CCAP Releases New Study on Intercollegiate Athletics

Today CCAP is releasing Funding the Arms Race: A Case Study of Student Athletic Fees, co-authored by Matthew Denhart and David Ridpath. Surveying roughly 1,000 students at Ohio University, a fairly typical mid-sized state university, Denhart and Ridpath find that intercollegiate athletics (ICA) is the largest recipient of general fee revenues, despite having low support among students. Other results include findings that:

• Over 70 percent of students favored ICA receiving modest to little general fee support, instead of being the most important use of those funds;

• Over 78 percent of students regarded ICA as an "unimportant" or "extremely unimportant" factor in deciding to enroll at Ohio University;

• 63 percent of respondents favor reducing the fee devoted to ICA, while 18 percent favor leaving it the same. Fewer than 10 percent of students favored a healthy ($30+ a year) increase in the fee to maintain ICA's current status;

• This study largely corroborates the results of a similar survey conducted by Katherine Ott at the University of Toledo in 2009.

Urging more transparency in the reporting of athletic fees, Denhart and Ridpath also call for additional research to be completed at other institutions to examine this issue on a broader, national scale.

Links for 1/31/11

Stephen Brockmann

If I go to a doctor’s office and witness doctors and nurses fighting about whether or not I should take a particular medication, I’m likely to go elsewhere for my health care needs. I think something analogous happened to the humanities in the 1980s, and it is continuing to happen today…

Michael Alison Chandler

South Korea… newly minted admissions officers, who have undergone training to evaluate hard-to-quantify traits, such as leadership potential and independent thinking. The change in admissions is the centerpiece of a slate of policy reforms aimed at coaxing creativity from students trained to memorize…

But reversing a centuries-old testing culture could prove to be as difficult here as anywhere. High schools and families need time to catch up in a society where "extracurricular" is often understood to mean extra English or math classes, and where competition is so stiff for entrance to top colleges that extra tutoring is hard to avoid and students don't have time to do anything except study…

the country's famed education system is blamed for a plummeting birth rate, record numbers of suicides, and a deepening rift between rich and poor…

Derek Neal

This chapter analyzes the design of incentive schemes in education while reviewing empirical studies that evaluate performance pay programs for educators. Several themes emerge. First, it is difficult to use one assessment system to create both educator performance metrics and measures of student achievement. To mitigate incentives for coaching, incentive systems should employ assessments that vary in both format and item content. Separate no-stakes assessments provide more reliable information about student achievement because they create no incentives for educators to take hidden actions that contaminate student test scores. Second, relative performance schemes are rare in education even though they are more difficult to manipulate than systems built around psychometric or subjective performance standards. Third, assessment-based incentive schemes are mechanisms that complement rather than substitute for systems that promote parental choice, e.g. vouchers and charter schools.

The Chronicle on this year’s freshman.

CATHERINE RAMPELL

A Sign of the Recovery? Law School Applications Fall

Links for 1/28/11

The Journal of Universal Rejection

all submissions, regardless of quality, will be rejected. Despite that apparent drawback, here are a number of reasons you may choose to submit to the JofUR:
• You can send your manuscript here without suffering waves of anxiety regarding the eventual fate of your submission. You know with 100% certainty that it will not be accepted for publication.
• There are no page-fees.
• You may claim to have submitted to the most prestigious journal (judged by acceptance rate).
• The JofUR is one-of-a-kind. Merely submitting work to it may be considered a badge of honor.
• You retain complete rights to your work, and are free to resubmit to other journals even before our review process is complete.
• Decisions are often (though not always) rendered within hours of submission.

This is cool.

So is this.

The 'Holy Grail' of Higher Ed Reform

by Andrew Gillen

Robert Martin and I have a piece over at Inside Higher Ed.

There is a thriving market for senior scholars in higher education -- a market that brings plenty of release time from teaching, along with high salaries and fame.
There is no corresponding market for world-class teachers…

The critical reason why one market exists and the other does not is the information available to potential employers…

The “holy grail” of higher education reform should be the creation of a market for exceptional college teachers. The vigorous market for scholars provides the keys to this project. First, the information required does not have to be perfect in order for the market to be efficient (the information about scholars is not perfect). Second, the source of this information should be independent of the individual teachers, their home institutions, and their potential employers…

Links for 1/27/11

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst

For education… more federal dollars and more federal control.

There are two opposing schools of thought on this. I will call the first “principled”, not necessarily in praise of its tenets but in recognition that it emerges from a coherent conceptual position. It has two facets: classic federalism,… and a market-based approach to the provision of services…

the second school of thought “opportunistic.” It is motivated to improve education outcomes for children… It identifies reforms and programs that are thought to be desirable and uses the federal government as a means to advance them…

Whether the nation will follow the opportunistic or the principled approach will be the education battle line in the 112th Congress…

This will not be a fight between good guys and bad guys – both sides care about education. It will be a fight between dramatically different visions of how the nation’s education future will be determined.

DAVID LEONHARDT

protecting higher education from across-the-board budget cuts, as Mr. Obama is urging, makes sense.

But the status quo is not worth protecting. Both the federal government and the states spend money on higher education in terribly wasteful ways. They don’t offer incentives for success, and they demand little accountability from colleges. Colleges that do a masterful job of graduating students receive no reward, and those that do a subpar job — of which there are many — go unpunished, giving them little reason to improve.

In the federal budget, the obvious candidates for cutbacks come from a grab bag of programs that cost about $12 billion a year and make up about one-fourth of federal spending on colleges…

Most of the $12 billion subsidizes student loans so that interest doesn’t accrue while students are still in college. That may be a nice little benefit, but it does not help students stay in school…

The remainder of the $12 billion is no better. Many of these dollars are matching funds for financial aid awarded by colleges, which means much of the money ends up going to wealthy private colleges…

Parul Sehgal via Scott McLemee

I studied political science. I wanted to understand "who gets what and why," but I was instead waylaid by theory, theories about theories, and texts so mazy that they seemed to have been explicitly designed to baffle… As a student, you're forced to build up your stamina as a reader -- I'm sure many students in the humanities experience this. You learn to sit with the text past any point of desire or even comprehension. And it makes you humble. It makes you the supplicant…

Axel Leijonhufvud on the greatest scam of our times. Btw, he also wrote perhaps the best economics paper ever.

Links for 1/26/11

Doug Lederman

the Lumina Foundation for Education is today releasing a draft of its Degree Qualifications Profile…

intended to establish, in more specific ways than has historically been the case, what the recipients of associate, bachelor's and master's degrees (regardless of discipline) should know and be able to do…

"it's a heck of a lot better than what we have now," Adelman said -- a situation in which politicians perceive colleges to pay too little attention to learning and constantly threaten to wade in and fix the problem.

And they will, Adelman warned, if colleges (and accreditors, whom he sees playing a key role) don't confront their perceived failings themselves…

Mark C. Taylor

When there is pressure to teach large classes to help the bottom line, the wisest policy is to assign little reading or writing and to grade easily. Teaching well takes lots of time and helping student to learn to read critically and write well cannot be done in lecture halls with hundreds of students…

Adam Kissel

Michigan State University… MSU's draconian e-mail policy. Unlike virtually all colleges and universities, MSU claims in its policy that "The University's e-mail services are not intended as a forum for the expression of personal opinions."

Greg Mankiw

we often remind policymakers that their decisions should be based on objective, empirical research rather than uninformed supposition. Yet when we are the decision makers, as we are when we run our own educational programs, we often have little data-driven analysis on which to base on our judgments. This kind of research should, over time, lead to a better educational system...

Consider now the fact that many students drop out of graduate school ... it is likely that in many cases their choice to drop out is optimal. They entered graduate school without fully knowing what it was like and whether it was a good match for them. After a couple of years, they decided it wasn’t. In light of the inherent uncertainty when choosing a path in life, a bit of experimentation is desirable...

