Graph of the Day: Female Faculty Pay Still Lags Behind Male Peers

A new story in the Chronicle of Higher Education analyzes some data put forth by the American Association of University Professors shows that female faculty are still making less than their male peers on average.

Student Parents Need Child Care to Increase Retention

Today I have a piece in The American Prospect on student parents. Check it out:

Each morning, Sherita Rooney wakes up around 6 a.m. She gets her 14-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son ready for the day. She makes breakfast and gets her children to school before driving an hour to West Chester University outside of Philadelphia, where she recently transferred after graduating from Montgomery County Community College.

Every day is difficult, but Tuesdays are especially so. She works from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. before class from 2 to 7. She picks up her kids, then brings them home and puts them to bed. As a math education major, she takes challenging classes that keep her up late studying. She goes to sleep around 2 a.m. each night. The next day, she gets up and does it over again.

Without the child care scholarship she found through the Philadelphia-based nonprofit, Family Care Solutions, Inc., Rooney says, she's not sure what she would do. She'll find out this summer, when she's signed up for classes but won't have the scholarship.

Student parents like Rooney make up about a quarter of all postsecondary students in the United States, according to a new report released by the Institute for Women's Policy Research. The report estimates that of the total of 3.9 million student parents in the country, more than half are low-income. About 12 percent of all undergraduate students in the United States are single parents, and of those more than three quarters are low-income. The vast majority of them are women.

Read the whole thing.

What Will It Take To Make a Consistent Sexual Assault Policy on Campuses Nationwide?

T-shirts San Francisco Women Against Rape created for a 2009 Walk Against Rape. (Flickr/Steve Rhodes)

Today the Chronicle of Higher Education has a really excellent piece on the current debate over sexual assault policies on campus. (Unfortunately, the story is behind a paywall, but I'll discuss some of the relevant bits below and for further context, you should read this really great series from the Center for Public Integrity on the problems with many campus sexual assault policies.)

It seems that whether a victim will receive justice for her assault (the vast majority of victims are women, though they aren't the only ones) depends greatly on where she attends school. Part of this stems from confusion over the law itself:

Federal civil-rights law requires [colleges and universities] to resolve all reported of­fenses. And increasingly, public pressure bears down just as powerfully. [...] The watchdog group Security on Campus proposed broader federal legislation, even a requirement that colleges use the relatively low standard of evidence "more likely than not." And at Dickinson College this month, students occupied an administration building and demanded that expulsion be the only available penalty for rape.

Meanwhile, confusion over existing law persists. The U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights recently found that two institutions, Eastern Michigan University and Notre Dame College, in Ohio, did not adequately consider the rights of sexual-assault victims. Observers expect the office to release more guidance this spring on how cases should proceed, apart from general campus-conduct systems.

What this ultimately reveals is that sexual assault policies vary widely by campus, depending on university policy, interpretation of the law, and campus culture. These factors all leave a great deal of sexual assault policy up to the discretion of individuals. Though it's sometimes helpful to have room for special circumstances—especially since rape cases sometimes are thin on provable evidence—but ultimately what campuses need is a consistent best practices approach to dealing with sexual assault.

And figuring out what such a policy might be is difficult. The Chronicle article points out:

For cases that are reported, single sanctions may decrease findings of responsibility. "If the hearing panel has any doubt at all, they're going to acquit," says Gary M. Pavela, a consultant to colleges on legal issues and a former director of student judicial programs at the University of Maryland at College Park. Technical explanations of standards of evi­dence don't matter, he says: "Your eyes glaze over and you do ulti­mately what you think is right."

Finding a balance between investigating cases fairly and providing strong support for potential victims is tricky, but, as Dickson college found, being precise and providing a range of offenses as well as clear definitions is helpful. The school was awarded a $300,000 federal grant administered by the Department of Justice designed to encourage individual institutions to implement a comprehensive and fair sexual assault policy on campuses for its implementation of mandatory prevention education programs.

The grant program is a good incentive, but it also means that schools that already care about this problem are the ones most likely to be the leaders on creating good sexual assault policies. Until best practices can be agreed upon, many victims will simply exist in a legal limbo until schools can figure out what to do with them.

The Center for Public Integrity report revealed that sexual assault victims they followed were sometimes more likely to drop out of school than their assailants were to be suspended while they waited to pursue university appeals processes. For the sake of these young people, here's hoping schools will adopt a precise, fair, and universal sexual assault policy.

