who knows.

[Update: Carey and Finn continue to go at it. Finn does mention my point that the money would have been spent anyway]

Links for 11/13/09

Chester E. Finn Jr. & Frederick M. Hess

Washington spent almost $68 billion more on education in fiscal 2009 than it otherwise would have…

What has all that extra money actually bought? The main answer… is jobs, jobs, jobs

Turning schools into a jobs program is a dubious way to tone them up for the 21st century.

And a tone-up — indeed, a makeover — is what they need…

Stanford economist Eric Hanushek estimate that substantial gains in pupil achievement would follow from (permanently) ridding K–12 education of the weakest 10 percent of today’s teachers — even if that means adding a few pupils to the classrooms of those who remain…

Al Roth

[UK] Students are increasingly looking across the Atlantic for university – but the application system can seem daunting.

"One of the main differences between the US and here is that there is no central body that handles the admissions, as Ucas does in the UK."

Sabine Hikel

This is kind of surprising -- money, the great panacea, not solving all our problems?

Felix Salmon on how not to be a charitable organization.

the Goldman Sachs Foundation… seems to be giving away only the bare minimum of the foundation’s assets each year: just 5%...

when Goldman Sachs trades with anybody, be it a client or the Goldman Sachs Foundation or anybody else, Goldman Sachs makes money.

Meanwhile, the foundation itself, as we’ve seen, has been losing money…

All in all, the single biggest beneficiary of the Goldman Sachs Foundation would seem to be Goldman Sachs itself, while the amount of money which trickles down from it to genuinely needy charitable cases is minuscule.

CCAP Working Paper Discussing Administrative Bloat in Higher Education

by Daniel L. Bennett

Last week's release of college president salary data by the Chronicle of Higher Education has caused quite an uproar. The scrutiny of higher education's burgeoning administrative bloat is heating up, as the media, college trustees, students, taxpayers, and even Senator Grassley are astonished by the salary and hiring trends of college officials. According to Grassley:

“The pressure on students and families gets greater all the time. The fact that these salaries are growing right now is out of sync with the reality for most parents and students who are trying to pay for college in the midst of high unemployment and after savings for education were either wiped out or greatly diminished last year due to the stock market falling.”

Because this is a hot topic, CCAP wants to release for comment a working paper on administrative staff in higher ed. A final version of this essay will be included in a volume to be released in the future.

CCAP in the News

ESPN writer Gregg Easterbrook mentioned Richard Vedder’s and Matthew Denhart’s article that appeared in last March’s WSJ on the exploitation of college athletes, as the antithesis to his argument that the NBA should increase the NBA age limit to 20.

Richard Vedder agrees that there is no across-the-board rule about the value of a master's degree in Sunday's Miami Herald.

"In fields where the rate of pay is pretty high and you show you have a higher degree of education, you probably get some pay off," he says. "What do you do with a master's degree in sculpture? What do you do with a master's degree in archaeology? I'm not knocking these disciplines. It's just not clear to me that the payoff is there."

The debate over higher education funding in North Dakota continues, as the Bismark Tribune prints an OpEd by Richard Vedder that discusses CCAP’s recent study on higher education in the state. Last week, the state governor responded to the study’s criticism of the state’s plan to devote significantly more resources to higher ed.

Richard Vedder was one of the featured interviewees in a feature story appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week that asks the question: Are too many students going to college? Here were some of Dr. Vedder's responses:

A large subset of our population should not go to college, or at least not at public expense. The number of new jobs requiring a college degree is now less than the number of young adults graduating from universities, so more and more graduates are filling jobs for which they are academically overqualified.

While it is true that areas with high proportions of college graduates tend to have higher incomes and even higher rates of economic growth than other areas, it does not necessarily follow that mindlessly increasing college enrollments enhances our economic well-being. My own research shows that there generally is a negative relationship between state support for higher education and economic growth. Sending marginal students to four-year degree programs, only to drop out, is a waste of human and financial resources, and lowers the quality of life for those involved.

I question the conventional wisdom that enormous positive spillover effects of college attendance justify large public subsidies for universities. If subsidies are to be given, they should go directly to students.

