(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Now the Universities, whose costs have been outpacing health care inflation in recent years, are begging for a bailout. There’s gall, and then there is breathtaking gall, and then, there is this nonsense.
You have GOT to be kidding me
December 18, 2008
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Posted by matthewladner
The Way of the Future in Higher Education
November 27, 2008
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Ed Sector’s Kevin Carey’s article on the technological transformation of American higher education is a must read. Carey’s article leaves much to discuss, but a bottom line conclusion is that computer based learning at traditional universities is improving instruction, lowering costs and moving us in the direction of outcome based assessment- all very positive developments.
The other story however is that many universities are pocketing the efficiency savings and jacking up tuition, making undergraduates even bigger cash cows than they used to be. Higher education is on an unsustainable path, and yet Carey writes:
Long-prosperous colleges risk finding themselves in the perilous state of the newspaper, with competitors using the Internet to drive down prices in businesses that were once profit leaders. That would be a mixed blessing, at best. The Web is a boon for those who need to access higher education at a distance. For colleges that have grown complacent and inefficient—and there are many—a dose of fiscal reality would do them good. But the financial cross-subsidization at the heart of the modern university also sustains much of what makes it a uniquely valuable institution, more than a mere conveyer of credits and degrees. Much as newspapers use classified advertising to support money-losing foreign bureaus, subsidized scholarship makes huge contributions to the scientific, cultural, and civic lives of the nation. The University of Phoenix does not.
Carey is of course correct about the huge contributions of university academic departments which cannot financially sustain themselves. I suspect however that the costs of many such departments are far greater than their benefits. It’s not a stretch, for example, to view, say, a Sociology department with a large number of faculty and few students as a group of self-indulgent rent seekers whose dead-weight cost helps drive up tuition and wastes taxpayer money. Mind you, there has been some great work done by sociologists, but there seems to be much more taxing of plumbers to subsidize coffee house revolutionaries going on.
Not just to pick on the Sociologists, when I was a Political Science graduate student in Texas, my fellow graduate students and I once counted up the number of Ph.D. programs in political science in the state. We wondered “do we really need so many?” The answer was obvious: no, hell no.
I think Carey’s use of the newspaper analogy is an apt one- it just hasn’t happened yet. A little Schumpeterian creative destruction in higher education seems long overdue.
5 Comments | higher education | Tagged: Computer based learning, higher education, Kevin Carey, Online learning, Online universities, Tuition inflation | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Obama and Universities, the Love is Mutual
August 28, 2008
OpenSecrets.org has a new analysis of campaign donations that confirms the earlier analyses I did here and here. Universities are a significant source of financial support for Barak Obama.
They write: “Educators contributed at least $2.3 million to his campaign in June and July, surpassed only by lawyers, who make up Obama’s top-giving industry since the campaign’s start, and retirees. Nine of Obama’s top 25 contributors—based on contributions from employees and their families—are universities: University of California, Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, University of Michigan, Georgetown, University of Chicago, University of Washington and University of Pennsylvania, in descending order.”
Leave a Comment » | higher education | Tagged: Barak Obama, Campaign contributions, Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene, John J. Miller, Open Secrets, universities | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
Obama’s Higher Education Plan: Throw Money Now, Ask Questions Later?
August 28, 2008(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
The final night of the Democratic convention is here, which seems like a good time to take a look at some of Senator Obama’s education plans. Here is the major Obama higher ed proposal from BarackObama.com:
Create the American Opportunity Tax Credit: Obama will make college affordable for all Americans by creating a new American Opportunity Tax Credit. This universal and fully refundable credit will ensure that the first $4,000 of a college education is completely free for most Americans, and will cover two-thirds the cost of tuition at the average public college or university and make community college tuition completely free for most students. Obama will also ensure that the tax credit is available to families at the time of enrollment by using prior year’s tax data to deliver the credit when tuition is due.
Good politics to be sure, but a terrible idea, for a variety of reasons. At the most basic level, far and away the main beneficiary of a college education is the student-he or she knows more, usually earns more money, etc. Even if universities do provide positive externalities to society, the evidence of this is far, far weaker than that of it benefiting individuals. Many studies, for example, find no relationship between state or national economic growth and higher education spending. Ergo, a university education is a primarily a private good, not a public good.
