Postsecondary Education OPPORTUNITY

Why Colorado?

2010-02-23T16:43:00.000-08:00

We have just updated our annual analysis of state fiscal investment effort in higher education. We now have 50 years worth of data for each state. We measure higher education investment effort as state fiscal support (largely appropriations) divided by state personal income (which we take to be the state’s tax base), and express the result as dollars for higher education per $1000 of personal income.

Measuring changes over the last 30 years—between FY1980 and FY2010—Colorado has reduced its state fiscal investment effort in higher education by (far) more than any other state: by 69.6 percent. Colorado has gone from $10.52 per $1000 in FY1980 to $3.20 per $1000 by FY2010. No other state can match this abysmal record of disinvestment in public higher education over the last three decades. Colorado has long been able to mask this destruction because so many college graduates educated elsewhere want to live in the state. But the real record is one of massive disservice to the state’s native population.

However, many national higher education organizations are headquartered in Colorado. In Boulder we find the national headquarters of the State Higher Education Executive Officers, the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. In Denver we find the Education Commission of the States.

We wonder why these organizations continue to bless Colorado with their presence. What kind of message does this convey to the voters and elected officials of Colorado about what they have done to their state’s higher education system. Might it not be appropriate for these national organizations to announce to Colorado that they are considering leaving the state because of its destructive attitude toward the higher education industry that they represent? Undoubtedly this would be disruptive to the organizations now located there. But the message their continued presence in Colorado conveys is the wrong one.

Federal Dishonesty in Needs Analysis for Financial Aid for Low Income Students

2010-01-10T08:57:00.000-08:00

The financial aid “system” was created to help students pay college attendance costs. This is not so much a system as it is a hodgepodge of policies, practices and paperwork that gets money to students in time to pay their college bills.

A major component of this hodgepodge is the federal need analysis used to get Pell Grants to students of low and lower-middle income families. This need analysis is fed by data supplied by students and their families on the FAFSA—the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The federal need analysis produces an EFC—or Expected Family Contribution—based on family resources that presumes ability (not willingness) to pay college attendance costs. This approach is based on the widely shared view that students and their families have the first obligation to pay college attendance costs to the extent that they have income and assets beyond basic levels to do so.

But a careful examination of the federal policy decisions used to determine the Expected Family Contribution reveals profoundly troubling practices applied to students from the very lowest family income backgrounds. These practices deliberately minimize or even hide the very serious financial barriers to higher education that students from very low income backgrounds face when they seek to pursue higher education. We describe two of these federal practices here.

Converting negative values to zero in calculating the Expected Family Contribution. When FAFSA data supplied by students and their families is fed through the federal methodology to calculate the EFC, negative values are changed to zero. This is a federal policy decision. It applies only to very low income families where incomes fall below maintenance levels deemed by others to be required to maintain a minimum living standard in the U.S.

In these very low income families students play breadwinner roles. Earnings from their work help support the family. When they leave the family to attend college, the loss of their earnings leaves the family worse off—a sacrifice some students from these families are unwilling or unable to make.

Over the years several policy analysts have recommended calculating and reporting EFCs that include these negative values. These policy analysts have included Kornfeld, Kantrowicz, myself, and Merisotis. ACT used to report a coded negative EFC for financial aid officers to use to help them sort out different zero EFC students. Most recently Goldrick-Rab has observed that zero EFC students at the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison have family incomes several thousand dollars higher than do zero EFC students at the University of Wisconsin’s regional campuses. The issue of the conversion of negative values in the federal methodology has been well known for decades. Yet the federal government chooses to hide, ignore and deny the reality of this additional financial barriers to higher education faced by students from very low income families.

Converting negative values to zero in the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study. This federal practice of converting negative values to zero has been carried over into the NPSAS files used to study how well financial aid in its broadest application meets students’ financial needs. I was introduced to this problem (although I did not understand it then) when a colleague at JBL Associates did some initial tabulations from one of the early NPSAS files. I was looking for unmet financial need. She prepared the tabulations through her online access.

I took these printouts home and went over them carefully. The numbers did not add up. She checked her work and assured me she had retrieved the data correctly. So I abandoned her tabulated numbers for unmet need and calculated them myself from the tabulated components of costs of attendance, less expected family contribution, less total aid received. The numbers my calculations produced both added up (because they were derived), and were far larger than the tabulated unmet needs of my colleague. I have continued to ignore tabulated financial barriers in NPSAS analyses, and calculated the financial barriers I report in OPPORTUNITY.

The federal government has been dishonest in assessing both ability to pay as well as measuring financial barriers to higher education for students from very low income families by following its chosen practice of converting negative values to zero. This hides a true picture of the real life conditions faced by those most in need of financial aid to be able to attend college. The practice should be stopped immediately, larger EFCs for these very low income students should be reported, and adequate and appropriate financial aid should be provided to help these students pay their college attendance costs. This practice should also be stopped and reversed in constructing the NPAS files on which policy judgments about financial aid are based.

A Boy’s Day at Home and at School

2009-12-16T10:32:00.000-08:00

The gender gap in higher education has been growing since 1981 when females surpassed males in college enrollment and bachelor degree awards. For a while we looked at higher education as somehow flawed in serving boys. There is some evidence from the National Survey of Student Engagement that this is true. But with more data and reflection, most of us came to realize that many more boys than girls were getting off the education train before they reached college age. So as higher education is prone to do, we pointed the accusatory finger at K-12 education and blamed them.

Now comes a report from the Census Bureau A Child’s Day: 2006 based on data collected in the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). This report is the fourth in a series examining children’s well-being and their daily activities at home and at school. This report offers useful and disturbing data on boys and girls that sheds light on how far off the education path many boys are from an early age. It is not just school where boys are disengaging—this report provides evidence of problems in home life too.

The SIPP data are collected from the “designated parent” which in 2-parent families is the mother. About 95% of the SIPP respondents were female, so these are largely maternal responses.

For their children ages 6 to 17 years, the mothers reported that:
• 60.8% of their boys often liked school, compared to 73.8% of their girls
• 52.9% of their boys were often interested in school work, compared to 68.7% of their girls
• 57.6% of their boys often worked hard in school, compared to 71.9% of their girls

Despite these notably poor indicators of student engagement in K-12 education, their mothers wanted :
• 88.6% of their sons to become at least college graduates, compared to 91.1% of their daughters
These mothers expected:
• 82.3% of their sons to become at least college graduates, compared to 86.2% of their daughters

This report of the study provides data that describe similarities in the lives of boys and girls at home. Among the similarities in the lives of boys and girls:
• Boys and girls were nearly equally likely to have been in non-relative child care, and to have spent nearly equal numbers of hours per week in non-relative child care.
• Boys and girls were nearly equally likely to have had breakfast with the designated parent during a typical week. Results were similar for regular weekday dinners.
• Boys and girls had similar types of and applications of television rules at home. (These rules included types of programs children could watch, time of day and number of hours.)
• Boys and girls had similar numbers of family outings together.

But there are differences too, and these differences provide interesting clues into the more grossly apparent enrollment and engagement problems that emerge when school enrollment is no longer compulsory and becomes voluntary and expensive. For examples:
• Mothers reported that they talked to or played with their child for 5 minutes or mjkore just for fun 3 or more times per day less often as their children aged, and this drop-off occurred faster with their sons than they daughters. Among children under 6 this gap was 0.9% in favor of girls. By 6 to 11 years it was 2.3%. By 12 to 17 years it was 4.8 percent.
• Maternal praise also declined as the child aged, and the decline was greater for their sons than their daughters. Among their children under 6, the gap was 1.3% in favor of the girls. By 6 to 11 years the gap was 2.0%, and by 12 to 17 it was 4.6%.
• Mothers reported that their sons were more likely to participate in sports than were their daughters, and that these differences increased with age.
• Mothers reported that their daughters were more likely to participate in clubs and than their sons were, and these differences also increased with age.
• Mothers reported that their daughters were more likely to be enrolled in gifted classes (26.6%) than their sons (22.9%), sons were more likely to have repeated a grade (12.9%) than were their daughters (8.0%), and that their sons were far more likely to have been suspended (13.8%) than their daughters (7.1%).

The published data from the SIPP provide interesting and useful insights from mothers’ perspectives about what is happening in the lives of their sons and daughters at home, at school and in communities. This published report invites further probing into the existing file for interactions by parental gender (there is some male parental data), race/ethnicity, marital status, educational attainment and employment status. But what is glaring deficient in this study is responses from fathers. God made men and women to have children, and this survey lets fathers off the hook.

Recession Effects on Opportunity for Higher Education

2009-10-14T13:27:00.000-07:00

I am looking at indicators that describe disruption in college access, choice and retention that students are facing and adjusting to because of the current economic recession. Here is what I have found in data so far:

Access
So far college continuation rates for recent high school graduates do not appear to be affected. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the college continuation rate for recent high school graduates was at a record high in October 2008. Data are from the Current Population Survey. The 2009 data will not be available until spring.

