Who’s to Blame for College Dropouts?

December 10, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Education Week has some survey results that most people probably won’t find surprising or controversial, but that actually raise some tough ethical questions:

The public pins most of the blame for poor college graduation rates on students and their parents and gives a pass to colleges, government officials and others, a new Associated Press-Stanford University poll shows…

When asked where the blame lies for graduation rates at public four-year colleges, 7 in 10 said students shouldered either a great deal or a lot of it, and 45 percent felt that way about parents.

Others got off relatively easy: Anywhere between 25 percent and 32 percent of those polled blamed college administrators, professors, teachers, unions, state education officials and federal education officials.

Plausible enough! If you go to college and don’t graduate, whose fault is it but yours?

Yet Education Week thinks this is bad news for folks like us:

The belief that students are most at fault for graduation rates is a troubling sign for reformers who have elevated college completion to the forefront of higher education policy debates and pushed colleges to fix the problem, said Michael Kirst, professor emeritus of education and business administration at Stanford.

“The message is, ‘Students, you had your shot at college and failed and it’s your fault, not the college,'” Kirst said.

You know what? I think they’re right. This is bad news for us on a certain level. Gathering political capital for reforms that will do something about our collegiate dropout factories requires us to convince people that the colleges, not just the students, need to change.

And yet I don’t think the popular view is quite wrong. Check out this quote:

“We’re all responsible for our own education, and by the time you get to college you are definitely responsible and mature,” said Deanna Ginn, a mother of 12 from Fairbanks, Alaska.

Ginn is right. We don’t want to undermine the personal responsibility of each individual student who drops out.

Yet that can easily become an excuse to take colleges off the hook for their legitimate responsibilities, and these survey results show that happening.

Matt has spent a lot of time documenting the disaster in Arizona, where (to pick just a couple of many shocking numbers he’s posted here) ASU graduates only 28% of students in four years, and the University of Arizona 33%. But those are not really unusual numbers – this is not just an Arizona problem.

No doubt, as thousands of kids come in, spend money and then drop out, year after year, the college administrators and their hired protectors in state legislatures tell themselves exactly what Ginn says – if you drop out, it’s your own fault.

Well, yes. If you drop out, it is your own fault. But let’s think about this. Year after year, you see these dismal dropout rates. Is that really no business of yours? Is it really OK to say that sure, something like two-thirds of the new students we’re accepting this year are making a bad decision by coming here, but hey, as long as their tuition checks clear, that’s their headache, not ours?

I say if you run a college that has a two-thirds dropout rate, it’s your responsibility to do something about that. Taking people’s money to help them make bad choices is both morally wrong and, even from a merely selfish standpoint, imprudent in the long term. You should be asking how you can help ensure that kids who have a low likelihood of graduating are steered onto some alternate path – perhaps you can develop an alternate path for them at your own institution, which would allow you to cash their tuition checks and also look yourself in the mirror with respect. I don’t think that’s inconsistent with saying that each and every dropout is personally responsible for dropping out.

If I know you have an allergy to a vaccine that’s so bad you’ll die if I inject you with it, I have a responsibility not to inject you with it no matter how much money you offer me or how completely convinced you might be that it’ll do you good. After we say that, the principle also implies repsonsibilities at a little lower level than life and death.

11 Comments | higher education, journalism | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Government Subsidies Subvert Colleges

October 28, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

One of those little one-sentence news items on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal reads:

College tuition and fees climbed again this year, but the burden was tempered by an increase in financial aid.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but shouldn’t that read:

The real price of a college education remained constant, but concealed government subsidies to colleges kept growing.

If you add up the revenue colleges derive directly from government through grants and contracts, the indirect revenue from government cartelization of labor pools such as teachers, nurses and social workers, and concealed subsidies through student loan programs, I wonder how big the total financial dependence of our higher education institutions on socialism in its various forms really is.

Over 50%, do you think?