As a society, we lavish resources on those students choosing to go to university, and ignore those who do not. Sooner or later, some bright young progressive will start to raise the equity issues involved in asking blue-collar folks to subsidize outlandishly expensive six year beer binges quests of self-discovery by rich kids.
More importantly, we now have a multi-decade long experience with public subsidies and higher education. One can only describe the higher education market as highly distorted, with costs out of control. Demand is inelastic (people think they must have a BA and will go into enormous amounts of debt to get it) and transparency is extremely poor (we literally have no way of knowing for sure whether a kid learns more at Harvard or Appalachian State).
For instance, a recent study by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute found a stunning lack of civic knowledge among our nation’s university students. Worse still, the authors found that some of the nation’s most prestigious universities had negative learning gains :
Generally, the higher U.S. News & World Report ranks a college, the lower it ranks here in civic learning. At four colleges U.S. News ranked in its top 12 (Cornell, Yale, Duke, and Princeton), seniors scored lower than freshmen. These colleges are elite centers of “negative learning.” Cornell was the third-worst performer last year and the worst this year.
Worse, much worse, is research on the reading skills of college students. American Institutes for Research (AIR) assessed the literacy of 1,800 graduating seniors from 80 randomly selected two- and four-year colleges and universities. What they found was not pretty.
The AIR study finds that 20 percent of U.S. college students completing four-year degrees have only basic quantitative literacy skills. That means they are unable to estimate if their car has enough gas to get to the next gas station or to calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies.
The study also finds that more than 50 percent of students at four-year colleges have only the most basic literacy skills, meaning they can’t do basic tasks like summarize the arguments in a newspaper editorial. On both measures, students at two-year colleges perform even worse.
The implications of this report are profound. Universities nationwide have been increasing taxpayer subsidies, tuition and fees for decades without anyone seriously questioning their return on investment.
Universities make outlandish claims about spurring economic development and leading the way to a new knowledge economy. At this point, we need to start asking if colleges are requiring students to read. To be sure, K-12 has much to answer for in this, but no one requires these universities to admit functionally illiterate students, and if they do so, they have an obligation to provide remedial education. Remedial courses of course are widespread, but apparently aren’t as widespread and/or as effective as needed.
The market does not discipline this type of failure, due to a lack of transparency. Instead, universities retain what looks to be close to unlimited pricing power. Higher education cost inflation has outstripped even that of health care inflation. Universities are much more expensive today than they were 20 years ago, but I am unaware of any evidence that they do a better job teaching students today than they did 20 years ago.
In short, we have every reason to expect, based on past experience, that if the Obama tax credit plan were to come to pass, that universities would simply hike their tuitions and continue on their merry way of ignoring quality issues in undergraduate education. The Congress has been chasing it’s own tail on “college affordability” for decades- providing more and more subsidies, watching costs go up and up, begin process again. Einstein’s definition of insanity certainly comes to mind.
Sadly, the Obama plan would simply add more fuel to the fire, and leave our very serious higher education problems unaddressed. We need to take a long hard look at higher education, not simply throw more money at the problem.
4 Comments | higher education | Tagged: Barack Obama, Higher education cost, Higher Education transparency, Obama higher education tax credit | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Why Aren’t We Already Doing It?
August 19, 2008Last week Charles Murray made an innovative and provocative proposal in the Wall Street Journal: Let’s not make the college B.A. the standard training for all professions and higher-skill occupations. Instead, let’s increasingly use certification tests, like the CPA for accountants, to indicate whether people are qualified for certain jobs. People could prepare for those tests by taking classes from traditional colleges, by taking courses on-line, by studying on their own in the neighborhood library, or in any other way they want. Expanding the paths by which people could enter high-paying occupations expands equality of opportunity by reducing the financial and logistical barriers that requiring a college B.A. imposes. And focusing career-oriented training on the skills required for that career and removing other requirements improves the efficiency of that training.
