Whispered Policies

Friday's Chronicle reports on a new study that points out how difficult it can be to identify which colleges and universities have no-loans policies designed to enhance affordability. Author Laura Perna and her colleagues find that the majority of elite institutions with these policies fail to advertise them in ways that are accessible to low-income students and families-- effectively maintaining their status as "bastions of privilege." The researchers then go on to make several helpful suggestions about how colleges could change their tactics to increase awareness and uptake of their progressive efforts.

But they could've gone one step further and discussed the incentives colleges have to maintain the status quo-- that is, to continue making their current and former students and staff feel good with liberal actions, garnering attention in elite venues such as the New York Times, without fundamentally changing their overall enrollment demographics or costing too much money. Call me cynical, but as a sociologist it strikes me that this is exactly how power is effectively maintained in the face of pressure for socially responsible actions from powerful institutions.

According to another recent study by economists Waddell and Singell, of the just-over 384,000 Pell Grant recipients attending 4-year institutions in 2000, only 0.3% were enrolled at Ivy League institutions (which disproportionately possess these no-loan policies). Across elite private institutions, Pell recipients rarely amount to more than 1% of the entering class. In 2000, there were only 108 Pell recipients in the freshman class at Harvard, and just 50 at Princeton. These are tiny, tiny numbers. So if no-loans policies actually resulted in massive increases in applications from low-income students, we could see many consequences for those schools. For one, their institutional aid budgets would have to grow-- if low-income students managed to get past the admissions hurdle. Second, depending on how exactly admissions dealt with the increased applicant pool (e.g. whether a 'thumb' was placed on the scale so as to ensure a reasonable proportion were admitted-- an action recommended by Bill Bowen), graduation rates might be affected. Third, you'd see a larger, more visible contingent of people on campuses from different family backgrounds, affecting social dynamics. Many of these outcomes could be interpreted as both positive and negative, depending on your perspective.

Simply put, right now colleges with small numbers of low-income undergraduates can afford to adopt no-loans policies. Based on the two studies discussed here, this is likely because their policies are only weakly communicated to the groups who'd be affected (I hestitate to call these the "targeted audiences" however) and the effects on enrollment are small and subtle. For example, Waddell and Singell conclude that such policies do not increase the overall number of needy institutions at institutions but do have some effect in skewing the composition of that group toward somewhat lower-income students who've traveled longer distances to attend college. Since positive publicity generated by laudatory articles in the elite press may well generate enough new alumni donations to offset current costs, the whole thing may be close to a "wash" --under current circumstances. More effective publicity and outreach to families who do not read the mainstream liberal elite newspapers or visit websites like finaid.org to get their information about college, might change the game. Under those new conditions, I have to wonder-- would no-loans policies continue to be so popular in elite higher education?

Overhauling Teacher Prep

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's call for an overhaul of teacher preparation programs is certainly warranted. Reports such as Arthur Levine's in 2006 have highlighted weaknesses in the training received by many graduates of traditional, university-based teacher preparation programs.

I'm one however who believes that there is role both for university-based as well as alternative providers of teacher preparation, such as Teach For America and The New Teacher Project. In a policy brief for the New Teacher Center (and related blog post), I discuss some promising partnerships between institutions of higher education and school districts -- teacher training pipelines that by and large provide the hands-on experience and training called for by Secretary Duncan and contained within many other diagnoses of what ails traditional teacher prep.

Likewise, the Carnegie Corporation's Teachers for a New Era initiative provides evidence of what effective university-based programs can and should look like.

To answer the Secretary's call, we needn't start from scratch.


UPDATE: Alexander Russo has the text of the Secretary's speech here. Secretary Duncan singles out Wisconsin-based Alverno College (among other institutions) and the state of Louisiana for praise. I also discuss both Alverno College and Louisiana's teacher preparation accountability system in my policy brief.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Once upon a time, college students could pay their tuition with a mix of family support, financial aid, and perhaps a little work. Today, family support and aid are woefully inadequate for a broad swath of undergraduates, and full-time work is common.