Choice
Data from the annual UCLA survey of American 4-year college freshmen show sudden and significant deterioration in college choice beginning in 2006. Up to that point about 70 percent of 4-year college freshmen reported that they were enrolled in their first choice college. This share then dropped to 67.3% in 2006, 64.1% in 2007 and 60.7% in 2008. At the same time the share of these freshmen reporting that the offer of financial assistance was an important factor in their college choice rose from 34.3% in 2006, to 39.4% in 2007 and 43.0% in 2008. However, the share of these 4-year college freshmen reporting that there was a major concern about their ability to finance their college education dropped from 13.2% in 2005, to 11.6% in 2006, 9.5% in 2007 and 10.9% in 2008.

Pell Grant recipient data points to a record low share of recipients enrolled in public and private 4-year colleges and universities. These data are from the Office of Postsecondary Education, which administers the Pell Grant program. This a long term issue, but one that has sped up during the recession. In FY2007 a record low 45.0 % of Pell Grant recipients were enrolled in 4-year colleges. This dropped to 44.0% in FY2008, and a preliminary 41.3% for FY2009.

Persistence
ACT has published data on frosh-to-soph persistence since 1983. We are looking at these data now. For all college freshmen this persistence rate to the sophomore year at the same institution dropped from 68.7% in 2006, to 68.1% in 2007, to 66.1% in 2008, to 66.2% by 2009. We have much more analysis to do of these data, but this factoid jumped out at me when I started graphing the data.

Ranked Colleges and Universities that Exemplify Social Inclusion

2009-06-15T16:33:00.000-07:00

Most of elite higher education in the United States practices class warfare against classes not already richly served by these institutions. We have a large group of ranked of colleges and universities that measure themselves by class exclusive criteria like college admissions test scores, admissions selectivity, and family income. They higher educate the rich and they are proud of it. They are enriching those born into affluence—those from inherited privilege classes. They offer a country club campus atmosphere needed to attract the affluent clientele they wish to enroll. They are also largely divorced from the national challenge of higher educating the growing share of the country’s population that is low income. There are whole recruiting, testing and college ranking industries that either exist to support this class structure of higher education or profit from it.

So it is quite unusual to find ranked colleges and universities that buck this trend and are deliberately practicing social inclusion. Or more accurately, these institutions are engaged in the higher education of the growing share of the country’s population that was born into low or lower-middle income families. This population is soon to become a majority of the K-12 student population, later to become a majority of higher education enrollments, and will eventually become a majority of the adult population, parents, taxpayers, workforce and voting citizens. These socially inclusive and exemplary institutions deserve recognition for their notable efforts to reach out to students who were born into low-income families.

We use two sets of criteria to identify these institutions. Group I institutions are ranked by U.S. News as among the top 100 universities and liberal arts colleges and have notably large shares of undergraduate students with Pell Grants. Group II institutions are also ranked by U.S. News among the top 125 universities and top 125 liberal arts colleges and have increased their enrollment of Pell Grant recipients at greater rates than the national growth rate in Pell Grant recipients. Only five of these 250 colleges and universities meet this criteria of engagement.

Group I

Berea College, Berea, Kentucky. This college was founded in 1855 as the first co-educational, interracial college in the South to serve low-income students primarily from Appalachia. An applicant with a family income above $40,000 is not admissible. In 2004 87.4% of its students received Pell Grants.

Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. In 2004 27.7% of the undergraduates at Smith were Pell Grant recipients. In that year the average Pell Grant share among the U.S. News top 50 national liberal arts colleges was 12.8%. At Smith the number of Pell Grant recipients has risen from 484 in 1992 to a peak of 716 by 2002. In 2009 there were still 645 Pell Grant recipients on campus. Unfortunately these numbers have been slipping slowly but steadily since 2002.

Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts. In 2004 24.2% of undergraduates received Pell Grants, compared to 12.8% for all top 50 national liberal arts colleges that year. The number of Pell Grant recipients at Mount Holyoke has increased from 390 in 1992 to a peak of 448 in 2002. Since then this number has declined very slightly to 432 by 2009.

University of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California. In 2004 38.7% of undergraduate students at UCLA received Pell Grants. This compares to 20.0% among all U.S. News top 50 national universities that year. The number of Pell Grant recipients enrolled at UCLA has increased from 6819 in 1992 to a peak of 9686 in 2004. Between 2004 and 2009 the number of Pell Grant recipients has declined steadily to 8852.

University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, California. In 2004 34.7% of undergraduate students at Berkeley received Pell Grants, compared to 20.0% for all top 50 “best” national universities as defined by U.S. News. The number of Pell Grant recipients at Berkeley increased from 5858 in 1992 to a record peak of 7989 by 2009.

University of California-San Diego, La Jolla, California. UC-San Diego increased its enrollment of Pell Grant recipients from 4608 in 2000 and 4680 in 2001 to 6458 in 2006 and 6817 in 2007, or by 42.9%. Since then the University has enrolled 7414 in 2008 and 8017 so far for 2009.

Group II

Between 2000+2001 and 2006+2007 the number of Pell Grant recipients in U.S. higher education institutions increased by 37.3%, from about 3.76 million to about 5.17 million students. Among the 125 “best” national universities (as defined by U.S. News and World Report), just four increased their own enrollment of Pell Grant recipients by more than 37.3%. Among the 125 “best” liberal arts colleges in the U.S. just one increased it’s own enrollment of Pell Grant recipients by more than 37.3%.

Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard increased its enrollment of Pell Grant recipients from 394 in 2000 and 636 in 2001 to 763 in 2006 and 808 in 2007, or by 52.5%. The number for 2008 was 940, and so far for 2009 the number is 959.

University of California-San Diego, La Jolla, California. UC-San Diego increased its enrollment of Pell Grant recipients from 4608 in 2000 and 4680 in 2001 to 6458 in 2006 and 6817 in 2007, or by 42.9%. Since then the University has enrolled 7414 in 2008 and 8017 so far for 2009.

University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pitt enrolled 3863 Pell Grant recipients in 2000 and 3828 in 2001. For 2006 Pitt enrolled 5080 Pell recipients, and 5719 for 2007, for an increase of 40.4%. Since then Pitt enrolled 5163 in 2008 and 4961 so far for 2009.

Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona. Arizona State enrolled 8590 Pell Grant recipients in 2000 and 8653 in 2001. Then in 2006 ASU enrolled 12,242, and for 2007 enrolled 11,783, for an increase of 39.3%. Since then ASU enrolled 11,779 Pell recipients in 2008 and 13,280 so far for in 2009.

University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia. Richmond enrolled 184 Pell Grant recipients in 2000 and 177 in 2001. By 2006 Richmond enrolled 242 Pell recipients, and 276 in 2007. This was an increase of 43.5%. In 2008 Richmond enrolled 305, and 351 so far in 2009.

We give honorable mentions to institutions that increased their Pell Grant enrollments by 30% to 37.2% between 2000+2001 and 2006+2007. The universities are: University of Denver, Loyola University of Chicago, University of California-Davis, Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of California-Riverside. The liberal arts colleges are Ursinus College, Agnes Scott College, Randolph College, Lake Forest College and Spellman College. Complete results for all 250 institutions ranked by U.S. News are available in the December 2007 issue (#186) of Postsecondary Education OPPORTUNITY. Online Pell Grant recipient data by institution is available at: https://cod.ed.gov/cod/LoginPage

Someday I will prepare a parallel Hall of Shame identifying the leading Class Warriors among the most Class Exclusive Gated Communities and Country Clubs. This will be a very much longer list.

The Major Factors Influencing Federal Education Legislation

2009-06-06T19:04:00.000-07:00

Robert Andringa prepared this list of what influenced federal education legislation in 1976 when he was minority staff director, House Committee on Education and Labor. For those of us who fancy our policy analysis as directly influencing how laws are made, this is a humbling lesson. - Tom

"The following list of major influences shaping federal education laws was put together in consultation with other Hill staff, but I take full responsibility for whatever reactions it generates! The variables are listed in the order in which I see their importance at this time.

1. Personal judgment and values of usually no more than 6-10 Congressmen and staff.

Some major bills have many issues…each issue is normally shaped and resolved by a small handful of people, later ratified by the full House and Senate…“judgments and values” are influenced by personal experience and the effect of the other items on this list.

2. Strong views of respected and trusted friends.

Each Member has a few trusted friends with knowledge in some particular area…these are friends from his hometown, experts with whom he has developed a friendship over the years, other Members, staff, etc.

3. Assumptions about the economy and budget.

These assumptions influence a Member’s interest in creating new programs or in cutting back on program authorities…also his or her sense of priorities among various educational needs.

4. Public opinion and the popular media.

Most Members do not support ideas which they feel do not have, or could not get, general public support…many shape their perceptions about educational needs by reading popular, rather than specialized, publications…the few people most involved in a legislative area do read more of the specialized newsletters and journals.