In this scenario we would have to rely on the K-12 system to provide the basic liberal arts training and civic education we think all people need to be productive citizens. Post-secondary education would be more focused on career training except for the relatively few people who really want further liberal arts training or additional preparation in a traditional academic field.
Expanding equality of opportunity and improving the efficiency of post-secondary education make Murray’s proposal very appealing. So appealing that one has to ask why we aren’t already doing it. The government does not mandate that employers of professionals and high-skilled occupations require a college B.A. — at least not directly. Why do employers require something that limits the pool of qualified labor from which they could hire and consumes considerably more time and resources than the certification test approach Murray suggests? If Murray’s proposal is on target, shouldn’t employers already be developing and using certification tests in lieu of the B.A., at least for certain occupations?
There are several reasons why Murray’s vision is not the current reality. First, developing appropriate certification tests for a number of high-skill occupations may not be as easy as Murray suggests. Perhaps many employers have not switched from the B.A. model because they don’t think they can meaningfully improve upon it.
Second, employers and private associations that develop and use certification tests would likely face a flood of employment discrimination lawsuits that challenged the validity of the test. I am no lawyer (nor do I play one on TV), but I suspect that fear of litigation plays a large role in deterring employers from relying on private certification tests for hiring.
Third, much of what employers want from their employees (at least in some occupations) is the self-discipline and obedience to authority necessary for completing assigned tasks. Perhaps employers don’t care too much about what prospective employees do in college as long as they have to complete a long list of assigned tasks demonstrating self-discipline and compliance. College selects and cultivates these desired traits.
Fourth, even if employers just want to use college as a liability-free way to screen for self-discipline and compliance, it is clear that this is a very inefficient arrangement from a societal perspective. It would be much more efficient to have employers hire crowds of interns/apprentices at low wages and only keep the most skilled, self-disciplined, and compliant as long-term employees. While this may be more efficient from a societal perspective, it is far less efficient from the perspective of individual employers. If they had to sort and train a crowd of prospective employees as interns/apprentices, employers would have to bear the costs that students and taxpayers currently bear in paying colleges to perform these roles. And having to dump a large number of interns/apprentices who didn’t make the cut would invite another flood of employment discrimination lawsuits.
Murray’s vision has much appeal, but there are also significant barriers to its implementation. Unless we address those barriers, especially liability issues related to employment, we are unlikely to realize the benefits of expanding equality of opportunity and reducing costs from Murray’s proposal. There are also practical barriers, like the difficulty of testing for certain skills and traits, that limit the benefits that could be realized. But we could still take steps toward what Murray has suggested and think about how those ideas could shape reform within the post-secondary education world.
10 Comments | higher education | Tagged: Charles Murray, Jay Greene, Jay P. Greene | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
On Immigration and the Catwalk
June 27, 2008(Guest post by Jonathan Butcher)
George Will had an incisive oped yesterday on immigration issues in the U.S. Not the issue of whether or not to build a giant wall from L.A. to Houston, but an actual immigration policy that is being enforced and routinely wedges our collective finger up our collective nose: kicking well-educated international students out of the country once they have their advanced degrees.
Our elected officials have thought it prudent to restrict the residency of international students who study in the States so that the students can only reside long enough to earn a diploma. To stay longer and get a visa they would have to get a job, but to get a job they have to have a visa first. And if they ask not to fly more missions they can’t be crazy and so will have to fly more missions but if they don’t ask they will still have to fly more missions and…ad infinitum.
After being trained at American colleges and universities, often subsidized by taxpayers, we make them leave. Clearly residency is a touchy concept to policymakers. If you sneak into America, you can get a job and stay until Congress decides on a way to a) find you and make you leave, b) give up and let you stay or c) move everybody north and take over Canada.
Will makes the following observation about what this policy accomplishes: “Suppose a foreign government had a policy of sending workers to America to be trained in a sophisticated and highly remunerative skill at American taxpayers’ expense, and then forced these workers to go home and compete against American companies. That is what we are doing…” This sounds to me like we are committing an act of corporate warfare upon ourselves. Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve done something like this: 25 years ago in A Nation at Risk the authors wrote, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
So to review: 25 years ago America was committing an act of war on itself by imposing mediocre performance on our students, and since national math and reading scores have held pretty much the same since, we decided to up the ante on future generations and engage in corporate warfare with ourselves by sending well-educated international students who came to the U.S. to study—whose educations taxpayers subsidize—somewhere else to be snatched up by companies competing with American businesses. This residency issue is case-in-point why we shouldn’t trust the government with anything important, like running the country.
