You Got Rejected from Your First Choice College. So What?

The following is a guest post from Robert Kelchen, doctoral candidate in Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The Washington Post’s Campus Overload blog recently featured a guest post, “Getting Rejected from Your Dream School(s) isn’t a Bad Thing” by Eric Harris, a junior who attended the University of Maryland after being deferred by his first choice (Duke) and rejected by six of the other eight colleges to which he applied. (He was also accepted by Emory.) Eric’s story is hardly unique, as numerous blogs and websites feature stories of students who were rejected by their first choice college. Most of the popular media accounts of students rejected by their first choice college are from students like Eric—those who applied to a large number of highly selective (and very expensive) colleges and universities and still attended a prestigious institution.

The kinds of students who are typically featured in the media are very likely to enjoy college and graduate in a timely manner, no matter where they end up attending. But the students who should be prominently featured instead are those whose first choice colleges are very different than their other options (much less selective four-year colleges, community colleges, or no college at all). Just-released data from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at UCLA shows that only 58 percent of students attending four-year universities were attending their first choice college in fall 2011; nearly one-fourth of students were rejected by their first choice. This suggests that a fair number of students fall into this category, but little is known about their college outcomes.

As a part of my dissertation, I am using data from the Wisconsin Scholars Longitudinal Study to examine the college experiences of students who attended their first choice college to those who attended another college—either because they were rejected by their first choice or because they were accepted by their first choice but did not attend. WSLS students all come from modest financial backgrounds and were Pell Grant recipients during their first year of college, so it is likely that the cost of college played a much larger role in their college choice process than for students like Eric.

It is important to note that students end up at their first choice college as the result of three decisions: applying to their first choice (not explored in my study), getting accepted, and then attending after being accepted. I model the acceptance and attendance decisions using available information on the students’ demographics and academic preparation, their high school of attendance, and their first choice college. This is an important step in establishing a causal relationship because WSLS students who attended their first choice college tend to come from different backgrounds (especially from more rural areas) than those who did not.

I use interview and survey data to explore whether students’ academic and social integration levels differed between students who attended their first choice and those who did not for either of the above reasons. The interviews suggest that most students reported being happy with their college of attendance, regardless of whether that was their first choice college. (Whether this is actually true or whether this is an example of self-affirmation bias, in which people try to portray a disappointing event in the best possible light, cannot be determined.) There are also few differences between students who attended their first choice and those who did not on survey measures of academic and social integration.

I also use academic outcomes from the University of Wisconsin System and the National Student Clearinghouse to estimate the effects of attending one’s first choice college. After modeling the selection process, I find no statistically significant differences on academic outcomes between students who attended their first choice and either group who did not. (This dissertation chapter is nearly complete, so stay tuned for the full results.)

It appears that being rejected from one’s first choice college is not the end of the world for most students. The psychic costs appear quite high in much of the popular media, but we don’t need to feel too sorry for students who are forced to attend a highly selective college that may have been their seventh choice instead of their first. I spent three years in college working in the admissions office at Truman State University, and I talked with plenty of students for whom Truman was not their first choice. After being rejected by elite, expensive universities, they came to Truman and turned out just fine. So don’t worry too much about getting rejected by your first choice college—especially if paying for college was never one of your concerns. Everything will be okay.

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The Manifesto, Income Inequality & Credibility

On Friday, I wrote a blog item ('Misleading Manifesto') chiding a group of urban superintendents for misstating educational research in a 'manifesto' published in Sunday's Washington Post. Teacher quality *is* important -- but it does not matter MORE THAN family income and concentrated poverty.

I am convinced that too many educational reformers are happy to 'spin' the truth for rhetorical purposes. I think this is exactly what we saw in this manifesto. While this may help to simplify messaging, target solutions at a more narrowly construed problem, and focus in on what education leaders have direct control over, it carries an inherent policy danger along with it. That danger is two-fold: (1) teacher policy reforms may be set up for failure by overstating their potential impact; and (2) more comprehensive strategies desperately needed to combat rising income inequality and growing poverty in our nation may be discounted and ignored.

For me, this isn't an issue of setting low expectations for children from poverty. We must train and support our teachers to have high expectations and develop the potential in all children. But, from a policy perspective, which is the world in which I work, to not even discuss poverty and inequality -- even though the research evidence points to its preeminence -- is akin to taking it off the table as a policy priority.

Nor it is a lack of belief in the ameliorative benefits that sensible teacher reforms can have on student outcomes by expanding the recruitment pool of teacher candidates, improving initial training and on-going support of classroom teachers, improving teaching and learning conditions within schools, providing differential compensation to teachers for leadership roles, difficult assignments, shortage fields, and demonstrated effectiveness, and more....