5. Strong views and efforts of major interest groups.

The education lobby is not one of strongest in Washington…yet major associations and coalitions can force consideration of issues they feel important…sometimes consensus among interest groups is important and sometimes a weakly developed consensus backfires.

6. Descriptive information about federal programs.

Most of this comes from the executive branch and a few educational associations…Members relate this to what they personally expect a program to accomplish.

7. Congressional hearings.

Attendance is often low, but “key Members” are usually present…educators often present long, dull papers full of jargon…many witnesses are not willing to be completely candid in formal, on-the-record sessions...field hearings [are] more important, although they are infrequent.

8. General Accounting Office reports and other independent reports on programs.

GAO studies get acceptance because GAO is [an] arm of the legislative branch and its studies are done in cooperation with Members…same applies to Congressional Research Service…sometimes other non-federal studies of existing federal programs are given similar credibility.

9. Policy research studies and reports.

These are often too long, full of jargon or statistics few understand…few people on the Hill have time to read such things…some studies use old data or come up with ideas Members have long since rejected…most influence from these reports must come indirectly through the other items on the list.

10. Administration views and lobby efforts.

Congress naturally puts this factor low when the majority party is different from that of the President…proposals often reflect budget constraints rather than sound educational policy…recommendations are often submitted too late in the process…recommendations of [a] technical nature to improve current programs have [a] much better success rate.

11. Program evaluation studies.

Most of these done by the U.S. Office of Education under contract…many are too late and use data that are too old…many studies try to quantify results that can not easily be quantified…most studies [are] done in isolation from other similar studies and miss the “big picture”…but there have been a few exceptions."

Shifting Freshman Market Shares

2009-05-15T07:58:00.000-07:00

On April 28th the Bureau of Labor Statistics released it’s annual report College Enrollment and Work Activity of 2008 High School Graduates. BLS has released this report annually since 1959. These are data collected by the Census Bureau in the October supplement to the Current population Survey. The reported data provide the first comprehensive look at the transition from high school into college in 2008. I know we are all busy speculating what is going to happen in the fall during this the second year of the current economic recession.

The media have not yet reported from these powerful BLS data. I was blown away by one part of these data: the massive shift of high school graduates entering college through the 2-year portal and away from the 4-year portal. In 2001 68.1% of college freshmen who were recent high school graduates were enrolled in 4-year institutions (and 31.9% in 2-year institutions). Then in 2002 freshmen began a gradual shift away from 4-year to 2-year colleges. By 2007 the share entering 4-year colleges and universities had dropped to 64.1% (and 2-year had risen to 35.8%).

Then the recession began in December 2007. By fall 2008 the economy was in free fall. Families had lost a great deal of their investments in the stock market. And the share of 4-year college freshmen who were recent high school graduates dropped to 59.7% (while the 2-year college share rose to 40.3%). In one year, between 2007 and 2008, there was 4.4% shift in market share from 4-year to 2-year colleges.

Out of 2,161,000 fall 2008 freshmen this means that about 95,000 college freshmen had shifted from 4-year to 2-year colleges compared to the 2007 market shares. Compared to the 4-year market share in 2001 this means that in 2008 about 181,500 college freshmen have shifted from 4-year to 2-year colleges to begin their higher education careers.

The 2008 college continuation rate in 2008 was 68.6% which ties the record rate set in 2005. These 2008 freshmen are also attending college full-time at record high rates. So the story is this: the kids are trying hard to get a college education, but the world around them is failing them. The system is failing them.

We see why in another set of data that we are mining: the 2008 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study. The financial barriers to higher education faced by students from the bottom half of the family income distribution are greater than they have been since these data were first reported in 1990. No wonder our country feels like it is in free-fall, because it is.

Endowing The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education

2009-02-15T14:18:00.000-08:00

In December 2008 I completed my personal pledge to endow The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education in Washington, DC. My 60 checks between 2001 and 2008 totaled $100,000. I had planned to complete my gift by the time I reached retirement age and I just barely managed to do so, since I turned 66 on February 6th, 2009.

My endowment gift to the Pell Institute is an unrestricted gift to support and advance the research agenda of the Institute. I decided to do so a decade ago because closing the gap in higher educational opportunity between those born into low-income families and those born into affluent families would not be accomplished in my lifetime. In fact this gap has been widening almost steadily since the advent of regressive social policy in the United States around 1980.

My personal motivation for endowing the Pell Institute with my gift reflects my family’s story of what America has meant to us. In 1957 when I was in the 9th grade in high school in Roseville, Minnesota, my American Studies teacher Ms. Bergeron assigned my class the task of researching and writing our families’ American family histories. Five decades after I turned in my high school paper I am still working on that assignment. Family history has become a lifelong hobby, and I am not done yet with either life or that assignment.

My travels have taken me from cemeteries in Albany, New York to Albany, Oregon. In 1975 I went to Europe to see where my ancestors had come from and try to understand why they left their homelands for America. Of the five places I visited one, in Prussia (now Poland) I knew the motivation to emigrate was to escape conscription into Otto von Bismark’s armies. These were draft dodgers.

But in the other four places I was stunned to find that my ancestors had lived in the shadow of castles. My ancestors were share croppers, or serfs, and did not own the land they farmed. They worked for the people who lived in the castles and owned the land. These places included Sweden (Skane), East Germany (Neuenkirchen), West Germany (Oberderdingen) and Switzerland (Graubunden). My farmer ancestors saw that good farm land was available free or at least cheap in the United States, and so they left and settled in Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa and South Dakota.

When these ancestors came to America between about 1840 and 1880 they came as farmers, and opportunity in the agrarian economy of that era meant owning and working your own land. America provided that opportunity in abundance and my ancestors benefited directly from the opportunities America offered but which were not available in Sweden, Prussia, Neubrandenburg, Mecklinburg and Switzerland.

My ancestors also benefited from the developing educational system America decided it needed. My great grandfather Nels Martensson left Sweden at age 22 and signed his name with his mark: “X”. My grandfather Frank Mortenson had a grade school education and beautiful penmanship—which he learned and of which he must have been proud. My father Allen Mortenson earned a bachelor’s degree, I earned a master’s degree, and my daughter is now working on her PhD at the University of Michigan. In every respect the educational opportunities available to my family in America have brought our family to a condition not available to our peasant ancestors in Europe.

The modern equivalent to the opportunity of land ownership that my ancestors sought when they emigrated from Europe for America is higher education. Since about 1973 access to the American middle class is through higher education. Other work that paid well in agriculture, manufacturing and some other industries has been replaced with work in other industries such as education and health care, business and professional services, leisure and hospitality services and other service industries that require higher education.

Today both immigrants and natives can prosper only if they have the education and training that only higher education provides. Higher education has become the gatekeeper to the American middle class experience. And under regressive policy choices that access has been largely limited to those that inherit privilege by their birth. The United States is becoming the kind of country that my ancestors fled when they left Europe for the opportunities available in America. And Europe is starting to look more like the progressive America that we once were.

My gift is an endorsement of the work of The Pell Institute. Long after I have turned to dust and ashes and I have been forgotten, the challenge to restore America to a land of opportunity for those willing to work for it will remain. I wish my successors well in meeting that challenge. This country’s survival depends on restoring the national commitment to helping everyone maximize their human potential and economic productivity.

Funeral of Senator Claiborne Pell

2009-01-11T15:44:00.000-08:00

On Monday, January 5, 2008, I attended the funeral of former Senator Claiborne de Borda Pell in Newport, Rhode Island. I attended with Dr. Arnold Mitchem, President of the Council for Opportunity in Education, Dr. Chandra Taylor Smith, Director of the Pell Institute for the Study of Higher Education, and two TRiO directors from Rhode Island.

I had known for years that when this inevitable day arrived I wanted to be there. I wanted to show and express my profound respect for the life of this very great man. It is no accident that I am a Senior Scholar at The Pell Institute—we named this think tank in honor of Senator Pell. So when his passing on January 1st was announced to the media, I scrambled to clear my schedule, get an airplane ticket to Providence, find a hotel room in Newport, and arrange for a shuttle ride between Providence and Newport.

Trinity Episcopal Church in Newport was filled to its limit—600 to 700 people—who had their own reasons for attending Senator Pell’s funeral. Many were family members (the Pell Family is very large), some were former staff of the Senator from his long career in Washington, and his very many friends from Rhode Island and New England. Also in attendance were Senator Ted Kennedy, President Bill Clinton, Vice President-Elect Joe Biden, Senator Jack Reed—all of whom gave moving eulogies for Senator Pell. I also noted Senators Durbin, Reid, Sarbanes, Leahy, Chaffee, Whitehouse, Lieberman, Bingaman, Dodd, as well as many congressmen with names that included Kennedy.

What I also noticed about those attending this funeral was the almost total absence of higher education leadership at this important funeral. Outside of TRiO leadership, there was no one I could recognize from Washington, DC, based higher education organizations. There was no one I could recognize from the financial aid community. Despite the enormity of the federal Pell Grant program, none of those who lobby for it’s funding or package Pell Grants for students at institutions could find time to clear their schedules and attend his final public event.