What Daymar College Tells Us About the Gainful Employment Rule

I have a piece up on Campus Progress on a school called Daymar College, which shows some of what's wrong with the for-profit education industry. Check it out:

Welcome to Daymar College, located in Owensboro, Ky. Students at Daymar pay $36,979 per year to attend the institution, and 97 percent of its students receive some type of financial aid. Pell grants, which go to low-income U.S. students, are distributed to 73 percent of those attending Daymar.

The most popular program at Daymar is its 12-18 month program to train pharmacy technicians/assistants, a job that, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, pays a median salary of $13.32 an hour. At that rate, assuming a graduate of the program can get full-time employment as a pharmacy technician and work 40 hours a week, he or she will make $27,705 a year.

But that’s just for students who actually graduate. Daymar College’s overall graduation rate is just 38 percent, according to its own self-reported data provided to the Department of Education. That means that means that just four in ten students have completed a one-year program in 18 months.

Read more ...

Libertarian Bob Barr Pushes to Keep Higher Education Subsidies

Last week Politico published an op-ed from 2008 Libertarian Party presidential candidate and former congressman Bob Barr on the proposed gainful employment regulations proposed by the Department of Education. But Barr’s support of subsidies to for-profit schools is less surprising in light of reporting by Salon’s Justin Elliott, which noted that Barr is a law professor at John Marshall Law School in Atlanta, a for-profit educational institution. The connection is something Barr has neglected to disclose in his writings in support of the industry.

In lockstep with other opponents of the proposed regulations in recent days, Barr criticized attacked Campus Progress’ advocacy work to support greater accountability of for-profit schools.

In the Politico op-ed, Barr also attacks a report released by the Government Accountability Office last year that found some for-profit schools were deceiving students in their recruitment process. Barr zeros in on the fact that GAO released “revisions” to the report. But while GAO made revisions to the report, a spokesperson also insists they don’t change the overall findings of the report.

GAO spokesman Chuck Young wrote in an e-mail that the office issues revisions when "additional information comes to light and provides additional context to our already published work." Of the roughly 1,000 reports issued in the last fiscal year, about 12 received later revisions, he said. He added that the office reviewed more than 80 hours of audio from the investigation before it released the revision on the for-profit college report.

"Nothing changed with the overall message of the report, and nothing changed with any of our findings," Young wrote.

But because the GAO made revisions, many for-profit lobbyists are seizing upon this as means of discrediting the entire report.

At its base, the “gainful employment” regulations issue is about curbing wasteful spending – the regulations promise to cut federal funding from programs that leave students with high default rates or too much debt compared with their earnings. While Campus Progress has been focused on eliminating spending for bad programs to ensure more aid to successful programs, curbing government subsidies more generally is something libertarians normally get behind. In fact, in 2005 the libertarian think tank Cato Institute released a study in which they argue, “Rather than expand the current system, Congress should consider a phase-out of federal assistance to higher education over a 12-year time frame.”

Barr seems to have abandoned his libertarian ideas in this case, where the interests of his employer are at stake.

Cross posted.

Veterans Groups Remain Uncommitted on Gainful Employment Rules

(Flickr/The U.S. Army)

Last Wednesday, at the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center, several veterans gathered to talk about what veterans need in higher education. Their concerns ranged from making credit transfers easier for veterans and active duty members who often attend multiple schools because of deployments, to making sure campuses have dedicated veteran counselors who can help them navigate paperwork for GI Bill benefits. The event was sponsored by the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU), formerly known as the Career Colleges Association, which represents the interests of many for-profit schools.

Only one veterans' advocacy group was represented on the panel. Tim Embree, legislative associate for the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), commented on the need for colleges to have dedicated offices for veteran students. Other panelists included: Michael Brink, a Republican staffer on the House Committee on Veterans Affairs; Kathy Snead, president of the Servicemembers Opportunity College; Craig Herndon, special assistant to the chancellor of Virginia's Community Colleges; William Hillard, CEO of Anthem College; James Hendrickson, vice president of the Wounded Warriors and Spouses Scholarship Fund for Colorado Technical University; Scott Palumbo DeVry University's National Director of Military Affairs; and Will Sampson, senior vice president and chief information officer of ECB Bankcorp, Inc.

According to data provided by APSCU at the event, "Private sector colleges and universities have a higher percentage of those working with military service than any other segment of postsecondary education." The group used data from the National Center for Education Statistics to conclude that 6.1 percent of students at private sector schools have at least some military experience compared with 3.9 percent at public schools and 4.2 at private non-profit schools. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 2008 that "While 6 percent of all college students choose for-profit institutions, 19 percent of students who use GI Bill benefits at the top 500 colleges that serve such students do."