I’ll admit there is actually an ingenious plan being proposed by Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) to remedy the situation. Earlier this month he introduced a bill that would allow more runway models (1,000, to be exact) into the country. I am not making this up. While this may spell trouble for congressmen who vote for the bill and their wives (yet spell opportunity for Weiner, a bachelor), it will actually free up 1,000 spots for technical workers to get visas. A bill that would bring more beautiful women and international computer geniuses into the country all at once? I take back my statement about not trusting the government to run the country.
Leave a Comment » | higher education | Tagged: higher education, immigration | Permalink
Posted by JButcher
What Are They Smoking?
June 27, 2008
On July 1 the University of Arkansas will become one of the first major universities to ban the use of all tobacco products on campus property. This is not a smoking ban, it is a ban on all tobacco, including chewing tobacco. And this is not just a ban on smoking inside buildings or within 25 feet of entrance-ways, which is already prohibited, it is a ban on using tobacco anywhere on campus by anyone.
The University has not specified the exact reason for the ban, but it cannot be to prevent second-hand smoking problems. By including chewing tobacco, from which there can be no second-hand harm, it is clear that the motivation for the ban is to benefit the health of the users of tobacco themselves by pushing them to quit.
Forcing students, staff, and visitors to our campus to improve their health seems beyond the reasonable authority of the University. What’s next? How about banning people from bringing fast food on campus? How about intentionally scheduling classes on opposite sides of campus to force people to walk more?
I see no problem with the University banning smoking inside or near buildings that may harm or seriously bother others. And I see no problem with educating students and staff about the health hazards of smoking. But the University also has a responsibility to respect and instill within students an appreciation for liberty. To do that they have to allow people to make life choices for themselves, especially when those choices pose no direct harm to others.
There is a University web forum in which these issues have started to be discussed.
On July 1 it will be the University of Arkansas, but soon it may be at a campus near you. As the University press release says, “people from several colleges across the nation have called university officials to get information about how they might create a similar policy on their campuses, and to find out what kinds of issues could arise when making this kind of policy decision.”
6 Comments | higher education, politics | Tagged: Jay P. Greene. Jay Greene, tobacco, University of Arkansas | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
The SAT and College Grades
June 18, 2008(Guest post by Larry Bernstein)
Yesterday, the College Board released a study of the predicative power of the SAT to estimate a student’s college freshman year grade point average. A Bloomberg article condemned the results because of the relative ineffectiveness of the new SAT to predict college grades. The predictive power of the SAT is trivially improved by the addition of the new essay exam which adds test time and is costly to grade.
I think this should come as no surprise, and it shows the general limitations of using standardized tests to predict college grades. One of the key points made in the study is that high school grades are a better predictor versus the SAT. High school grades need to be included with the SAT to best estimate GPA.
In my 1985 Wharton undergraduate statistics class, each student was required to create a regression research project. By chance, I chose to research predicting my classmate’s college GPA. I used 20 variables, including the SAT score, and I found only 5 variables with statistical significance: SAT score, number of hours studied, Jewish or Gentile, Wharton or other school such as the college of arts and sciences, and raised in the Northeast or elsewhere.
Similar to the national studies, in my survey of 100 fraternity brothers the SAT score did a mediocre job of predicting college GPA as a single variable. The key variable in my study was the number of hours studied. You would be surprised by the variance in Ivy Leaguers’ study habits. My survey asked students to estimate the number of hours as 1-10, 10-20, 20-30, or 30-40. My favorite response was: “Is this per semester?” I assumed the student would realize it was per week! Work habits and effort played a critical role in estimating college GPA. Obviously, the college placement office will have difficulty estimating this variable, though difficulty of course load and number of AP classes might help.