Links for 1/25/11

Jonathan B. Imber

True teachers must live with the prospect that most of those they teach over a lifetime will not remember their names or what they were taught. They must endure George Bernard Shaw's famous aphorism that "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches." That was in Shaw's The Revolutionist's Handbook. In the same section of aphorisms, under the heading "Education," he added, "No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot."…

TAMAR LEWIN

In most states, it is now tuition payments, not state appropriations, that cover most of the budget…

Daniel J. Ennis

nobody has offered a compelling reason why America continues to overproduce doctorates in the face of a market that screams "stop!"…

until we wrestle the Smugness Angel to the ground we won’t get a handle on the doctoral overproduction problem (if there is one). It isn't the hope of some future job satisfaction that pushes folks to burn a near-decade of life on a piece of paper, it is self-satisfaction…

The Knowledge Maven

Do We Really Need More College Graduates? 20 Must-Read Analyses.

Do for-profits exist to make profit? Yes.

by Andrew Gillen

I’ve got a bunch of new faces in my RSS reader thanks to great lists from Ben Miller and Linda Perlstein. One of the new ones is Walt Gardner, who writes

This attitude calls into question whether proprietary schools are more interested in making a profit or providing education and training.

This type of statement perfectly illustrates the difference between those who can’t stand for-profits, and those that think for-profits are very useful (I have no idea which camp Walt is in as this was the first post of his that I have read).

The primary purpose of any for profit institution, whether a school or a bakery, is to make profit. In a well functioning market for education, the only way to obtain sustainable profits would be to create value (a good education for the price), just as the only way to make a sustainable profit in the bakery business is to create value (a good baked good for the price).

But we don’t have a normally functioning market for higher ed. We have a system where the quality of education provided is unknown and outcomes (such as job placement rates and average salaries) are deliberately hidden. This means that profits and value creation do not necessarily go together.

Those who can’t stand for-profits see profits and say “How terrible. Money that could have been used to teach students is lining the pockets of corporate shareholders instead.” Those who hold out hope for for-profits see this and say “That’s unusual. There must be something dysfunctional about the functioning of higher ed.” They then look for peculiar aspects of the industry to explain the anomaly. They aren’t hard to find (see number 25 or our recent project for a brief introduction to them).

Given the loose connection between quality and profit, there are probably lots of examples of undeserved profits out there. But obsessing over their existences is akin to worrying about the symptom rather than the disease. The same system that allows for undeserved profits for for-profit schools also allows for them in public and private-non-profit schools. While they don’t distribute their “profits” to shareholders, as Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa have shown, they aren’t using them to provide an education either.

Instead of trying to banish the symptom (what we think are undeserved profits), we should treat the disease that allows them to exist. If we create a system where the connection between profit and value creation is strong, then the only way for-profits can make a profit will be to provide a good education. Importantly, such a strong connection would also fix the dysfunctional incentives of public and private-non-profit schools.

We can either fix the incentives of the system, which would lead to better for-profit, public and private-non-profit institutions alike, or we can continue in our quest to eradicate the for-profits, letting the dysfunction in public and private-non-profits fester. Doesn’t seem like a hard choice to me.

Academically Adrift: A Must Read

By Richard Vedder*

The most significant book on higher education written in recent years is out, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia. While I have not read every word of this new University of Chicago Press book, I have read enough of it and an accompanying summary to know that it is very, very important, and extremely devastating in what it says about American higher education today. Basically, students study little and, as a consequence, learn little.

Arum and Roksa wed data from two very important but underutilized test instruments, the Critical Learning Assessment (CLA), and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). These instruments are used at hundreds of schools, and the Arum and Roksa book is based on detailed results from a good sized sample of students from 29 institutions. The CLA measures things such as aptitude with respect to critical learning and writing skills, while the NSSE mostly measures how students are engaged at school, in large part measured by how they use their time.

For the reader not familiar with some of the findings, Arum and Roksa conclude:

• “gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills (i.e., general collegiate skills) are either exceedingly small or empirically non-existent for a large proportion of students”;
• 36 percent of students experienced no significant improvement in learning (as measured by the CLA) over four years of schooling;
• less than one-half of seniors had completed over 20 pages of writing for a course in the prior semester;
• total time spent in academic pursuits is 16 percent; students are academically engaged, typically, well under 30 hours per week;
• scholarship from earlier decades suggest there has been a sharp decline in both academic work effort and learning;
• “students…majoring in traditional liberal-arts fields…demonstrated significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study. Students majoring in business, education, social work , and communications had the lowest measurable gains”;
• 35 percent of the students sampled spent five hours or less a week studying alone; the average for all students was under 9 hours.

Critics will no doubt argue that the CLA is an imperfect test instrument or that the sample of schools was too small and unrepresentative. What strikes me most, however, is that these findings are similar to those found in other studies (e.g. the Time Use Survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics), and with my own personal observations based on a half century of involvement in higher education in all types of institutions ranging from mid-quality state universities to elite private liberal-arts colleges and prestigious private research institutions.

Moreover, the survey seems to confirm that many of the modern-day trends in higher education have lowered the quality of the educational experience. “Collaborative learning” is all the rage, and students are encouraged to work in groups—the Arum and Roksa study, however, suggests that studying alone is more effective than studying in groups. Another trend is the decline in the “market share” of the traditional liberal arts disciplines—social and natural sciences and the humanities—yet students in these disciplines seem to be learning more. To be sure, the communications and business majors are sometimes picking up vocational skills that are useful, which are not measured by the CLA.

To me, this above all further strengthens the thinking of scholars ranging from Robert Hutchins and James Bryant Conant (to go back more than a half a century) to Charles Murray today. As the proportion of the population going to college rises, more and more of them are simply not suited for academically rigorous forms of higher learning. Consequently, schools dumb down the curriculum, engage in grade inflation, etc.

Why, then, do college graduates continue to earn a healthy premium over high school graduates? In part, because, despite being relatively lazy and relatively unchallenged in school, college graduates are still smarter, more ambitious and more disciplined than the graduates of our relatively mediocre (on average) secondary schools. College is an expensive (to students) screening device, and one that is increasingly emphasizing the socialization dimensions of young adulthood over the dissemination of true knowledge and ideas. We are sending too many kids to school to learn too little to get jobs for which often the little that they do learn is not even necessary.

Ultimately, the public policy question is why the financially strapped federal government provides billions of dollars to subsidize students participating in the increasingly expensive and hedonistic experience we call “higher education?” Why do states subsidize the institutions that are responsible for this decline, rather than directly supporting a modest number of serious, hard-working and financially needy students? Why is higher education so dysfunctional, and becoming more so daily? When is the bubble going to burst? Run; do not walk, to the store to get this book.

*This post originally appeared on the "Innovations" blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education on January 20, 2011.

Links for 1/24/11

William G. Bowen

a recurring theme is that on more than one occasion I failed to look closely enough at real evidence. I sometimes relied too much on what I assumed to be reality—or feared might be reality. I learned that it was easy to succumb to the temptation to believe what I wanted to believe or to accept at face value assertions made by others. There is simply no substitute for framing questions carefully and then looking with a cold eye at properly organized sets of facts.

Richard Posner

there is no reason to subsidize tuition of persons able and willing to pay it without subsidy...

William Major

On our final day of discussing Walden in my literature course for sophomores, I ask students to get out their BlackBerries and smartphones and lay them on their desks. I then offer the extra credit they've been begging for since day one: They'll get it if they let me keep their phones for five days…

Mike Mandel

Friday Wrap-up

by Jonathan Robe

I wonder if this owl was in college taking one of these courses...

