Links for 05/27/10

Sara Goldrick-Rab:

Faculty members are used to being consulted on which courses they will and will not accept. Professors like to sign off on what courses can count to "replace" theirs—seemingly because they want to ensure educational quality, but let's face it, it's also because it helps to protect their jobs. The more courses deemed transferrable, the more it will become clear that the current system is inefficient—if many courses equate with each other, why have so many different people in different places teaching them?

But undergraduate education isn't meant to serve faculty; it's meant to serve students. This is something people seem too ready to forget.

Harris Miller comments on the inspector general's report on the Higher Learning Commission:

[it] was "silly" and missed the point...whether or not the accreditor's actions actually forced change at the institution.

That's what the department and Congress and taxpayers should be worried about

Chad Aldeman:

In 1990-1, public school districts employed one teacher for every 17.4 students. By 2007-8, that ratio had fallen to 15.7 to one, the lowest on record.

This change alone is responsible for more than 300,000 full-time teaching jobs. To estimate how much this costs annually, let’s assume each of these teachers costs $75,000 a year after salaries, health care, and retirement benefits...Three hundred thousand teachers times $75,000 a year would put the cost of these teachers at $23 billion.

To put these numbers in perspective, consider the current proposed teacher jobs bill. The National Education Association and Secretary Duncan spent yesterday lobbying Congress to spend $23 billion to save the jobs of 300,000 teachers.

It’s hard to argue the investments in more teachers has paid off.

In any profession, especially one as large as teaching, there’s going to be a tension between quantity and quality. For the last two decades, we’ve chosen quantity. Let’s hope the coming decades focus more on quality.

Miley Cyrus is:

passing up a shot at higher education to focus on her flourishing career.

(CCAP Note: You can vote whether Miley should go to college in the above link. Thus far, 57% of voters replied "I couldn't possibly care less")

Richard Vedder on NPR

Richard Vedder was on the Patt Marrison NPR show in Southern California recently, discussing the need for a college education. He was joined by Sara Goldrick-Rab in addressing the issue and taking calls. You can listen to the program and read additional comments.

Links for 5/26/10

Eric Hoover

A majority of students and their parents have ruled out colleges based solely on published sticker prices without considering how much financial aid they might receive, according to a recent survey of college applicants. Most students and parents said they had not used online financial-aid calculators to determine how much they would need to pay at different colleges…

students from high-income families made greater use of aid calculators than those in the lowest-income group…

Nearly two-thirds of students with SAT scores of 1250 or higher expected to receive merit aid. Almost as many respondents with scores between 1000 and 1240 expected to receive merit aid, and so did about 45 percent of students with scores 1000 or below.

The widespread availability of merit aid seems to have created "a climate of expectations" among applicants…

Rob Manwaring

The back and forth in the last couple of weeks over seniority layoff policies goes something like this. When districts are forced to lay off teachers based on seniority policies, those layoffs happen disproportionately at schools serving low income students. Research has shown that high rates of teacher turnover impacts the achievement levels at schools. This results in a civil rights issue because of the disproportionate impact that these policies have on the most disadvantaged students. (See National Journal discussion and new CRPE report for more details on the debate and research).

On the other side, the best argument seems to be that districts do not have good teacher evaluation systems, and until such evaluation systems are in place, any policy for teacher layoffs other than based on seniority would end up being arbitrary and could actually discriminate against veteran teachers because they are more expensive…

Paula Krebs

If we value the humanities enough to teach them at the undergraduate level, if we believe that humanities education produces thoughtful, critical, self-aware global citizens, then we need to recognize that advanced training in the humanities cannot be simply the province of aspiring tenure-track faculty members. If there’s no prospect of a tenure-track job in the humanities, and humanities graduate programs train students for nothing but tenure-track jobs, how long can these programs be sustainable?...

KC Johnson

Principles of academic freedom, appropriately, guard against retaliatory action toward professors who take ill-conceived positions. But with the rights of academic freedom are supposed to come responsibilities as well---including open-mindedness in pursuit of the truth. The Group's utter lack of accountability---and what it says about the state of the fields that they dominate---reflects the malaise that continues to beset contemporary higher education.

Who Should Pay for Student Loans Gone Sour?

by Daniel L. Bennett

I discuss a recent proposal to make private student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy in this article for Forbes. In the article, I identify several troubling aspects of the proposal and offer a few alternatives, including one that would share some of the burden of bad debts with the colleges whose students default or file bankruptcy.

Links for 5/25/10

Robert Barro and Jong-Wha Lee

Our findings confirm that schooling has a significantly positive effect on output. Our estimates of rates of return for an additional year of schooling range from 5% to 12%. These estimates control for the simultaneous determination of human capital and output by using the 10-year lag of parents‘ education as an instrumental variable for the current level of schooling. These estimates are close to typical Mincerian return estimates found in the labour literature.

Estimates of rates of return to education vary across regions (Figure 2). The estimates for the group of advanced countries, East Asia and the Pacific, and South Asia are the highest at 13.3%. In contrast, the estimated rates of return are only 6.6% in Sub-Saharan Africa and 6.5% in Latin America...

JENNIFER SARANOW SCHULTZ

starting July 1, only the government will provide Plus loans directly and as a result, Wells Fargo is launching the new loan to fill the gap in its product portfolio, said Kirk Bare, head of education financial services at Wells Fargo.

The new private loan has a number of differences from the federal option. For instance, while Wells Fargo’s current federal offering has a fixed rate of 8.5 percent, the rate on Wells Fargo’s loan will range from prime plus one percentage point to prime plus 7.49 percentage points, or 4.25 percent to 10.74 percent currently...

Tom Vander Ark

No more free money without some reforms that point the way to the system our kids deserve…

Another bailout just delays the inevitable shift to more learning online.

Forrest Hinton

More federal money for teachers must come with changes in how teachers are hired, fired, laid off, evaluated, and paid—if it comes at all.

[AG: I think I'm sensing a pattern here]

Links for 5/24/10

Eric Kelderman

"In some of these places, undergraduate education has never been a top priority," says Jane V. Wellman… The issue is whether the increasing amount of support coming from sources outside state tax dollars "is causing these institutions ... to move away from their public mission. The answer in too many cases is, unfortunately, yes."

the institutional goals are being defined in language that is very much about enhancing the institution's prestige and pecking order," she says.

Kevin Nestor

What I have seen and learned during nine years as a trustee has convinced me, beyond doubt, that the politicization of the curriculum, programming and scholarship on our nation's public campuses is indisputably real, systemic, and pervasive; and that it is gravely detrimental to the fundamental purposes for which our public colleges and universities were founded and to the well-being of our nation and its citizens. Thomas Jefferson said, "It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself." Fair-minded people do not want to silence the gay activists or the leftist theorists, but we all should mount resistance to the imposed ideology and punishing of dissent that too often flies the flag of "diversity."

Lumni

Lumni Inc creates an efficient market for investing in human capital through systems that allow individuals, organizations and communities to finance their educational and training projects using the value of their
future income.

The Cronk of Higher Education

Psychiatrists apologized this week for failing to correctly identify Southwest State University sophomore Janet Szak's bipolar disorder…

"We misunderstood when she told us she was studying liberal arts. We thought she said she was liberal and an art major, which would have explained the disproportionate amount of drama in her life."…

Why We Shouldn't Send More Kids to College

by Daniel L. Bennett

Our good friend David Azerrad of ACTA provides a few reasons in an editorial for the NY Daily News today:

people don't realize is that rampant binge drinking is not a self-contained problem. Only because our colleges and universities are increasingly abandoning their educational mission is the party culture thriving.

you might spend more hours partying every week than doing homework or sitting in class.

so what if the kids are partying? As the lead character, himself in the seventh year of college, says in the "Van Wilder" college flick: "You shouldn't take life too seriously. You'll never get out alive."...tell that to the parents of the 1,700 college students who die every year from alcohol-related injuries. Or to the nearly 100,000 college students who are victim of alcohol-related sexual assault or rape. Or to 150,000 students who develop alcohol-related health problems while in college.

