Data Infrastructure

I study higher education data because to me data tell important stories about what we are doing, what we are not doing, what we should be doing, and because it often reveals blatant lies. In an objective manner it establishes reality—often a scarcity in the public policy worlds I work in where ideology, self-interest, issue spinning, partisan politics and convenient myths too often distort or hide reality. Data is a tool to set benchmarks and to frame important public policy discussions. Its presence or absence is itself a statement about our institutional interests in particular subjects, like class issues in higher education.

So when key data to study class issues is eliminated--as the Census Bureau did recently-- this is a red flag issue with me. This spring the Education and Social Stratification Branch of the Census decided to eliminate Table 14 from its annual report on school enrollments. For 36 years the Census Bureau has published this table with extensive information on school enrollment by family income. This table uniquely provides the annual overview of high school graduation, college continuation, college participation, estimated bachelor’s degree completion, and estimated bachelor’s degree attainment by age 24 for dependent 18 to 24 year olds by family income.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school.html

In the extreme political context of the Bush Administration, the Census Bureau’s decision appears to be a political act to eliminate embarrassing data. The Chief of the Education and Social Stratification Branch claims that this was not the case. But the history of the Bush administration’s efforts to eliminate Upward Bound services for high school students from low income families, its unfulfilled campaign promises to increase the Pell Grant maximum award, the wasteful spending on the student loan industry, and proposed elimination of many federal student financial aid programs for needy students tells a different story. Any act by the Bush administration—and the Census Bureau is a part of the Bush administration—is a political act. The Chief of the Education and Social Stratification Branch has suggested that limited resources, shifting priorities, and technical issues with the Current Population Survey were all factors in his decision. We have offered to seek additional funds for the production of this table, and we have encouraged addressing whatever technical issues that led him to think a 37^th year for this table was not warranted. But he will not change his decision—so the Council for Opportunity in Education has appealed his decision to the head of the Census Bureau, Dr. Steve Murdock, former Texas state demographer and a very serious student himself of the demography of education.

This painful incident is a reminder of the importance of the data infrastructure required for informative policy studies. In my career I have seen data collection stopped when the results were going to be an embarrassment to the collecting agency (the job placement data at the College of Education at the University of Minnesota in the late 1960s). This may or may not be a political decision to stop publishing embarrassing data. The Chief of the Education and Social Stratification Branch has provided detailed assistance to me to retrieve the 2006 data from the Current Population Survey myself. We have published our analyses from the CPS data in the June issue of OPPORTUNITY. And that is the issue: Should this country’s dialogue on the dominance of class and inherited educational opportunity be dependent on an old man who works out of the basement of his house in a cornfield in southern Iowa? Or should such vital data be published by the Census Bureau? We think the answer is obvious, are we are trying to convince the director of the Census Bureau that it is his agency’s job, not ours.

No one should take the data infrastructure for policy analysis for granted. Data is subject to the most depraved political decision making, as I have too often witnessed in my career. If we are to make public policy based on a clear understanding of reality then decisions such as the elimination of Table 14 from the school enrollment reports must be reversed. If additional resources are needed we will help get them. If there are technical issues in the CPS data we will eagerly work to address them. But unilaterally eliminating Table 14 is unacceptable.

Poor Kids in A Rich Country

This is the title to a book that I have been reading on and off for several months. I cannot read it in long stretches because I grow so angry that I frequently have to set it aside and walk away from it for a while.

Rainwater, Lee, and Timothy M. Smeeding. Poor Kids in a Rich Country, America’s Children in Comparative Perspective. (2003.) Russell Sage Foundation, New York.

http://www.russellsage.org/publications/books/0-87154-702-3

During my 38 years as a higher education policy analyst I have struggled to understand why this country treats children born into poor families the way we do. Maybe I could understand why we turn our backs on adults who have made persistently self-destructive choices in their lives and find themselves at the margins of life—maybe. But how we could condemn utterly innocent children to a life poisoned by inherited poverty bespeaks a degree of American extraordinary meanness that I want to deny exists.

For example since about 1980 the United States has been working relentlessly to make college more expensive and less affordable to students. Mainly this is occurring at the state level where states have slashed their state support for the public universities and colleges they created. So public institutions have been aggressively raising tuition charges to students to offset the lost state support. And since no more than 10 states have decent state need-based grant programs college is truly less affordable, but mainly to students from the bottom half of the family income distribution, below about $65,000 per year. At the federal level the focus student financial aid has shifted first from need-based grants, to cheap loans, then to subsidized loans and most recently to private market loans. The federal government now offers various tax incentives to just about everyone except families too poor to pay federal income taxes. Where we are today is about 180 degrees reversed from where we set out in 1965 in the War on Poverty. Today students from the bottom half of the family income distribution--below about $65,000 per year—face about $32 billion in unmet financial need. Since 1980 our public financing of higher education opportunity has been corrupted by political interests, profit motives, and institutional greed that have had disasterous consequences for poor college-age children.