Quality in Higher Ed (and Art)

by Andrew Gillen

A. Lee Fritschler had a piece a while back on quality in higher ed. In it, he does a pretty good job of reminding those of us (such as myself) that constantly bemoan the low quality of college that we are awfully vague when it comes to defining what quality means. Fair enough. But he then goes on to tell us that various proposals for reforming higher ed would unquestionably reduce quality. My first reaction was one of incomprehension. Saying that you can’t define quality, but that doing X or Y would nonetheless lower quality strikes me as just throwing everything you can find against X and Y and seeing what sticks. While a common form of argument, especially in DC, this is generally not very persuasive.

But I know from reading some of Fritschler’s prior work that he is an informed, astute, articulate, and passionate observer of higher education issues, so I reread the article, and discovered that the argument is a bit more nuanced. A careful rereading reveals that the argument is not that no one can judge quality, but that only experts/practitioners can do so, and that trying to force them to implement “objective” measures of quality would be largely infeasible, and even if accomplished, would have a host of negative consequences such as hindering progress and innovation. This is a much more plausible argument.

But even if correct, I have a sneaking suspicion that if faculty are to be their own judges of quality, then we will be assured that they are all awesome. The straw man counterpoint to this is similar to the old army joke about how to improve accuracy: Shoot first, then call whatever you hit the target.

But suppose you grant the premise: i.e., that only experts/practitioners can judge quality. Wouldn't this place higher education in a situation similar to that of artists? Perhaps that is where they properly belong. Perhaps not. Either way, I have another sneaking suspicion that academics would be very unhappy with the levels of public funding that artists typically receive.

When it comes to judging the quality of art, we are told that we should listen to artists, who are the only legitimate judges of quality. They tell us art is extremely valuable and worthy of public funding, but a skeptical public is not content to just take their word for it. As a result, art has never been generously financed by the public because there is no way to convince the public that it is of high quality.

Higher education has been generously funded by the public in the past because it was widely seen as being of high quality. Rightly or wrongly, public perceptions of the quality of higher ed are being revised downward. If the best that the higher ed establishment can do is to say, “we are the only ones qualified to judge quality, and we can assure you that everything we do is great,” then they are making the same claim artists make and will increasingly receive the same level of public financing. Needless to say, that wouldn’t be good for the industry.

It is in higher ed’s best interest to develop measures of quality that can convince the public that its money is being spent wisely. The alternatives are either to have such measures forced upon them, or to see funding wither away.

Richard Vedder on Problems in Higher Ed

Today's edition of Inside Higher Ed features, "For Many, College Isn't Worth It," an article from CCAP Director Richard Vedder. In it, Dr. Vedder offers a counter to a recent post by Anthony Carnvale on the topic of underemployment and the use of Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data. Vedder asserts that while college may be a good investment for many Americans, for the large group of students that fails to graduate and find good jobs, that proposition is problematic. He further argues that the call by "many higher education advocates to rapidly and radically increase the number of college graduates is fundamentally off-base." We hope you will weigh-in on this debate.

Also, Richard Vedder has a new post over at the Chronicle of Higher Education's "Innovations" blog. In "Academically Adrift: A Must Read," Vedder summarizes Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's important new book which provides startling evidence that many students learn little while in college. Vedder questions why "the financially strapped federal government provides billions of dollars to subsidize students participating in the increasingly expensive and hedonistic experience we call 'higher education?'"

Links for 1/20/11

Paul Basken

Universities are aggressively seeking federal dollars to build bigger and fancier laboratory facilities, and are not paying an equal amount of attention to teaching and nurturing the students who would fill them, scientists say in the articles.

"It's a Ponzi scheme," said Kenneth G. Mann, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Vermont, whose concerns were described by Nature. "Eventually you'll have a situation where you're not even producing the feedstock into the system."…

"Nobody has ever asked me how good my papers were, and I think you would find that universally true," he said, "They basically say, Well, how many research dollars are you bringing in?"…

Anthony Carnevale

Those who make the “skip college” argument often bolster their arguments with official state and national Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data suggesting that the U.S. higher education system has been turning out far more college grads than current or future job openings require…

The most persuasive evidence that the BLS numbers are wrong are earnings data, which show that employers across the country pay a "wage premium" to college graduates, even in occupations that BLS does not consider "college" jobs…

To dismiss the significance of wage data requires a belief that employers across the country have systematically hired overqualified workers for their job openings and then grossly overpaid them for the past three decades…

Paul E. Harrington and Andrew M. Sum

Unlike virtually any other analyst of labor market activity, the Georgetown authors define the size of the college labor market as equal to the total number of college graduates that are employed. BLS and most other college labor market analysts define the college labor market as essentially a set of occupations that most often require persons to earn a college degree in order to be fully qualified for employment in that occupations…

for the Georgetown analysts, all the college graduates working as bartenders are part of the college labor market…

BLS analysts disagree. They would not assign any bartender employment to the college labor market because, although one in four bartenders are college graduates, these jobs do not typically utilize the knowledge, skills and abilities acquired in college…

If malemployment among college graduates simply does not exist, as the Georgetown forecasters argue, then there should be little difference in the earnings among college graduates regardless of whether they were employed in college labor market occupations or not... Not surprisingly we found very large and statistically significant difference in the annual earnings of college graduates based on their malemployment status…

Jason Delisle

the recovery rate for a student loan in default is 122 percent. That is, for every $100 in loans that default, the government ultimately collects $122…

These budget numbers have misled reporters, student-loan borrower advocates and industry lobbyists alike…

the default recovery rates are not what they appear. That is, the figures don’t represent the real cost of a default because they don’t factor in how much the government spends to collect a delinquent loan or when the funds are actually collected. Both OMB and the Department of Education will admit that once those costs are included, the recovery rate falls well below 100 percent…

a 2007 Congressional Budget Office study that examined student loan collection information in the National Student Loan Data System found that after accounting for collection costs and the time it takes to collect on a loan, recovery rates are actually only about 50 percent…

Does the Root Problem Lie with Colleges of Education?

by Jonathan Robe

Last April, Richard Vedder suggested (here and here) that there might, just might, be a connection between low-quality collegiate instruction at colleges of education (notorious across campuses for providing routinely easy A's) and the abysmal performance of those elementary and secondary students the graduates of such colleges teach. Some of the evidence unearthed in Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa earth-shattering new book, Academically Adrift, brought this back to mind. As Kevin Carey puts in his latest column for the Chronicle (emphasis mine), Arum and Roksa

found significant differences [in learning] by field of study. Students majoring in the humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, and math—again, controlling for their background—did relatively well. Students majoring in business, education, and social work did not. Our future teachers aren't learning much in college, apparently, which goes a long way toward explaining why students arrive in college unprepared in the first place.

This observation, of course, makes perfect sense. If we dumb down college curricula (particularly for future educators), we shouldn't be surprised to see students at elementary and secondary schools exhibit lower levels of academic achievement than should be expected of them.

The Study of Beer: Maybe One Reason College Students Don't Learn Much

by: Matthew Denhart

I began this morning like I have every morning so far this year, tearing away a page to reveal the current date on the 2011 "page a day" calendar of the Stupidest Things Ever Said that I received for Christmas. I was surprised to see that today's entry focuses on higher education. Specifically, the entry features actual college course names/descriptions at three well-known American universities. Here they are:

From Indiana University:

"Art & Science of Beer: We will explore the place of beer in ancient as well as modern life, and the role beer has played in important achievements in microbiology, biotechnology, and physics."

From Duke University:

"Campus Culture and Drinking: The cultural understandings that motivate and shape undergraduate drinking.

From Oklahoma State University:

"International Beverage Education: The history of beverages such as wine, distilled spirits, and beers. Prerequisite: Must be 21 years of age."

Coincidentally, a new book by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, was just released by the University of Chicago Press. In it, Arum and Roksa provide strong evidence that little learning actually occurs on college campuses. One wonders why this might be the case.