Think also of all the lost academic potential. A quarter of our college students say that drinking has had negative effects on their studies: Missing classes, doing poorly on assignments and lower overall grades. If the kids themselves are admitting to the damage, you know it must be serious.

The well-documented grade inflation epidemic tells us all we need to know about the back room deal students and professors have made with one another. Grading has become a form of mutual pandering - a sort of "don't ask, don't tell" compact in which professors hand out good grades for very little work, and in return, students don't complain that they aren't actually learning anything.

To fill this academic void, of course, administrators woo students by building lavish resident halls, fitness centers and other amenities that contribute more to a "country club" mentality than an intellectual one.

Beating My Head on the Desk Won't Stop the Insanity

by Daniel L. Bennett

I've been openly critical of the gainful employment proposal being considered by the Department of Education (here and here). The proposed rule is overly harsh and would likely result in many programs and schools going out of business and hundreds of thousands of students being shut out of postsecondary educational opportunities. An analysis by economic consulting firm Charles River Associates concluded that up to 1/3 of the students currently served by for-profit schools would be denied access. An analysis by financial aid expert Mark Kantrowitz concluded that the proposed rule is flawed, unrealistic and would lead to unintended consequences.

While I generally think that for-profit sector does more good than harm, there is some anecdotal evidence of foul play in the sector. This is by no means pervasive among the entire industry, nor is it limited to for-profit schools (Kevin Carey recently highlighted the scam of Southeastern University that was knowingly permitted to occur over multiple decades). There are admittedly scam artists in every sector of society, including the government and non-profit world. Does this mean that we need to regulate ourselves out of jobs, economic growth and individual liberty in an unrealistic effort to safeguard every nook and cranny of our lives, turning over human responsibility to far-off bureaucrats who have proven repeatedly ineffective at protecting its citizens? We simply can't prevent every crime or wrong doing in society.

By and large, economic interventionist policies by the government have lead to unintended consequences that are far worse than the situation present before the rules were implemented. Individual decisions and markets are the best allocator of resources, not central economic planners. So what are the unintended consequences likely to result from gainful employment?

First and foremost, hundreds of thousands of students will be shut out of the educational opportunities to improve their lives. The public and non-profit sectors do not have the capability or capacity to absorb these students, nor do they offer programs or schedules that meet the needs of this segment of the population. This is a negative for college access.

Second, it will be counterproductive to making college more affordable and productive, as the for-profit sector is the one bright spot in postsecondary education today that is showing real signs of management efficiency and innovation. It would also weaken competition and restrict the supply of education, which as economics 101 tells us, will lead to an increase in price.

Lastly and as I mentioned earlier this week, it will attack our freedom and individual liberty to make decisions that have consequences. Are we really willing to surrender this rare freedom and turn over our decision making to bureaucrats and politicians?

Apparently this group of folks (a consortium of politically left and special interest groups) thinks that all of the above negative consequences are acceptable, as they have written a letter to Secretary Duncan calling for even stricter gainful employment rules.

The solution to the problems of misleading advertising regarding employment and high levels of debt are really quite simple:

Mandate that colleges disclose to all prospective students the typical level of debt occurred by their students, program completion rates, data on where students have been placed and how much they are earning, and what the likely debt-to-income ratio will be for students finishing the program. This information would give students all the information that they need to make an informed and rational decision on what school and program to pursue. If prospective students don't like what they hear, then they can vote with their feet and go elsewhere. Because of the incentives, schools would seek to offer programs that provide relatively high rewards for students, while programs with costs that exceed the benefits would likely go wayside, and thus, eliminating most of the problem. For the remainder, violators and cheats would be dealt with harshly with loss of Title IV eligibility and possibly criminal punishment.

Links for 5/21/10 - Shouldv'e been in The Onion Edition

Simon Rich

Congratulations! It took four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, but you’re finally the parents of a bona-fide college graduate. After the commencement ceremony is over, your child will be ready to move back into your house for a period of several years…

Murray Wardrop

Dr Evans was disciplined following a formal complaint from a colleague, to whom he had shown an article from the journal Public Library of Science One entitled “Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time”.

The woman, who has not been identified, complained that she felt “harassed”, “hurt” and “disgusted” by his actions.

Links for 5/210/10

Goldie Blumenstyk and Kelly Field

In the five months since the department offered its controversial "gainful employment proposal," for-profit colleges and their chief association have spent at least $620,000 lobbying members of Congress, the Education Department, and the Office of Management and Budget…

One senior Republican aide says that the Education Department has failed to make a case for its proposal. Education Department officials have so far refused to provide opponents of the rule with the data they say they used in drafting the rules…

Meanwhile, on the House side, Rep. Robert E. Andrews, Democrat of New Jersey, is preparing to offer legislation that would substitute the debt-to-income ratio for a "matrix" of variables used to measure the value that for-profit colleges add. The matrix, he said in an interview, would apply to all colleges, nonprofit and for-profit, and assess four things: job placement in the advertised field, graduation rates, default rates, and success in serving low-income, high-need populations. His goal, he said, is to measure students' "actual outcomes," rather than their "projected incomes."…

Scott McLemee

They are a masterpiece of evasion. The paragraph is, in its way, quite impressive. Every word of it is misleading, including “and” and “the.”

Bellesiles has a certain claim to fame, certainly, but not as “the target of an infamous ‘swiftboating’ campaign.” He is, and will be forever remembered as, a historian whose colleagues found him to have violated his profession's standards of scholarly integrity. Arming America won the Bancroft Prize -- the highest honor for a book on American history. But far more salient is the fact that the Bancroft committee took the unprecedented step of withdrawing the prize…

gun nuts did not force Bellesiles to do sloppy research or to falsify sources…

Chandru Rajam via Keith Hampson

Most traditional institutions take in higher-quality students and then add very little value (relative to resources used). So, they end up looking a lot better than their for-profit counterparts. So, the Feds should insist on VALUE-ADDED measures of student achievement, so as to account for the differences in demographics and incoming student-quality that institutions get to work with.

The Economist

Sweden’s system is more sweeping than most. In 1991 a rare right-wing government passed a law allowing not only charities, religious organisations and groups of parents but also businesses to open schools and get as much state money per student as state-run ones. When the law was passed, private education was almost unknown in Sweden; since then more than a thousand of these “free schools” have opened, and 12.5% of 11-16-year-olds attend one…

a study finding that, though free schools pushed up standards in neighbouring state-run ones, the competition effect faded over time. The researchers speculated that this was because few state schools closed when independent schools opened…

Gainful Employment is an Attack on Freedom, For-Profit Industry Should Fight It

by Daniel L. Bennett

The Chronicle has extensive coverage today regarding the for-profit industry's efforts to stymie the gainful employment rule being proposed by the Department of Education. CHE has even developed a table detailing lobbying dollars spent and political contributions made by the industry. Democratic Congressman were the recipients of 70% of the for-profit industry's $400k in total political contributions, with George Miller (Chair of the House's Committee on Education and Labor) taking home honors as the top recipient of more than $70k in campaign contributions. On the Senate side, the top 5 recipients were all Democrats, with Harry Reid being the top recipient.

I've written in this space in the past about the implications of gainful employment (here, here and here) and have an article due out soon on the topic in Career College Central. I'm generally opposed to the Department of Ed's proposed metric, which would impose an unrealistic 8% student debt to income ratio that would force the closure of many programs and limit the career and college choices of students.