Sending too many students to college instead of, for example, postsecondary schools teaching useful trades (to become a beautician, truck driver, plumber) is a morally questionable exercise. However, the American egalitarian ideal runs strong in our society, so a good position honoring that tradition in a cost-effective way is to allow all minimally qualified students some opportunity to attend at least a low-cost community college, and if success is demonstrated, then be supported at a four-year institution. But many people have the financial means to pay for that themselves, and the notion that college is a universal public entitlement is economically imprudent and morally dubious.

Rebelling Against Big Time College Sports

By Richard Vedder

When budgets get squeezed, there is a tendency for various constituencies in universities to start to war with one another, trying to preserve their own share of resources by favoring reductions in the budget of others. That is a huge reason, but far from the only one, behind the growing campus rebellion against big-time college sports.

USA TODAY revealed football coaches salaries at big time schools are continuing to rise rapidly, even at Cal Berkeley, a school in the midst of truly real and large budget cuts. It is also becoming obvious that many athletic programs are now running huge and growing deficits. Faculty at Berkeley are seething over the literally tens of millions of dollars of heretofore unrevealed subsidies (in the form of "loans') to the athletic program. The Faculty have formally condemned the move. Across the country, academics and university administrators are starting to say "enough is enough."

At Ohio University, it was revealed by the student newspaper that the Athletic Department, already subsidized about $14 million a year (maybe 4 percent of the total core budget), was bailed out, again, for well over a million dollars, by raiding student fees designed for health services --while the old health center crumbles. 10 percent cuts for academic units are being seriously discussed, and plans are afoot to eliminate several programs --while expanding athletics. The football team, less pathetic than usual this year, wants to go to a bowl game --any game--and the University appears ready to subsidize that venture (there is no way my school will get into a bowl game that produces real revenues) if necessary, apparently even if it means laying off staff.

I have said it before, so I will say it again. You have to fight cartels with other cartels. University presidents that have guts, admittedly an endangered specie, should get together --a large number of them, and propose an alternative to the current system. Roughly, athletics should return to where they were in 1950. Football teams should be smaller (say 60 persons), play 9-10 games a year, and players should be eligible for three years of play --no freshman playing. No redshirting. No mid-week football games, or games during exam periods. Similar shortening of baseball and basketball schedules is desirable. Make athletes into real students again. Ban weight conditioning programs. Limit the number of coaches. Tax universities that pay their coaches more than X times the average salary of full professors or the university president. Remove tax exemptions for athletic facility construction beyond some basic level. Allow student votes on use of so-called activity fees that often prop up the athletic programs. Ban hotel rooms for athletes when playing home games. Maybe even forbid federally funded colleges from subsidizing athletics more than one or two percent of core financial resources. The list can go on and on. Don't ban college sports. People enjoyed college sports 50-60 years ago as well --when budgets were smaller and most athletics were genuinely students as well. Or, if the current madness is going to continue, the presidents at least should impose a hefty tax on television and other revenues, end the independence of athletic departments, etc., etc., etc. DO SOMETHING!!!

Most presidents are afraid to touch this. In unity (many presidents acting together), however, there is strength. It is time for action.

Links for 11/11/09

Arthur Peng and James Guthrie on "The Phony Funding Crisis"

If one relies on newspaper headlines for education funding information, one might conclude that America’s schools suffer from a perpetual fiscal crisis, every year perched precariously on the brink of financial ruin, never knowing whether there will be sufficient funding to continue operating…

Yet somehow… from one year to the next, schools almost always have more real revenue for each of their enrolled students. For the past hundred years, with rare and short exceptions and after controlling for inflation, public schools have had both more money and more employees per student in each succeeding year...

Russell Nieli on grade inflation.

For it was during this period -- the late 60s and early 70s -- when the universities lost their nerve as traditional sources of authority … The student consumer was now king, and the demand to eliminate low grades -- like the demand to eliminate burdensome course requirements -- proved irresistible to institutions that had lost confidence in themselves and sought above all to please their paying customers…

There has been a "Lake Wobegon" pattern in grading, Malkiel says, where every student is above average…

The anti-grade-inflation policy seemed to be working and not harming Princeton graduates in the employment and professional school arenas…

David Grant

after the president’s “pay czar” finishes mastering Wall Street pay, he might try storming America’s ivory towers.