The Rainwater/Smeeding book begins with the finding that there are poor children everywhere. Then with data compiled through the Luxembourg Income Study the authors compare the effects of government resource transfers to alleviate child poverty in the United States and 14 other rich countries: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada. The many comparisons reported in the book consistently show the United States ranking dead last—often by a wide margin—in alleviating child poverty. All of the other 14 countries make greater efforts and are more successful in reducing child poverty than is the U.S. The four Scandinavian countries effectively eliminate child poverty completely. The other countries are not quite so successful, but all try harder and accomplish more than we do.

At several points in the book the authors offer their own interpretations of these data. On page 13, for example, the authors write:

"… we conclude that America has high child poverty because we choose to have it—not because we cannot do anything about it. Other nations make different choices and get different results. In contrast to the Bush administration’s rhetoric, we choose to leave a large fraction of America’s children behind and the comparative analyses we present here inform us by how much.

Anyone who cares about poor children in the United States will find this book a very difficult read. For me it helps understand the mean spirited, selfish, short-sighted choices our federal and state policy makers have made since 1980. The ugly reality about ourselves revealed by the authors through the comparison of poor child treatment sheds light on our shameful record of indifference to child poverty.

What is Middle Income?

In the last few months there have been many references to financial aid for students from "middle income" families where the income ranges from $100,000 to $200,000. I find these references to be abuses of the English language and the facts. Students in this family income range are wealthy or affluent or rich--but they certainly are not "middle income".

Here are the facts. For decades I have calculated and reported on the family income distributions of high school graduates in the 18 to 24 age range using data from Table 14 of the Census Bureau's annual report on school enrollments:
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school.html
The most recent data for 2005 may be divided into four quartiles of family income as follows:
Bottom quartile: $0 to $36,539
Second quartile: $36,540 to $64,108
Third quartile: $64,109 to $98,433
Top quartile: $98,434 and up
These are for 18 to 24 year old high school graduates who are dependent family members. Exactly one-quarter of the total fall into each family income quartile range. If one were to include the family incomes of 18 to 24 year old high school dropouts these family income ranges would be lower.

Using the 2004 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study we have also calculated family income quartile ranges for all 18 to 24 year olds:
Bottom quartile: $0 to $34,288
Second quartile: $34,289 to $62,240
Third quartile: $62,241 to $95,006
Top quartile: $95,007 and over

There are other data sets that confirm these ranges. Most policy analysts refer to middle income broadly as the two middle quartiles, from about $35,000 to $95,000, then might say something about lower middle income and upper middle income. None that I have ever heard or read would consider students from families with incomes of more than $100,000 to be "middle income."

By any conceivable measure students from families with incomes of more than $100,000 are doing extraordinarily well in the education pipeline. They have the highest high school graduation rates (92.5%), college continuation rates for those that graduate from high school (87.0%), and bachelor's degree completion rate by age 24 for those who start college (90.1%). As a result they earn bachelor's degrees by age 24 at far higher rates (72.6%) than do students born into lower income families (27.9% in the third quartile, 16.6% in the second quartile, 12.3% in the bottom quartile).

I realize that many high school and collegiate members of NACAC work almost entirely with students from the top quartile of family income, over $100,000 per year. While these are undoubtedly talented students, they are also students with inherited privileges and educational opportunities not available to students born into families with fewer resources. They have little or no measurable financial need to pay for college. However students from the bottom three quartiles of family income faced $31.9 billion in unmet financial need, or $56.4 billion in work/loan burden in 2004 based on our calculations from the NPSAS study. To fuss over financial aid awards for these rich kids while the staggering gaps in aid for those from lower income families who need it keep growing should be a professional embarrassment to the NACAC organization and its members.

I speak American

At an international conference in Toronto in April of 2008, many speakers from Canada and Europe spoke a language--English--that I thought I did too. Besides their accents, these speakers used vocabulary with which I was often only vaguely familiar. And sometimes not at all. So I started taking notes. Here are the words and phrases that "caught my ear:"

stupid

unfair

social inclusion

second chance learner

wicked problems, issues

second cycle learners

moral blot on society

widening participation

weasel words: excellence

world-classness

admissions tutors

case managers

work from the same hymn sheet

purple patch

lead, or be led

thinking forward

third level, second level

white paper

green paper

dedicated funding stream

concession on competitive entry

from the margins to the mainstream

clean slate policies

go forward basis

social cohesion

top up skills

discourse of marginality

reconciliation

first nation

honorific

aboriginals

outers

go forward actions

ginger group

The winner was a phrase used by Grace Edge of Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. While making a presentation, Grace pointed to the blackboard and said:

"bring your eye up to …"

Am I a closet feminist?