The for-profit industry has floated a counter proposal similar to what I have recommended in the past, namely that colleges provide full disclosure to prospective students regarding the debt that students at their school take on and the employment outcomes (placement rates, salaries, etc). This ought to be a respectable solution to those opposed to the for-profit sector in the name of consumer protection, as their main argument appears to be that students are lured into these schools based on false or limited information. If it is not and they continue to insist upon a top down approach in which bureaucrats decide how much debt is appropriate for a particular program, then these folks are obviously convinced that individuals do not have the capacity to make decisions that will affect their livelihood and should be stripped of decision-making rights in favor of turning such decisions over to the state. In other words, anonymous bureaucrats in far off places are better equipped to make decisions for people than the actual individuals themselves.

Here's the abbreviated case for full information disclosure:

If the students are presented with the information upfront, prior to enrolling, then they are responsible for the decision of whether to attend. If, for example, a prospective student is told that they will incur $25k in student loans, that their first job upon completion will likely pay $30k (likely to increase over time with experience), and that their monthly loan payment on that loan over a 10-year period would be $294 (which would be 12% of their income), then the student can make an informed decision of whether to pursue that particular program and compare it to other options. This presents the prospective student with enough information and potential career training options to make an informed decision.

The alternative, centralized decision making, will limit the number of options and essentially decide what fields that certain students (i.e. - those who don't have parents capable and willing to foot the bill) may pursue. This is an attack on freedom and only a few steps removed from the European education model in which students are directed towards a particular track (vocational or academic) early in their education - often middle school. This is in sharp contrast to the American tradition of a forgiving educational model that allows late bloomers the opportunity to pursue postsecondary education of their choosing.

Links for 5/19/10 – David Leonhardt vs. Skeptics Edition

The JACQUES STEINBERG story in which some argue that we are sending too many people to college has set off a bit of a firestorm.

DAVID LEONHARDT

the real pay of college graduates has risen over the past 25 years. The real pay of every other group has dropped…

It’s theoretically conceivable that these trends have nothing to do with the actual education that college students receive. Perhaps graduates gain little or nothing from college that they didn’t already know — but the economy has been changing in ways that favor the kinds of people who enroll in college and make it through. In that case, the charts above would say nothing about the college.

As it happens, though, labor economists have spent years trying to answer this exact question, devising careful studies to see whether students actually benefit from college. The answer, in a nutshell, is that they do...

Floyd Norris

I remember having doubts about that data the first time I heard about it, which was probably from a teacher in junior high school. My logic went like this: Rockefeller children go to college. Rockefeller children do quite well in life. That does not prove college made a difference.
To put it more elegantly, such data does not control for the qualities and other attributes of the person entering college…

One question that I think should be pondered is this: If somehow every 22-year-old did graduate from college, and if that was not accomplished by dumbing down the requirements, would all the graduates earn as much as graduates do today?...

Daniel Indiviglio

Just because college graduates earn more doesn't mean that their degree provides them any additional knowledge necessary to succeed in their jobs; it just means that employers found them more attractive because of the degree…

Other college students major in subjects with little practical use in the job market -- like anthropology or Russian literature. Those graduates often end up in careers that have little or nothing to do with their education, but their college degree still gives them an edge over someone with just a high school diploma. Employers would rather you have studied something irrelevant to the job in college than nothing at all…

What's so bad about a population with more knowledge than it needs? The problem is the expense and opportunity costs. By plowing more money into an education, many students incur incredible amounts of debt before they ever get their first paycheck…

Saying college is valuable for many young adults is an indisputable claim. But saying it's valuable for all -- or even most -- young adults isn't as clear.

Some commenter on the story

As a former college professor I have long been concerned for the students being funneled into the college mill, not because it would benefit them, but because schools profit.

DAVID LEONHARDT

What worries me is that the small group of economists who believe that many students should not go to college — and whose ideas get a lot of media attention – will persuade some would-be graduates that they would be better off dropping out. Might that be correct in some cases? Sure. But for most students, it’s among the worst advice they could get.

I’m reminded of what happened in this country in the first half of the 20th century, when a high school education changed from being elite to being commonplace. At the time, some European intellectuals dismissed the new American high schools as wasteful, Ms. Goldin and Mr. Katz note. Instead of offering narrowly tailored apprentice programs, the United States was accused of overeducating its masses. Not everyone, the Europeans said, needed a high school education.

The decades that followed proved the Europeans wrong, of course. With the most educated population in the world, the United States built the most successful economy in the world.

Links for 5/18/10

Tim Harford

New research by Giorgio Di Pietro looks at data from an unnamed UK university. Di Pietro compares candidates with identical – or very similar – test scores, but who (because of the arbitrariness of the dividing line, or because of the discretion of the board of examiners) are awarded a different class of degree.

The good news is that once your underlying scores are taken into account, your degree class seems to make no difference to your chance of a job or further place. The bad news is that no matter how hard you work from now on, your fate has probably been sealed already.

Megan McArdle

I have long theorized that at least some of the leftward drift in academia can be explained by the fact that it has one of the most abusive labor markets in the world. I theorize this because in interacting with many professors, I am bewildered by their beliefs about labor markets more generally; many seem to think of private labor markets as an endless well of exploitation where employees are virtual prisoners with no recourse in the face of horrific abuses. Yet this does not describe the low wage jobs in which I've worked…

It is common, of course--in academia. Until they have tenure, faculty are virtual prisoners of their institution. Those on the tenure track work alongside a vast class of have-nots who are some of the worst-paid high school graduates in the country. So it's not surprising to me that this is how academics come to view labor markets…

What puzzles me is how this job market persists, and is even worsening, in one of the most left-wing institutions in the country…

Eliza Woolf

At the age of 22 I’d had it with the nonacademic world of low-paid drudgery; it was the life of the mind or bust.

Fast forward to 2010 and I find myself somewhere closer to busting. After many years earning my history doctorate while working as a teaching assistant, hundreds of post-Ph.D. job applications and several futile trips on the global academic job market, a string of temporary postdoctoral fellowships, and a combined student loan and credit card debt large enough to buy a condo, I’m now neither naïve nor optimistic about my future employment prospects…
academia… has it crushed my spirit, emptied my bank account, and sent me in pursuit of anti-anxiety medication…

But I keep coming back for more…

Tim Ranzetta

In less than five years, learners will be earning credits through OpenCourseWare

Bob Shireman Leaving ED

by Daniel L. Bennett

Over lunch I heard a rumor that Bob Shireman was to depart from the Department of Education. Kelly Field at the Chronicle confirms that Shireman will vacate his post at the end of summer. Will ED implement a gainful employment rule before he leaves is the billion dollar question.

CCAP Making an Impact

CCAP has been making an impact in getting the public to question the mantra that everyone needs to go to college. Several major media outlets have ran related stories recently that included remarks by Richard Vedder. Be sure to read the full stories.

The Associated Press ran a story last week begging the question, College for All? Experts Say bit Necessarily

Richard Vedder blames the cultural notion of "credential inflation" for the stream of unqualified students into four-year colleges. His research has found that the number of new jobs requiring college degrees is less than number of college graduates.

Vedder's work also yielded something surprising: The more money states spend on higher education, the less the economy grows — the reverse of long-held assumptions.

"If people want to go out and get a master's degree in history and then cut down trees for a living, that's fine," he said, citing an example from a recent encounter with a worker. "But I don't think the public should be subsidizing it."

The New York Times' Jacques Steinberg wrote a provocative piece over the weekend entitled, Plan B: Skip College. Several other major outlets picked up on the story, including the SF Chronicle.

“It is true that we need more nanosurgeons than we did 10 to 15 years ago,” said Professor Vedder, founder of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, a research nonprofit in Washington. “But the numbers are still relatively small compared to the numbers of nurses’ aides we’re going to need. We will need hundreds of thousands of them over the next decade.”