So I have been thinking about what the absence of most of the higher education community or their representatives at Senator Pell’s funeral means. Are they only in it for the money? What does this say about the life of this very great man when a good share of the U.S. Senate can break away from busy schedules in Washington but the higher education leadership in that same city cannot attend? Where was NASFAA, of all organizations?

Should Children Vote? (Or Who Cares about the Future?)

2008-10-21T08:03:00.000-07:00

With the election now 14 days away, the political promises are now piling up at least thigh deep. Each presidential candidate has promised new funding commitments and tax cuts. These tax cuts are promised at the same time the federal government is already running huge budget deficits. The current budget deficits are financed by issuing debt that must be repaid with interest. The current political promises—regardless of which presidential candidate is elected—will add to our national debt.

It is unrealistic to write off these political promises as simply the political silly season, and hope that politicians will regain their grip on economic reality after the November 4^th election. Since about 1980 during the neoliberal era of smaller government, lower taxes, and unrestrained federal spending the federal budget has remained persistently out of balance except for a brief period in the late 1990s. In this decade we have initiated two wars financed entirely on credit. Now with the economic meltdown an unfathomable $700 billion of credit has just been allocated to restore credit market liquidity. This adds to our borrowing from our future. Add global warming to this balance sheet and most people agree that our current lifestyles are not sustainable.

All of these political promises and program commitments involve borrowing against our country’s future. In effect we are taking from the lives of our children to support lifestyles we have neither earned nor deserve. We are increasingly living beyond our means. But spend we do. And we do this on credit.

I dare say politicians who were accountable to children would view their responsibilities to the future far differently than do today’s politicians. Forget the political blather about commitment to children and their futures—deeds are what counts. And it is their record of economic and environmental misdeeds that requires political correction.

So I propose that children get to vote in elections, and that their votes count equally with those of adults who have supported the current political and economic irresponsibility. That vote franchise should be exercised through their custodial parents. It is parents who have the most visceral commitment to their children’s futures. So in a family of two parents and three children there would be five votes cast in elections. Each parent would cast their own vote, then together they would cast three more votes for those who they felt best addressed the needs and futures of their children.

An office-seeking political candidate would now have to pander to the children’s vote, exercised through their parents. Since children will outlive their parents and their elected representatives, politicians would be expected to look much farther into the future that they have done for the last 28 years. Greater attention to economic and environmental issues should result than what we have witnessed during the last 28 years of mismanagement and irresponsibility.

Whose Debt is Student Debt?

2008-09-29T10:29:00.000-07:00

A few years ago a colleague at The Pell Institute—Marshall Grigsby—predicted that the mountain of educational debt accumulated by college students to finance their higher educations would someday come crashing down. The economic lives of young adults fresh out of college were too fragile to withstand some unforeseen future storm.

Now that I am a witness (and victim) of the current seizure of credit markets in the U.S. and around the world, Marshall’s comment has been churning in my mind. Today (September 29, 2008) the House of Representatives will vote to authorize the Secretary of the Treasury to spend up to $700 billion to buy bad debt from banks and other credit holders to restore some liquidity to domestic (and international) credit markets.

This act is profoundly troubling to almost everyone. It reeks of a taxpayer bailout of the unbridled greed that has plagued the U.S. economy since 1980. The moral hazard problem is that there is no penalty for risky investment practices if taxpayers assume bad debts from speculators who gambled and lost (or won). Without the moral hazard penalty excessive greed and unwarranted risk are freed to plunder and steal wherever people can be duped into dubious investment schemes—of which there are now many. In the end future generations of taxpayers will be paying off China for our current irresponsibility.

What lesson does this offer to the student loan industry? The federal government is neck deep in guarantee obligations to student loan lenders and holders. If students default on their federally guaranteed student loans the U.S. Government (yes, We the People) will pick up the tab. Then we will deny the student a bankruptcy outlet and assign the defaulted paper to multiple collection agencies to harass the student loan borrower until death to pay off his/her loan balance, plus interest. Death is the only way out of this economic slavery.

If the country is headed for recession now then student loan repayment default rates should be rising. The more serious the recession the more students will default and the greater the cost of the taxpayer bailout. An economic depression could produce the collapse of the deck of cards on which the educational loan industry is built. Then, as we have been doing since 1980, we will not tax ourselves to pay off the lender’s debt but rather increase our borrowing from China and defer to future generations final reconciliation.

The problem as I see it is that the intermediaries (colleges and universities) escape with their profits from student loans without any responsibility for seeing that educational loans are repaid to lenders (increasingly the federal government under direct lending). To protect We the People from paying off such debts, requiring colleges to co-sign with student borrowers for educational loans used to pay institutional charges would greatly reduce taxpayer default obligations. Institutions would have a powerful incentive to graduate those they admit (the U.S. graduation rate is among the worst in the western world), and if students got into default trouble with lenders then institutions would share in the recovery effort. Taxpayers should not have to repay defaulted student loans—such responsibilities should be shared between the students who took them out and the institutions that received these funds.

Data Infrastructure

2008-06-24T15:28:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-31T19:10:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-05-06T11:03:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-12T06:11:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-03-09T18:22:00.000-07:00

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.

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.
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.
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.
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!

2006-10-03T09:01:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-21T17:10:00.000-07:00

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?

University of New Mexico Graduation Project

2006-08-16T18:53:00.000-07:00

Only about half of students who start college eventually earn a bachelor’s degree, and another 15 percent or so earn an associate’s degree. So over a third of those who start college leave before they complete their degree. Some of these college dropouts get close to graduation but still do not graduate. They leave in good academic standing. But other problems—at home, financial, health and other personal problems (in my case the military draft during the Vietnam War)—get in their way.

The University of New Mexico’s Graduation Project seeks out these near-graduate dropouts and invites them to return to complete their college work and receive their justly earned college degrees. Started in 1996 the Graduation Project has identified 3830 dropouts who left the University in good standing and were close to graduation. The Graduation Project has tracked down and re-enrolled 1934 of these dropouts (50.4%) and graduated 1342 of them (69.4% of those who have re-enrolled), with 197 more still enrolled as of last spring.

The average GPA at graduation of the dropouts/returnees was 3.03. The average GPA of the entire stopout cohort was 2.97. Of the 1342 who returned and graduated from the University of New Mexico, 30 have earned a graduate degree at UNM and 47 others were enrolled in graduate school.

A very few other colleges do this—we have heard of only two. The University of Wisconsin/Oshkosh and one of the CUNY colleges operates such a program. The University of Missouri at Columbia is moving towards a graduation project of its own.

The question that occurs to me is why every college does not have a Graduation Project like that of the University of New Mexico. Don’t colleges and universities care enough about their student stop-outs to seek them out, help them re-enroll, to address their problems and help them graduate? This is a win-win situation--if only colleges would reach out to their nearly-graduated dropouts.

Financial Aid for Men and Women Undergraduate Students

2006-08-02T07:14:00.000-07:00

Do men and women undergraduate students receive different financial aid packages? The answer is clearly no and yes. While financial aid is ostensibly awarded without regard to gender, in fact men and women are often differently situated and financial aid is awarded to address the circumstances of each individual aid applicant. But when these individual circumstances are controlled, a small but consistent pattern of differences emerges, particularly in favor of women in private colleges and universities.

We have analyzed the financial aid circumstances for men and women undergraduate students using data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) for the 2003-04 academic year. Our analysis is limited to full-time, full-year single institution enrollments. (Financial aid policy analysis quickly becomes complex beyond comprehension unless it is focused on a recognizable population.)

The overview finds:

There were 2,387,180 men and 2,766,780 women undergraduate students in our NPSAS sample.
Median parental income for men was $64,807 compared to $60,055 for women.

Our analysis of the NPSAS data examines college affordability for male and female undergraduates controlling for institutional type and control (public 4-year, public 2-year, private 4-year), and parental income quartiles ($0 to $34,288, $32,289 to $62,240, $62,241 to $96,006, and $95,007 and above). We measure college affordability for students in four ways: 1) unmet financial need, 2) student work/loan burden, 3) net price to family and 4) net price to family as a percent of parental income.

We will report these findings in more detail in the August issue of Postsecondary Education OPPORTUNITY. The major findings are:

Similarly situated men and women undergraduate students receive very similar financial aid packages to address their financial needs.
When institutional sector and parental income are controlled women have a financial aid advantage over men in 31 cells and men have an advantage over women in 11 cells.
Among students in the bottom quartile of parental income women enjoy an advantage over men in 11 cells and men enjoy the advantage in 1 cell.
Women enjoy their largest advantage over men in private 4-year colleges and universities in all affordability measures and at all income levels.