Is working while in college truly necessary? Are the earnings used for academic expenses related to postsecondary education, or are they frittered away on life's pleasures? Since a handful of studies indicate a negative association between working long hours and rates of degree completion, these questions have taken on broader significance.

Unfortunately, few studies track students' income and expenditures in systematic ways. To better understand spending patterns, and attempt to tease out the reasons for those patterns, one would ideally have longitudinal data collected for a large sample of students, and complemented by in-depth interviews with a sub-sample of students to delve more deeply into the reasons underlying decisions, and validate the measures employed. Now true confession: Together with Doug Harris, I am conducting just such a study right now, the Wisconsin Scholars Longitudinal Study. But that's not why I'm writing this-- we don't yet have data to report on.

But apparently someone else does. A few weeks ago, a news outlet reported the headline "Will Work for Beer," covering the release of a new study from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, published in the Journal of Population Economics. In that study the authors used national cross-sectional data and determined that the earnings students make from work are not enough to replace contributions from their parents, or cover tuition costs. According to the report, "We test several hypotheses regarding the financial motives for and academic effects of college student employment and find empirical support for the hypothesis that a decrease in parental transfers increases the work hours of four-year college students. We also find that an increase in the net price of schooling increases the number of hours worked by both four-year and two-year college students."

Ok. So the decision to work may have something (but not everything) to do with how much support parents provides and how expensive college is. Unsurprising. Not particularly newsworthy.

But the lead author didn't stop there. Instead, she waded into popular stereotypes about college students, telling the reporter that the results mean that the drive to work isn't coming from a need to really make ends meet-- instead, "students...work to have ‘beer money,' money for entertainment, money to pay other expenses, just not their tuition."

Huh?

Her conclusion took a gigantic interpretive leap from her data. Notably, it's not a conclusion found anywhere in the actual research paper. All her evidence suggests is that students' work isn't generating income equivalent to parental contributions or in line with college costs. This could mean many things, including that students have a hard time finding enough work to generate sufficient earnings. Of course it suggests they likely need to find other ways to make ends meet-- including loans. But it says nothing about what they use their work earnings for, how they prioritize expenses, what they go without, etc. With her statement to the press, the author did little more than simply impute meaning to meaningless results.

Why mention "beer money"? It's not uncommon for an academic paper to simply say what it shows-- and conclude that while we need to know more about explanations for patterns in the data, we just don't have the information in the dataset to tell us what we need to know. Why step outside those bounds, and lend fodder to the fire? In what way is this helpful-- to policymakers, to students, or frankly, to anyone?

Working students are often struggling students. There's good qualitative evidence on this, even if the quantitative evidence isn't yet available. Professors dislike them because they tend to fall asleep in class, having been up serving on the graveyard shift instead of studying. Their classmates often don't know them well, since student-employees have little time left for socializing. Their grades are lower than average, their stress levels high, and their chances of degree completion relatively low. So why do we feel the need to minimize their need to work, to mock them for it, to enforce a stereotype that their earnings are spent at bars? It seems nothing less than classist-- in the absence of providing students with sufficient financial supports to make working during college truly optional, we try and make ourselves feel better by telling stories that students work not out of true financial need, but rather a desire to imbibe.

Maybe that helps some fraction of folks sleep at night, but I seriously doubt it's grounded in any kind of truth.

Teachers' Voice

An important survey was released this week that captures teachers' perceptions of their professional working environment. The national study of 900 teachers by Public Agenda describes educators as falling into one of three groups: "Disheartened," "Contented," and "Idealists." It also raises some serious policy implications for the placement, retention and longevity of teachers based on teachers' perceptions about working conditions, why they entered the profession, and their opinions about proposed policy reforms.

But as useful as this survey may be in defining these issues at a 30,000-foot level, it does not approach the power and utility of teacher surveys that offer entire populations of educators in individual states and districts the opportunity to share their voice about working conditions, leadership support, resources, opportunities for professional learning, etc. In turn, these anonymous surveys also provide contextualized, customized summary data at the state-, district- and school-level based on the perceptions and opinions of local educators.

Teaching and Learning Conditions surveys have been led by the New Teacher Center in states such as Alabama, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina and West Virginia, and in school districts such as Fairfax County, Virginia. They provide state and district policymakers and educational leaders with powerful data to define issues that need to be addressed in school and districts that have major implications for the quality and effectiveness of teachers and principals.