It doesn’t actually matter; the tipping point beyond which an institution becomes de facto subservient to socialism is well below the halfway mark. The ideological reasons colleges indoctrinate students with collectivism and use their social prestige to promote it in the nation at large have been widely analyzed. The institutional reasons seem to me to require further publicization.

3 Comments | higher education, school funding, student loans | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Lawyers, lawyers everywhere

October 27, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Four years ago or so I attended the graduation ceremony of Arizona State University’s law school. I remember thinking to myself that there were a rather large number of new attorneys walking across the stage. Later I was told that ASU is not considered a large law school,  and this was during the bubble years.

Now law students who went in hoping to wait the recession out are graduating heavily in debt and underemployed.

From the Slate article:

One Boston College Law School third-year—miraculously, still anonymous—begged for his tuition back in exchange for a promise to drop out without a degree, in an open letter to his dean published earlier this month. “This will benefit both of us,” he argues. “On the one hand, I will be free to return to the teaching career I left to come here. I’ll be able to provide for my family without the crushing weight of my law school loans. On the other hand, this will help BC Law go up in the rankings, since you will not have to report my unemployment at graduation to US News. This will present no loss to me, only gain: in today’s job market, a J.D. seems to be more of a liability than an asset.”

Hooo boy.

1 Comment | economics, higher education | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

The Sustainability Craze at Universities

October 12, 2010

Peter Wood, the president of the National Association of Scholars, has an excellent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education about how sustainability is displacing diversity as the campus craze du jour.

Here is the (vegetarian) meat of his piece:

I view this changing of the ideological guard with wariness. Diversity was pretty bad; sustainability may be even worse. Both movements subtract from the better purposes of higher education. Diversity authorizes double standards in admissions and hiring, breeds a campus culture of hypocrisy, mismatches students to educational opportunities, fosters ethnic resentments, elevates group identity over individual achievement, and trivializes the curriculum. Of course, those punishments were something that had to be accepted in the spirit of atoning for the original sin of racism.

But for its part, sustainability has the logic of a stampede. We all must run in the same direction for fear of some rumored and largely invisible threat. The real threat is the stampede itself. Sustainability numbers among its advocates some scrupulous scientists and quite a few sober facilities managers who simply want to trim utility bills. But in the main, sustainability is the triumph of hypothesis over evidence. Its scientific grounding is mostly a matter of models and extrapolations and appeals to authority. Evoking imminent and planet-destroying catastrophe, sustainatopians call for radical changes in economic arrangements and social patterns. Higher education is summoned to set aside whatever it is doing to help make this revolution in production, distribution, and consumption a reality.

Sustainability combines some astonishingly radical ideas with mere wackiness. Many sustainability advocates want to replace free markets (a source, as they see it, of unsustainable growth and exploitation) with some kind of pan-national rule with little scope for private property rights. On the other hand, sustainatopians also busy themselves with eliminating trays from cafeterias and attacking the threat of plastic soda straws. Sustainability thus unites vaunting political ambition and comic burlesque. Both are at odds with patient and open-minded intellectual inquiry.

The diversity movement has always been rife with contradictions. Seeking to promote racial equality, it evolved into a system that perpetuates inequalities. But whatever else it is, the diversity movement thirsts to be part of mainstream America. Its ultimate goal is to make diversity a principle of the same standing as freedom and equality in our national life. The sustainability movement, by contrast, has no such affection for the larger culture or loyalty to the American experiment. It dismisses the comforts of American life, including our political freedom, as unworthy extravagance. Sustainability summons us to a supposedly higher good. Personal security, national prosperity, and individual freedom may just have to go as we press on to our low-impact, carbon-free new order. In this sense, it goes beyond promising to redeem us from social iniquity to redeeming us from human nature itself.

Many campus adherents to sustainability may eventually tire of its puritanical preachiness and its unfulfilled prophecies, but for the moment, sustainability has cachet. Diversity, meanwhile, has aged into a static bureaucracy, and diversicrats increasingly spend their energy polishing the spoons…

3 Comments | higher education | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Higher Ed is in for a World of Hurt

October 4, 2010

Last Friday the Department of Education Reform’s lecture series featured a great talk by Richard Arum, a sociologist from New York University.