Threats to Autonomy

by Andrew Gillen

Dean Dad gets it almost right when he writes

university leaders in several states are proposing a form of fiscal secession from their states. The idea is that in exchange for acceding to ever-greater budget cuts from the state, they will be granted much greater autonomy in decisionmaking…

(It’s also hard to imagine that the alleged autonomy would last very long. As long as there are political points to be scored one way or the other, there will be interference. And the giant sucking sound from public money being hoovered by the plutocracy won’t suddenly stop just because subsidies go away. Next they’ll want PILOTs -- Payments in Lieu of Taxes -- and an end to student loan subsidies.)…

This is almost right, but not quite. The threat to autonomy doesn’t come from the fact that “there are political points to be scored,” but rather from the fact that public money is being spent. You can’t determine someone’s stance on this issue if all you know is their politics. A much better determinant is whether they are happy with the current state of higher education. If so, they are very likely to favor autonomy. If not, they are very likely to favor less autonomy (usually called accountability). Since neither the right nor left has a monopoly on dissatisfaction with the current state of higher ed, politics is not the driving force.

But don’t take my word for it. Here is Armen A. Alchian

THE FACULTY AND administration… have learned to use that political structure… They praise politicians for statesmanlike, responsible behavior when the university budget is increased; but if it is decreased, they cry of political interference. Having accepted almost exclusive dependence on financing directly from the political and legislative processes, they should not complain of “political interference” when that same political process examines more intently the budget and the operations of the university…

Either the students pay and control, or the political processes and politicians do. Yet some of the faculty seem to think they can avoid both…

Links for 1/19/11

Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa

"With regard to the quality of research, we tend to evaluate faculty the way the Michelin guide evaluates restaurants," Lee Shulman, former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, recently noted. "We ask, 'How high is the quality of this cuisine relative to the genre of food? How excellent is it?' With regard to teaching, the evaluation is done more in the style of the Board of Health. The question is, 'Is it safe to eat here?'" Our research suggests that for many students currently enrolled in higher education, the answer is: not particularly… At least 45 percent of students in our sample did not demonstrate any statistically significant improvement in Collegiate Learning Assessment [CLA] performance during the first two years of college… large numbers of U.S. college students can be accurately described as academically adrift. They might graduate, but they are failing to develop the higher-order cognitive skills that it is widely assumed college students should master…

The U.S. higher-education system has in recent years arguably been living off its reputation as being the best in the world. The findings in our study, however, should remind us that the system's international reputation—largely derived from graduate programs at a handful of elite public and private universities—serves as no guarantee that undergraduate students are being appropriately challenged or exposed to educational experiences…

Scott Jaschik

The main culprit for lack of academic progress of students, according to the authors, is a lack of rigor…

Kevin Carey

there are two kinds of college students in America. A minority of them start with a good high-school education and attend colleges that challenge them with hard work. They learn some things worth knowing. The rest—most college students—start underprepared, and go to colleges that ask little of them and provide little in return. Their learning gains are minimal or nonexistent. Among them, those with a reasonable facility for getting out of bed in the morning and navigating a bureaucracy receive a credential that falsely certifies learning. Others don't get even that…

we have overcomplicated the practice of higher education. It comes down to what it always has—deep engagement with complex ideas and texts, difficult and often solitary study, the discipline to write, revise, and write again. What students need most aren't additional social opportunities and elaborate services. They need professors who assign a lot of reading and writing. Professors, in turn, need a structure of compensation and prestige that rewards a commitment to teaching…

Deep down, everyone knows that learning has long been neglected. But they don't want to know. Policy makers who have poured gigantic sums of money into financial-aid programs designed to get people into college don't want to know that many of the graduates, leaving with degrees in hand, didn't learn anything. College presidents don't want to know, because fixing the problem means arguing with faculty. Faculty don't want to know, because it would expose the weakness of their teaching and take time from research. Students don't want to know, because they'd have to work harder, and it would undermine the value of their credentials.
It has been a conspiracy of convenience…

Arnold Kling

I suspect that this explains some of the wage differential that shows up for college graduates. Graduating high school shows that you can submit to external discipline. Graduating college shows that you can operate under internal discipline…

CCAP in the News

CCAP's recent study, Intercollegiate Athletics Subsidies: A Regressive Tax, was featured in the most recent edition of Change Magazine. In the magazine's cover story article, Karen Weaver makes the case for athletics reform and highlights CCAP's work on the regressive and inequitable nature of student athletic fees. Here are some more good quotes from Weaver:

College sports, as played by the top universities, have entered an entirely new era. Television is willing to pay substantial sums for lucrative marquee match-ups each week. The Universities of Texas and Notre Dame just signed to play each other for four consecutive years—imagine the television ratings for those games! Next we may find ourselves with a “super-conference,” where four national conferences of 16 teams each will dominate the media and the revenues.

This creates a dilemma for the next group of 70–90 schools. How should they respond? One possible move would be to stop participating in Division I sports and redesign their programs to meet the needs of students. But there are signs that instead, most have ramped up their efforts to join the winners' circle.

On January 6th, The Chronicle of Higher Education revealed that Richard Vedder's "Innovations" blog "Why Did 17 Million Students Go to College?" was its third most read story of 2010.

Also on January 6th, the Austin American Statesman published an opinion article by Richard Vedder examining faculty productivity at Texas A&M University.

Links for 1/18/11

DAN FROSCH

Nic Ramos, paid his entire spring semester tuition — all $14,309.51 of it — using dollar bills, a 50-cent piece and a penny…

[And the video interview.]

Martha Ann Overland

when students are paying up to $1,000 for books each year…

the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges… has started an ambitious program to develop low-cost, online instructional materials for its community and technical colleges…

DANIEL HAMERMESH

sometimes my own papers are held by scholarly journals for a year, as the journal waits on reviews by one or more delinquent reviewers. David Figlio of Northwestern University has proposed a clever matching mechanism that seems to offer the right incentives on both sides of the market: The editor of scholarly journals can base the author/reviewer match in part on the author’s reviewing speed when s/he has reviewed...

Mark Kantrowitz

Federal law requires colleges to reduce a student’s need-based financial aid package when the student receives a private scholarship. This is referred to as an overaward. After all, receipt of a scholarship reduces the student’s financial need.

Most colleges will reduce their own financial aid funds to eliminate the overaward, rather than decrease the federal financial aid…

Colleges do have flexibility in how they reduce the aid package. Some colleges will substitute the scholarship for their own grant funds, yielding no net financial benefit to the student. Other colleges will let the scholarship replace the loans, effectively reducing the out-of-pocket cost to the student…

WINNIE HU

proposals, meant to introduce competition, choice and incentives to improve education performance — something he calls “market models of school reform” — are becoming more popular, attracting the support of the Obama administration and influential groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In New Jersey, as in other states, the teachers and their unions are resisting…

Links for 1/17/11

Bob Samuels

I have put together a comprehensive proposal to save vital services, while absorbing the latest round of budget cuts:

1. Reduce senior management group by 20%...

2. Institute a UC tax on all auxiliaries of 10%...

3. Reduce the number of grants that do not bring in at least 50% in indirect cost recoveries…

4. Cap administrative salaries, raises, and supplemental retirement perks. This will reduce future costs and help motivate some overpaid administrators to leave. (cost: priceless).

5. Prevent athletic subsidies…

Bill Tucker

When you see companies no longer touting just enrollment growth, but also graduation and other measures of student success as reasons to invest, then we’ll know that we’ve got the incentives right.

Leonard Cassuto

We teach graduate students to want the kinds of jobs that most of them won't ever get…

Neal McCluskey

You don’t have to suffer from tinfoil-hat paranoia to see real and potential government abuse all over this sorry episode. First, opportunist politicians and others misused the initial GAO report to smear the whole for-profit sector. Then, once the damage was done, the GAO made significant changes to their report without even so much as issuing a press release. And now, as even the amended report is being ripped to shreds, the GAO’s response is basically “you can’t have access to the evidence being used against you, and you don’t need it: We’ve already decided we’re right and you’re wrong.”