Read the Public Agenda report, but also think about conducting a Teaching and Learning Conditions survey in your state or school district. What do the teachers where you live and work think?

Democrats, Poverty, and Schools

Renewing the War on Poverty clearly needs to be one of President Barack Obama's main objectives during the coming years. As Barbara Ehrenreich and so many others are documenting, the deteriorated safety net is failing poor people during this recession, leaving them in dire straits.

So when Nick Kristof decided to pen a column for the New York Times urging the Democrats to again lead a fight against poverty, his heart was in the right place. But his aim was way off. On Thursday, he wrote that the Dems must focus on public schools, since they "constitute a far more potent weapon against poverty than welfare, food stamps or housing subsidies. " Huh?

Social science researchers across the nation are scratching their heads. Where in the world did Kristof get this one? For decades, solid analyses have demonstrated that while aspects of schooling can be important in improving student outcomes and alleviating the effects of poverty, the effects of factors schools cannot and do not control are much greater (for a place to start, read Doug Downey's work). Kristof emphasizes teachers and improving teacher quality by taking on the teachers' unions because he reads the data to mean that "research has underscored that what matters most in education - more than class size or spending or anything - is access to good teachers." Simply put, wrong. Access to good teachers is the most important factor affecting student achievement that is under schools' control (or as many put it, the most important school-level factor). What matters most in educational outcomes is the poverty felt by students' families. And to my knowledge, no study has ever rigorously compared the effectiveness of interventions based on cash transfers, housing subsidies, and teacher quality improvement-- what's needed to reach the kind of conclusion with which Kristof drives his argument. At the same time, a simple glance at the relative effects of programs like Moving to Opportunity, New Hope, etc which target poverty itself rather than how adults interact with children from poverty (the aim of improving teacher quality), should convince anyone than his target is misplaced.

Experts who think daily about how to end poverty could, and undoubtedly will, inform the next steps taken by Democrats. Dems should listen to them, and not to Kristof. With that approach they will undoubtedly begin not with teachers' unions but rather by connecting job seekers to work that pays, installing strategies to promote stable families, making quality housing affordable and safe, and of course guaranteeing access to good health care.

California Knocks Down Data Firewall

California is adept at building firebreaks to stop advancing wildfires throughout the state. The inferno that is the student-teacher firewall issue was apparently doused yesterday when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill that eliminates a statutory ban on using student achievement data to evaluate teachers. The existence of such a restriction would have deemed California ineligible for a federal Race to the Top competitive grant award.

Here is the Governor's press release.

Here, here and here are background posts on the student-teacher data firewall issue in California.

Pondering Perkins

Since 1958, the Federal Perkins Student Loan Program has been providing low-interest loans to needy students via campus-based revolving funds. More than 600,000 students (mostly undergraduates with family incomes under $30,000) receive a Perkins each year. The current Perkins differs from other federal loan programs, most notably the Stafford, because it is subsidized (the interest doesn't begin accruing until 9 months after graduation) and has a lower interest rate (5%, compared to the 6.8% Stafford).

The Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) would change the Perkins in some notable ways, not all of which are clear improvements. The proposed changes are rather intricate, and as I've spent a fair bit of time puzzling over them lately I want to bring some of my nagging questions to this wider audience in an effort to gain some insights and answers. (In full disclosure, the financial aid officer at my university, Susan Fischer, is a vocal opponent of the changes. I have listened to her views, and considered why UW-Madison might resist the changes. Of course, what I'm writing here are my own thoughts, not hers.) Don't get me wrong-- I am generally very supportive of this piece of legislation, which I do think will expand college attainment and improve the American higher education system. I raise these issues in the hopes that tinkering with a few details might make it more effective.

As I understand it, the Obama Administration has several goals for changing the program: (1) increase efficiency via a move to direct lending, (2) expand access by substantially increasing the dollars allocated, and (3) create incentives to keep tuition (and private loan reliance) down by changing the allocation formula (right now the institutional 'fair share' is based partly on tuition costs, and this is thought to contribute to rising tuition).