Once the panel discussion had concluded, Harris Miller, the president of APSCU, got up to talk about gainful employment regulations, a set of technical requirements proposed in July by the Department of Education. The proposed regulations would place restrictions on which programs can receive federal funding based on student debt loads and a debt-to-expected-earnings ratio. The purpose is to reduce the number of students with overwhelming student debt and channel federal financial aid to programs that are effective in training people for jobs. Miller insisted that these regulations would cut off access to programs and would "hurt veterans." [Disclosure: The advocacy arm of Campus Progress has submitted comments and testified before the Department of Education in support of the proposed regulations.]

APSCU has been one of the leading groups opposing the proposed gainful employment regulations. The group helped sponsor a rally on Capitol Hill in September with about 1,000 students from for-profit schools around the country to oppose the regulations. IAVA, the veterans group represented on last week’s panel, says it hasn't taken a position on the gainful employment regulations; its spokesperson offered no further comment on Embree's presence on APSCU's panel. Overall, veterans groups have largely remained silent on the gainful employment regulation issue.

But veterans groups should be very concerned with the issue. As noted, many veterans attend for-profit institutions. And recent investigations, including by the Government Accountability Office, the New York Times, and Dallas TV station WFAA, demonstrate that some for-profit programs engage in deceptive practices and leave many students deeply in debt and without marketable skills.

Bloomberg News recently discovered that Kaplan University sent a collection agency after Keith Melvin, a decorated and disabled veteran, for $4,125 when his federal grants didn't come through. The Bloomberg report shows that Kaplan aggressively recruited Melvin—even telling him he could lose his spot in the class even though Kapaln doesn't limit online enrollment.

According to data from the National Survey of Student Engagement compiled by APSCU, Kaplan University enrolls more than 1,500 students who claim Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits. (University of Phoenix and DeVry University top the list, with 10, 872 and 4,428 students, respectively.)

Brian Hawthorne of the Student Veterans of America, a group that supports veterans in higher education, says his group doesn't have an official position on gainful employment regulations at this time, but, he wrote in an email to Campus Progress, SVA calls "on all schools, for-profits included, to closely examine their policies and programs to ensure that a student veteran has the greatest chance of success." "Online education can be a real asset to a service member or a veteran, as I know myself as I earned my Associates Degree online while in Iraq. Schools should be offering programs that fit the lives of their student veteran population, not pursuing them to increase their Federal Aid and then not supporting them through to graduation. This would not be acceptable at any type of school, not just for-profits."

In fact, as was a prevalent theme on last Wednesday's panel, nearly all higher education instructions offer some of its education in the form of distance-learning classes, whether public, private non-profit, or for-profit. Many for-profit schools also don't just have online classes. Kaplan, the school that was subject of the Bloomberg investigation, offers both online and in-person classes.

For now, prominent national veterans groups are staying away from the debate on gainful employment, which currently remains divided between the companies that own for-profit schools and student advocacy groups like U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), United States Students Association, and the advocacy arm of Campus Progress. Whether or not gainful employment regulations are put in place could affect a significant number of veterans. And if veterans' organizations speak out now, they could have a powerful impact on the debate.

Cross posted at Campus Progress.

The Pay Gap in Academia

Last week the National Center for Education Statistics at the Department of Education released its "Employees in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2009, and Salaries of Full-Time Instructional Staff, 2009-10" report [PDF], which offers statistics on employment in higher education.

There's a lot in the report that isn't too surprising from a gender perspective, but I will note two things. First, women are starting to make inroads among universities by achieving more full professorships than the last time they conducted the study (in the 2003-2004 school year).

More men than women were employed as professors at 4-year institutions between 2003-04 and 2009-10 ... However, during this period, the percentage change in the number of professors was higher for women. For example, the number of men at public institutions decreased by 4 percent while the number of women increased by 24 percent; at private not-for-profit institutions, the number of men increased by 1 percent and the number of women increased by 26 percent; and at private for-profit institutions, the number of men increased by 50 percent while the number of women increased by 73 percent.

The second thing is that there's still a pay gap between what men and women earn in pretty much every instructor level at pretty much every type of school. (One notable exception is that women out-earn men at the lecturer level at 2-year private non-profits, but that could be because there are so few schools that the sample size is skewed. Of course, if others have insight to offer on this point I'd love to hear it.)

The biggest pay gaps occur at the professor level at public, 4-year colleges and universities and private, non-profit 4-year colleges and universities, which are both most likely to be research universities. Based on my previous reporting on women in academia, this doesn't surprise me much at all. Though some of this pay gab can be attributed to both blatant and subtle sexism, there are some institutional reasons why the pay gap appears most prominently at research universities.