A female colleague of mine has been accusing me for some time of being a closet feminist. I had not thought of myself as such, despite being a card-carrying member of Emily’s List, having opposed affirmative action for males in college admissions, and having proposed student loan repayment relief for women with educational loans who want to start families. By choice I have surrounded myself with Alpha females who are extraordinarily talented and well educated, striving to make the world a better place to live in, and going crazy and stressed-out while also trying to have a fulfilling and meaningful private life. My colleague’s accusation got me to thinking where I come from on issues of higher education opportunity and how my values guide my choices in life.

Years ago another colleague once told me about the two great progressive traditions in the United States. The first emanates from the Jewish faith and the other from Midwestern populism. These progressive movements seek improvements in human welfare far beyond the limits of their group membership and far enough into the future that current advocates will not benefit from what they propose and advocate. It is this selflessness, almost self-sacrifice, that distinguishes group interest politics from progressive politics. Progressive politics value and advocate for a general social welfare and recognize that their results will produce benefits in the future. Special interest politics are just that: narrowly self-serving: I want mine and I want it now!

I am a product of Midwestern populism. My ancestors were mostly poor northern European farmers who toiled in the shadows of castles owned by rich families who also owned the land my ancestors worked. I have visited these castles in Sweden, Poland, Germany and Switzerland. I know what my ancestors fled, and I understand what they sought to build when they settled in the Midwest. They had known exploitation by selfish, rich landowners. They understood that by working together for a common good their lives and especially the lives of their children would be improved. I am a direct beneficiary of that progressive tradition and as a legacy I feel a moral imperative to carry that vision forward. I see how it works, and frankly the self-interest alternatives look selfish, mean spirited and short-sighted—everything I have come to abhor in the public policy process.

In my work as a higher education policy analyst I am surrounded by people of the Jewish faith who are working on similar issues toward similar ends by similar means. Jews represent about 2.2 percent of the U.S. population, but a far larger share of the academic and policy analysis communities working on issues of higher education opportunity. I greatly admire their contributions to the policy work on educational opportunity in the United States.

Does feminism qualify as a progressive movement? Or is it just self-interest politics?

As one who has studied and reported on the growing plight of males in education, feminism as I experience its practice profoundly troubles me. When I began my career as a higher education policy analyst in 1970 there were 1.5 million more men than women enrolled in higher education. Women complained loudly that this was a problem needing correction, and advocated affirmative action for women in college admission. Today there are 2.7 million more women than men enrolled in higher education. The feminist agenda has shifted because the enrollment imbalance has reversed. But there are still issues that feminists rally around: the scarcity of women in STEM enrollments, fewer women in senior academic positions and management, and pay differences. Clearly there is some important work to be completed, but the broader gender imbalance is now one of too few males in higher education.

As one who advocates for males in higher education—because they are seriously underrepresented—I have experienced a nasty side of militant feminism that sounds more like self-interest than progressive politics. Raising issues and concerns about the plight of males in education, the workplace, and their lives has generated four kinds of responses from militant feminists. These responses occur in about this sequence.

1. Ignore the problem. The gender imbalance in higher enrollments that stood at 1.5 million in 1970 was corrected by 1981. Since 1981 males have fallen ever farther behind female enrollments, yet feminists continued to complain about their enrollment plight for another decade. Women’s groups continue to ignore the male enrollment issues and focus exclusively on the narrower women’s issues. Emily’s list is one example, and so is the AAUW.
2. Deny it is a problem. When the gender imbalance in higher education enrollments can no longer be ignored, deny that it is a problem. Men, after all, have access to better paid jobs in the workforce than do women without higher education. This argument has been invalid since about 1973 when male incomes for males without college degrees began an economic free-fall. The free fall has been caused by loss of jobs in traditionally male industries of agriculture, manufacturing, mining and forestry.
3. Marginalize or trivialize the problem. Another diversion strategy is to say that the problem of males in education is not a general problem, but one limited to minority males. This is partly true—black males are clearly in the worst shape of any racial/ethnic group. But white, Hispanic, Asian and American Indian males have also fallen well below their sisters in bachelor’s degree attainment. Another diversion is that this is only true for males from low income families. While the evidence is mixed, the preponderance of the evidence is that males from affluent families have fallen somewhat behind their sisters too.
4. Emasculate the response. The greatest gender imbalance in bachelor’s degree awards among whites is in the state of Maine. In recognition of the plight of boys in Maine education, a task force was recently created to examine the needs of boys in education. The task force appointments included three leadership positions (all women), a staff (all women), and task force membership (majority women). The first decision of this task force was to change its charge from a study of the problems and needs of boys in education to a study of gender issues in education.