In a nutshell, goal #2 would appear to be achieved via accomplishing goal #1-- moving to direct lending enables the investment in Perkins to grow from $1 to 6 billion. Goal #3 would appear to be achieved with a new formula that distributes money to campuses based partly on how much non-federal aid they provide, whether they charge below-average tuition and fees, and enrollment of Pell Grant recipients. But what worries me are some of the proposed accompanying changes and plausible unintended consequences. In particular:

(A) In the new version, Perkins becomes an unsubsidized loan, rather than a subsidized one. This would make the Perkins akin to the Stafford, albeit at a somewhat lower interest rate. This makes the program more expensive for students (anyone who thinks even $500 a year in additional interest doesn't matter to the decisions of poor kids just isn't paying attention), and therefore less attractive.How does this enhance access?

(B) In the new version, a match is required from colleges, which they are interpreting as "pay to play." If they do acquiesce, they'll likely draw that money out of need-based funds, or through raising tuition. This would seem to work at cross-purposes with the intentions of the allocation formula, and again, not increase access.

(C) The new allocation formula is likely to benefit private not-for-profit 4-year colleges the most (for more on why, see this cogent analysis by Education Sector).

(D) Most troubling, I am told that another big change is coming with the new Perkins (though I admit, I cannot find evidence of this change in the current legislative language-- I expect it's to come in the rule-making): Packaging rules will require that Perkins be packaged after the Stafford. In other words, financial aid officers must first offer (and students must accept) the unsubsidized Stafford at 6.8% interest, before offering the 5% Perkins. This strikes me as a substantial barrier, likely resulting in few students even getting to the Perkins. Everything we know about loan aversion among low-income populations, and the unwillingness of some of the lowest-cost colleges to even offer their students loans points in this direction. Again, how does this enhance access?

Are there other ways to achieve the same objectives? In particular, is it absolutely necessary to end the subsidy, and change the packaging rules? Could savings be achieved, instead, by ending those abysmal TEACH Grants and perhaps sacrificing GRAD Perkins as well? It might also make sense to keep the subsidy and end the 9-month grace period.

In summary, before we effectively end a mean-tested program offering low-interest loans, have we thought through every alternative and pondered every possible unintended consequence? I realize Perkins may feel like small potatoes in the context of this big bill, but with every penny mattering to our students in this recession, I think the proposed changes to the Perkins deserve closer attention.

Inn-O-Vate

Yesterday the U.S. Education Department released proposed regulations to govern the $650 million Investing in Innovation Fund, part of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, along with the $4 billion Race to the Top fund.

Education Week's Politics K-12 blog has a good summary of the proposed regulations, and the New York Times and Washington Post have articles worth reading as well.

Individual school districts or groups of districts can apply for the i3 grants, and entrepreneurial nonprofits can join with school districts to submit applications.

Under the proposed priorities, grants would be awarded in three categories:

• Scale-up Grants: The largest possible grant category is focused on programs and practices with the potential to reach hundreds of thousands of students. Applicants must have a strong base of evidence that their program has had a significant effect on improving student achievement.
• Validation Grants: Existing, promising programs that have good evidence of their impact and are ready to improve their evidence base while expanding in their own and other communities.
• Development Grants: The smallest grant level designed to support new and high-potential practices whose impact should be studied further.

Here is the link to the Education Department press release.

New Tune, Same Stupid Key

Well, it had to happen sometime. Faced with a thoughtful, responsive piece of federal legislation to reform the financial aid system, some ideologue had to come forward with a proposal to end federal student aid entirely. Yep, you heard me right-- get rid of financial aid. Throw out the baby with the bathwater.

The Chronicle is reporting that a director of the Cato Institute's Center for Education Freedom -- aka the freedom not to be helped by the government-- is purporting that "student aid explains the pain" of rising tuition. This "higher education expert" (honestly, some people are way too kind) argues that phasing out aid will make colleges more responsive to people who pay "with their own money."