BILL ALPERT

ON TOP OF DOUBLE-DIGIT ENROLLMENT growth, for-profit schools benefited from the generous pricing umbrella of the traditional schools. For three decades, tuition has increased by an average of more than 7% each year at public and nonprofit private universities, according to the government's National Center for Educational Statistics. By pricing themselves between the public and the non-profit colleges, the for-profits have been able to swell revenues at 20%-to-30% annual rates.

Careers in English... or lack thereof

by Peter Neiger

With a struggling economy and job market, more and more recent college graduates are having trouble finding work. It has always a burden to find a tenure-track position and this year it is more difficult than usual.

All you need to do is take a look at a recent copy of the Modern Language Association Job List where English departments at research universities and liberal arts colleges advertise available positions. This year only 55 positions have been advertised. The problem becomes obvious when you contrast that with the 1257 graduates from 2007 who now hold a PhD in English. 2007 was not an outlier, in fact it was only slightly higher than 2006 or 2005 that produced 1182 and 1006 new graduates respectively.

Fewer and fewer students are enrolling in courses within specialized areas of English, making it difficult for administrators to justify taking on additional faculty to teach these courses. As the demand by institutions for English PhD's decreases and the supply of candidates increase this will place downward pressure on the salary of English professors. It is possible that the salary offered candidates will actually not be enough to justify the time and money spent pursuing a PhD to begin with.

Mark Bauerlein at Minding the Campus sees this as a vicious trend that could seriously deteriorate the quality and variety of education offered at universities across the country.

If jobs are simply not to be found in certain fields, graduate students won't enter those fields. That will make them even less popular, producing fewer enrollments in upper-division courses in Romanticism et al, and reducing the presence of authors in those fields in general education courses at the lower-division level. We will steadily lose John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and On Heroes and Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History in the curriculum.

While the long-term impact of having a large number of potential professors but no job waiting for them has yet to be seen, one can theorize potential consequences. Lower salaries for professors may push students into other fields that are less reliant on an academic career. It is also possible that for-profit universities may spring up and begin to utilize the cheaper labor to produce more PhD programs in these areas. Regardless, this trend is likely to continue as the push for more and more college graduates increases and focus remains on getting a degree and not an education that will allow the student to get a job and create value.

Rate of Return on Education Spending

by Jonathan Leirer

We at CCAP have demonstrated that while having a more educated work force tends to help economies, spending more money on education tends to have little effect. Good Magazine, as part of their Transparency series, has created a nice infographic looking at state spending per student and high school graduation rates. Even though these figures are for high school graduation, they once again show that there does not seem to be a clear connection between spending and outcomes in education.

However, I would be remiss if I did not mention the statistical naivety of this graphic. Many factors come into play when analyzing graduation rates, with socioeconomic factors and parental (specifically maternal) education levels typically leading the pack. Still, while occasionally lacking sophistication, infographics and data visualization are great tools for relaying statistical and numerical information to a general audience, and this infographic is no exception.

Equal Opportunity is Good, Discrimination is Bad

by Daniel L. Bennett

Last week, IHE featured a story describing the results of a new book, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, which presents new data on the impact of affirmative action admissions to college. I have not read the book, so will not comment directly on the results. Rather, I want to respond to the comments elicited by the story. Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity was the first to comment on the story and his remarks propelled a flurry of responses. Roger commented:

There are two forests here that should not be obscured by the trees: First, there is a lot of racial discrimination in admissions taking place; and, second, the purported beneficiaries of such discrimination perform significantly worse academically than other students. The justification for such discrimination is the supposed educational benefits of a racially diverse student body. Those benefits are dubious, but even if they exist, they are simply not worth the costs of racial discrimination, namely: It is personally unfair, passes over better qualified students, and sets a disturbing legal, political, and moral precedent in allowing racial discrimination; it creates resentment; it stigmatizes the so-called beneficiaries in the eyes of their classmates, teachers, and themselves, as well as future employers, clients, and patients; it fosters a victim mindset, removes the incentive for academic excellence, and encourages separatism; it compromises the academic mission of the university and lowers the overall academic quality of the student body; it creates pressure to discriminate in grading and graduation; it breeds hypocrisy within the school; it encourages a scofflaw attitude among college officials; it mismatches students and institutions, guaranteeing failure or academic underperformance for many of the former; it papers over the real social problem of why so many African Americans and Latinos are academically uncompetitive; and it gets states and schools involved in unsavory activities like deciding which racial and ethnic minorities will be favored and which ones not, and how much blood is needed to establish group membership.