Now, are for-profit schools pure and blameless? Absolutely not: Norton/Norris confirmed several of the GAO’s findings, and some findings they questioned are probably accurate. Moreoever, as I’ve pointed out before, many for-profit schools are happy to take students carrying taxpayer dollars despite knowing there’s little chance that those students will ever finish their studies. Of course, that makes those institutions no different from many public and nonprofit private schools about which Sen. Harkin evinces no concern…

Alexandra M. Lord

employers looking to hire a Ph.D. historian tend to balk when the job applicant has absolutely no experience outside of academe. Consequently, jobs with tremendous potential to transform how the American public understands history often go to people who lack extensive academic training in the subject…

Links for 1/14/11

David Stockton via RTE

a story told by Nobel laureate Ken Arrow. During World War II, Arrow was assigned to a team of statisticians to produce long-range weather forecasts. After a time, Arrow and his team determined that their forecasts were not much better than pulling predictions out of a hat. They wrote their superiors, asking to be relieved of the duty. They received the following reply, and I quote “The Commanding General is well aware that the forecasts are no good. However, he needs them for planning purposes.”

Math jokes:

The logging problem

1960s:

A logger cuts and sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is four-fifths of that amount. What is his profit?

1970s:
A logger cuts and sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is four-fifths of that amount, i.e. $80. What is his profit?

1970s (new math):
A logger exchanges a set L of lumber for a set M of money. The cardinality of set M is 100. The set C of production costs contains 20 fewer points. What is the cardinality of Set P of profits?

1980s:
A logger cuts and sells a truckload of lumber for $100. Her cost is $80 and her profit is $20. Find and circle the number 20.

1990s:
An unenlightened logger cuts down a beautiful stand of 100 trees in order to make a $20 profit. Write an essay explaining how you feel about this as a way to make money. Topic for discussion: How did the forest birds and squirrels feel?

“Good reasons for not doing your math homework”

I accidentally divided by zero and my paper burst into flames.
I have the proof, but there isn’t room to write it in this margin.
I could only get arbitrarily close to my textbook. I couldn’t actually reach it.
I couldn’t figure out whether i am the square of negative one or i is the square root of negative one.
I’ve included a reference to the solutions manual, reducing this assignment to one previously solved.
I had too much π and got sick.

And Anagrams

committees – cost me time

New Evidence That College is a Risky Investment

By Richard Vedder*

Many published studies argue that higher education as a private investment yields a high rate of return—10 percent is a commonly cited figure. It is argued that you can do much better investing in higher education than in, say, real estate, stocks, or bonds. I have always been very skeptical of these studies, and two new papers support my view.

I have been saying for years that there is a huge risk that new college entrants will drop out, and that published academic studies usually implicitly look at those who graduate, ignoring a roughly equal number who fail to graduate from college in a timely manner. That is the huge flaw in the Does College Pay? studies annually produced by Sandy Baum for the College Board.

Now two studies, both presented at the American Economic Association meetings in Denver last week, make the same point. In “College Risk and Return,” Gonzalo Castex suggests a large part of the extraordinary (above normal) returns of college are explainable by the compensation needed for risk-averse persons to take the risks of going to college—the risk they might not make it through. Roughly the same thing is argued, albeit a bit differently, by Kartik Athreya and Janice Eberly in “The Education Risk Premium.”

When the return on something is high, investors flock to it, eventually reducing the return to a more “normal” return. Thus when Apple seemed to be making millions of new profits from the hugely popular iPad, dozens of imitators appeared with tablet devices—within months. But seemingly that phenomenon has not happened in higher education—enrollments have risen, but rather sluggishly, and not enough, it would seem, to increase the supply of college graduates enough to depress their average wage and thus the return on college investments.

The reason is that in some risk-adjusted sense, the return to higher education is NOT that unusually high, since the risks associated with “buying” an education are actually greater than buying, say, stock in Procter & Gamble: The probability of essentially losing the investment (by failure to graduate) is greater in higher education than in blue-chip stocks or certainly bonds.

Other evidence suggests that we may be entering an age where the risk-adjusted return on higher education, actually near that of other investments in the past, may be falling below the gains from these alternative opportunities. Tuition fees continue to rise sharply relative to the incomes of college graduates. More college graduates are taking low-paying jobs, say as waiters or cashiers in stores.

As former Spellings Commission chair Charles Miller reminded me the other day, if we reduce the price of higher education through productivity-enhancing changes in higher education, the rate of return will rise. Lower-than-normal returns in higher education can be remedied two ways: by reducing costs (and thus the size of the investment) or by increasing the wage premium associated with college by restricting the supply of growth of new college graduates. Or both.

*This post originally appeared on the "Innovations" blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education on January 10, 2011.

The College Athletic Cost Explosion Spreads to Divisions II & III

By Richard Vedder*

As we, at last, come to the end of the 35 college football bowl games, I would note that part of the expense of producing these ball throwing contests was incurred by the students and their parents currently attending college through tuition or activity fees. I always knew intercollegiate athletics was a huge financial activity at the top football/basketball schools like Texas, Ohio State, USC, and even Duke (see this recent report on the topic), but not at the generally smaller, lower athletic budget schools such as the non-flagship state universities and even private liberal arts colleges. New NCAA data suggests this is flatly wrong.

A new NCAA report on revenues and expenses of Division II schools (of which there are 309) reveals the following:

• Division II athletics spending for schools with football rose 10.6 percent a year from 2004 to 2009, not much less than the 11.49 percent annual increase for top Football Bowl Subdivision teams;

• Even Division III (of which there are 444) schools with football saw spending rise nearly 45 percent even after adjusting for inflation;

• Division III teams without football saw total athletic spending more than double in five years;

• Athletics spending in Division II now constitutes nearly 6 percent of the total institutional budget at a typical school;

• The share of athletic expenses coming from generated revenues fell from 17 to 12 percent at Division II schools with football from 2004 to 2009.

The NCAA would have one believe that Division II athletic spending is rising no more than total institutional expenditures, which seems dubious to me as I read the data, although admittedly there was a spending spree in all of higher education in most of the period under discussion. An argument for athletic spending at Division 3 (and to some extent, Division 2) schools is that it is an important student recruiting device: at some liberal arts schools, 30-40 percent of students are on some intercollegiate team, and the figure is 10 percent or so at some Division 2 schools (as opposed to well under 5 percent at most FBS powerhouses). But the data suggest the cost of all of this has been very high, contributing to the tuition fee explosion at many schools.

The numbers in the information given out about the NCAA report are a bit sketchy, and no doubt there are accounting issues in assessing revenues and expenditures. For example, the data provided seem to be median figures instead of means (averages). I suspect because of skewness in spending, the means are greater than the medians. It would appear, however, that total athletic spending at the Division 2 schools well exceeds one billion dollars a year, and probably two billion dollars annually for Division II and III combined. I am wondering if our obsession with promoting sports is having a dual undesirable effect of downplaying the academic purpose of schools while all the while adding importantly to the cost explosion. There are schools that have recently announced they are adding football, which strikes me as an incredibly dubious move in these times of budget stringency. Perhaps it is time for the federal government to remove tax exempt status for donations to the non-academic activities of colleges and universities.

*This post originally appeared on CCAP's "Higher Education and the Economy" blog at Forbes.com on January 11, 2010.

