Research Update: Unmarried Parents in College

In 2010, UW-Madison graduate student Kia Sorensen and I published a paper in the Future of Children about college access and success among single parents attending college. We utilized data from the 2008 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) and the latest NPSAS just came out for 2012.

I notice the following trends related to this population. 

1. The representation of single parents among undergraduates grew again. In the 1980s it was 7% and by 2008 it was 13%-- in 2012 it was 15.2%.
2. That growth was entirely among women, not men.  The fraction of male undergraduates were are single parents remained steady at 8%, while the fraction of female undergraduates who are single parents grew from 17% in 2088 to 20.7% in 2012.
3. The racial/ethnic differences in single parenting changed slightly, creeping upwards by a point for non-Hispanic white students and down a point for Asian students.

The situation for single parents on college campuses nationwide has not improved much over the last several years.  The Institute for Women's Policy Research is doing important work in this area and it's worth reading up on.  We need to be concerned about the supports provided to these parents, given how much is riding on their success.  In this latest data release, I'm  most troubled by the indication that rates of borrowing large amounts of money for college are much higher for single parents than for other students.   College has inter-generational benefits, and institutions need to be equipped to ensure they assist in that transfer.

Are Students Really Academically Adrift? Rethinking the Assessment of “Limited Learning” on College Campuses

Four years ago I attended a presentation at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in which Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa previewed the findings of Academically Adrift, their influential book published in 2010.  In a column for the Chronicle of Higher Education, I wrotethat this “cool study” was producing some interesting results.  Most importantly, I reported, that it seemed like the learning gains identified by the research “didn’t look like much.”  I was concerned, for sure, and thus wasn’t surprised when the authors eventually subtitled their book “Limited Learning on College Campuses.”

 Fast forward, and after attending a presentation at this year’s ASA in New York last week, I’ve come to question my assessment—and theirs.   At the time, I was looking at percentage point gains over time, and we know that these are not a good way to assess effect sizes since they do not take into account the amount of variation in the sample. Once the gains are standardized, Arum and Roksa find that students tested twice, four years apart, improve their scores on the Collegiate Learning Assessment by an average of 0.46 standard deviations.  Now that’s a number we can begin to seriously consider.

Is a gain of 0.46 sd evidence of “limited learning” and something to sniff at?  As I said back in 2009, we need a frame of reference in order to assess this.   In the abstract, an effect size means little if anything at all.

For their part, the authors point to a review of research by Ernie Pascarella and Pat Terenzini indicating that on tests given at the time, students in the 1980s gained about 1 standard deviation.  Doesn’t that mean students learn less today than they once did, and that that’s a problem?  Actually, no.

Scores cannot simply be compared across different tests. The scales on tests differ and can only be linkedby administering the same test to comparable people. Clearly, the CLA was not administered to students attending college in the 1980s.  Nor, for that matter, were students then comparable in demographic characteristics to the students of today, or were the conditions of testing the same.

Certainly, the authors know this and it is why they seek to replicate their findings with different tests and samples.  There is some evidence that the effect size of about 0.44-0.47 holds up.  But the purpose of the replication, their main focus, is on whether the magnitude of the gains are the same—they are not using replication to think about whether the effect size is large or small.

So, let’s go back to that critical question.  It was during Josipa Roksa’s ASA presentation last week that I felt we finally had a reasonable answer.  Her talk focused on inequality in learning, and she showed several achievement gaps.   This is one good way to benchmark an effect size and it’s commonly done in k-12.  When educational interventionists seek to examine the size of a program’s impact on achievement, they often compare it to the magnitude of the black-white achievement gap in math, which is about one standard deviation.

The same exercise with the impact of 4-years of college on learning as measured by the CLA is illuminating.   The learning gap in parental education among first-year students in the Academically Adrift sample (e.g. the differences in CLA scores between students with a high school-educated parent and students whose parents completed graduate school) is 0.47 standard deviations.  The black-white gap is 0.79 standard deviations.  These are highly relevant comparisons, given that the posited benefits of colleges are thought to be especially strong and important for students facing more disadvantages.