The data doesn't do a breakdown by discipline, and men are more likely to dominate the higher-paying professorships at research universities in math, science, and technology. The reasons research universities often give for the premium of paying a physicist more than, say, an English literature professor, is that these people are most likely to be lost to the lucrative private industry.

Many women on the professor track -- especially those in the the "hard sciences" -- find the demand of achieving tenure to be challenging. If a woman is planning to have children at all, the time in her life when she is supposed to be publishing lots of prestigious research and looking toward tenure is around the same time many women are looking to start families.

A few women I've spoken with have gotten around this by not having children or waiting until after they raise children to go into academia. But the pressure of child-raising, so long as it disproportionately falls on women, tends to directly conflict with the timely many aspiring professors must adhere to if they want tenure.

But I'll let the numbers speak for themselves. Below are breakdowns by overall salary differences for men and women as well as broken down by career type (complete with graphs).

Overall

• Public, 4-year institution: Men $83,379, women $67,878;
• Public, 2-year institution: Men $62,298, women $60,020;
• Private, non-profit, 4-year institution: Men $85,087, women $69,448;
• Private, non-profit, 2-year institution: Men $39,333, women $46,037;
• Private, for-profit, 4-year institution: Men $45,790, women $44,397;
• Private, for-profit, 2-year institution: Men $37,660, women $36,155

Professor

• Public, 4-year institution: Men $108,104, women $95,942;
• Public, 2-year institution: Men $73,169, women $69,487;
• Private, non-profit, 4-year institution: $113,639, women $99,454;
• Private, non-profit, 2-year institution: Men $55,028, women $51,510;
• Private, for-profit, 4-year institution: Men $58,642, women $54,772;
• Private, for-profit, 2-year institution: Men $40,849, women $46,537.

Associate professor

• Public, 4-year institution: Men $77,873, women $72,867;
• Public, 2-year institution: Men $60,973, women $59,341;
• Private, non-profit, 4-year institution: $76,635, women $71,875;
• Private, non-profit, 2-year institution: Men $45,040, women $48,871;
• Private, for-profit, 4-year institution: Men $52,658, women $55,139;
• Private, for-profit, 2-year institution: Men $39,454, women $39,680.

Assistant professor

• Public, 4-year institution: Men $77,873, women $72,867;
• Public, 2-year institution: Men $60,973, women $59,341;
• Private, non-profit, 4-year institution: $76,635, women $71,875;
• Private, non-profit, 2-year institution: Men $45,040, women $48,871;
• Private, for-profit, 4-year institution: Men $52,658, women $55,139;
• Private, for-profit, 2-year institution: Men $39,454, women $39,680.

Instructor

• Public, 4-year institution: Men $47,600, women $45,591;
• Public, 2-year institution: Men $64,855, women $63,069;
• Private, non-profit, 4-year institution: $47,472, women $46,878;
• Private, non-profit, 2-year institution: Men $36,535, women $45,645;
• Private, for-profit, 4-year institution: Men $43,029, women $40,726;
• Private, for-profit, 2-year institution: Men $37,608, women $35,682.

Why Tax Credits Don’t Do Much for Low-Income Students

Today President Barack Obama highlights the benefits of a tax credit program called the American Opportunity Tax Credit, which gives families a $2,500 tax credit for education-related expenses. The program, which replaced the old HOPE tax credit program, would allow individuals making up to $90,000 as individuals or $180,000 as joint tax filers to deduct tuition, fees, and related education expenses at the end of the tax year. The program is currently set to expire at the end of 2011, but Obama is pushing to extend the program.

While the program is a $700 tax credit boost over the HOPE program, it's important to remember that while tax credits are often politically popular, they actually do little to incentivize low-income individuals to attend institutions of higher education. The lowest-income individuals, who often qualify for Pell grants and other student aid, often don’t pay federal income taxes anyway. Furthermore, such tax credits are only applicable after federal and institutional aid is deducted from the bill. As Higher Ed Watch once wrote when it was analyzing the HOPE program:

Every dollar received in the form of a Pell Grant or institutional grant aid leads to a decrease in the maximum possible tax credit a student can claim. Why? Because the Internal Revenue Service deducts Pell Grants and "any tax-free educational assistance," such as institutional aid, from its assessment of "qualified expenses" for college when determining the size of an individual's tax credit.

In other words, a low-income student with $10,000 in tuition expenses would normally be eligible for a $2,000 Lifetime Learning credit. But if that same student receives a $4,050 Pell Grant, he or she would only have $5,950 in "qualified expenses." For that not untypical low-income student, the maximum Lifetime Learning credit he or she could claim would be $1,190 a loss of $810 in benefits. And that's assuming he or she isn't receiving institutional aid as well, which is pretty unlikely and thus means an even lower tax credit.