This is the type of comment that I've come to expect from Roger, one that is sensible but not politically correct. A response by Carson Byrd poses the questions:

Are we to simply forget the historical discrimination and the structural inequality in society that exists today when we discuss college admissions? Is it all about today and not yesterday with this debate?

In which my response, and likely Roger's, is yes. Sure, most of us look at past discrimination with disdain and wish that things would have occurred differently. We should never judge a book by its cover, but rather by what is inside. But, we should learn to forgive in order to make progress -the objective is to move forward. By permitting preferential treatment for one or a few groups, we are discriminating against other groups, which is not a path towards progress. According to Byrd's claim that we need to make up for past discrimination, almost every group today needs to be given preferential treatment. But if every group receives preferential treatment, then where does that leave us? Basically, all preferences cancel out to produce an arena for equal opportunity that is based on merit.

I whole-heartedly support the notion of equal opportunity, but not entitlement. America was founded by immigrants who flocked here because of the opportunity to make a better living through hard work, not to mention the right to avoid religious oppression. Egalitarian principles is what made this nation great. One of the great moral teachings of Christianity is that we must learn to forgive past hurt in order to make progress in our spiritual lives with God. Whether you are religious or not, forgiveness is a sound moral principle that leads to progress, and is equally applicable to society and the economy. Where would the world be if the Japanese did not forgive the Americans, if the Americans did not forgive the British, or if the confederate states did not forgive the north? My guess is that the world would likely be filled with much more violence, hate and societal stagnation than exists today.

By permitting affirmative action policies, we are perpetuating the problem by discriminating against different groups. It is an attempt at social engineering that is simply bad policy. No policy should pick the winners and losers. By doing so, we are only breeding disdain of the new victims of discrimination, while attempting to appease the previous victims. The long-run outcome, like other policies that pick winners and losers, will be chalked full of unintended consequences that will further distort the notion of equal opportunity.

In terms of higher education, we should judge applicants by their merits and potential to succeed, not by the color of their skin, religious beliefs or sexual organs. Colleges benefit by admitting and graduating the strongest possible students, and organizations benefit by hiring and promoting the strongest possible employees, without regards to skin color or religious beliefs. Economic theory suggests that wage discrimination is inefficient, as it costs organizations more when they engage in discrimination, whether it be racial, gender, ethnic, height, etc., because it distorts wage levels. Moral principles and economic theory agree that equal opportunity is a great ethos, and that discrimination is a horrible one.

Japanese University Crisis

By Anthony Hennen

The United States is not the only country plagued with problems in higher education; Japan has challenges of its own to overcome, albeit of a different variety. Lack of enrollment for private universities is threatening bankruptcy or mergers. The Chronicle reports that

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

Why?

“Japan is running out of 18-year-olds.”

Public universities are not as affected due to students choosing private over public for reasons of prestige and perceived quality. How then, did private higher-education become such a mess? The article continues,

“Why did the government ignore the looming population crisis and continue to crank out licenses to the private-university sector, which has grown by a third since the late 1980s? Some in the industry blame free-market fundamentalism.”

“The result is over-competition. And they [the government] have ruled out a rescue scheme or a bailout. A shakeout is inevitable," says Hiromitsu Takizawa, senior analyst at the Research Institute for Independent Higher Education, a think tank run by the Association of Private Universities of Japan.

Is this actually a problem that restricting licenses to universities would fix? It would restrict the growth of the private sector in higher education assuredly, but it would limit competition and ease the burden of improving the quality of education at the remaining universities. A shakeout occurring in the food sector with restaurants would not be met with a demand for the government to bail out failing restaurants; why should a bailout (that probably would not work) be used in the education sector?

But the emphasis on the government coming to the rescue of universities ignores the root of the problem.

"The No. 1 problem is demographics. There just aren't enough students to go around,” Kathy Yamane, director of St. Thomas University’s Center for Cross-Cultural Exchange said.