Thus, the learning gains made during college are equivalent in size to the advantage that a student from an educationally-advantaged family holds over a first-generation student.  They are also almost two-thirds the size of the black/white gap.   In this sense, these are sizable gains. 

However, advantaged students make bigger gains during college such that the parental education gap is 0.54 standard deviations four years later.  This is entirely unsurprising, given the body of evidence indicating that colleges and universities are prioritizing the desires of elite students over the real educational needs of those for whom college is essential to social mobility.

Social inequalities are very hard to close—we won’t be reassigning children to new parents anytime soon. But four years of college clearly raises student achievement, and it is an intervention we can promote and can afford.  The findings from Academically Adrift tell a very different story than its subtitle suggests.  On average, college is transformative for learning, and the real tragedy is that higher education does not focus more attention on the neediest students in order to close the gaps that affect the stability and fabric of our everyday lives.

            

New Evidence on Need-Based Grant Aid

Ben Castleman and Bridget Long of Harvard University just issued a terrific new paper on the impacts of a Florida need-based grant distributed to students across the state.  Using a rigorous regression-discontinuity design, the authors make several contributions to the study of the impacts of financial aid by tacking a couple of of tough questions:

• Does need-based aid promote college completion?
• Who benefits most from need-based aid? Is it the highest-achievers to whom merit aid is often targeted?

They find that YES, need-based aid (without any performance criteria) produces strong and statistically significant impacts on credits earned and degree completion.  Specifically the authors find that $1,000 more of grant eligibility increased the probability of staying continuously enrolled through the spring semester of students' freshman year by 3.3 percentage points, increased the cumulative number of credits students completed after four years by 2.3 credits, and increased the probability of earning a bachelor’s degree within five, six, and seven years by 2.5, 3.5, and 4.0 percentage points, respectively. This is very similar to what my team is learning from studying a Wisconsin grant program.

They also find that the impacts of need-based aid are strongest for students who did well in high school but are below the cut-off for the Florida Bright Futures grant, again mirroring findings from Wisconsin. 

Critically, the authors also note that most students got this need-based grant just once-- as in Wisconsin, many lost it between the first and second years of college. How much more effective might financial aid be if we made it easier for students to retain it?  

In short, the answers do not surprise me at all and lend important empirical evidence to a debate that has been tilted towards merit & performance aid mainly because of a lack of tests on the need-based aid.

So...implications:

Policymakers:  Please read this carefully before jumping to the conclusion that you must change the structure of need-based aid to promote college completion -- it is already doing so.  Changes could be positive or could undermine effectiveness.  In fact, the authors conclude: "Overall, our results suggest that not only does need-based aid have a positive effect on persistence and degree completion, but also that increasing the award amounts of current aid programs could have beneficial effects." 

States and Colleges and Universities:  Investments in well-prepared students who aren't making your merit cutoffs are good bets for cost-effective investments in need-based aid.  Mark Schneider and I have been saying this for a long time.   Consider making your money really pay off.

UVA: Poster Child for Empty Promises and False Hopes

Just a few years ago, we the people of UW-Madison were hearing quite a bit about the flagship university of another state -- the University of Virginia.  Our Chancellor at the time, Biddy Martin, is from Virginia, and lauded UVA's efforts to gain autonomy from the state while also increasing affordability through its "Access UVA" program.

I vehemently and repeatedly disagreed with Martin's assessment of UVA and its "successes" at the time, but to little avail.  She managed to convince most of the university that a semi-divorce from the state would allow for financial flexibilities that would help to make college more affordable. While some of her plans were thwarted by the rest of Wisconsin, she got the vote of the Faculty Senate and to this day, many students and faculty speak of her efforts as if they made UW-Madison more affordable.

In point of fact, they did not, and today even the poster child she commended-- UVA-- fell to pieces. Access UVA will no longer be a grants program, instead it will be scaled back and shifted to include a sizable amount of loans.  Students from low-income families will graduate with $14,000 in debt (if they escape after just 4 years--unlikely) and other students with up to $28,000.