Links for 1/13/11

Michael Poliakoff

the verdict of sociologists Richard Arum from New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia in a recent interview with the New York Times. The details are grim. After tracking a cohort of 2,300 students who started college in fall 2005 and graduated in spring 2009, they report that 36% have moved back home with their parents, almost one-tenth carry over $60,000 in debt. It gets worse: two-thirds earn less than $35,000 and 45% earn less than $15,000…

"large numbers [of students] don't seem to be learning very much."…

Michele McNeil

What $1 Million in Education Stimulus Money Buys

4.2 jobs.

Mark Kantrowitz

529 college savings plans owned by a dependent student or the student’s parent are reported as a parent asset on the Fafsa. In a worst case scenario this will reduce eligibility for need-based financial aid by up to 5.64 percent of the college savings plans.

That still leaves you with 94.36 percent of your money, a significant financial advantage over someone who did not save.

Every dollar you save is a dollar less you will need to borrow (er, 94 cents). Every dollar you borrow will cost you about two dollars by the time you pay back the loan. It is literally cheaper to save than to borrow…

Lee Burdette Williams

Our students are different people late at night. In our classrooms and offices during the day or the library or practice rooms in the evening, they are smart, charming, ambitious, clear-headed and reasonably nice to one another. But like a collegiate version of Teen Wolf, as the clock ticks closer to midnight, they become unrecognizable to us…

If we were to design a similar staffing structure in the retail world, we would be out of business in short order. Imagine a convenience store that closed at noon, a shopping mall that shuttered its doors on the weekends, a train schedule that ignored common commuter times. Imagine a restaurant that served exquisite dinners… at 2 p.m. Or a pub that opened at 8 a.m. and closed at 4 p.m. None would survive, and on the way to their demise, people would say, “Geez. What were they thinking?” But on our campuses, many of us miss the big stuff that happens daily (and nightly) for our students…

Links for 1/12/11

Dan Ariely

If empirical observation is incompatible with a model, the model must be trashed or amended, even if it is conceptually beautiful, logically appealing, or mathematically convenient...

Michael Huemer

Should I Go to Graduate School in Philosophy?

However smart you may be, when you apply for that coveted position at the University of Colorado, your application will go into a pile of 300 others, of which at least 20 will look about equally good. All 20 of those people will have been the best philosophy students at their colleges. Think about the smartest person you have ever known. Now imagine that there are 20 copies of that person competing with you for a job. That is roughly what it will be like...

Once you’ve received your Ph.D. from somewhere other than a top-twenty school, it is extremely difficult to advance in the field... Hiring committees are lazy and very prestige-oriented...

Since 1940, about 400,000 philosophy books and articles have appeared. What proportion of those do you suppose the average person in the field has read?...

Roxanna Elden

failure IS an option. Ironically enough, it tends to be an especially popular option at schools with giant "Failure is not an option!" posters in front of the main office...

the term paradigm shift has undergone a shift of its own. It has become a code word in any presentation that means, "You can stop listening now."...

Paul E. Peterson

the evidence is showing that schools of choice are compiling a consistently better record than that of traditional public schools.

The Institute of Education Sciences study headed up by Patrick Wolf found students more likely to graduate from voucher schools in Washington, D. C. Kevin Booker, Tim R. Sass, Brian Gill and Ron Zimmer found the same for charter schools in Chicago and Florida. Now a new report from John Warren shows similar results for voucher schools in Milwaukee…

Just why schools of choice produce higher graduation rates—even when, as in Milwaukee and D. C., test score results are not noticeably different—remains a puzzle…

Anne Neal Discussing "What Will They Learn" for the Wall Street Journal

In today's Opinion Journal, Anne Neal, President of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), goes beyond the bowls to discuss how well BCS participants fare when evaluated on their curriculum requirements for students. You will probably be surprised with what ACTA has uncovered. Check it out.

Coverage of the For-Profit Higher Education Industry

by: Matthew Denhart

Back early last month I had the pleasure of participating on the media panel of the higher education symposium put on by the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU). The discussion revolved around the extremely negative publicity the industry has been receiving over the past year. I was joined on the panel by a reporter for NPR and another from the National Journal. Both explained that media stories of the industry have been mostly negative because they are covering the Senate committee hearings and U.S. Department of Education proposed industry regulations (which I have argued are counter-productive) that themselves have cast for-profit colleges in a negative light. Even if a news story provides both sides, readers are still presented a negative viewpoint on a for-profit industry that otherwise rarely makes the press.

This seems logical, but there is more to the story. Last week, The Village Voice announced that it was retracting its article "For-Profit Blues" because the article's author, Rob Sgobbo, had fabricated significant parts of the story. Specifically, Sgobbo invented a fake student named Tamicka Bourges and claimed that she had accumulated large debts at Berkeley College. Additionally, Sgobbo claimed he spoke with a representative at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) named Matt Fraser about the GAO's recent report that questioned the recruiting practices of many for-profit institutions. The only problem is that the GAO has no employees by that name.

This follows the announcement in December that the GAO's own report required several revisions. As Frederick Hess and Andrew Kelly pointed out, all the errors were such that they originally made the for-profit industry appear in a more negative light than was justified. I'll take a pass on speculating whether or not this was a mere accident on the part of the GAO, but either way it is another example of the industry receiving undeserved bad publicity.

Amidst all this bad publicity for higher education, one wonders why the traditional higher ed sector has escaped. Congress and the Department of Ed have focused rather keenly upon for-profit schools but ignored the reality that many non-profit institutions have very poor outcomes (for example, the University of the District of Columbia -- a mere 6 miles from the U.S. Capitol -- has a 4 year graduation rate of 3 percent). Rather than singularly attacking the for-profit industry, and sometimes using totally inaccurate claims, the media could provide a valuable service to the American people by telling these stories as well.

Links for 1/11/11

Kelli Space

I had bought into every piece of college propaganda on the supposed personal and financial benefits of campus life and getting my degree. Unfortunately, I had also overlooked the minor detail of how I would pay for this coveted experience. “Private loans,” advisers suggested. “Everyone does it. It’s good debt!”…

Elyse Ashburn

legacy applicants got a 23.3-percentage-point increase in their probability of admission…

Josh Fischman

“We have a boutique problem,” said Mark David Milliron, deputy director of higher education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who joined Ms. Thor on the panel, which was about using technology to improve graduation rates. There are plenty of good ideas, the two said, but colleges are reluctant to adopt solutions that did not arise from their own campuses.
There is an institutional mind-set, Mr. Milliron said, that if something was not invented on a particular campus, it is not appropriate for that particular campus…

“Higher education has been good at creating islands of innovation,”…

DAVID SEGAL

He spent it on a law degree. And from every angle, this now looks like a catastrophic investment.

Well, every angle except one: the view from law schools. To judge from data that law schools collect, and which is published in the closely parsed U.S. News and World Report annual rankings, the prospects of young doctors of jurisprudence are downright rosy.

In reality, and based on every other source of information, Mr. Wallerstein and a generation of J.D.’s face the grimmest job market in decades…

How do law schools depict a feast amid so much famine?

“Enron-type accounting standards have become the norm,” says William Henderson… “Every time I look at this data, I feel dirty.”…

Apparently, there is no shortage of 22-year-olds who think that law school is the perfect place to wait out a lousy economy and the gasoline that fuels this system — federally backed student loans — is still widely available…

law school is a pie-eating contest where the first prize is more pie…

Law School: Lottery or Tournament?

by Andrew Gillen

David Segal's piece on law school in the NY Times is deservedly getting lots of attention. The moral of his story is that the overproduction of lawyers is reducing salaries to such an extent that recent graduates have a very hard time paying back their student loans. The only ones that don’t struggle are those that win the lottery for the few high paying jobs available.

Kevin Carey thinks this is off; that it is not a lottery but a tournament:

there was nothing random about it… Everyone applying to law school takes the same standardized test. Classes are graded on a curve and class rank is relative to other students who took the same classes. It’s not perfect–nothing is–but law school is about as close to a fully-transparent pure meritocracy as you’ll find in American education.