Tax credits on education expenses also do little to offer instant relief to student debt. By offering a tax credit, the government essentially asks students (or their parents) to front the money for tuition, fees, and other higher education spending and then take that money off the tax bill at the end of the year. While that's a great incentive for someone on the higher end of that $90,000 ($180,000 for joint filings) income bracket, it is less likely to help low-income students. Additionally, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that revenue will drop by $10 billion as a result of this credit and cost the government an additional $3 billion in other administrative costs.

That's not to say that AOTC won't provide a little extra cash to some middle-class families in what is still a very tough economic climate, but if the objective is to help low-income students achieve better access to affordable higher education, let's not pretend that this program will help achieve that goal.

Cross posted.

‘Washington Monthly’ Asks What We Really Want Out of Higher Education

Today the Washington Monthly released its annual college issue online. There's a lot of good stuff in there, including its alternative school ranking that it has compiled since 2005. The universities that top the Monthly's list aren't necessarily the Ivy League schools like Harvard or Princeton, schools that continue to attract more and more applicants while admitting the same number of students and thus see their acceptance rates spiral downward.

Instead, the schools in the Monthly's rankings are schools that provide a means of social mobility and actually contribute research that's useful to society at large. Unsurprisingly, the top three schools on the Monthly's ranking of schools nationally come from the University of California system: San Diego, Berkeley, and UCLA. In fact, state schools tend to perform pretty well on the Monthly's rankings overall, leaving those private schools typically ranked highly in the U.S. News & World Reportrankings to dwindle further down the list.

The important thing that the Monthly is putting forward with its college issue is that the writers and editors are encouraging us to think more critically about what America wants out of colleges more generally. The answer, all too often, seems often to be that more education in America is better — after all, President Barack Obama issued a challenge to Americans to commit to "at least one year of higher education or advanced training." But we can't just stop at encouraging students to get more education. We also need to look at the quality of that education.

The Monthly's articles ask some critical questions about what higher education is and what it should do. They examine how some schools, dubbed "dropout factories," turn high-performing low-income high school students into college dropouts saddled with debt. They ask why George Washington University suddenly got a whole lot more expensive even if their students graduate with career earnings potentials on par with those who graduated from cheaper schools like the University of Virginia or the University of Maryland. They also look at some good models for making higher education better, like the University of Minnesota's Rochester campus, which is integrating undergrads more directly into its research and creating better learning opportunities for its students.

The articles published by the Monthly ask the question of what we actually want our higher education system to do. The answer isn't just throwing more money at it, although affordability and access are both really important pieces of the puzzle. Advocates for affordable college education experienced a huge victory when Congress passed the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA), legislation that put subsidies toward Pell grants rather than toward less good federal loan subsidies, earlier this year. But a victory like SAFRA, as important as it is, isn't the end of the story. The real goal is to make college — including community colleges and other non-traditional higher ed opportunities — work better for students.

Cross posted.

More Emphasis on Study Abroad?

I was surprised when the House passed legislation to expand the number of students who study abroad. Study abroad programs, as Campus Progress has written before, are programs that vary widely in standards. All too often a study abroad program is an excuse to travel and hasn't proven any kind of added value to a four-year education. There seems to be an assumption that studying abroad has some kind of intrinsic value. But study abroad programs are often fairly expensive, usually on par with a semester of schooling -- sometimes even thousands of dollars more.

There is an argument that encounters with other cultures can be of value, but programs like study abroad often don't supplement that experience with the pricey classes that program tuition provides. Especially if the student doesn't have fluency with the local university's language, it would be almost impossible to have a valuable academic experience beyond language learning. It can be valuable to learn languages, but one could almost take the money spent on tuition to take a semester off to travel in that country and experience the culture.

I'm not entirely opposed to traveling to other countries or even studying abroad. I just think there needs to be more study about the kinds of education such programs should reasonably be expected to provide, and we need to develop some kind of standards for these programs. Otherwise this bill might just be a waste of money.

Shady Stuff Going Down in South Carolina

Ben Miller has uncovered some pretty shady stuff that's going on in the student loan industry in South Carolina. It all has to do with something called a guaranty agency, a state-run agency that serves as a government-subsidized backup for federal loans. Miller has the goods here:

The federal lender-of-last-resort program is administered by the designated guaranty agency in each state to provide government-backed loans to students whose applications have been denied by other lenders. Since the agency must give qualified borrowers a loan-of-last-resort, the federal government agrees to take on all the risk associated with the debt. This means that holders of these loans are reimbursed for 100 percent (page 8) of any losses sustained due to borrower default, as opposed to ordinary loans made through the Federal Family Education Loans program (FFEL) that are reimbursed at only a 97 percent rate.