Too bad this expert, Neal McCluskey, didn't bother to do his homework. If he'd cracked a book, he would've learned--fast-- how wrong he is. Not to mention unoriginal. Back in 1987 then-Secretary of Education Bill Bennett made the same argument in a New York Times op-ed titled "Our Greedy Colleges." And economists including Ron Ehrenberg, Caroline Hoxby, and Sandy Baum flatly rejected it--on empirical grounds-- as simplistic and ideologically convenient (much as Kevin Carey apparently did today). Since that time, plenty of studies have tested the hypothesis. As one (real) expert, Harvard's Bridget Terry Long, puts it, "Of the many studies that have tried to identify whether colleges react to federal financial aid, most find little to no response. While several studies do find a college price response, their overall results are mixed and often contradictory. In summary, none of the numerous studies on the subject have found a "smoking gun" in terms of college pricing behavior....the fact that these two trends (rising tuition and rising aid) move in similar directions does not mean that one caused the other." Heck, even Rich Vedder's shop has moved past the simplicity of the idea, instead developing a (somewhat) more nuanced twist in which aid contributes to rising spending, not rising tuition (the latter could occur, but isn't inevitable).

Yet the Bennett hypothesis keeps on rearing its ugly head. I think after more than 20 years of this nonsense it's time to call the idea what it is-- just plain stupid-- and stop giving ink to the people who repeat it.

Surprise! Public Support Boosts Public Enrollment

As I've described in several posts this year, there's an ongoing debate over the role, value, and outcomes of the private for-profit sector of higher education, particularly the 2-year schools. Community colleges are often compared to their for-profit counterparts, many times unfavorably. For example, their graduation rates are notably lower. And enrollment in the for-profits continues to rise rapidly, suggesting that consumers are voting with their feet, regardless of any hesitation on the part of academic researchers. The students, some say, are the best judge of institutional quality.

But a new study suggests that student behavior may reflect another factor: institutional resources. Community colleges are historically underfunded, and as I've argued elsewhere, this seriously affects their capacity to serve students. It's one thing to point to differences in practices between the community colleges and for-profit colleges, and another thing to attribute those differences to variation in the "will" or intentions of practitioners, rather than attribute them to under-funding and all that comes with it.

Stephanie Riegg Cellini, an assistant professor at George Washington University, has conducted a rigorous analysis of enrollment in California that tackles these hypotheses from a useful angle. She asks: What happens to enrollment when public support for community colleges increases? Does enrollment shift from private to public? Does the number of proprietary colleges decline?

Cellini examines what happens after local community college bond referenda are passed in the state, and uses an econometric approach (regression discontinuity) that allows her to mostly rule out the potential that enrollment is endogenous to the decisions of those referenda (e.g. that a desired increase in community college enrollment induces passage of the referenda, rather than the referenda inducing increases in enrollment). Her results, published in a peer-reviewed journal (American Economic Journal: Economic Policy), indicate that an "increase of $100 million in funding for a local community college causes approximately 700 students per county, or about 2 percent of sub-baccalaureate students, to switch from the private to the public sector in the first year after bond passage, crowding out two proprietary schools in that county."

This suggests that students really do consider public and private 2-year colleges alternatives to one another (Jim Rosenbaum has also provided evidence of this), that they compete in overlapping markets, and that students' enrollment decisions may reflect the ability of one sector or another to work to attract them. In other words, when community colleges have more resources, students respond by enrolling-- in fact, until the bond-financed changes take place those schools may become quite crowded. As Cellini writes, "Potential two-year college students may simply be unaware of their public sector options. With limited budgets and virtually no advertising-a particular disadvantage relative to the private sector-community colleges may be overlooked by many local residents. Fewer still may know the extent of the programs and courses offered by the public sector, particularly considering that the growth in vocational fields has been relatively recent for many colleges. In the presence of this type of market failure, bond passage may generate a temporary surge in awareness of these institutions. The positive media attention elicited after bond passage may increase demand for institutions that were previously overlooked."

Of course, these results are most intriguing when considering the potential effects of the pending higher education legislation, which would give community colleges many more resources.Will any corresponding increases in enrollment, coming from the private sector, be sustained? How might this change the debate about what community colleges should learn from for-profits? These are important questions in need of answers-- let's hope researchers pay close attention.