For teacher quality specifically, as I argued in my previous post, playing fast and loose with the facts isn't necessary. There is a powerful argument to be made based on the fact that teachers are the most important school-based influence on student learning. That's exactly what my colleagues at the New Teacher Center have done. We've made careful and honest declarations about teacher quality being the most critical within-school variable, but haven't framed the issue in a way that would make us education-industry Pinocchios.

And this leads us directly to the question of credibility. While I am personally inclined to support elements of what the superintendents' manifesto calls for -- and inclined to support elements of broader education and teacher reform agendas -- I am disinclined to associate myself with a clarion call that is dishonest on its face and misserves the national need for a critical conversation and accompanying set of public policies to address issues of economic inequality. That need extends well beyond the education system and requires responses much broader than merely strengthening the teaching profession and overhauling human capital systems.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently has been banging the drums challenging policymakers -- and Democrats, in particular -- to address our nation's historic levels of income inequality and rising levels of poverty. As reported by the Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein, since 1976 "virtually all of the benefits of economic growth have gone to households that, in today's terms, earn more than $110,000 a year." Further, UNICEF reports that the United States has the highest rate of childhood poverty among 24 OECD nations -- over 20% -- and the second-worst rate (barely ahead of bottom-dwelling Great Britain) of childhood well-being in the industralized world. Further, as Walt Gardner recently noted, a September 2010 U.S. Census Bureau report showed that the percentage of Americans below the poverty line in 2009 was the highest in 15 years. And the rise was steepest for children, with one in five affected. Think this has any bearing on U.S. students' relatively poor performance on international student assessments? Uh-huh.

So, let's talk about how to strengthen teaching and its central importance to student outcomes. But let's not fence ourselves in with self-serving rhetoric. Let's be honest in our communications and expansive in our thinking about policies needed to improve the lives of American children.

It's about education -- and a whole lot more.

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Live By The Sword, Die By The Sword?

The problem with Jay Mathews' defense ("Measuring Progress At Shaw With More Than Numbers") of a Washington, DC school principal who did not demonstrate student learning gains at his school after one year is that the principal operates within an accountability system that demands such a result. In this case, both Mathews -- and DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, as described in Mathews' WP column -- are right not to have lowered the boom on Brian Betts, principal of the DC's Shaw Middle School at Garnet-Patterson, based on a single year's worth of test scores.

The state superintendent of education's Web site says Shaw dropped from 38.6 to 30.5 in the percentage of students scoring at least proficient in reading, and from 32.7 to 29.2 in math.

But those were not the numbers Rhee read to Betts over the phone.

Only 17 percent of Shaw's 2009 students had attended the school in 2008, distorting the official test score comparisons. Rhee instead recited the 2008 and 2009 scores of the 44 students who had been there both years. It didn't help much.

The students' decline in reading was somewhat smaller; it went from 34.5 to 29.7. Their math proficiency increased a bit, from 26.2 to 29.5. But Shaw is still short of the 30 percent mark, far below where Rhee and Betts want to be....

Despite the sniping at Rhee, the best teachers I know think that what happened at Shaw is a standard part of the upgrading process. I have watched Betts, his staff, students and parents for a year. The improvement of poor-performing schools has been the focus of my reporting for nearly three decades. The Shaw people are doing nearly everything that the most successful school turnaround artists have done.

They have raised expectations for students. They have recruited energetic teachers who believe in the potential of impoverished students. They have organized themselves into a team that compares notes on youngsters. They regularly review what has been learned, what some critics dismiss as "teaching to the test." They consider it an important part of their jobs.

That's how it's done, usually with a strong and engaging principal like Betts.

Mathews' take -- including consideration of contextual factors, such as the fact that only 17% of the school's students had attended the prior year and the contention that school turnaround requires more than a single year -- is how the education world should work. Embrace the complexity of learning and trying to measure it! To do so would disallow the use of single-year changes in test scores for making high-stakes decisions about schools and individual school personnel. It would also remove the unrealistic pressure on school turnarounds to bear fruit in a single year. Test scores would be used responsibly in combination with other data and evidence to paint a fuller picture about individual school contexts and inform judgments about school leadership and student success.

But Michelle Rhee and other education reform advocates have publicly argued that student performance as measured by test scores is basically the be all and end all. According to this Washington Post story ("Testing Tactics Helped Fuel D.C. School Gains"), Rhee supports strengthening No Child Left Behind to "emphasize year-to-year academic growth." Such a stance creates a problem for such reformers when they are leading a district and staking their leadership on uncomplicated test score gains. Others will assess their leadership and judge their success by this measure -- an ill-advised one in its simplest form.