And much of their training, he added, might be feasible outside the college setting.
Professor Vedder likes to ask why 15 percent of mail carriers have bachelor’s degrees, according to a 1999 federal study.

“Some of them could have bought a house for what they spent on their education,” he said.

Links for 5/17/10

William Deresiewicz

There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics…

Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there. Long before they got to college, they turned themselves into world-class hoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers, getting A’s in every class no matter how boring they found the teacher or how pointless the subject…

Paradoxically, the situation may be better at second-tier schools… others end up there because they have a more independent spirit. They didn’t get straight A’s because they couldn’t be bothered to give everything in every class… These are the kinds of kids who are likely… to think about leaving college bearing questions, not resumés…

Edward B. Fiske

Perhaps the most distressing thing about the reputational surveys is that they tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Nicholas A. Bowman and Michael N. Bastedo, two academics who have studied the effects of reputational surveys, talk of the "anchoring effect" under which people asked to make judgments in ambiguous circumstances start with whatever information they already have at their disposal and then go on from there. In the case of reputational surveys, what college presidents know at the outset is last year's U.S. News rankings. So in a paper prepared for the recent meeting of the American Education Research Association they come to the conclusion that "rankings drive reputation, and not the other way around."

Doug Lederman

How bad are things in Colorado?...

Under the plan, which is designed to last for five years, each institution would by November submit a plan for how it would deal with a 50 percent reduction in its current allocation of state funds. (The Colorado Commission on Higher Education would take those plans into consideration in framing its budget request for the 2011-12 fiscal year.) In exchange, individual universities would, beginning in 2011-12, be allowed to increase their tuition by up to 9 percent a year with no restrictions, but would need approval from the Colorado Commission on Higher Education to exceed that level.

While it's a "very seductive policy" for colleges to say "give us tuition authority, we'll assure you that we protect the students," the approach has both philosophical and practical problems…

Justice Department Investigates Intercollegiate Athletics

by Matthew Denhart

Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education both recently ran stories (here and here) speculating as to the position the current Justice Department inquiry into intercollegiate athletics (ICA) will take with respect to scholarship rules for student-athletes. Currently, according to NCAA guidelines, scholarships for athletes are granted on a year-by-year basis and can be revoked for academic or athletic reasons. The Justice Department is likely most concerned with the legality of this policy and seeks to clarify whether such policies impede competition in violation of anti-trust law.

The NCAA maintains that this guideline is in place because athletic based scholarships are a merit award and student-athletes must maintain eligibility throughout their collegiate careers. This eligibility hinges on both athletic and academic qualifications. If scholarships were guaranteed, the argument goes, then student-athletes not meeting eligibility requirements would face no consequences.

However, critics assert that the one year renewable scholarship model is used to mislead student-athletes and inappropriately emphasizes athletics at the expense of academics. They argue that when committing to a college, high school athletes are often misled into believing that their scholarship is guaranteed for all four (or five) years of college. Furthermore, they contend that since coaches can revoke scholarships for athletic reasons, student-athletes find themselves in a precarious position. Being a student-athlete is supposed to imply that these individuals are students first. However, the opposite is usually true as they face great pressure to perform well athletically. Even though coaches are not supposed to strip scholarships for things such as injuries, many in the college sports world admit that appeal committees are a joke and it's rare for a coach's decision to be overturned.

Compared to the real scandals associated with ICA, this argument is somewhat inconsequential. My hope is that the Justice Department condemns the NCAA for its cartel like policy that allows student-athletes to be manipulated and exploited. As Dr. Vedder and I argued last year in an article for the Wall Street Journal, many student-athletes are wildly undercompensated for the marginal product they return to their universities. In a normal market, exploitation doesn't persist for very long because rival firms offer a higher compensation package and lure away formerly exploited employees. However, the NCCA fervently insists that member schools cannot provide compensation beyond scholarships to their athletes because they are amateurs. It would be difficult to convince anyone that college sports is indeed an amateur operation. Many football coaches earn salaries in excess of $1 million and this month the NCAA just inked a new contract with CBS and Turner to cover March Madness for $10.8 billion. The only people treated as amateurs are the players who actually enable the entire system. The Justice Department would be well served to eliminate this practice.

Another issue in ICA that deserves more investigation is the highly regressive nature of the "athletics tax." Nearly all athletic departments require subsidies from the wider university, students, and taxpayers to balance their budgets, this subsidy can be thought of as a tax on resources that would have been used for other purposes. The tax is small (or non-existant) at the well-known and more wealthy institutions, but much larger at the lesser known schools that have poorer students on average.

ICA needs serious reform to help control costs and address scandals. A number of organizations such as the Knight Commission, the Drake Group, and the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics continue to fight. Perhaps the Justice Department will be a positive force. Time will tell.

Links for 5/14/10

Mike Mandel

In 2000, the average young adult with only a bachelor’s degree earned about 4 times the annual cost of a 4-year college. By 2008, the average young college grad was earning less than 3 times the annual cost of college. Going to college is still a good idea–but the payback period is longer…

I tend to view this divergence between rising real college costs and flat or falling real earnings for young college grads as insupportable over the medium term for an economy like the U.S. Either real pay for college grads has to pick up (perhaps because of a surge of innovation), or the real cost of higher ed has to stop rising…

DANIEL HAMERMESH

My university (Texas, not Maastricht) has issued a dictum severely limiting faculty seeking authorization to travel to “dangerous countries” (including Israel and Mexico)…

In my 42 years as a University professor, I have seen many administrative stupidities; but this one is a strong contender for the dumbest.

Stuart Rojstaczer

[Why doesn’t everyone just reject G.P.A.’s and demand class ranks?]

It’s not part of college culture today to emphasize competitiveness in the classroom. I would argue that competitiveness would be of value, but not many would agree with me. Class ranks would make some students winners and others losers. Such distinctions run completely counter to our primary goals in higher education today: make sure students enroll; make sure they have an emotionally healthy and positive experience; and try to make sure they graduate. I would argue that such goals are of considerable value, but our primary goals should be to educate students well and challenge them.

Does Credential Inflation Explain Some of the College Wage Premium?

by Daniel L. Bennett

Lately, I've been doing some thinking about the college wage premium and the growing number of college graduates. Advocates of higher ed have long espoused that college is the best investment that one can make, and that the returns to this investment are substantial. This line of reasoning has been continuously espoused by proponents for increasing the number of students going to and completing college, with folks implying that the labor market increasingly demands more college graduates. The evidence doesn't seem to support this claim.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics identified the 30 occupations that will experience the most numeric job growth between 2008 and 2018. Only 7 of the 30 occupations require a bachelor's degree or higher, with 5 of the top 6 occupations requiring on-the-job training only. According to BLS, these 30 occupations will create more than 7.3 million jobs by 2018. 2/3 of these jobs (nearly 4.9 million) will require no formal postsecondary credential.

So where exactly are all of these new college grads going to find jobs if they are not in fact in demand by the labor force? My hypothesis is that the US labor force has been and will continue to experience credential inflation. Jobs which in the past didn't require a postsecondary credential (and likely still don't), will increasingly be filled by those with college degrees because there is an excess supply of them. Why hire a high school grad when you can hire a college grad for roughly the same cost?

I think that this phenomenon helps explain why administrative, customer service, retail and other relatively low skill jobs are increasingly staffed by persons with a college education. It is not that these kinds of jobs require someone with a degree, but rather that college grads are willing to take these kinds of jobs. I think that credential inflation plays at least some role in explaining the wage college wage premium.

Credential inflation is not only bad for those without a college credential, as they are pushed out of jobs for which they previously were able to do, it is also bad for those with a college degree who spent a considerable amount of time and money to get that degree, only to wind up in a job for which the degree wasn't really necessary. In other words, the explicit and opportunity costs are high to seek a college degree.