Class Segregation of Higher Education

2006-05-24T06:59:00.000-07:00

It is no secret that higher education is divided along class lines. We recently calculated median parental income for dependent undergraduate students by institutional sector from the 2004 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study. There results were:

Private 4-year colleges and universities: $67,534
Public 4-year colleges and universities: $63,888
Public 2-year colleges: $53,010
Private less than 4-year: $47,279
Proprietary: $36,469
All: $59,505

Then we compared these parental income medians to the medians for dependent undergraduates in the 1990 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study. After adjusting for inflation (CPI-U) the following changes occurred between 1990 and 2004:

Private 4-year colleges and universities: +3.2%
Public 4-year colleges and universities: +5.8%
Public 2-year colleges: -2.4%
Private less than 4-year: -8.9%
Proprietary: -4.5%
All: +2.9%

These findings are consistent with other data that we have examined. Pell Grant recipients are increasingly concentrated in public 2-year colleges and proprietary schools (ED/OPE). Minority students are increasingly concentrated in 2-year colleges and white students are increasingly concentrated in 4-year colleges and universities (NCES). The 2-year college share of dependent undergraduates from the bottom two quartiles of family income has grown while it has shrunk in both public and private 4-year colleges and universities (NPSAS). Median family income has risen in all 4-year sectors but declined in public 2-year colleges (CIRP).

What is happening is that under regressive federal, state and institutional policies adopted beginning about 1980 higher education enrollments are being resorted along social class lines. Our 4-year colleges and universities are increasingly reserved for white children born into affluence, while our community colleges and proprietary schools are increasingly populated by minorities and the poor.

Different sectors of higher education produce different outcomes for the students they enroll. Thus this increasingly class-segregated and class-segregating performance of higher education deserves critical scrutiny. Is the purpose of higher education to secure the futures mainly of those born into affluence and to relegate to less prosperous lifetime paths those born into families with lower incomes? What messages do these policies and practices convey about our commitment to diversity? To community? To social harmony? To social and economic vitality? To democracy? To prosperity?

My view is that the policy choices that we made between 1862 (first Morrill Act) and about 1980 were consistently progressive, expansive and inclusive. Since about 1980 our federal, state and 4-year institution policy choices have been consistently regressive, constrictive and exclusive. The enrollment consequences of these regressive policy choices were predictable by anyone with a modicum of social science familiarity. We have deliberately chosen to protect a status quo that assures the best and most expensive higher education for those born into affluence and provides other postsecondary opportunities to the growing share of the rest of us who were born into less fortunate circumstances. Ultimately these regressive policy choices weaken and divide us, and offer a far dimmer future for the United States than what the progressive policies of the past produced.

For every 100 girls .....

2006-05-02T09:35:00.000-07:00

For every 100 girls .....

For every 100 girls that are conceived 115 boys are conceived.
For every 100 girls that are born 105 boys are born.
For every 100 girls enrolled in the elementary grades there are 107 boys enrolled.
For every 100 girls enrolled in high school there are 100 boys enrolled in high school.
For every 100 girls that graduate from high school 96 boys graduate.
For every 100 women enrolled in college there are 77 men enrolled in college.
For every 100 women who earn an associate's degree 67 men earn an associate's degree.
For every 100 women who earn a bachelor's degree 73 men earn a bachelor's degree.
For every 100 women who earn a master's degree 62 men earn a master's degree.
For every 100 women who earn a first-professional degree 107 men earn one.
For every 100 American women who earn a doctorate 92 American men earn a doctorate.

For a much longer version of this list, including urls to the internet sites with the original data, go to:
http://www.postsecondary.org/archives/previous/ForEvery100Girls.pdf

Failure to Launch

2006-04-14T10:30:00.000-07:00

Failure to Launch is a movie about a male approaching middle age who is still living at home with his parents. His mother takes wonderful care of her son, cooking his meals, doing his lanudry, providing maid service.

The promos for this movie might imply that this is a recent phenomenon--overaged boys remaining at home with Momma. In fact the Census Bureau has reported these data since 1960, and the trends are not so clear in the reported data. First this is mainly a guy thing:

In 2004 56.5% of males and 46.5% of females ages 18 to 24 were living at home.
Among 25 to 34 year olds 13.9% of males and 8.0% of females were still living at home with their parents.

The trends are less clear.

For guys ages 18 to 24 the share living at home with their parents has declined from about 60% a decade ago to about 55% for this decade.
For women ages 18 to 24 the trend is also downward but is less drammatic, from about 48% in the early 1990s to about 46% in this decade.
For men ages 25 to 34 years the trend is downward, but only slightly, from about 15% in the early 1990s to about 13-14% in this decade.
For women ages 25 to 34 years there may be a slight downward trend since the early 1990s, but it is less than 1%.

Boys are clearly and consistently slower to leave home than girls. It happens eventually, but given caring mothers its a shock for some young men to have to care for themselves. To see these data go to:
http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/ad1.pdf

College Continuation Rates for Recent High School Graduates in 2005

2006-03-29T17:23:00.000-08:00

The college continuation rate for 2005 high school graduates was 68.6%--the highest on record since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began reporting these data in 1959. This broke the previous record of 67.0% set in 1997. Out of 2,675,000 high school graduates 1,834,000 were enrolled in college by October 2005.

Overall this is good news. A growing share of recent high school graduates have heard the message that high school is no longer sufficient to get good jobs and live a middle class American lifestyle. And they have acted on it. But scratch beneath the surface of this data and the picture quickly turns mixed. The good news is that:

White high school graduates were enrolled in college at a record high rate of 69.4%.
Male high school graduates were also enrolled at a record high rate of 66.5%. But this is just barely above the rate of 63.2% in 1968. Seems that boys appreciate college more during times of war.
The non-white college continuation rate was at a record high of 65.2%, but this was entirely due to the rate of 82.2% for those of other race (mainly Asians).

The darker side of these data are:

The college continuation rates for blacks and Hispanics were both down from previous highs. These numbers bounce around from year to year, so this may simply be a statistical spike. But they should be watched carefully. They are far below rates for whites.
The gap between white and black college continuation rates has been widening since 1999.
The gap between white and Hispanic rates is the widest for any major minority group.
The share of college freshmen who were recent high school graduates that are enrolled in 4-year colleges and universities has declined steadily from 68.1% in 2001 to 65.0% in 2005.

Most dramatic in these data are the shifting racial/ethnic composition of the annual classes of high school graduates and college freshmen.

The white share of high school graduates has declined from 93% in 1960, to 89% by 1970, 84% by 1980, 77% by 1990, 70% by 2000 and 66% by 2005. The actual numbers have declined from a peak of 2.8 million in 1975 to 2.1 million by 2005.
Between 1960 and 2005 the minority share of all high school graduates has increased from 7% to 34%. The number of minority high school graduates increased from 41 thousand in 1960 to 555 thousand by 2005.
The white share of college freshmen has declined from 95% in 1960 to 70% by 2005. The minority share has increased from 5% to 30% during the last 35 years.

In the new flat earth Global Human Capital economy the rest of the industrial and industrializing world is aggressively expanding college participation rates. Our have languished for the last decade or more. Renewed growth in college continuation rates is very good news indeed.

The Declining Economic Value of a Bachelor's Degree

2006-03-17T07:49:00.000-08:00

Labor market economists have recently noted the soft labor market for recent college graduates. Because these data are only for the last few years what has been observed may be a temporary legacy of the economic recession of the early years of this decade. Or, the globalization around 2000 of the Human Capital Economy that began in the U.S. in the early 1970s may now be permanently affecting the labor market for college graduates in ways similar to the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs that has plagued less educated workers for decades.

What is clear is that colleges and universities have continued to aggressively increase the price of higher to students while the labor market for their product--graduates--has softened. A soft labor market for college graduates has not deterred higher education institutions from increasing the prices they charge for tuition, fees, room and board. This disjunture between benefits and costs of a college education has diminished the economic value of a bachelor's degree since 2000 for both men and women.

Our crude benefit/cost calculation is a ratio of the difference between the incomes of bachelor's degrees and high school graduates (ages 25 and over), divided by the price of higher education (tuition and fees, room and board).

Men: At public universities this benefit/cost ratio has hovered around 3 since 1967. The range has been between 2.56 (1996) and 3.42 (2000). But in 2003 this ratio dropped to 2.58 and by 2004 it had dropped to an all-time low of 2.39.
Women: At public universities this benefit/cost ratio rose from about 1.2 between 1967 and 1980, to a peak of 1.75 in 1993 and again in 2000. Thereafter this ratio has steadily declined to 1.32 in 2004, or about where it was in 1983.

We get similar results for private colleges and universities. Our crude benefit/cost ratio for men in 2004 is lower in 2004 than it has been for any other year than 1996. The ratio for women is lower in 2004 than it has been since 1982. The directions are all down since 2000.

Unless the income differential between college and high school graduates resumes its historic widening trend colleges and universities will have to curtail annual price increases to preserve enrollment demand for their higher education services. The outsourcing of college graduate jobs will clearly weaken the job market for recent college graduates. To preserve the benefit/cost ratio institutions will have to limit annual price increases to the annual change in the income differential between high school and college graduates.