My experience with feminists is that they are not (yet) worthy of being called progressives. To date they have functioned consistently and exclusively as advocates for women. Moreover they have actively opposed initiatives to try to help boys with increasingly serious educational issues. They have been a very effective self-interest and self-serving group. They have also been selfish, mean spirited and stunningly short-sighted. The feminist movement does not (yet) qualify as a progressive movement.

So, no I am not a closet feminist. But I would certainly like to be able to call myself a feminist someday when the feminists begin to show interest and advocacy for the plight of males in education. Then, and only then, can the feminist movement be called progressive.

It's Affordability, at Last!

The college affordability crisis in U.S. higher education is now so severe that all recent national reports highlight it. In September along these reports were released:

• Measuring Up 2006 from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education gave 43 states F grades on college affordability. The previous report in 2004 gave 36 states F grades. The 2002 report gave 13 states F grades. The original 2000 report gave 3 states F grades on college affordability.
• Mortgaging Our Future: How Financial Barriers to College Undercut America’s Global Competitiveness from the federal Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance highlight “how financial barriers created by rising college prices and insufficient need-based grant aid lower bachelor’s degree attainment.” Using very conservative estimates that during the 1990s between 1.0 and 1.6 million college-qualified students from low- and moderate-income families did not earn bachelor’s degrees that should have. In the current decade this estimate rises to 1.4 to 2.4 million.
• A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education from the commission appointed by Secretary of Education Spellings addresses access, affordability, quality and accountability. “The commission notes with concern the seemingly inexorable increase in college costs, which have outpaced inflation for the past two decades and made affordability an ever growing worry for students, families and policymakers. Too many students are either discouraged from attending college by rising costs, or take on worrisome debt burdens in order to do so.” The Spellings Commission also “found that our financial aid system is confusing, complex, inefficient, duplicative, and frequently does not direct aid to students who truly need it.” The Commission noted that its proposed changes “would require a significant increase in need-based financial aid …”

In January 2006 we reported in OPPORTUNITY that during the 2003-04 academic year undergraduate students faced $31.8 billion—yes billion—in unmet financial need. This is a situation that has been deteriorating since 1980. But maybe, at last, this crescendo of the voices of major policy players will be heard by our federal, state and institutional policy makers. Unfortunately, we have not heard those running for election in November say much about the crisis.

Ranking colleges and universities

If you do not like the criteria used by US News in their annual guide to America’s “best” colleges and universities, you might check out the Washington Monthly alternative. These two alternative approaches illustrate Mies van der Rohe’s dictum: God is in the details. Different criteria produce different rankings.

The US News approach uses criteria that are stacked heavily toward colleges that enroll mostly rich white students. The rankings are based on peer assessment (25%), retention (20%), faculty resources (20%), student selectivity (15%), financial resources (10%), graduation rate performance (5%, and our contribution) and alumni giving rate (5%).

The Washington Monthly criteria take a different approach: Ask not what your college can do for you but ask what you can do for your country with your college education. The rankings use measures in three categories of equal weight: community service (1/3), research (1/3) and social mobility (1/3). The community service component uses data on ROTC enrollments, alumni currently serving in Peace Corps and share of federal work-study grants used for community service. The research component uses data on the amount spent on research, doctorates awarded in science and engineering, and the share of alumni who have later earned PhDs. The social mobility component has two calculated measures based on Pell Grant recipient data: one on actual versus predicted graduation rate controlling for the share of students with Pell Grants, and the other based on the predicted share of Pell Grant recipients based on average SAT scores for admitted students.

So you have two approaches and as you might guess the results are very different. At least these rankings are made public.

But neither approach really gets at student learning, which is why we think students go to college and spend 4 years and truckloads of money to get their degrees. There are two major higher education initiatives that are trying to get answers to this vital question: the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). While these two projects are in early stages of development, both offer real hope of measuring learning processes and outcomes. Unfortunately, these efforts are confidential: institutions participate in these studies but results are not publicly available unless the institution chooses to release them.

If we could pick and choose ranking criteria from the above array of approaches we would choose: 1) the wide distribution vehicle developed by US News through its annual guide (but not their criteria), 2) the community service and social mobility components of Washington Monthly’s ranking, 3) the learning process measures of the National Survey of Student Engagement, and 3) the learning outcomes measures from the Collegiate Learning Assessment. Of course institutions would have to participate in NSSE and CLA and be willing to release their data. But given the possibility of a clumsy and irrelevant government mandate to do something higher education should choose to lead on this issue. After all shouldn’t students who pay $20,000 to $40,000 per year for their higher education know what they are buying?