The rest of the variables seem obvious. It is much more difficult to get into Wharton than the other programs at Penn. So it is no surprise that Wharton students were running circles around the non-Wharton students, even adjusting for SAT scores and hours studied. In addition, it is much more difficult to get into Penn from the NE than from other areas of the country.
Very few of the Jews were jocks. Needless to say my college fraternity had plenty of sample problems.
2 Comments | higher education, methodology, research reports | Tagged: Bloomberg, College Board, GPA, Larry Bernstein, SAT | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
The College Access Myth Marches On
June 11, 2008(Guest post by Greg Forster)
In the May 30 edition of NEA’s Education Insider, the union makes the following request: “As we approach the graduation season, we are asking NEA members to share stories of your students who would like to attend college but cannot because of the cost. Stories will be collected and used to bolster the case for action by policymakers.” (Hat tip to America’s last education labor reporter.)
Here we go again. A while back, Jay and I ran the numbers using data from the U.S. Department of Education’s NAEP Transcript Study and found that the number of graduating 12th graders whose academic transcripts and possession of basic skills made them eligible to apply to four-year colleges was very close to the number of students actually entering four-year colleges for the first time: 1.3 million. The difference between the two figures was only about 42,000. The rest of the 4 million or so college-entrance-aged persons consists of those who either 1) dropped out of high school, 2) didn’t take the academic coursework (four years of English, three years of math, etc.) that is generally necessary to attend a four-year college (we reviewed the entrance requirements at a selection of low-prestige four-year colleges to confirm this), or 3) did not possess even basic reading skills. In other words, the college-entrance-aged population consists almost entirely of people who either entered college or were not academically qualified to enter college. A subsequent study Jay did with Marcus Winters confirmed the finding.
Obviously there are some non-traditional-age students entering college, and some students can get into four-year colleges without possessing the qualifications that are generally necessary to do so. (For more discussion of the methodological issues, see you know where.) But even if we allow a (probably over-generous) 10% allowance for these and similar factors, that still leaves us with about 2.4 million people who can’t go to college because they’re not academically qualified, as compared with about 270,000 who are qualified to go to college but don’t go because of all other factors combined. Some of those 270,000 will be people who are qualified to go but don’t want to, or are prevented by some other, non-monetary factor. So the number who are qualified to go and would like to go and are kept out by no other barriers but money would be some subset of that 270,000.
In other words, if our goal is to increase college access, focusing on people who lack access because of money is an extremely inefficient way to do it. You’re going to find a lot more “low-hanging fruit” in a pool of 2.4 million than in a pool of less than 270,000 (by this over-generous estimate). And that’s even before you consider that improving the academic performance of the K-12 system would create many other benefits besides just increasing college access.
Leave a Comment » | higher education, teacher union | Tagged: college access, Greg Forster, NEA | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
You’re on Notice!
May 22, 2008
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Last year, Steven Colbert had a segment on college rankings. Colbert expressed disappointment that his alma mater, Dartmouth, did not rank well in the Washington Monthly rankings of college effectiveness. Washington Monthly focuses on the graduation rates of low-income students. Colbert protested that Dartmouth has plenty of social mobility, as you could enter a plutocrat and graduate an oligarch.
Despite the lighthearted treatment, a serious issue surrounds the issue of the perverse incentives created by the U.S. News and World Report (USNWR) rankings. Inputs dominate the USNWR rankings–how much money the universities have, and the SAT scores of incoming students, etc.
But a more appropriate ranking system would focus on outputs, not inputs. Student learning gains should be the focus of judging the effectiveness of colleges. The University of Texas System pioneered the use and publication of such gain scores on a broad test of cognitive skills. The results: the value added champions were UT-San Antonio, which sits at the bottom of the USNWR rankings. Strangely enough, the highest rated university according to USNWR, my alma mater of UT-Austin, does not do as well in the value added department.
Have-not universities have every incentive to adopt a similar system. Harvards by the Highway will never buy their way to the top of the heap, but they might be able to teach their way there, given the proper incentives.
Leave a Comment » | higher education | Tagged: Colbert, Higher Education transparency | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
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