It’s a valid point, but it misses something pretty fundamental about tournaments – the prizes are known in advance.

That is clearly not the case with law school. Many law schools report average salaries of $160k, leading many students to think they have a good shot at getting a job paying $160k after graduating. But they don't. Nor is $160k an accurate figure even for the best schools. As Felix Salmon explains,

Even at Harvard and Yale I’m suspicious of that $160,000 figure; for the non-top-tier colleges, it’s clearly fictional. No matter how many of your graduates go on to $160,000-a-year jobs, there’s always going to be a significant number who earn a lot less than that and there are going to be almost none who earn more. As a result, the mode might be $160,000, but the median will never be that high.

How do they report such high numbers? As Segal reports,

“Enron-type accounting standards have become the norm,” says William Henderson… “Every time I look at this data, I feel dirty.”…

Top students may get exactly what they expected. But many students just below them could reasonably expect, based on what law schools tell them, that "second place winners" get a prize too, only to discover at the end that there is no prize for second place.

Overall, I view the process of law school itself as a tournament, but going to law school as a lottery. I buy Carey’s argument that entrance and progression through law school can be thought of as a tournament. But Segal’s piece dealt with the end result, not the process leading up to it. And from the student’s perspective, there is a large random element in the end result relative to the reasonably expected result. This difference is primarily determined by the extent to which law school’s lie to their students. A tournament with uncertain winnings for most of the winners is basically a lottery.

Help With the Matching Problem

by Daniel L. Bennett
Note: This is a satirical piece

Economists often discuss the matching problem in the labor market. In other words, the labor supply may equal the labor demand, but there are sometimes problems in matching prospective employees with certain skills with employers seeking employees with certain skills. Part of the problem is that there are information and search costs involved. Being one who likes to solve problems, I've identified a possible employee-employer match.

According to Inside Higher Ed, Rob Sgobbo is an award-winning graduate of Columbia University's journalism school. His award was for education reporting. He recently wrote a freelance piece for The Village Voice that was highly critical of for-profit colleges and universities. The article was later rescinded when the publication realized that at least part of his story was a fabrication. In addition to the fabrications, Sgobbo also apparently has trouble regurgitating statistics, as he stated in his article that for-profit enrollments grew from 365,000 in 2005 to 1.8 million in 2009. A quick glance at Figure 1 of CCAP's report on for-profit education reveals that enrollments in the sector have been well above 365,000 since the mid 90s.

Looks like Scobbo is a great match for the GAO's investigative arm.

Links for 1/10/11

Collin Hitt

Today, teacher evaluations are not used to inform personnel decisions. Therefore, on balance, they are not conducted with earnest. Therefore, they lack accurate information. Therefore, as poor meters of quality, they have no business being used to inform school-level policy. Therefore, they cannot be used to inform personnel decisions…

Richard B. Freeman, Stephen Machin, and Martina Viarengo

the highest-scoring countries are those with the least inequality in test scores, suggesting a “virtuous” equity-efficiency trade-off...

EduBubble

it’s all about getting warm bodies to apply and get rejected, just so the suckers who do get in feel good about spending so much...

Joanne Jacobs

What happens when a disorganized, dysfunctional school gets a bunch of computers? Nothing…

Too Many Ph.D.’s and Professionals?

by Richard Vedder*

In two blogs in this space (here and here) that stirred up some interest (80 comments), I presented evidence that a large portion of those receiving bachelor’s degrees at American colleges and universities these days are getting jobs requiring less-than-college-level educational skills. I went on to argue that this is further evidence that the strategy of trying to dramatically increase the number of those with degrees may be counterproductive, and that we in fact in one sense are “overinvested” in higher education—that more people are getting degrees than the number of jobs available that traditionally have gone to college graduates (for a complete study on this topic, click here).

Mentioning this, however, leads to two fears. One is that some people, for whom college is almost certainly likely to be a good investment of time and money, might decide to forgo an education, to their detriment and that of society. There are still a good number of students who benefit from a college education.

However, I have a second, seemingly contradictory fear: that as college grads learn of the job/degree imbalance, they will try to get around the problem in some cases by inappropriately going to school even more, by getting a master’s or even doctoral degree, or perhaps become a member of the professions—becoming, say, a lawyer. The Bureau of Labor Statistics data suggest that the problem of underemployment or over-education (taking jobs requiring vastly less education than that acquired) extends very much to still higher levels of learning, to advanced degrees.

Consider the following. Looking at BLS data for 2008, over 10,500 persons with Ph.D. or professional degrees were employed as “cashiers” (excluding gaming); over 27,400 were retail salespersons; and well over 4,700 were hairdressers, hairstylists, or cosmetologists. My sidekick Chris Matgouranis found 10 occupations like these: the ones listed above plus waiters and waitresses, landscaping workers, amusement and recreation attendants, receptionists and information clerks, secretaries (except legal, medical, and executive), truck drivers (heavy and tractor-trailer) and electricians. Collectively, these occupations had well over 74,000 with doctorates or such professional degrees as a J.D. Other evidence confirms this. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that 29 percent of new lawyers were not doing legal work, consistent with the notion that there is a glut of those with doctorates and some professional degrees. The Economist recently published an article presenting evidence of very dim job prospects for many new Ph.D.’s.

To be sure, some of this is related to the recent prolonged economic downturn. Yet stories of, say, historians, with doctorates doing all sorts of non-history type work, have been around for years. Training Ph.D.’s and professionals is extremely expensive—often six-digit amounts for the post-bachelor’s training, only part of which is billed to the student. Why are we doing this? Why, for example, doesn’t the U.S. go to perhaps 30 or 40 Ph.D. programs in history (instead of 100 or more), to train perhaps one-third the number of students that we train now? That would be enough to keep us from losing touch with our heritage, and would allow us to continually record and analyze our ever-growing past, and continue to disseminate that knowledge to a broader public.

The argument sometimes used to keep graduate programs is they are is that relatively low-paid graduate students are doing a lot of the undergraduate teaching. But does that not really mean that such students are doing work traditionally done by faculty, who don’t want to have to stoop to teaching lowly undergraduates? And the fact that graduate students in some disciplines, including the humanities, often take eight or more years to get their degrees suggests that the true cost of these degrees (including the value of work foregone while in school) is even higher than the mere tuition fees, etc., would indicate.

Many programs are kept, of course, because the faculty members teaching them want to keep their jobs, or simply prefer teaching advanced graduate students. In other cases, the institution equates prestige and status with offering a large number of graduate/professional programs, and thus resists abandoning them. One of the healthy byproducts of the financial squeeze facing some schools as a consequence of weak business conditions is that out of sheer desperation they are being forced to abandon some of these programs that make little sense on any sort of rational cost-benefit analysis.

In a pure unfettered market economy, there are no such things as “shortages” or “gluts” of any type of worker—wages adjust to meet market conditions. If we are turning out too many historians, their pay will reach such low levels that few new candidates will pursue that field. But the combination of subsidies (mostly publicly but some privately financed) and nonprofit institutional status leads us to continue to produce highly trained individuals who do things that society does not find very valuable. When the political process, rather than market process, controls resource allocation and compensation, we tend to get undesirable results.

*This post originally appeared on the "Innovations" blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education on January 5, 2011.

Attacking Higher Ed Cost Inflation: Reform Academic Employment Policies

By Daniel L. Bennett*

With the November midterm elections delivering what President Obama called a “shellacking” to the Democratic party, many have suggested that there could be political gridlock in Washington for the next few years. With the 112^th Congress taking seat this week, there is still a lot of speculation about whether the President and a newly divided Congress will be able to meet in the middle to pass any meaningful legislation. One policy concern that both sides of the aisle could and should address, however, is reigning in the rapidly increasing cost of college. Past political efforts to slow tuition inflation have been largely ineffective as the generosity of lawmakers to dole out cash in the form of student financial aid and institutional subsidies have been swallowed up and spit back out in the form of tuition hikes by college administrators whose spending habits (i.e., spend all of their revenues and then some) resemble those of Washington.