As its name suggests, this program is supposed to be used only in rare cases. But the documents, which we obtained from the Department of Education through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, show that over at least the past six years, South Carolina's guaranty agency has provided loans to students through this program with unusual frequency. The rate at which the agency used this program to request reimbursement from the Department was at least 100 times greater than any of the other nine agencies whose documents we obtained -- a sampling that included the largest guarantors in the country. All told, South Carolina's lender-of-last-resort claims were three times greater than those for the other nine agencies combined. (See chart below or the spreadsheet at the bottom of this post for additional information on the guaranty agency claims.)

In an e-mail to Higher Ed Watch a spokesperson for the Department of Education said the Department "is aware of the situation and the Federal Student Aid office is conducting a program review." The spokesperson, however, declined to comment further until that process is completed.

Miller has a lot more details here.

About That Competition Thing ...

Kevin Carey, as usual, makes really excellent points on the Quick and the Ed about the education stuff I posted about here. His point is slightly different, although he does touch on the graduation rate stuff, and he focuses more on the competition component of Obama's speech. Our goal, Obama said, should be to have the greatest proportion of college graduates in the world. Carey grounds this statement effectively:

If we want to be #1 in the percent of adults age 25-64 with a bachelor's degree, that won't be too hard, because we currently trail only Norway, 31% to 30%.

If we want to be #1 in the percent of adults 25-34 with a bachelor's degree, it will be much harder. We're still at 30% on that measure--educational attainment in the U.S. has been steady for a long time--but Norway is at 40%, the Netherlands 34%, Korea 33%, Denmark 32%, and Sweden 31%, Israel 30%. This is the trend that has everyone so worried--the difference between the two age cohorts shows that we used to be much better than everyone else (we're far ahead in the 55-64 age bracket), but other countries have since caught up and moved ahead.

In terms of the percent of adults 25-64 with a bachelor's or associates degree, we're #3 at 39%, behind Canada (47%) and Japan (40%). In the 25-34 cohort, however, we're 12th (also 39%), and some countries like Canada, Japan, and Korea are so far ahead (55%, 54%, 53%) that catching up in eleven years is unrealistic.

Creating Opportunity?

I really liked the part of Obama's speech to the joint session of Congress last night (It's not a State of the Union speech, okay? Even if it seems exactly like one. It's not. Really. It's not.) where he talked about education:

Right now, three-quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require more than a high school diploma. And yet, just over half of our citizens have that level of education. We have one of the highest high school dropout rates of any industrialized nation. And half of the students who begin college never finish.

[...]

It is our responsibility as lawmakers and educators to make this system work. But it is the responsibility of every citizen to participate in it. And so tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school, vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It's not just quitting on yourself, it's quitting on your country — and this country needs and values the talents of every American. That is why we will provide the support necessary for you to complete college and meet a new goal: by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.

So I might not be a total education wonk like Ben or Sara, but this seems to be really ambitious to me. Perhaps overly ambitious. It's an ideal that sounds really nice, having everyone complete at least a year of postsecondary training of some kind, but it doesn't seem realistic.

After all, as Obama himself pointed out, we have a really high high school drop out rate. It's also really hard to get people to finish college once they start. The problem isn't asking to people to start a postsecondary education, the challenge is making it possible for them to finish it.

I've done enough reporting on college cost and student loans to know that it's really hard to figure out why people drop out of school. Even when you ask them and they say they drop out of school for "financial reasons" it's hard to know what that means. Did the debt burdens they took on become too high? Were they working a full-time job in addition to going to school full-time and they just couldn't keep up after a while? Did they have a sudden medical problem that took over all their savings?

These things are really hard to determine, but the problem with dropping out of college is it's kind of a double-whammy. Not only do you have to start repaying your loans, you also didn't get the degree that was supposed to get you a better job to help you pay them back.

The result here perhaps isn't that we need more opportunities for people to start post-secondary schooling (although if we can increase high school graduation rates so more can actually have the opportunity for it, that'd be awesome) but perhaps we need to figure out a way for those who start to get something worthwhile out of it -- in the end, that probably means making sure more people graduate.

Obama has the right instinct in creating more opportunity, but that opportunity should count for something other than saddling students with debt they can't pay off.

Women on the Board

Also via Inside Higher Ed, more women seem to be getting a spot on the boards of colleges and universities. It seems the percentage of women has increased from 20 percent in 1981 to 30 percent in 2007. I fear, though that this number may be stuck there. It seems that the number of women among traditionally male-dominated fields does make gains -- until the percentage of women hits about 30 percent and then the gains mysteriously stop. It's historically been the case with women on op ed pages for years.