The counter argument is that college is not only an economic investment, but that there is also the socialization and consumption value that needs to be considered. This is true, but the problem with this line of reasoning is that wage earners should not be taxed so that young people can have a good time and make new friends. Socialization and consumption are experience goods that individuals choose to purchase and as such, should be paid for by the benefiting party that voluntarily elects to purchase them.

RateMyProfessor Rears Its Head Yet Again

by Jonathan Robe

Ever since Forbes and CCAP teamed up to rank colleges and universities, our use of student evaluations posted on ratemyprofessor.com (RMP) has been severely criticized (see, for instance, this article from InsideHigherEd or this piece in Change). The New York Times ran a piece earlier this year restating the common, skeptical view of RMP. My colleague Jonathan Leirer has responded to some of these criticisms in the past here.

There’s an interesting new article in the May 2010 edition of the electronic journal Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation dealing with the validity of the RMP data as we use it in our rankings. The authors of this study, April Bleske-Rechek and Kelsey Michels, test three common criticisms made against RMP data: 1) only students with highly negative or highly positive comments post on RMP, 2) students who post on RMP are not typical and representative of the student body as a whole, and 3) student postings exhibit a positive relationship between easiness and quality.

While this analysis was restricted to only one school (and one not included in our rankings at that), the results offer additional support for our use of these data. As far as the three common assumptions are concerned, Bleske-Rechek and Michels conclude that their "findings put each of these notions in doubt." They found that the distribution of RMP ratings at the professor level are near-normal (rather than bimodal) and that students who post on RMP are typical students (in terms of GPA, year in school, and "similar in their focus on grading versus learning"). Furthermore, while the study confirms a positive relationship between quality and easiness at the instructor level, the authors warn that "it is misguided to jump to the conclusion that the association between easiness and quality is necessarily a product of just bias" rather than remaining open to the possibility that the RMP data may reflect that "quality instruction facilitates learning."

In other words, this study potentially undermines the argument that RMP data is widely susceptible to student misuse and therefore an improper measure of actual student perception of the education they receive in the college classroom. While this study is itself somewhat limited (the authors expressed a desire for further expanded research), it does reaffirm our view that student ratings of professors are seriously important to other students, that the RMP data are a good measure for the satisfaction of students with the instruction they receive in college, and that RMP can be improved upon to make it a better measure.

Links for 5/13/10

Mike Mandel

Brains and education did not seem to count too much in success in the last business cycle. Overall, the top ten cities, measured by growth in per capita income, had an average college graduate rate of 17.7% The bottom ten cities had a college graduate rate of 31.8%.

Is this inverse relationship between growth and education going to persist into the future? Impossible to say. My personal view is that the lack of rewards for education–which show up in the individual income statistics as well–is correlated to the lack of commercially-successful breakthrough innovations, which would immediate sop up all the excess college graduates.

To put it another way, innovative industries tend to locate where they can get a lot of college graduates. That means high education areas attract new companies, boosting growth.

But without innovation, the whole economic development dynamic changes.

Felix Salmon comments on Mandel:

My feeling is that this is a historical anomaly, and largely a product of the beginning and end points that Mandel used: 2000 was the peak of the dot-com bubble, which artificially inflated tech salaries, while 2008 came at the end of a commodity boom which helped oil-rich states. The long-term trend is inescapable: the returns to education are large and growing, and if you’re not a college graduate and you don’t own your own company, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain a middle-class lifestyle.

Martin Ringle via Steve Kolowich

higher education is now reacting to popular technology and not the other way around

Kevin Carey

The government subsidies create huge incentives for for-profit colleges to enroll anyone they can find. The awkward regulation offers little in the way of effective oversight. The opaque nature of the higher education experience makes it hard for consumers to sniff out fraudsters up-front. And the fact that people don’t continually purchase higher education throughout their lives limits the downside for bad actors. A restaurant or automobile manufacturer that continually screws its customers will eventually go out of business. For colleges, there’s always another batch of high school graduates to enroll…

The gainful employment standard highlights some of my biggest concerns about the Obama administration’s approach to higher education policy. To its lasting credit, the administration has taken on powerful moneyed interests and succeeded. Taking down the FFEL program was a historic victory for low-income students and reigning in the abuses of for-profit higher education is a needed and important step.

But the administration has displayed no similar enthusiasm for addressing the many problems in the traditional public and non-profit sector where most students actually go to college. Attacking corporate interests is good politics for a Democratic administration. Challenging the academy to do a better job of teaching students and helping them graduate is a much bigger lift. But that’s what will have to happen if the administration is serious about meeting its 2020 goal for college completion.

CCAP on YouTube

In the above video, CCAP staff discuss rising college costs. Participants are: Richard Vedder, Matthew Denhart, Christopher Matgouranis,Jonathan Leirer and Jonathan Robe.

To check out more CCAP videos, visit and subscribe to CCAP's YouTube page.

Is There a Case Against Loan Certification?

by Andrew Gillen

Certification (requiring the consent of colleges before students can take out loans from private lenders) is making the rounds, and “Everyone Seems To Agree With This One”

As stated in the letter,

The goal of school certification is simple: Assure that borrowers use private education loans only after exhausting less expensive federal, state, and institutional aid.

Requiring school certification that confirms students’ attendance and loan eligibility — as is currently required on all federal student loans — discourages unnecessary borrowing which could lead to delinquency and default during repayment. It also gives financial aid administrators an additional opportunity to counsel students about less expensive forms of financial aid…

Since I’m having a rough week already, and misery loves company, I thought I’d be contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian and try to make the case against requiring private student lenders to be certified by colleges.

The goal is pretty untouchable – anyone borrowing from private lenders before maxing out federal loans is either woefully uninformed or being defrauded. That leaves me with the mechanics of how you would actually implement certification, which allows for two big objections.

The first objection is that colleges have no business interfering with arrangements between other private parties. It is not the responsibility of colleges to monitor and approve of every financial decision that students make, nor would anyone like it if they tried. However, this objection suffers from a serious flaw because under current law, private student loans are not typical private transactions – they have special bankruptcy protections because they are supposed to be used for educational expenses. While my view is that private student loans should not be protected in bankruptcy, in the world we live in, they are. As long as that is the case, it makes sense to take extra steps to ensure that the student needs* the private student loan and that they use it for their education, and to do those, some type of certification/oversight by the college is called for.

The second objection is that this could lead to corruption like we saw with the preferred lender lists in the late FFEL program. We’ve seen time and time again that private lenders are not above offering bribes, and employees at public, quasi public, and private colleges are not above taking them. If the interests of students and administrators diverge again, the “additional opportunity to counsel students” may not count for much.

To combat this, the discretion of financial aid administrators over which lenders are certified needs to be all but eliminated. Some set of clear, easily observable, and publicly available criteria would need to be established, with no room for subjective interpretation.

An ideal world would not need certification because private student loans would be dischargeable in bankruptcy. Since we don’t live in that world, it is possible that certification would be a net benefit, but unless there are adequate safeguards against corruption, it is not a foregone conclusion.

*”Need” is used very loosely here. I really don’t see why the current limit on federal loans of $31,000. Combined with any grants, scholarships, savings from summer and part time work, and parental assistance, this isn't sufficient to finance an education.

Links for 5/12/10

Brad DeLong

Those majoring in peace and conflict studies, development studies, and rhetoric...

It seems, reading through the lines of what they say, that the modal teacher in those programs approaches their educational mission as though they have a dire and urgent need to deprogram young minds that have been enslaved to the harsh market-ueber-alles doctrines of neoliberal capitalism and classical economics.