To slow the growth of tuition, we need reforms that attack the inefficient cost structure and low productivity in higher education. We have recently suggested a number of such reforms in our book-length policy research tool, 25 Ways to Reduce the Cost of College, which features 25 chapters, organized into five topical sections, each describing a different way that college administrators and policy leaders can make college less expensive. One such policy suggests that colleges reform their academic employment policies by replacing tenure with one of a number of alternatives that would preserve the holy grail of higher education, academic freedom, which is necessary to prevent faculty from being arbitrarily dismissed for saying or writing things that administrators or influential outsiders consider wrong or offensive.

As the 1940 AAUP Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure describes, tenure is merely a “means to certain ends,” suggesting that it is not the only mechanism to protect academic freedom. In fact, it is an economically inefficient means of doing it. One theory behind tenure is that “only those professors who have proven their worth through excellence in teaching, research, and service during the probationary period will be awarded tenure.”^[1]

Under most private sector employment policies, however, when an employee has demonstrated that his/her work no longer meets a minimum standard of quality (and often after efforts to rehabilitate have failed), the employer initiates action to terminate that unproductive employee. Under a tenure policy, however, the employer effectively loses this flexibility to eliminate tenured faculty whose quality of work fails to meet a minimally acceptable level or whose productivity has dwindled over the years. This is often referred to as the deadwood dilemma. And while deadwood faculty are by no means the norm in higher education (the majority of faculty surely pulls its own weight), the mere inability to remove unproductive faculty is economically inefficient for colleges and unjust to the students paying tuition and forced to sit through classes with professors who view them as a nuisance.

The dynamic nature of the global economy requires that organizations have the flexibility to adapt to changes in the world. The presence of tenure in higher education significantly reduces a college’s ability to efficiently reallocate resources in response to consumer demand–a hindrance that would be life-threatening to an organization in a healthy market economy. A tenure policy increases the cost of college, as institutions are forced to hire additional faculty to teach courses in popular disciplines with high demand, rather than being able to reallocate faculty resources from subjects that are in low demand by students and the labor market.

In addition to being a costly employment policy, tenure also results in a reward structure that is largely misaligned with the interest of the public, as tenure rewards research and public stature, while it punishes teaching. This opinion appears to be quite common among scholars, as it has been suggested that “academic culture is not merely indifferent to teaching, it is actively hostile to it,” and that “receiving an award for good teaching is considered the kiss of death for an untenured professor [implying that] anyone who spends so much time preparing for class must somehow be deficient in research.”^[2] The current tenure system provides an incentive for professors to neglect their teaching and service duties in pursuit of publishing research, a questionable reward structure that appears to be misaligned with one of the primary missions of higher education – to educate citizens and the future workforce.

There are several alternatives to tenure, some of which colleges have widely adopted. For instance, many colleges have steadily increased their use of contingent, or non-tenure track, faculty. In public institutions, for example, the percentage of full-time contingent faculty increased from 19 to 32 percent between 1989 and 2007.^[3] Additionally, most institutions have adopted a post-tenure performance review policy; however, many have criticized such policies as largely inconsequential. For example, the President of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Anne Neal, described the current post-tenure review process as a “ritualistic exercise in rubberstamping,” suggesting that while widely implemented, "it carries little value as an effective practice of increasing accountability among faculty.”^[4]

There are several other prospective employment policies that would increase the economic efficiency of colleges, but have yet to be widely implemented. One alternative would be to replace tenure with long-term, renewable faculty contracts. Such contracts could be structured for an initial probationary period of three to five years, with the criteria for performance evaluation (a detailed outline of teaching, scholarly, and service expectations)^[5] specified in the contract, including a clause pertaining to academic freedom to avoid diminishing it. If after the probationary period, a faculty member passed his/her performance review and there was still a need for the position at the college, then the contract would be renewed, with a subsequent performance review similar to the initial one. This contract renewal process would continue, with perhaps an increase in the length of additional contracts, not to exceed ten years, as a reward for continued successful performance. Several institutions, such as the Franklin W. Olin College, Lindenwood University, and Quest University in Canada, have adopted such a policy and have experienced some early successes.

Another alternative, an idea similar to that proposed by my colleague Richard Vedder in his book Going Broke by Degree, would be to offer tenure (or enhanced job security) as one of a number of compensation options for which individual faculty choose from a menu of compensation items, including salary, health and life insurance plans, retirement contributions, and time off, etc. Each faculty member would be allowed a given level of total benefits and would make trade-offs among the various options in accordance with their individual risk tolerance and familial needs. For example, a mid-career professor who is risk averse and has small children at home might elect job security in exchange for a reduction in his or her annual salary or other benefit levels; whereas a single and highly sought-after researcher might elect a higher salary and retirement contributions over job security. This would be a much more efficient means of allocating university resources, and would better meet the needs of individual employees.

The alternatives mentioned, if implemented judiciously, offer some generalized approaches to reducing the cost inefficiencies imposed by tenure without requiring a low-ball pay structure or imperiling academic freedom; however, there is no one-size-fits all solution. The optimal strategy for one institution type may vary from what is most effective at another. For instance, research-intensive universities might benefit most from a hybrid of renewable long-term contracts and fringe benefit trade-offs, whereas it may be most efficient for teaching colleges to utilize a combination of contingent faculty and renewable contracts. Tenure as an employment policy, however, is no longer economically sustainable if we want to solve the price inflation problem in higher education. You can read a more detailed analysis of this, as well as 24 other ideas to reign in college cost inflation, in CCAP’s publication, 25 Ways to Reduce the Cost of College. Free PDF downloads of each individual chapter, the entire 234 page report, or a 43 page summary of the report, are available on the CCAP website.

[1]Robert McGee and Walter Block, “Academic Tenure: An Economic Critique,” Academic Freedom and Tenure: Ethical Issues, (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 1997).

[2] Ibid

[3] http://www.centerforcollegeaffordability.org/uploads/25_Ways_Ch03.pdf

[4] Anne Neal, “Reviewing Post-Tenure Review,” Academe Online, September-October 2008.

[5] Victor Davis Hanson, “Reconsidering Tenure: Its Time Has Come,” Tribune Media Services, 16 May 2005.

*This post originally appeared on the Forbes blog site on January 3, 2010.

Links for 1/7/11

Funny comment and reply.

Anonymous

Because…

If you thought underemployment among US college graduates was bad, get a load of this:

over 4,000 people — some with university degrees — applied for 33 rat catcher positions.

Measuring College Affordability

by Andrew Gillen

Robert Martin and I have a new working paper available at SSRN. From the abstract:

The effect of rising net attendance prices on college students and their families is a contested issue. Traditionally, this financial burden is measured by the share of income taken by the net price of attendance. Recently, some claim the residual real income left after paying for college should be the measure of this financial burden: if residual real income increases, the household must be better off. Using a household utility function we demonstrate that the residual income argument is flawed since the substitution effect leads to an increase in non-college expenditures regardless of the change in utility. On the other hand, we find that changes in utility are a function of the share of income accounted for by the net attendance price and the ratio of the growth rate in net price to the growth rate in income.

In general, household utility declines as net price increases for low income households and for households with slow growing incomes. Hence, rising real net attendance price is a "regressive tax" that is particularly burdensome for low income households. Further, when net price increases, households substitute away from college attendance, causing increases in expenditures for composite commodities, regardless of whether or not household utility is increasing or decreasing. Therefore, changes in expenditures for other goods tell us nothing about the burden imposed by rising net attendance prices. Finally, the model suggests a variety of empirical results for measuring changes in affordability. We also pursue these results in the paper.