I'm not sure what causes the stop. Perhaps there's a sense that "some" women are needed, so there becomes a conscientious effort to include women. For some reason, the magical percentage of 30 satisfies that need for the "some." As soon as a few women are on board, the pressure is relieved and the sense of urgency to hire women disappears.

Gen-1 House: Nanny State

I read this article in Inside Higher Ed on this special housing for first generation college students at the University of Cincinnati and, well, it seems a little like life control. The housing for first gen students comes complete with a strict guest policy, a curfew, and is designated an "alcohol-free" zone.

Now, I don't know how strictly these policies are enforced -- most colleges are "alcohol-free" for freshman housing because, well, it's technically illegal for people under 21 to consume alcohol (I think the age should be lowered to 18, but that's an issue for another day). The thing is, among the first generation college students I knew from my college days, this seems like a bad way to try to retain first gen students.

While it may be true that studies show that first gen students benefit from more attention, I tend to think that means more in the way of academic counseling, tutoring, and instructor attention than it means trying to enforce strict social rules on these students' personal lives. If anything, by putting such strict rules on their personal lives, they may find college patronizing and be more likely to drop out. It's not surprising that 18-year-olds might want to be treated like adults, so perhaps we shouldn't enforce such rigid rules.

Reprioritizing College Affordability

An article in today’s New York Times paints a dire picture for the affordability of college in the future. As states cut allocations to public colleges and universities, the institutions are making up for it by hiking tuition prices. At this rate, an expert quoted in the article says, tuition could make up 24 percent of the family budget by 2036. The Times points to a study released by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education today which shows that 49 of the states are getting an “F” in college affordability, with only California managing to get a passing grade.

The list of reasons why college has become so unaffordable is long. Many schools are just aren’t getting as much out of their endowments since the stock market has taken a tumble, and therefore schools are seeking more from state budgets. But state budgets are tight, too, so states are allocating less and less. This means the burden falls on the students to make up the rest. While some families can afford to pay the increased cost, the hardest hit are low-income students. The Pell grant just hasn’t been keeping up with the cost of tuition, forcing low-income students to take our more and more loans. While federal loans are fairly safe–they’re guaranteed and come with a fixed interest rate–private student loans are fairly unregulated. What’s left is piles and piles of debt, and students are having a harder time paying them off when they have a hard time finding jobs after graduation.

Kevin Carey recently pointed out in a Washington Monthly article that some schools have been compensating for increasing costs by increasing distance-learning-style classes. But the reality is that there are a lot of good things about college affordability–Pell grants and federal loan programs–but there just hasn’t been enough to go around. And many schools, in a constant vie to increase rankings, are spending money on merit aid, or scholarships that often go to those that don’t necessarily need it. If we really want to make sure that low-income students can go to school, we need to restructure priorities in higher education. Low-income students may be the most expensive to educate, but they also see the greatest economic mobility increases. That means it’s the best return on an investment.

Cross posted at Pushback.

Student Moms

Inside Higher Ed has a profile of a program that provides special housing to single mothers who are attending an undergraduate Roman Catholic institution, the College of Saint Mary in Omaha, Nebraska. These women are required to find their own childcare, but by putting single mothers in one place, it has fostered a cooperative living environment where the women can watch one another’s children while at class. Furthermore, the living situation addresses some diversity problems that the college seems to have:

This housing option for single mothers began in fall 2000, when it attracted nine mothers and their ten children. Tara Knudson Carl, Saint Mary senior vice president, said the idea of the program arose in administrative conversations as way to serve this traditionally underserved population. She added that the program was started on a trial basis. Participation reached its peak in fall 2007, when 39 women with 46 children lived in Walsh Hall.

This year’s cohort living in the Mothers Living and Learning program is more racially diverse than the overall Saint Mary student population – which is 78 percent white. Fifty-six percent of the mothers are white, 38 percent are black and 6 percent are Hispanic. Additionally, students enrolled in the single mothers’ program have a higher graduation rate than the overall student population. The recent six-year graduation rate for mothers in the program was 53 percent, compared to 51 percent for the entire student body. Citing the relative youth of the program, Carl said she expects this graduation rate to increase significantly.

This program addresses is an age-old problem for women who want to have children. Having children and attaining professional success are often seen as being at odds with one another, mostly because there aren’t mechanisms in place to help women that want both. This program is one way to address the idea that women with children can succeed.