Access UVA, said President Teresa Sullivan, wasn't "sustainable."  There's an end-stop to her statement that makes you wonder if she and the school recognize that the result was not inevitable but rather stemmed directly from the political and policy choices made over the last decade.  Now UVA must face facts: its costs of attendance are high, its support from the state of Virginia is low, and it is going to ask students from poor families to graduate with debt amounting to a third or more of their families' annual income.  These things don't just happen.

High-tuition high-aid models of financing higher education were formulated and evaluated at a time when college students were on average wealthier, whiter, and smaller in number.  It was perhaps possible to feel proudly progressive about taking tuition from the top 75% and redistributing aid to the bottom 25% (or even 90/10).  No longer.  Today about 80% of students feel college is unaffordable, and yet they have to pay high tuition to make the top 20% happy in their glorified teeny-tiny classes, lush campuses, and elitist environments. Only a fraction of that 80% gets any significant grant aid, while the rest carry debt.  In this model, 80% of the students bear the brunt of the education of the top 20%, who escape from their college party years with debt that Mommy and Daddy pay off on graduation day.

The student leader at UVA who objected to these changes perfectly described the real underlying problem when he said "[but] there are increasingly few places left to streamline or cut back on to make these ends meet without impacting the quality of education or student experience.”   There it is-- we need to spend a lot to have high quality.  Affordability be damned.

Anyone who's taken a stroll across UVA's lawns knows that it would be perfectly possible to have a darned good college education for the students of the state at a fraction of what they are spending now. Sure, it wouldn't be the same-- but times they are changing. And it is far less tenable for colleges and universities to throw up their ivy-covered walls and say "sorry you cost too much" to poor students than to insist that they take action to lower their costs for all students, to make college opportunities for all Americans the realities they should and must be.

Thoughts About the Future of UW-Madison? Please Share!

We are welcoming a new chancellor to UW-Madison this fall, along with many other new leaders.  I have been receiving many emails from colleagues and students expressing feelings (both positive and negative) about campus life and the direction it is taking, and in response I will soon begin to host Room for Debate- style forums on key topics. The intention is to provide our community with a sense of the array of opinions, and share insights with our administrators-- including Chancellor Rebecca Blank.

I welcome your participation. Please email me at srab@education.wisc.edu with suggestions as to what questions the forums should be asking, and who you'd like to hear from.   This is open to anyone in the UW-Madison community, very broadly defined-- including community members, people working at other institutions, etc.

In addition, please email me if you are willing to contribute your opinion to the forums.  If you have a compelling reason to write anonymously (and there are many) I will be happy to publish you that way.

The first several forums will address these topics, so please let me know right away if you want to write about any of them:

1. How should the UW-Madison community work to ensure that its relationship with the people of the state of Wisconsin improves over the next 10 years?

2. What rules of conduct or guidelines should govern the interaction of private philanthropy, including UW Foundation, with UW-Madison?

3. What role should academic deans play with regard to academic departments moving forward?

4. How should UW-Madison work to create new leaders to fill administrative positions at the university in coming years?

Lessons for Higher Ed from Health Care

The New York Times has been running a terrific series helping to illustrate why costs of healthcare in this country are so incredibly out of control. Today's story is masterful in the way it breaks down the cost of an artificial hip replacement in the U.S. versus Belgium.  The cost in the U.S. is over $78,000, while in Belgium it is $13,660.

The main cost differences lie in variation in the surgeon's fee (about 16 times higher in the U.S.), the implant cost (more than 8 times higher in the U.S.) and the hospital room cost (about 8 times higher on a per-night basis).  These differences helped direct the reporters towards a story that unpacks the reasons for variation in impact and hospital costs, while unfortunately saying little about the differences in surgeon's fees.

Imagine what we could learn from similar analyses of the costs of higher education in this country versus in others.   Time and again I hear that costs of education students at the postsecondary level are higher here than anywhere else, and it is very hard to believe that those costs explain our high (yet declining) ranking in terms of quality.