The problem is that these nineteen year olds are from the upper-middle class of twenty-first century California and are at base do-gooder meritocrats deeply suspicious of large greedy corporations that repeatedly and recurrently try to sell them junk that they don't really need. They have not only not been programmed by the ideologies of neoliberal market capitalism and classical economics, they barely know that they exist at an ideological level…

If you are going to turn every class into a wrestle with the ghosts of Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Robert Nozick, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher, you will look silly unless you first make sure your students know who you are wrestling with, and why your struggle is such a desperate one--why their arguments have force and power...

Chad Aldeman

The University of California took 2,300 fewer students, Cal State enrolled 40,000 fewer, and the California Community Colleges turned away nearly 250,000 students last year… The dream of offering universal access is crumbling…

Rick Hess

When those paid from public coffers cease to feel any obligation to recognize that public resources are limited or that others, suffering through the same turbulent times (or those that won't draw their first paycheck for awhile yet), must foot the bill, it raises questions about whether public servants have morphed into public claimants. Something seems fundamentally off when irresponsible spending is justified as a matter of "fairness."

Peter D.G. Brown

I must confess that belonging to the de facto elite minority makes me very uneasy. Most tenured faculty view themselves as superior teachers with superior minds. In this view, the arduous six-year tenure process clearly proves that all of us are superior to "them" and have deservedly earned our superior jobs by our superior gifts and our superior efforts…

While instances of dumpster diving are rare, adjunct shopping is typically limited to thrift stores, and decades-old cars sometimes serve as improvised offices when these "roads scholars" are not driving from campus to campus…

what does it say about my entire profession when over 70 percent of those teaching in American colleges today are precarious, at-will workers? This new faculty majority, frequently and erroneously mislabeled as part-timers, are often full-time, long-term perma-temps, whose obscenely low wages and total lack of job security constitute what is only now being recognized as the "dirty little secret" in higher education…

Lies, Lies, and Damned Lies

By Richard Vedder

I have read two books recently that suggest that the academy's "research" is increasingly an ideological driven agenda that has nothing to do with truth and discovery and more about trying to make the world conform to a twisted and distorted zeitgeist far out of line with the instincts of the vast majority of Americans. It is a return, albeit in a different form, to a pre-Enlightment sort of intellectual totalitarism that is the antithesis of modernity and progress.

First, I commend to readers Chris Horner's fine book Power Grab. Chris argues, convincingly in my judgment, that much of the environmental/global warming cries in recent years has actually little to do with environmental concerns and all to do with an attempt to destroy the modern capitalistic order that has increased the quantity and quality of our lives so dramatically. The environment is merely the vehicle used to push an agenda. I am biased --Chris is a former student --but I think there is no finer writer and thinker on environmental issues than Chris. This book joins many earlier exposes on the lies, the distortions of evidence, etc., of many who are trying to drive dissent away in the discussion of global warming. So-called scientists are behaving in the most un-scientific way, and many of them are associated with our universities. Will they be punished for their academic malpractice, for their violation of professional responsibilities? No, of course not. And that is much of what is wrong with higher education today. People can lie and act irresponsibly with impunity. They can stifle intellectual expression or distort it and laugh all the way to the bank. Run, do not walk, to buy Chris's book (or click to get it from an on-line bookseller).

Second, my collleague Lowell Gallaway gave me a book to read that is several years old by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial. The authors show how a large number of historians of prominence continue to deny what has become irrefutably obvious --that American Communists spied against the U.S. in the 1930 to 1955 period. They refuse to accept the evidence from the Venoma intercepts or the vast evidence from newly opened Russian archives. It becomes obvious that their real agenda is not truth but pushing an erroneous view of the world, a poisionous far left ideology. The shameful thing is the Historical Establishment has gone along with this and shut out solid fact-based scholarship, with none of the more anti-communist revelations being accepted for publication in the top ranked Journal of American History or the American Historical Review.

Again, the consequences are zero. Some of these individuals continue to hold prestigious chairs, teach little, and pontificate at public expense leftish fantasies that have nothing to do with truth and discovery--and smear and try to suppress those who have different views. No one is detenured for academic dishonesty --au contraire, those who take opposite views are shut out of the journals, meaning that ideology, not fact, is driving the scholarly consensus in an important subset of the history profession. There is a smear on honest historians, one of whom, my friend Lon Hamby, had the last traditional article as of 2003 (the time this book was written) in the early 1970's in the American Historical Review suggesting that the American Communists were engaged in espionage.

This is yet another reason why the "research" enterprise of universities needs to be reassessed. It is costly, detracts in some cases from the instructional mission, and appears to often corrupt the very values on which universities were founded and on which modern progress depends.

New Forbes Article

by Daniel L. Bennett

My latest article discussing the new Income-Based Repayment plan and how it puts taxpayers at risk is now available on Forbes.com

Links for 5/11/10

Katja Grace

when we can’t compare something, we assume it is better than average

Tim Ranzetta

so, if the students had in fact been lied to, the industry's chief lobbyist proposes the government wipe out their debt...hmmmm...sounds like a wonderful solution...so the school keeps the money, the students get their debt forgiven and the taxpayer gets soaked…

SIMON ROMERO

Mr. Mockus. He became well known in 1993 after dropping his trousers and mooning an auditorium of unruly students, forcing him to resign as rector of the National University.

Frank D. LoMonte

Congress enacted the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or Ferpa, in 1974 to safeguard the confidentiality of student "educational records." But today colleges are abusing Ferpa and denying information requests with no conceivable privacy interest—applying a limitless definition of "educational record" well beyond what Ferpa's sponsors intended…

The U.S. Department of Education should be ensuring the integrity of Ferpa by insisting on a rational interpretation that balances the competing priorities of openness and privacy. But it has abdicated that role… the Education Department should act with regard for the overwhelming mandate of state legislatures that—absent a compelling justification for secrecy—government records are to be open for public inspection…

last year involving the records of a $1.6-million "discretionary scholarship" program at the University of Central Arkansas. The university's former president reportedly directed the scholarships to relatives of trustees and politicians. The institution, citing Ferpa, has strenuously refused to disclose who received the scholarships, even though colleges—including Central Arkansas—regularly disclose other scholarship winners when they think the awards reflect glory on the institutions…

The fault in Ferpa begins with a poorly worded statute. The law begs to be misapplied by defining educational records as those that "contain information directly related to a student." And the statute carries a knee-buckling potential penalty: the loss of all federal education support. With the lopsided incentive system—reveal too much and your institution risks the financial death penalty; reveal too little and you might get a court order directing you to disclose—colleges almost invariably err on the side of secrecy.

Instructively, the courts have been almost unanimously unsympathetic to the Education Department's expansionist view of Ferpa…

Help, I’ve Got Some Cognitive Dissonance

by Andrew Gillen

I usually make it all the way to Wednesday or Thursday before breaking my brain, but this week, I didn’t even make it to lunch on Monday. The culprit was this article in CHE by Eric Kelderman. It turns out, the IRS is looking into

potential discrepancies between colleges' financial activities and what they report to the government.

Towards the end, there is this:

how private colleges set the salaries for their top employees, such as presidents and chancellors. Private institutions can be subject to a tax penalty if they pay key employees amounts above what is comparable for similar positions at similar organizations.

[AG: I didn’t know this. That’s pretty cool – perhaps if this is actually enforced it would curtail the practice of university presidents getting all the rewards of CEO’s without having any of the potential downside, like the possibility of running the business into the ground and them losing their job.]

Forty-five percent of small colleges and 38 percent of the largest institutions in the survey reported not using the IRS's suggested procedures for setting the compensation of their highest-paid employees.

[AG: What? The IRS has suggested procedures for setting compensation at private entities! How can they be private if the government is determining what they can pay? Well, maybe this is just my libertarian side getting out of line. From a practical perspective, the IRS needs some way to know if they are paying “above what is comparable for similar positions at similar organizations”, so maybe this is just a survey of what salaries are at other schools…]

The IRS also noted that it is concerned that too few private colleges are using an independent survey of comparable institutions to determine salaries.