This program is only one of eight nationwide, but it seems to me that more colleges should consider implementing programs like this. College dormitories aren’t designed to house children, and a small building bought up by the university could help foster a cooperative living environment and give opportunities to those that might not otherwise get the chance to succeed. Although these women could live in off-campus housing, they really are on their own. Commute times and a lack of helpful neighbors make the burden of attending classes too much sometimes. More colleges and universities should consider implementing such programs.

Cross posted at Pushback.

Is Culinary School Worth It?

It’s Top Chef season again. I’ll be making my friends some yummy food tonight while we watch the second episode. This season my favorite chef is Eugene, who worked his way up from his position as a dishwasher. The rest of the contestants went to fancy shmancy culinary schools.

Over at one of my other blog projects, The Internet Food Association, New America Foundation education policy wonk Ben Miller takes a look at whether culinary schools are actually worth their rather sizable price tag:

For those who don’t spend all day obsessed with higher education trade publications, cohort default rates measure how many student loan borrowers from a graduating class default on their debt within two years of graduation. The national average cohort default rate is right around 5 percent. A high cohort default rate generally indicates that students are having trouble finding jobs that helps them cover their debt. I say generally because the measure is far from perfect. For one, it only looks at what occurs two years out and not farther down the road, and two it is not perfectly correlated with school quality. (Those wanting to know more about the problems with cohort default rates can click here.)

The one good thing about cohort default rates is that the Department of Education publishes schools’ cohort default data right on its website. I pulled out every school with the word “culinary” in its name (none have chef or food), plus Baltimore International College and Johnson & Wales University, which also have culinary schools.

The results varied widely. The CIA was far and away the best of the large schools, recording a cohort default rate of around 2 percent each year in 2006, 2005, and 2004 (the most recent data due to the two-year measurement window). At the other end of the spectrum was Johnson & Wales and the JNA Institute of Culinary Arts. The former had over 7 percent of its 5,000-plus borrowers default, while the latter had 10 percent of its borrowers default in 2006 and 13 percent(!) default in 2005.

So the answer to the question is no, culinary school is probably not worth it. I see in the comments section that some are advocating for community colleges to step in for people who aren’t going to be top-tier chefs. The tuition at a community college is usually somewhere under $5,000 a year and gets you all the basic skills you might get at a more expensive for-profit institution.

Cross posted at Pushback.

Race-blind Admissions Aren’t Real

Inside Higher Ed has a great piece today summarizing Timothy Groseclose’s study on the illusion of race-blind admissions. Oftentimes students make references to things in their persona essay that may tip off an admissions officer to a student’s race or ethnicity: mention of a unique holiday, travel outside of the country to visit relatives, or even the student’s hometown or high school. Additionally, high school activities, like involvement in the school’s Black Student Union, may tip off an officer to the student’s race. Even names can identify someone as a race or ethnicity. These indicators would probably be considered illegal under California’s anti-affirmative action measure, but they are impossible to exclude.

It may not be “fair” that a student can reveal his or her race simply through her name or student activities, but the admissions officer, as long as they aren’t giving preferential treatment solely for race reasons, is doing his or her job: admitting students who will create a positive learning environment for other students.

Conversely, the article points to other factors that make admissions unfair:

Is it fair that a student with C’s gets into an Ivy League school because his father is a trustee? How about the lacrosse player with SAT scores 300 points below the institution’s average? The daughter of a politician? The Republican at a liberal arts institution?

The dean of admissions at Tufts University called such factors another form of “affirmative action.” At it’s root, affirmative action’s goal isn’t to simply give preferential treatment to students of color–it’s designed to level the playing field for the students, like the ones above, who get into colleges simply because they have some other asset working for them.

Cross posted at Pushback.

Single Mothers Drop in College Attendance

Well, here’s yet another complication to Bill Clinton’s welfare reform. Changes in welfare policy during the 1990s put the incentive on welfare recipients to work, by means of kicking them off after a certain, rather arbitrary, period of time. The changes received a mixed reaction from liberals: first an urge to veto the legislation, then warming up to the reforms but calling for alterations to them.

A new study shows (via Inside Higher Ed) that single mothers are dropping in college attendance in an era of welfare reform because education doesn’t count as work. In single mothers aged 24 to 49 with only a high school education, college attendance reduced by 20 to 25 percent compared with pre-welfare reform statistics. The researchers behind the study say there is strong evidence to think this might be linked to the changes in distribution of welfare.

This policy doesn’t make a lot of sense. The best way for many people, especially women, to increase their income is to attend school. By placing the emphasis of welfare reform only on work and not including education in that formula, we’re reinforcing economic stratification and discouraging economic mobility. Without knowing much about the nitty gritty of welfare policy, it seems to me we should fix this policy to encourage higher education, not discourage it.

Cross posted at Pushback.