I would argue that, in addition to doing the right thing (as happened in this instance), reform advocates and school leaders like Rhee also have a responsibility to say and advocate for the right thing. They have a responsibility to be honest about the complexity of student learning and the inability of student assessments to accurate capture all of the nuance going on within schools and classrooms. While the reformers' challenge of the adult-focused policies of the educational status quo is often warranted, some reforms -- accountability, chief among them -- have been taken too far. Student learning, school leadership and teaching cannot be measured and judged good or bad based on a single set of test scores. Test scores must be part of the consideration -- and supporting systems such as accountability, compensation and evaluation must be informed by such data -- but they should not single-handedly define success or failure.

The complexity as presented by Mathews in his article -- and, more importantly, by existing research (such as by Robert Linn, Aaron Pallas, Tim Sass, and embedded within Sunny Ladd's RttT comments) about year-to-year comparisons of both overall test scores and test score gains -- strongly suggests that educational accountability systems should be designed more thoughtfully than they have been to date, but unfortunately that does not seem to be the direction that policymaking is headed at either the federal or state levels. Part of being more thoughtful is moving away from NCLB-style adequate yearly progress and toward a value-added approach, but thoughtfulness also requires not making high-stakes decisions based exclusively on volatile student data. Do I hear "multiple measures"? Sure, but Sherman Dorn offers some provocative thoughts on this subject in a 2007 blog post.

With regard to educational accountability, policymakers first should do their homework -- and then they clearly have more work to do in creating a better system and undoing parts of the existing system that aren't evidence-based and accomplish only in simplifying a truly complex art: learning.

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For those of you that have gotten this far, there's a related post on the New America Foundation's Ed Money Watch blog discussing a new GAO report that analyzes state spending on student assessment tests -- $640 million in 2007-08.

The increasing cost of developing and scoring assessments has also led many states to implement simpler and more cost-effective multiple choice tests instead of open response tests. In fact, although five states have changed their assessments to include more open response items in both reading and math since 2002, 11 and 13 states have removed open items from their reading and math tests, respectively over the same time period.... This reliance on multiple choice tests has forced states to limit the content and complexity of what they test. In fact, some states develop academic standards for testing separately from standards for instruction, which are often un-testable in a multiple choice system. As a result, state NCLB assessments tend to test and measure memorization of facts and basic skills rather than complex cognitive abilities.

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And here's a new story hot off the presses from Education Week. It discusses serious questions raised about New York City's school grading system.

Eighty-four percent of the city’s 1,058 public elementary and middle schools received an A on the city’s report cards this year, compared with 38 percent in 2008, while 13 percent received a B, city officials announced this month.

“It tells us virtually nothing about the actual performance of schools,” Aaron M. Pallas, a professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, said of the city’s grades.

Diane Ravitch, an education historian at New York University, was even sharper: She declared the school grades “bogus” in a Sept. 9 opinion piece for the Daily News of New York, saying the city’s report card system “makes a mockery of accountability.”

But Andrew J. Jacob, a spokesman for the New York City Department of Education, defended the ratings, even as he said the district’s demands on schools would continue to rise next year....

The city employs a complex methodology to devise its overall letter grades, with the primary driver being results from statewide assessments in reading and mathematics, which have also encountered considerable skepticism lately.

The city’s grades are based on three categories: student progress on state tests from one year to the next, which accounts for 60 percent; student performance for the most recent school year, which accounts for 25 percent; and school environment, which makes up 15 percent.

Mr. Pallas of Teachers College argues that one key flaw with the city’s rating system is that it depends heavily on a what he deems a “wholly unreliable” measure of student growth on test scores from year to year that fails to account adequately for statistical error.

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Obama Endorses Community College Reform

It's a very big day for the nation's community colleges. In today's Washington Post, our president praises them, and calls for additional funding to support their work. In particular, President Obama writes, "We can reallocate funding to help them modernize their facilities, increase the quality of online courses and ultimately meet the goal of graduating 5 million more Americans from community colleges by 2020."

On Friday I spent the morning speaking with staff from the U.S. House of Representatives Community College Caucus, and was impressed by the significant turnout and detailed questions they asked. Then, TIME magazine moved on a substantial piece noting the importance of the 2-year sector as well.

This thing has legs. It's a very exciting time.... Let's hope that the President's ability to connect community colleges not only to job training but to his goals for increasing degree attainment continues. An integrated agenda will pay off.