Look Who Is Coming to Lunch

2006-03-04T03:10:00.000-08:00

In FFY2005 43.5% of the K-12 student enrollment were approved for free or reduced-price school lunches under the National School Lunch Program administered by the Food and Nutrition Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. To be eligible for this program benefit the student must live in a family with income below 185% of the federal poverty level. The 43.5% figure for FFY2005 is the highest on record in the current Program. In 4 states over 60 percent of the K-12 children are approved for subsidized school lunches: District of Columbia (69.8%), Mississippi (65.3%), Louisiana (63.5%),and New Mexico (60.6%). In five states less than 30 percent of the children are eligible for subsidized school lunches: New Hampshire (19.8%), North Dakota (26.2%), Connecticut (28.5%), Massachusetts (28.6%) and Vermont (28.9%).

The share of K-12 students eligible for subsidized lunches has increased by 6.5% from 37.0% in FFY1993 to 43.5% in FFY2005. The rate of growth in the share of school children living below 185% of poverty has accelerated since FFY2001 when it was 40.0%. Between FFY1993 and FFY2005 the share of K-12 enrollment approved for subsidized school lunches increased in 49 states and decreased in just two states. The largest increases were is: Oregon (13.8%), Indiana (13.5%), Tennessee (13.4%), District of Columbia (13.2%), Idaho (12.9%) and Illinois (12.8%). The two states with declines were South Dakota (14.4%) and North Dakota (1.9%). (The South Dakota data for FFY1993 look fishy to me.)

These children living below 185 percent of poverty represent a very large and growing share of our country's future workforce, voters, citizens and taxpayers. How well we higher educate them when they reach college age will largely determine this country's future economic prosperity, government tax revenues, domestic tranquility, political engagement and vitality and social cohesion. We are doing a simply terrible job of higher educating them now. Our federal, state and institutional policies have been turning away from meeting the preparation, financing and support needs of children from low income families since 1980. We should ponder carefully what we are doing (or not doing) and where we are taking the country with our actions (or inaction) today.

Public Universities: Refocusing from Low Income to Non-Resident

2006-02-19T09:19:00.000-08:00

Public higher education has been treated brutally in state budgeting since about 1980. States have been shifting their fiscal resources toward corrections (prisons, law enforcement, courts) and Medicare (health care for poor people) and away from everything else, especially public higher education. The resulting fiscal pressure on public universities has led directly to higher tuition charges to students.

Less obviously state universities have increased their pursuit of non-resident students who typically pay tuitions that average 271 percent of those paid by state resident students according to tuition date reported by the Washington Higher Education Coordinating Board. Between 1994 and 2002 the share of first-time freshmen at public universities and 4-year colleges increased from 15.0 to 16.2 percent of all admitted freshmen. The non-resident share of freshmen increased in 36 of the 51 states (including DC), and decreased in the remaining 15 states. The states with the largest increases in non-resident shares of freshmen enrollments between 1994 and 2002 were Hawaii (+18.9%), Rhode Island (+16.0%) and Delaware (+14.3%).

Even less obvious than the shift from state residents to non-residents is the shirking of Pell Grant recipient enrollment by public universities. Low income students do not make much money for public universities desperately seeking alternative revenues to offset declining state support. Undergraduate Pell Grant recipients are probably more costly because they may come to campus less well prepared for the academic and social challenges of college enrollment. Between 1992 and 2003 the share of Pell Grant recipients in public universities increased by 2.6%, compared to an increase of 6.2% for all postsecondary education. Low income student enrollment growth has been shifted primarily to community colleges and to a lesser degree to proprietary schools.

The public university shift toward non-residents and away from low income students makes short term budget sense. It helps fill budget gaps created by inadequate state appropriations. But it also further disengages state universities from the needs of their states, such as the growing share of students in the K-12 pipeline that are on free or reduced price school lunches (family incomes below 185% of federal poverty level). State universities focused on higher educating the affluent and non-residents weaken their claim to state financial support. Both public universities and state budgeteers are locked in a death spiral of mutual self-destruction. Both should ponder the consequences of the decisions they have made over the last 25 years. Our future depends on very different choices.

Institutional Graduation Rates by Academic Selectivity

2006-02-09T06:00:00.000-08:00

Institutional graduation rates are largely determined by the academic qualifications of the students they admit. More selective admissions institutions tend to have higher graduation rates than do less selective institutions as Astin pointed out more than a decade ago. The institutions that have higher or lower graduation rates than the rates predicted by the academic qualifications of their admitted freshmen differ from their peers in ways that offer useful insight into more and less successful institutional retention strategies such as academic and social integration, first-year experience and learning communities.

But there is another more troubling aspect to selective college admissions: the criteria used in selection (SAT, ACT, high school grades and class rank) are so highly correlated with family income that colleges could substitute the students' parents' federal income tax return for test scores, letters of recommendation, essays and campus visits to build similar entering freshman classes. These class-based admissions criteria tend to exclude students born into low income families. And this exclusion diminishes low income students' chances of ever graduating from college.

We have recently re-analyzed a data file on institutional graduation rates prepared by the Higher education Research Institute at UCLA. Astin and his colleagues gathered graduation status at 4 and 6 years on a sample of 56,818 freshmen who started college in 1994 at 262 baccalaureate-granting institutions. From this file Astin published Degree Attainment Rates at American Colleges and Universities (January 2005). We used this file to calculate graduation rates for freshmen from different family income levels at institutions with different levels of admissions selectivity. Controlling for SAT score our analysis finds that at all levels of family income and all levels of SAT scores graduation rates increase with admissions selectivity.

For example for 1994 freshmen from families with incomes of $0 to $25,000 and SAT scores between 1001 and 1099, six year graduation rates by institutional selectivity were:
Low selectivity 53.6%
Medium selectivity 61.3%
High selectivity 69.3%
This pattern holds across family income levels, SAT score ranges, and institutional types and controls.

My conclusion from these findings is that the exclusion of students from low income family backgrounds by class-based admissions criteria at selective admission colleges and universities diminishes the overall graduation prospects for students born into low income families. It also inflates the graduation prospects of students born into affluent families. In other words the current college admissions system is enriching the rich and impoverishing the poor.

Higher education has utterly failed to grasp the key role it now plays as the gatekeeper to the American middle class. The alternative paths to the middle class through family farming and manufacturing employment in earlier stages of economic development no longer exist. Who gets into higher education and who gets into selective admission colleges now determines who gets to most fully experience the American lifestyle. The class-based admissions criteria currently employed by selective admission colleges and universities are dividing educational opportunity along the line of inherited--not earned--privilege. I cannot imagine anything more destructive of what makes the United States uniquely a land of opportunity for the talented and ambitious--unique in the world and unique in history.

Social Inclusion in Tertiary Education

2006-01-27T09:40:00.000-08:00

When I meet with European colleagues at the annual meeting of the European Access Network I am struck by their commitment to "social inclusion" in tertiary education. It is a term they use often. This is not a term I hear in policy dialogue in the United States. And I have come to think its not just a difference in terminology. I do not think that American's think of higher education and social inclusion as linked in any particular way.

The Europeans speak of national commissions and ministerial reports that provide guidance to national policy makers, program designers and resource commitments to broadening opportunity for tertiary education. They link these commission reports to national initiatives. And the annual report Education at a Glance published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) provides abundant evidence that their initiatives have produced huge gains in tertiary education participation and attainment over at least the last 15 years.

Meanwhile in the United States our college participation rates have stopped growing in the 1990s (different data sets give slightly different dates), and we now have an older generation that has more higher education than does the generation of their children, according to OECD data. While the Europeans (and the rest of the world) make bold initiatives to increase the human capital of their future workforces, we have turned away from progressive social policy toward social exclusion and reinforcement of disparities in educational attainment, income and wealth.

In the United States since about 1980 we have come to practice social exclusion. This began with federal retreat from need-based financial aid, with state decisions to shift the costs of higher education from taxpayers to students and to create large merit scholarship programs, and with self-indulgent enrollment management practices of selective admission 4-year colleges and universities that focus on students born into affluence.

In the short term the enrollment consequences of the shift from the socially inclusive policies of the 1960s and 1970s to the socially exclusive policies of the 1980s, 1990s and this decade are now clear in higher education participation and distribution data. College participation rates have been stagnant since the mid 1990s, low income and minority students are increasing excluded from 4-year institutions and are increasingly concentrated in public 2-year and proprietary institutions, the United States usually ranks last among the 30 OECD countries in gains in college participation rates since about 1990, and the gains in bachelor's degree attainment since 1980 have gone overwhelmingly to students born into the top quartile of family income (about $96,000 per year).