Attracting foreign students does not appear to be the end-all solution, either.

"Many small private colleges have an unofficial ceiling on students from Asia of 10 percent," says an official at the troubled Tokyo Fuji University, who also requested anonymity. "Accept more, and the reputation of the college declines. It becomes self-defeating because Japanese students start believing the college is poor."

“Excessive competition” is the scapegoat and distracts attention away from a stable solution. An overview of the structure of Japan’s higher education system can be found here.

Links for 11/10/09

Carter A. Daniel

Fifty years ago … the simultaneous publication of two reports, by the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, on the state of business education in America... considered half a century later, can be more accurately described as something close to a catastrophe…

instead of boldly fighting back against their misguided detractors, the nation's business schools uniformly cowered and began scurrying to conform to the wishes of the reports' authors.
Business education could, and should, have adopted the model of other professional schools…

instead of constantly striving to achieve that delicate, razor's-edge balance between theory and practice, business schools, frightened by the reports, retreated almost entirely into the theoretical camp. Doing so damaged several important, distinct characteristics of business schools…

Since experienced businesspeople seldom have any reason to earn a Ph.D., and Ph.D. candidates seldom have any time or inclination to work in business, the rise of the doctorate requirement has served to separate theory and practice instead of unify them, and has severely limited the perspectives that are brought to bear on the subject…

The foundation reports should not have said what they said, and business schools should not have responded as they did…

SLA

With the House SAFRA legislation calling for the elimination of FFELP and for all schools to shift over to Direct Lending (Senate has not released a companion bill), the time is right to require an annual reporting requirement which includes financial statements and detailed repayment data (for example, can anyone answer the basic question of what percentage of federal loans are delinquent?), beyond the flawed cohort default rate. An annual report seems like a perfect opportunity to build some accountability into a student aid reform bill while ensuring that the taxpayer is receiving transparent information commensurate with their $550 billion investment to date.

Kevin Carey

of the nation’s highest paid college presidents, a list topped by Shirley Ann Jackson, who was paid $1,598,247 to lead Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute last year… The article is accompanied by an text box listing Jackson’s “Key Accomplishments at Rensselaer.”…

One can learn a great deal about American higher by considering what is on this list, and what is not. Specifically, there is no mention of how well students at RPI were taught, how much they learned, whether they graduated, and what became of them after they left…

Instead, Jackson’s accomplishments are measured purely in dollars raised, buildings constructed, and faculty hired…

Ben Miller

One of the biggest problems with the existing federal student loan system is that it relies upon the same entities, known as guaranty agencies, to both prevent default and handle collection. Making matters worse, subsidies for these activities are skewed heavily toward collection, so there is less incentive to help borrowers stay in repayment.

College Entitlement

by Anthony Hennen

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

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

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

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

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

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

President Shirvani continues:

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

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

The Market as Corrector

by Anthony Hennen

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links for 11/9/09

Michael W. Kirst

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

Arnold Kling on the above referenced Hoxby paper:

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

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

Goldie Blumenstyk

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

The Chronicle asks some scholars about various HE issues.

Links for 11/6/09

Barbara Kiviat

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

Tim Ranzetta

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

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

Doug Lederman

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

In response, the groups settled on three possible options…

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

A picture from Jake

Measuring Student Learning Outcomes to Increase Value-Based Competition

by Daniel L. Bennett

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

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

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

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

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

The Winters of Our Discontent

By Richard Vedder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links for 11/4/09

Scott Carlson, Kathryn Masterson, and Jeffrey Brainard

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

Neal McCluskey

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

Edward L. Glaeser

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

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

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

The Economist

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

Links for 11/3/09

Doug Lederman on priorities:

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

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

David McNeill reports on trouble in Japan:

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

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

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

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

Emma L. Carew and Paul Fain on presidential pay:

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

Charles Wheelan on the adverse selection of teachers:

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

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

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

CCAP in the News

by Daniel L. Bennett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PILGRIM: Hiring is out of control apparently.

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

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

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

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

Golden Parachutes - Academic Edition

by Andrew Gillen

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

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

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

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

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

Links for 11/2/09

Eric Kelderman

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

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

John F. Cullinan

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

Arnold Kling

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

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

Goldie Blumenstyk

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

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