NOTE: On July 14, 2009 the President will announce a proposal for $12 billion in support for community colleges, to enable them to produce an additional 5 billion graduates over 10 years. This is a remarkable turn of events.

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RELATED ARTICLES:
New York Times, "A Boon To Two-Year Colleges, Affirming Their Value", July 14, 2009
NYT, "Obama Attacks On Economy and Seeks Billions For Community Colleges", July 15, 2009
Derrick Jackson, "Community Colleges' New Clout", Boston Globe, July 18, 2009
David Brooks, "No Size Fits All", New York Times, July 19, 2009
Cap Times, "UW-Madison profs help shape bold initiative for community colleges" July 20, 2009

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Will Darwin Take It On The Chin in Texas?

The Washington Post editorial page ('Strengths and Weaknesses') weighs in on the creationism debate in the Lone Star State.

Starting today, the state's board of education will consider whether the phrase "strengths and weaknesses" should remain deleted from the state's science standards. Debating strengths and weaknesses of various scientific theories might sound reasonable until you learn that those are supportive buzzwords for people who doubt evolution and want creationism taught in the classroom.

The force behind restoring the "strengths and weaknesses" language, which was stripped from the science standards in January after two decades, is Don McLeroy. He's the chairman of the State Board of Education. He is also a "young earth creationist" who believes the Earth was created by God no more than 10,000 years ago. Never mind plenty of scientific evidence that the planet has been around for a few billion years. The scary thing is that what's happening in Texas is by no means isolated.

So, in a state of 24 million people, this Mr. McLeroy is the best candidate that Republican Governor Rick Perry could find for the job of chair of the State Board of Education? Scary. Purposefully scary, I'll bet.

For more background, see here (6/3/08), here (7/21/08), here (1/22/09), and here (1/23/09).

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Does This Stimulate Change?

The Washington Post is onto something here ("An Education Stimulus?")

EDUCATION is poised to win big under the economic stimulus plan hurtling through Congress. But it remains to be seen whether America's schoolchildren really will be helped by the huge investment of public funds that is being planned. After all, it seems that much of the billions of dollars of new federal spending is aimed at continuing programs and policies that largely have failed to improve student achievement. For the amount of money being spent, Congress should insist on real change, not simply more of the same.

Its editorial underscores what I was saying yesterday in this post ("Overstated"). More money by itself won't produce educational reform unless the way that money is spent locally changes. It doesn't appear that such requirements will be made part of the stimulus legislation. Thus, the federal role in education isn't poised to become more significant apart from covering a higher (albeit still small) portion of overall education costs.

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The Iceman Cometh

Amen! "Washington Post: "As To Ice, Chicago Still Obama's Kind Of Town".

"My children's school was canceled today," Obama said, speaking to reporters before a meeting with business leaders. "Because of what? Some ice? . . . We're going to have to apply some flinty Chicago toughness to this town."

In 2001, the first of three winters I lived in Washington, DC, I innocently walked into my local grocery store one evening on my return home from work. Before me stood dozens of Washingtonians scooping up batteries, bottled water and toilet paper, with checkout lines stretching halfway up the aisles. Why? Two-to-three inches of snow was forecast for the next day. A native New Englander, I rolled my eyes and walked out.

If we lived like that here in Wisconsin -- or in my former Vermont -- the entire state would shut down for half the year. Not gonna happen.

I think President Obama is onto something. Maybe as a condition to giving Washington DC statehood, the Prez should insist on more "Chicago toughness."

In Chicago, where the President's daughters previously attended school, the schools haven't closed for weather since a 1999 ice storm.

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UPDATE: Just discovered that Huffington Post, Alexander Russo and Kevin Carey beat me to the punch on this one. Guess it takes longer for news to reach Wisconsin ... especially through all this ice and snow.

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Debate Redux: DC Vouchers

Republican presidential candidate John McCain made a point to declare school vouchers an education policy grounded in research at Wednesday's debate. "And I've got to tell you that vouchers, where they are requested and where they are agreed to, are a good and workable system," said McCain. "And it's been proven." Not so fast, Senator!

Today's Washington Post offers a fact check on the federal "Opportunity Scholarship Program" which, of course, was imposed upon Washington, DC by the Republican-controlled Congress and President Dubya.

A U.S. Department of Education study released in June showed that students in the program generally scored no higher on reading and math tests after two years than public school peers. The findings are consistent with previous studies of the voucher program.

Leslie Nabors Olah, senior researcher for the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, a coalition of five prominent universities, said that the D.C. voucher program hasn't shown immediate benefits and that more research needs to be done.

"We have no evidence that vouchers work," Nabors Olah said.

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