[AG: Ahhhh – that “also” is killing me. Not only are these private institutions supposed to use a survey to help guide compensation decisions, but that is separate from the IRS sanctioned procedures. I need some help on this one – due to their tax advantaged status, I can see why it might be appropriate to restrict the compensation choices of these private institutions, but I’m pretty sure that having the IRS determine what procedures they must follow is way over the line. Can we have one without the other? If not, which one is more important?]

Links for 5/10/10

Jay Schalin

Social and Economic Justice, Without the Economics or the Justice

Andrew Kelly

The idea that the patchwork system of higher education accountability is only lax vis a vis for-profit institutions, but ensures quality and good faith among all public and non-profit colleges, is a fallacy. Surely, the profit motive can lead to severe problems when educational quality cannot be mandated, but the same goes for traditional schools that offer little by way of return on the federal investment…

Edububble

Most sane people think it’s a bit odd to pay outrageous amounts of money for something that’s not much better from the mass produced item at Target. They understand how the luxury goods industrial complex creates illusions of exclusivity and faux scarcity to make us feel better about our consumption.

So why don’t these same rational folks feel the same way about the knowledge industrial complex? Why do we still revel in the entire college application process when all of the knowledge is available on free YouTube videos?

Jack Stripling

Kean University department chairs have spent a year on the endangered species list…

The plan, which would replace departments with schools headed by presidentially-appointed “executive directors,” has been met with renewed furor from faculty, who view it as a power grab that leaves the future of many disciplines uncertain…

Progress on the Credit Transfer Front

Back in March, Richard Vedder joined Anne Neal of ACTA, Kevin Carey of Education Sector and Rick Hess of AEI and Mark Schneider of AIR in signing and sending a letter to Arne Duncan requesting that the Education Department commission a study on the credit transfer problem in postsecondary education. Mr. Duncan signed a return letter on April 30 with good news, expressing:

his shared concern at the “financial and human costs associated with restrictive college credit transfer policies” and his “interest in learning more about the extent of the problem and identifying conditions and interventions that advance student success.”

To do so, he has commissioned a study by the National Center for Education Statistics and the Office of Postsecondary Education, the results of which are to be released within a year.

Links for 5/7/10

C. Cryn Johannsen

how the best and brightest in the U.S. have been s$%*#ed by the student lending industry and been turned into indentured educated citizens. This industry, as a result, has turned college into a racket (they ain't no better than a bunch o' loan sharks…

[AG: Yikes, I wonder how long it will be before this anger is directed at our new loan sharks now that FFEL is gone?]

Pete Davis

CBO analyzed tax arbitrage by U.S. colleges and universities. The Internal Revenue Code bars recipients of tax-exempt bond proceeds from directly reinvesting at higher rates, but the Congressional Budget Office found that most colleges and universities will do so indirectly with the $5.5 billion of muni's to be issued for them in 2010. Tax arbitrage is a pipeline directly into the pockets of U.S. taxpayers.

whether certain large endowment universities are institutions of higher learning with large endowments or whether it's more accurate to describe them as hedge funds with some education on the side...

Peter Schmidt

the American Educational Research Association did not hesitate … to declare its opposition to Arizona's controversial new immigration law…

In doing so, they themselves crossed a frontier, between their commitment to promoting solid research and their urge to take public stands on issues…

That they felt torn between the group's legal obligation to be politically neutral and their own desire to be anything but became apparent as the conference quickly escalated from a briefing on the resolution into a forum for association leaders and members—and even visiting Arizona high-school students—to speak out against the immigration measure…
This was hardly the first time the education-research group has taken a public stand on a divisive issue. Most notably, when the U.S. Supreme Court weighed the legality of the University of Michigan's race-conscious admissions policies, in 2003, the association's leadership declared in a friend-of-the-court brief…

Sara Goldrick-Rab

Of course academia trains us to think, like Hess, that research is worthy only when fully divorced from politics. Our research questions should be derived from theory, stemming only from the reading of great books and dusty journals, and never from a desire to enter policy or social debates. Puhleese. Every research question is inherently political--we conceive and ask questions the way we do because we have a desire to know something. Knowledge is socially, and therefore politically, constructed.

I'm the first to admit that AERA is a deeply flawed organization, but aren't they all (Hess's included)? I think honesty and transparency are among the best qualities, and would much rather AERA's leaders and members take visible positions on issues they care about rather than pretend not to have opinions. Research lacks an agenda only in the most naïve of imaginations. But agendas lack research all-too-frequently. If AERA begins to use its members' work to create a research-backed agenda, that can only be a good thing.

A New Vice Higher Education Czar

As reported by Kelly Field in the Chronicle:

The U.S. Senate education committee has approved President Obama's nomination of Eduardo M. Ochoa as assistant secretary for postsecondary education, a long-open leadership spot at the Education Department.

If confirmed by the full Senate, Mr. Ochoa, who is now provost and vice president for academic affairs at Sonoma State University, in California, would take charge of the Education Department's Office of Postsecondary Education, which administers most of the federal government's programs for colleges and college students. The assistant secretary has also typically served as the chief adviser to the education secretary on higher-education issues.

The position has been vacant since Mr. Obama took office more than a year ago. He nominated Martha J. Kanter for the other top postsecondary job, under secretary of education, in April of last year, and her appointment was confirmed last June. The president nominated Mr. Ochoa in February.

As assistant secretary, Mr. Ochoa would report to Ms. Kanter, who also came from California, where she was chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District.

Taking Out the Trash

by Daniel L. Bennett

Ben Miller has a great suggestion over at The Quick and the ED blog in which he calls for 3 outdated higher ed statistics to be put to rest. He believes that the following 3 arguments need to be taken out with the trash:

Each Year 170,000 qualified students will not attend a college or university–often because of monetary concerns.

Around 28 percent of all freshmen, and 42 percent of freshmen at two-year institutions require remediation. Only 30 percent of students who completed a remedial reading course, and 42 percent of those who completed two or fewer remedial math courses, earned any sort of degree within eight years of enrolling

The United States is falling behind other countries in postsecondary attainment.

Miller also asks if there are any other higher ed stats that deserve the same treatment. I have one:

Stat: College graduates will earn a million dollars more than non-graduates over their lifetime because of their degree

Original source: The US Census Bureau

Why it needs to be retired: The figure is severely flawed. Mark Schneider of AEI has suggested that it fails to account for factors such as school selectivity, the cost of a college education, foregone wages and the net present value stream of income. He estimates that the actual figure is closer to $280k. Furthermore, the figure is based on statistical averages of non-continuous income groups over time and fails to account for the earnings increases of actual individuals over time. It also fails to account for other factors that may have contributed to the increased earnings of individuals, such as innate ability, on-the-job training and outright luck.

What we need to talk about instead: Developing longitudinal datasets that track individuals from K-Retirement that will allow us to track individuals throughout their education and work experience in order to provide us with ample evidence to assess and evaluate the outcomes and value-added of our education system.

Links for 5/6/10

James Kwak

you internalize the rationalizations for the work you are doing...

It’s easier for college professors to think that, by training the next generation of young minds (or, even more improbably, writing papers on esoteric subjects), they are changing the world than to think that they are teaching and researching instead of changing the world...

A college student asked me at a book talk what I thought about undergraduates who go work on Wall Street. And individually, I have nothing against them...But as a system, it’s a bad thing that a small handful of highly profitable firms are able to invest those profits into skimming off some of the top students at American universities — universities that, even if nominally private, are partially funded by taxpayer money in the form of research grants and federal subsidies for student loans –and absorbing them into the banking-consulting-lawyering Borg...

Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks find a

10 hour decline in the average weekly study time of full-time college students at four-year colleges in the United States, from about 24 hours per week in 1961 to about 14 hours per week in 2003.

Arnold Kling asks

What sort of model can reconcile this with secular increases in college attendance and the college wage premium? Possibilities
1. A secular increase in credentialism, which would make you want to get a college degree with the least effort possible.
2. An increase in the efficiency of students, which allows human capital formation to be maintained with less effort.
3. Professors have failed to adapt to the Flynn Effect, so that many students are sliding by easily on the basis of ability rather than effort.

Jane Wellman via Jack Stripling

the tough conversations about pension plans in public universities aren’t going away any time soon. A number of benefit plans reduced retirement ages or increased benefits when market returns were good, and now the “chickens are coming home to roost,"...

The University of California and its employees haven’t paid into the retirement plan for about 20 years... The university’s unfunded post-retirement liability is $1.9 billion, and it’s expected to grow to $18 billion by 2013...

“If they don’t take care of that problem, they don’t have a University of California,” she said. “And they are acting like this is an 'oh by the way.' ” “If they don’t take care of that problem, they don’t have a University of California,” she said. “And they are acting like this is an 'oh by the way.' ”

College Inc

PBS aired a FRONTLINE documentary last night that discusses for-profit education, including an extensive interview with education entrepreneur Michael Clifford. If you missed the show, then you can watch the video online here.

Kevin Kuzma and Andrew Kelly both offer a good review of the film and its shortcomings.

Links for 5/5/10

Lloyd Armstrong

the core costs of instruction. John argues that these core costs are very similar institution to institution, for-profit and non-profit. That is, the core of education is essentially a commodity. These core costs are always less than the revenue that comes in to pay for the educational product, creating a profit to the institutions. What varies, institution to institution and for-profit to non-profit, is how this profit is used.

Typically, in the non-profit sector, the instructional profit is used to subsidize the various components of the bundled degree… we over-subsidize. That is, we spend more than the profit made on the core instruction, thus losing money on our now- bundled degree…

most of the for-profit sector sells what is basically an unbundled product focused on core instruction. This leaves some of the instructional profit to be returned to investors…
the way many non-profits are handling difficult financial times… .they begin to unbundle their products…Interestingly, this economically-forced unbundling makes these non-profits more closely resemble their already unbundled for-profit cousins

Paul Kedrosky

more than 70% of the scientists who have ever lived are alive today

Ben Miller

7.2 percent of borrowers defaulted within two fiscal years of entering repayment…

it is still way below the historical high of 22.4 percent seen in 1990…

Doug Lederman

FIPSE has become a -- choose your phrase: "slush fund," dumping ground, haven -- for earmarks awarded without competition by members of Congress, eating away at the funds that are supposed to be awarded competitively to identify and reward innovation.

Links for 5/4/10

Tony Bates

any large organization is difficult to manage, and universities particularly so. In fact, the terminology explains why. They’re not called managers or executives in universities but administrators – they are there to serve the main stakeholders in the university (and faculty in particular), not to ‘run’ things. Unfortunately, though, this term ‘administrator’ (which strikes me as being reminiscent of civil servants in colonial England – responsibility without power) is no longer suitable in organizations often with billion dollar budgets facing great challenges, both externally and internally. We need if not professional management, administrators with a high level of managerial and executive skills…

Edububble

universities sit on immense pools of lawyer bait (i.e. cash)...

Scott Jaschik

Bolt and Charlier looked at students who were considered to have "high exposure" to adjuncts (at least 75 percent of first semester courses taught by adjuncts) and "low exposure" (up to 25 percent of courses). About 30 percent of the students were in the low exposure group and about 41 percent were in the high exposure group.

Then Bolt and Charlier tracked student success over three years, looking at two measures of success: fall to fall retention, and program completion (either a degree or a certificate, depending on the student's program). They found absolutely no correlation between adjunct exposure and either of those measures...

Thomas Cranly

I was within hours of spending $600 on 10 law-school applications with the click of a button. But before going home to commit that act of resignation, I absent-mindedly checked my campus mailbox, which contained a letter explaining that my book had been accepted for publication by a university press.

That notice saved me hundreds of dollars in the short term. In the long term, it probably cost me millions. But it kept my peculiar dream to be a faculty member alive...

Are Think Tanks At Their End?

by Andrew Gillen

Bruce Bartlett has a terrific piece in Forbes titled “The End Of The Think Tank” concerning the history behind and the troubles with modern think tanks.

Their rise was spurred by those

frustrated by the slow, plodding style of AEI and Brookings, which tended to publish their research in books that often took years to complete…

The idea was to have an institution that wouldn't take years to study an issue to death and not deliver its research until it was too late, but that would produce its research on a much faster schedule, in time to influence congressional debate…

This is problematic:

The increasing impact of think tanks brought in new money as corporations realized that think tank studies were highly effective ways of influencing legislation... Unfortunately, the additional money brought increased donor pressure to produce bottom line results--getting bills passed or defeated--and had a corrupting effect on the think tanks…

Mark Thoma comments:

I think these organizations -- think tanks -- have done great damage to economics… there has also been a blurring of lines between academic research and think tank research … The main problem, I think, is the he said - she said presentation of academic work in the media alongside the papers that think tanks put out as though there is an equivalence (or a similarly structured debate on, say, CNN). Much of the think tank work (but not all) is junk and no such equivalence exists, but the work is often given equal footing in the press…

See also comments by Holly Yeager

I don’t have too much to add, but working at a think tank, I do want to make a couple of points.

First, while I’ve certainly come across some of the shoddy “research” produced by some think tanks, there are problems with peer reviewed academic research too. This article describes how many seminal articles were rejected, sometimes over and over again (and it’s in a peer-reviewed journal, so you know it’s good :) You can also see here, or the second link here, or here, or this story.

Of course, none of this makes think tank research any better, and I still put more weight behind a journal article than the policy brief, but it does illustrate that it’s a bit more complicated than “academic research = good, think tank research=bad.”

Second, the focus and process of academic work and think tank work is very different. To vastly oversimplify, journals are interested in publishing original theoretical ideas, or rigorous evaluations of ideas that have been implemented (which requires lots of data, which means the program must have survived for awhile). It also often takes a few years from the first draft of a paper to publication.

In contrast, think tanks are interested in how to apply ideas, and in arguing for the continuation or elimination of policies for which there is not yet overwhelming evidence. Their time frame is much shorter, since it is driven much more by the political process.

In other words, academics generally come up with the ideas and evaluate them if implemented, while think tanks figure out how to implement them and whether they are promising enough to continue when piloted, or whether those resources have better uses elsewhere. However, they must do this latter part before there is really sufficient data to answer the question to an academic standard, which means that there will be lots of conflicting conclusions. Looking back after the fact, much of think tank research will be wrong. This higher error rate is not because think tankers are inherently charlatans (though some are), or because their research is junk as Thoma would have it, but because they are asked questions to which the answer is not (yet) clear. It’s one thing if they get it wrong given the information available at the time, but it seems too harsh to me to go back later and call their work junk if it's wrong only with the benefit of more and better information that time provides.

To illustrate, consider that when academics are asked the types of questions think tankers are routinely tasked with answering, there response is in the style of Zhou Enlai’s response when asked in the 1970’s if the French Revolution was a good thing:

It is too soon to say.

While that might be a reasonable answer for an academic, that is not a sufficient answer for those making policy decisions right now (and therefore for think tankers trying to provide them with information).

Given the different focus, timeline, and process, it is no more surprising that there are different yardsticks for evaluating academic vs. think tank research than it is that there are different yardsticks for evaluating pure research as opposed to development in R&D. Of course, pointing out these things doesn’t make think tank research any better, but it does illustrate why it is more often wrong than academic work, and how simply adopting the quality control practices of the academic world won’t really work.