This quote in the Times article stood out to me as precisely the sort of thing we need to explore.  When an American traveled to Belgium for a far less expensive hip replacement, he entered a hospital and was initially concerned: I was immediately scared because at first I thought, this is really old.  The chairs in the waiting rooms were metal, the walls were painted a pale green, there was no gift shop. He flashed back to his recent visit to New York Presbyterian Hospital, which has comfortable waiting rooms, an elegant lobby and newsstands -- along with much, much higher prices. But then I realized everything was new. It was just functional. There wasn't much of a nod to comfort because they were there to provide health care.

Think about the last private college or public flagship campus you visited, and then think about your local comprehensive university or community college.  They are all there, purportedly, to provide education.  Yet the former are all about "comfort"-- and their influence is leading other institutions with far fewer resources to follow that path.  The question is, at what cost?

Take a look at this recent transformation of Madison Area Technical College -- which now calls itself Madison College. What if this happened to two-year colleges across the nation, most of which rely on underpaid college instructors for the actual educating? At what cost, and at what consequence?  Of course it's always wonderful to spend your days learning new things in beautiful places, but what if it means your neighbors can't afford an education at all?

Last year

This year

Sure, buildings and amenities aren't the whole story-- we really need the Times to unpack those discrepancies in surgeon fees.  We have to get to the bottom of our American obsession with equating amenities with quality in fields and services where the amenities are immaterial to the purposes.  And then we need to engage in appropriate comparative analyses to look for better solutions to our American higher education challenges.

Student Power Converges on Madison

Starting today, the National Student Power Convergence is occupying UW-Madison.  My home department of Educational Policy Studies is a proud sponsor of this terrific event.  It is FREE, open to the public, and the place to be for the next 5 days.  UW Alum Maxwell Love, newly elected Vice-President of the United States Student Association, is a key organizer.

The agenda is entirely constructed by student organizers and aimed at sharing political and tactical analyses, and creating replicable campaigns to put student issues on the table in higher education nationwide.

Among the program highlights relevant for readers of this blog:

Friday August 2, 230-4 pm, Ingraham Hall Room 122 at UW-Madison
Student Debt: Dealing with Existing & Future Debt

Nelini Stamp as Moderator, Heather McGhee of Demos, Anne Johnson of Generation
Progress, Sami Alloy of Oregon Working Families Party, Scott Ross of One Wisconsin, and Sophia Zaman of United States Student Association

The millennial generation is the largest generation in American history, the most educated
generation in American history and the most indebted. The good news is that young
people around the country are pushing for the sweeping changes we need to tackle the
$1 trillion in student debt and make college more affordable and accessible for every student
and family. Check out this panel to hear from individuals and institutions involved in
the National Student Debt campaign.

Saturday August 3, 230-4 pm, Education L150 at UW-Madison
TAKING OVER YOUR STUDENT GOVERNMENT

Jalina Wayser of United States Student Association and New Jersey United Students

Just like power, student governments can be tools for the expression and manifestation of
your values. For this training, students from New Jersey United Students will draw on their experiences
of infiltrating and redirecting student governments to serve as hubs for organizing.

Saturday August 3, 230-4 pm, Ingraham Hall Room 116 at UW-Madison
HOW TO ORGANIZE ON CAMPUS: STUDENT DEBT 

Nelini Stamp of Working Families Party, Anne Johnson of Generation Progress

Mapping out Wall Street‘s Role on Campus will be a training on how to find the
different ways in which Wall Street has taken control of public higher education.
We will map out how to find endowment funds, board of governors/regents/
trustees that have ties to Wall St, and Wall Street on campus debit cards. This
will help give students tools to analyze the current power structure on campus.

Saturday August 3, 430-6 pm, Ingraham Hall Room 113 at UW-Madison
PUBLIC EDUCATION - ATTACKS & FIGHTING BACK

Jacob Chaffin of Ohio University Student Union, Stephanie Rivera of Students United
for Public Education, Israel Munoz and Ross Floyd of Chicago Student to Save
Our Schools, Jaysen Brazile of Newark Students Union, Anthony Ramirez of Voces
De La Frontera

College and high school students talk about the attacks on public K-12 education, the
fight back mounted by youth, communities, and teachers, and the role of college student
solidarity in the fight for public education.