In the long term the economic and social consequences of the shift from social inclusion to social exclusion will mean that higher education is causing income concentration, political disengagement and social, racial and class segregation. The failure to sustain a national commitment to social inclusion (won over dead bodies in the brutal 1960s) is leading us to the injustices likely to repeat the cycle. The social exclusion choices we have made in federal, state and institutional higher education policies since 1980 are leading us back to conditions that by thoughtful choice no one should ever want to repeat.

The Boys Project and the Messiah

2006-01-23T19:29:00.000-08:00

I have now been pounding away on the problems of boys in education (especially higher education) since 1995 and I have nothing to show for it. Clearly talking about the scarcity of boys in college accomplishes little more than making people aware that it exists.

For several years reporters (usually women, who like to write about this issue) have been challenging me: Okay, so what do we do about the problem? What do you recommend be done? I just don't know. As one who studies demography I can see that there is a serious problem. I only know that affirmative action for boys in college admissions could diminish opportunities for better prepared and motivated women. I oppose affirmative action for males because it addresses symptoms and not causes--although I am not sure what the causes are.

So, after a fruitless decade where males continue to fall ever farther behind females, a messiah steps forward and agrees to lead a national effort to do something based on real science. And sure enough, as I had long suspected, it is a woman: Prof. Judith Kleinfeld of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Dr. Kleinfeld has written on the subject of males in education in the past. She is now organizing a national boys project and is gathering the kind of scientific talent that we might expect to provide answers to the question: Okay, so what should we do about the problem?

This boys project will begin at the beginning: How are little boys different from little girls, and what does this mean for the educational experience we design for each? At last I can see a way to make progress on this terribly important issue.

State Tax Fund Appropriations for Higher Education

2006-01-20T07:15:00.000-08:00

FY2006 state tax fund appropriations for higher education have been reported by Jim Palmer and his colleagues at Illinois State University (see Grapevine). We have added the control of state personal income to his data to measure state investment effort in higher education. The Grapevine data and our reworking of it present a decidedly mixed picture of state higher education funding.

FY2006 state tax fund appropriations for higher education was $6.89 per $1000 of state personal income. This was the same as FY2005, and slightly above the low of $6.87 for FY2004. While state appropriations increased by 5.90 percent between FY2005 and FY2005, state personal income (the presumed state tax base) increased by 5.96 percent between CY2003 and CY2004.

But overall state investment effort has been ratcheting downward since FY1976 when it peaked at $10.58. The downward lurches have occurred during periods of economic recession in the early 1980s, early 1990s and again in the early 2000s. The current pause awaits the next national economic recession before lurching downward further. Historically corrections and Medicaid have been crowding higher education (and everything else) out of state budgets. The reduction in state investment effort in higher education since about FY1980 has been accompanied by huge increases in the tuition and fees paid by college students. Effectively states have been shifting the costs of higher education from state taxpayers to students enrolled in public colleges and universities.

States vary widely in their state tax investment effort for higher education. In FY2006 the national leaders are New Mexico ($14.42), Wyoming ($12.76), Hawaii ($11.95), North Carolina ($11.69) and North Dakota ($11.60). The national laggards are New Hampshire ($2.46), Massachusetts ($3.40), Colorado ($3.58), Vermont ($4.16) and Missouri ($4.88).

For current management purposes the year-to-year changes are most important. Between FY2005 and FY2006 19 states increased their investment effort, 4 states held steady, and 28 states reduced their higher education investment effort. The largest gainers are Hawaii (+$1.21), Alabama (+$.90), North Dakota (+$.53), Montana (+$.41) and Oklahoma (+$.34). The largest losers are West Virginia (-$.82), Mississippi (-$.79), Iowa (-$.76), Wyoming (-$.41) and Idaho (-$.40).

I have been writing in OPPORTUNITY about the privatization of public higher education since the early 1990s. (My first analyses were from the early 1980s.) Others have recently picked up this theme. While I have watched public institutions struggle with inadequate state appropriations for 25 years a number of things have become obvious to me:

The problem is not going away. The aging of the population places extraordinary demands on state budgets and higher education cannot compete with old folks. Higher education never could compete with health care and corrections. It probably cannot compete with tax cutting initiatives.
Higher education is far too self-absorbed in its own Ivory Tower world to understand how disengaged it has become from the pressing issues facing elected state officials.
The costs of public higher education have been and will continue to be relentlessly shifted from state taxpayers to students. Very few states have made any provision to cover these tuition increases for students who cannot afford them. The states have taken a walk on this one.
States are largely responsible for the college affordability crisis. The burden of this failure is born entirely by students born into the bottom half of the family income distribution who are increasingly concentrated in public 2-year colleges while students born into affluent families are increasingly concentrated in 4-year colleges and universities.
Private higher education has used the real financing problems of public higher education as a smokescreen for very large tuition increases of their own that have been used to feather their own nests. The growing compensation differential between private and public higher education faculty is the clearest evidence of this.

Male Shares of Undergraduates by Family Income

2006-01-16T10:29:00.000-08:00

The scarcity of males in higher education has strong class-based roots: males are under-represented compared to females by the largest margin at the lowest family income levels. As income rises the gap narrows. In this analysis we used data from five National Postsecondary Student Aid Studies (NPSAS) to examine the male shares of various undergraduate enrollments. The NPSAS studies used were for 1990, 1993, 1996, 2000 and 2004. Remember that males are about 51% of the college-age population.

Among dependent undergraduates (students less than age 24) males were 47.0% of all undergraduate students in 2004. They were 48.3% in 1990, 48.6% in 1993, 47.4% in 1996 and 46.7% in 2000. By quartiles of parental income the male shares in 2004 were: 44.0% in the bottom quartile ($0 to $34,288), 45.3% in the second quartile ($34,289 to $62,240), 47.6% in the third quartile ($62,241 to $95,006), and 51.7% in the top quartile ($95,007 and over). Between 1990 and 2004 the male share of undergraduate enrollment declined by 1.5% in the bottom parental income quartile, by 2.3% in the second quartile, by 2.2% in the third quartile and by 0.8 percent in the top quartile.

Among independent undergraduates (age 24 and over) males were 37.8 percent of undergraduates in 2004. They were 41.2% in 1990, 40.7% in 1993, 39.1% in 1996, and 40.8% in 2000. By quartiles of student/spouse' income in 2004 males were 39.5% in the bottom quartile ($0 to $6823), 37.3% in the second quartile ($6824 to $16,776), 35.5% in the third quartile ($16,777 to $34,048) and 39.0% of the top quartile ($34,049 and up). Between 1990 and 2004 the male share declined by 0.8% in the bottom quartile, 5.4% in the second quartile, 8.2% in the third quartile and 0.7% in the top quartile.

The only good news in these data is that the male share of black dependent undergraduate enrollments rose by 4.5% between 1990 and 2004. This was the only racial/ethnic group that experienced an increase and this increase occurred in all four quartiles of parental income. If blacks are the canaries in the coal mine on this issue then the turn around for dependent black males is a good omen since they led the original decline in male shares of undergraduate enrollments.

Double Standard for Labor Economists

2006-01-15T06:22:00.000-08:00

Labor economists must be carefully watched for what they say compared to what they do. My experience is that they do not all believe that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. Two cases to make this point:

One labor economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for decades has pointed out that only 20 percent of all jobs in the economy require a college degree (1970s) or more recently only 30 percent do. This has caused no end of trouble in state budgeting for higher education where typically 60 percent or more of high school graduates go on to college. States have used this BLS figure as justification for reducing state investment in higher education. However this economist sent both of his children (100 percent) to college.

Another labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute recently told me that there is recent labor market weakness in the absorption of college graduates into the labor force. That means that government investment in higher education can be reduced. He said that as an economist he would offer one set of advice to the President about appropriate government investment levels in college trained workers, but that as a father he practiced a different (and far higher) standard for his own children. 100 percent of his children attended college.

Besides this hypocrisy I have long been troubled by the disparity between economists' fascination with economic growth, efficient allocation of resources and other important economic principles and their indifference to the allocation of social resources and economic growth benefits. Income and wealth concentration are trivial within the profession. And when it comes to who gets a higher education one hears not a peep that the share of bachelor's degrees awarded to students born into the top quartile of family income has grown from 44 percent in 1979 to 58 percent by 2004. At the same time the share of bachelor's degrees awarded to people in the bottom half of the family income distribution has gone from 28 percent in 1979 to 21 percent by 2004.

The double standard of these two labor economists is troubling because they claim a greater share of higher educational opportunity for their own children than they advise for others, and it is always those with lowest incomes and weakest political voices that bear the consequences of their influential policy recommendations. The indifference of these kinds of economic policy influences to growing inequality in the U.S. is ultimately socially destructive, democratically divisive and economically weakening. I remain deeply troubled by the myopic, tunnel vision of many economists in their public policy work. Their work deserves only a narrow respect and voice.

Unmet Financial Need for Undergraduate Students

2005-12-28T06:53:00.000-08:00

From the 2004 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study we have calculated unmet financial need for undergraduate students for the 2003-04 academic year. Unmet financial need is cost of attendance less expected family contribution less all financial aid received (grants, loans, work-study and other financial aid).