He presented research from the forthcoming book, Academically Adrift, which he co-authored with Josipa Roksa.  I don’t want to scoop their findings, which will be released in the book and an accompanying report in January, so let me simply quote from the promotional material:

Almost everyone strives to go, but almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by Academically Adrift: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there?

For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s answer to that question is a definitive no. Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college. As troubling as their findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators they will come as no surprise—instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list.

Be sure to read this book and the supplemental report when it comes out because he presented some amazing and disturbing information on how students spend their time, what their courses require of them, how much they learn, and what happens after they graduate.  Let’s just say that the results don’t paint a pretty picture.

And we may want to ask again why universities are hiring all of those non-instructional professional staff and administrators.

1 Comment | higher education | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

How Mission Creep Adds to Administrative Bloat

September 14, 2010

In case you need any examples of how mission creep in higher education contributes to administrative bloat, check out this story about the University of Central Arkansas.  UCA decided to contract with a company, called Snoozester, to provide a wake-up and reminder phone call service for students.  Students, at no additional cost to themselves, can arrange to have Snoozester call their cell phone to make sure they wake-up on time in the morning or to remind them of a test or appointment.  Never mind that almost all cell phones already have alarm functions.  We need the university to pay $11,000 to a company to make phone calls to students.

This doesn’t just contribute to administrative bloat by causing UCA to spend $11,000.  There also have to be administrators who write and approve the contract with Snoozester.  Administrators have to monitor the performance of the company.  Some administrator had to dream up the idea (perhaps his dream was interrupted by a sales call from Snoozester).

Of course, we have highly trained professionals recommonding the addition of this service.  From the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:

Dr. Lynn Taylor, chief of psychiatry at Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock, said UCA’s program is “a great idea,” especially for freshmen, if the calls wake students up better than alarm clocks.

“That is a really hard time – the transition to college and being on your own,” she said.

This is a small example of mission creep contributing to bloat, but eventually all of this adds up.  And it reflects an attitude that there is no limit to the services students need.  And since students only pay for a fraction of the cost of all of these services, given high rates of public subsidy, and only do so indirectly, of course students don’t mind getting these extra services.

When will universities start offering the butt-wiping service?

For more on the administrative bloat report that I wrote with Brian Kisida and Jonathan Mills, see this post.

4 Comments | higher education | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Governor Daniels vs. Bloat

August 31, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

From the Indy Star:

Daniels cited a national study released a few weeks ago by the Goldwater Institute in Arizona. It found the number of full-time administrators for every 100 students at 189 top U.S. universities had increased by 39 percent from 1993 to 2007.

The study blamed the administrative bloat on subsidies from federal and state governments and suggested that reducing subsidies would force schools to operate more efficiently.

“The role of trustee has never been so critical as it is today,” Daniels said. “But I don’t want to see you at the Statehouse asking for more money.

“Please stay back at the school and find ways to be more efficient with those dollars.”

5 Comments | higher education | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

The Future vs. Bloat

August 25, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Brian Caulfield asks the question at Forbes: should Apple kill the university as we know it? Cites Jay, Brian and Jonathan’s bloat study.

Answer: yes. If they don’t, someone else will.

3 Comments | higher education | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Even More Bloat!

August 23, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Yours truly weighs in on the bloat fest!

1 Comment | higher education | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Administrative Bloat Report — Release Tomorrow

August 16, 2010

With Brian Kisida and Jonathan Mills, I have a report on administrative bloat at American universities being released by the Goldwater Institute tomorrow.  You should be able to find it at the Goldwater web site.

If you thought K-12 education was suffering under a large and growing bureaucracy, just wait until you see the results in tomorrow’s report.  In your heart you know it’s right.

Leave a Comment » | higher education | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

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