For all undergraduates in the U.S. total unmet need was $31.9 billion.

Sectors: public 4-year: $8.6 billion; public 2-year: $9.8 billion; private 4-year: $8.1 billion; private less than 4-year: $0.4 billion; proprietary: $5.1 billion
Status: dependent: $15.0 billion; independent: $16.9 billion
Income quartile: bottom: $17.3 billion; second: $10.3 billion; third: $4.3 billion; top: $0
States: California: $4.6 billion; Connecticut: $0.5 billion; Georgia: $0.9 billion; Illinois: $1.3 billion; Indiana: $0.5 billion; Minnesota: $0.4 billion; Nebraska: $0.05 billion; New York: $2.8 billion

Unmet financial need appears to be growing. College costs are rising (rapidly), family incomes are stagnant, the Pell Grant has been flat for too long, and loan limits have been stuck at ancient levels during several reauthorizations of the Higher Education Act. Over the last 25 years the federal government has lost its way in financial aid, most states have stuck their heads in the sand over the issue, and far too many institutions have concluded that if the federal and state governments no longer care about college affordability that they don't have to either.

The predictable result of large and growing unmet financial need is that the financial barriers to higher education opportunity that financial aid was created to remove are now re-emerging. Student enrollment decisions of access, choice and completion are increasingly limited by these financial barriers to higher education. And so we see students from low and lower-middle income families increasingly concentrated in the lowest priced institutions--our community colleges, and students from the highest income families increasingly concentrated in our elite public and private colleges and universities. If this isn't class warfare then I don't know what is.

College Participation Rates for Low Income Students

2005-12-22T03:49:00.000-08:00

We have just updated through 2003-04 our calculations of college participation rates for students from low income family backgrounds. This rate is the ratio of dependent Pell Grant recipients by state of residence to 4th to 9th graders approved for free or reduced-price school lunches nine years earlier. The time series of available data span the years 1992-93 through 2003-04.

For the U.S. college participation rate for students from low income families was 27.1 percent in 2003-04. This was up from 24.7 percent in 2002-03 and 22.2 percent in 2001-02. In fact the 2003 rate was the highest over this time span.

The states with the highest rates were: Iowa (43.7%), North Dakota (43.2%), Montana (38.1%), Utah (37.7%), Nebraska (27.1%) and Minnesota (34.5%). This list affirms my long held view that life is so boring here in the upper Midwest that going to school is the highlight of the day for most children. Focusing attention on school is certainly helped by the absence of ocean beaches, ski slopes and big cities--especially when the temperature outside is below freezing for a good part of the school year.

The states with the lowest college participation rates for students from low income families in 2003-04 are: Louisiana (13.0%), Alaska (13.5%), Mississippi (14.6%), District of Columbia (15.1%), Texas (16.1%), Tennessee (16.5%) and South Carolina (16.8%).

Women, Higher Education, Student Loans and Babies

2005-12-20T11:27:00.000-08:00

A demographic fact of life is that women need to average 2.1 babies over their reproductive lifespans. If they have more the population grows, and if they have less the population declines and eventually reaches extinction.

Currently American women are averaging less than 1.9 children each. This is down from 3.1 in 1976 and 2.1 in 1990. More important the average number of children declines with increasing levels of education. According to data just released from the Census Bureau the average number of children born to women 40 to 44 years old at different levels of educational attainment is:
Not a high school graduate: 2.5
High school graduate: 1.9
College, no degree: 1.8
Associate degree: 1.9
Bachelor's degree: 1.7
Graduate/professional: 1.6

It is hardly in this country's long term interest to program itself for extinction. Yet we burden young college educated women--like men--with very large educational loan debt that must be repaid in the decade following college. These are exactly the same years when women who want children should be starting their families. Our public policy today is not to forgive women any part of their educational debt repayment obligation. We say in our loan repayment policies that it is more important to get a job and repay educational loans than it is to reproduce the species. This is nonsense. Society has a far greater interest in perpetuating itself than it does requiring women with educational loans to repay them instead of starting families.

What we need is an educational loan repayment policy that provides college educated women with a window for child bearing and rearing while they are young enough to do so. Perhaps the federal government could treat the first four years of a child's life as if the mother were still in college and not require education loan repayment for this period. Or perhaps the federal government could make the loan payments for the mother during this period. These costs are likely to be substantial (as they are today for in-school interest payments to lenders), but extinction is a more serious consequence for society.

The Most Exclusive Gated Communities of Higher Education

2005-12-10T09:08:00.000-08:00

By every measure I can find students from low and lower-middle income families are a large and growing share of K-12 and higher education enrollments. They represent a growing of the future workforce, voters, citizens, taxpayers and parents. How well we higher educate them is largely determining our country's future. And parts of higher education are clearly trying to serve these students.

But not in the most exclusive Gated Communities of higher education. On these campuses students with Pell Grants represent very small and usually shrinking shares of undergraduate enrollments.

Out of 534 public 4-year college and university campuses, the four with the worst representation of Pell Grant recipients among their undergraduate students were all public campuses in Virginia: College of William and Mary (8.3%), University of Virginia (8.4%), University of Mary Washington (9.5%) and James Madison University (9.9%). Four more public colleges and universities in Virginia made the bottom 50 institutions by this measure of class exclusivity.
Out of 1239 private 4-year colleges and university campuses, the 2 with the smallest shares of Pell Grant recipients among their undergraduates were also in Virginia: Washington and Lee University (3.6%) and University of Richmond (6.3%). Another private college in Virginia made the bottom 50 by this class exclusivity measure.

Virginia had 11 colleges and universities on our list of the most exclusive Gated Communities of higher education for 2003-04 out of the worst 100. Other states near the bottom of our list were: Massachusetts with 10, Pennsylvania had 9, Connecticut had 7, North Carolina and Maryland had 6 each. The geographic concentration of these class-based higher education institutions in the mid-Atlantic and New England regions is duly noted. (For further reading see my previous post on Five Questions for Enrollment Management and the December issue of OPPORTUNITY.)

Five questions for Enrollment Management

2005-12-04T06:55:00.000-08:00

I am deeply troubled by the short-sighted, self-interest focus on revenues and prestige reflected in the enrollment management decisions of many selective admissions 4-year colleges and universities, both private and public. The public interest has been seriously short-changed by these self-serving institutional decisions. Here are five questions for enrollment managers (and their college presidents) to ponder:

Should states continue to provide financial support to public institutions that enroll small or declining shares of students from low income/first generation and/or under-represented minority populations?
Should institutions that enroll small or declining shares of students from low income/first generation and/or under-represented minority populations be placed on probation for continued participation in federal Title IV student financial aid programs?
Should private institutions with substantial endowments that enroll small or declining shares of students from low income/first generation and/or under-represented minorities continue to receive tax exempt status?
Is college admission too important to be left to the colleges to decide themselves?
Is your institution a part of the problem or is your institution a part of the solution?

Go Boys Go!

2005-11-30T07:29:00.000-08:00

The National Center for Education Statistics has recently shared with me some as yet unpublished data on higher education degree awards for 2003-04 by degree level and state. These data continue to show women far outpacing men in bachelor's degrees: 804,117 for women compared to 595,425 for men.

However, these new data suggest that since 2000 the boys may finally be waking up to the need to get a college education. The women continue to make extraordinary year-to-year gains in bachelor's and other degrees received. But since 2000, at last, the men seem to be making nearly comparable gains year-to-year. Between 2000 and 2004 the number of bachelor's degrees awarded to women increased by 96,609 (13.7%), while the number of bachelor's degrees awarded to men increased by 65,058 (12.2%). This may not look like progress. But between 1970 and 2000 the number of bachelor's degrees awarded to women increased by 366,289 (107.3%) while the number awarded to men increased by 79,270 (17.6%).

While the gender gap in higher education continues to widen, the rate at which it is widening has slowed. And the reason it has slowed is not because women have slowed their own progress. It is because the men are finally starting to make some real progress of their own.

Purchasing power of Pell Grant maximum award

2005-11-28T17:51:00.000-08:00

I have just updated our previously reported analysis of the loss of purchasing power of the Pell Grant maximum award. Following the Expected Family Contribution (EFC), this is the foundation of needy students' financial aid packages to pay college attendance costs. Where the EFC is zero the student receives the maximum Pell Grant which is currently $4050. But if the Pell Grant maximum award bought as much higher education in 2005-06 that it bought in 1979-80 then the Pell Grant maximum award would have to be:
$ 9720 in public universities
$ 9523 in other public 4-year colleges
$ 6796 in community colleges
$ 11,223 in private universities
$ 9953 in private 4-year colleges
$ 10,506 in private 2-year colleges
Sadly, the difference between $4050 and these needed amounts has been left to Pell Grant recipients and their families to work out. Usually this means more work, or more borrowing, or too often moving down the price ladder of higher education to a community college where Pell Grant recipients are increasingly concentrated.