Pell Funding: Is it Out of Control-- and Who Does it Support?

Catching up on my reading from the last few weeks and want to draw your attention to this bit of reporting from Inside Higher Ed.

Key lessons here:
(1) Pell spending leveled off in the last year.
(2) A very sizable fraction of Pell dollars are still going to for-profit institutions, but this has declined a bit in the last year.
(3) We could cut total Pell spending by $15 billion dollars (almost 45%) simply by deciding that public dollars cannot be spent at for-profit institutions.  This would make Pell policy consistent with the policies of most state grant programs.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is spending $3.3 million on efforts to "re-imagine aid design and delivery." I'm hoping they will revisit the decades-old decision to offer aid through a voucher system that rests on the premise that maximizing choices in an open market will promote the well-being of all students and the national interest in an educated citizenry.

But absent that, let's hope they push to create additional charts like these, including one that shows how much debt Pell recipients had to accrue in order to use their Pells at these institutions. In other words, let's get a sense of which states and institutions are matching this federal investment-- and which ones require students to make the match.

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Wisconsin Needs to Educate, Not Incarcerate

Yet another policy brief highlights what realists know:  Wisconsin policymakers are presiding over poor policy decisions that threaten to undermine taxpayers' decades-long investment in the state's human capital.

Far from saving our children from lifetimes of debt, those on the neoliberal Left and the conservative Right advocating for either "freeing" state universities from the limitations of state funding in pursuit of market models, or diminishing state spending in a time of austerity, are accomplishing the same goal:  driving up the costs of college attendance and reducing the overall educational attainment of our state's workers.

Forty years ago our grandparents elected officials who invested $14 per $1000 of personal income in higher education.  Today, we elect jokers who put in just $5.  What happened?

Figure courtesy of Tom Mortenson, Postsecondary Education Opportunity

Let's admit it: we aren't leaders anymore, we're laggards. Yes, Wisconsin pays taxes, but we throw away far too much of it on other things.  According to Figure 4 in the new report I referenced above, we rank 32nd thanks to the policy choice displayed above-- relative to per capita income, we are outspent by the likes of Mississippi, Alabama, and West Virginia, not to mention our neighbors Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Minnesota.

Where is that money going instead? One simple word answers the question: corrections.  To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, we fought a War on Drugs, and drugs won-- but heck, we are still throwing our money at the problem.  Legacy spending, you might call it.   Over the last 10 years, spending on corrections went up 9%, while spending on k12 dropped by 6% and spending on higher education dropped 20%. Right, because clearly the goal of Wisconsin taxpayers is not to help educate our children, but rather to lock 'em up and shut 'em up.

For those who manage to avoid prison and get into college, instead of investing in their future, Wisconsin taxpayers seem to want their families to foot the bill. How's that working for us? Well, enrollment in our public institutions is lagging behind those in other states.  We have experienced far slower growth in fall enrollment as measured over both 5-year and 10-year periods, compared to the national average (see Table 6 here). Perhaps most startling is how little enrollment in our 2-year colleges has changed-- there was practically no change at all in enrollment there over the last 5 years (0.6%) while the national average was 16.7%! Perhaps not coincidentally, during that time, tuition and fees at the 2-years (already higher than the national average 5 years ago) rose by 20%.

I have to admit being persistently perplexed at how other parents throughout Wisconsin can sit idly by while we pour money intended for our kids into pits of despair like the state's correctional facilities.  It is far more cost-effective to educate rather than incarcerate.  It's time to make our policymakers do right by the limited dollars we have. Let's re-instate a real early release plan, and rollback the ridiculous "truth in sentencing" guidelines that lengthened parole time, greatly increasing the likelihood of being returned to prison. As UW-Madison expert Walter Dickey notes, there are numerous hidden costs to incarceration, and as state we simply can't afford to be in the corrections business.   

The best solution is to treat education as the crime-fighting technique it really is.  Providing young people with truly viable opportunities later in life gives them something to really aim for, helping keep them off the streets and on the job.  A recent UW-Madison graduate, economist Ben Cowan, finds that a $1,000 reduction in tuition and fees at two-year colleges is associated with a 26% decline in the number of sexual partners an adolescent has, and a 23% decline in number of days in the past month he used marijuana.  Policies that support affordable higher education may simultaneously support reductions in the costs of incarceration, in a virtuous cycle that is win-win for all.

This is pure common sense and we all know it.  It's simply time we demand that our "leaders" catch up.

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Reflections on Foundations, ALEC and Higher Ed Reform in Wisconsin

Last week, a fellow Madison blogger drew our attention to some potentially troubling relationships between a major higher education foundation, a DC-based consulting group, a conservative political organization, and a new initiative in the UW System.  Scott Wittkopf at Badger Democracy is playing a critical role in attending to the relationships among funders of higher education reform efforts, and political constituencies.  He has since mapped in greater depth the work of one foundation, Lumina, and another blog post is forthcoming.

Since I have established relationships with both Lumina and HCM Strategists, the consulting group in question, and have blogged (and hosted guest blogs) before on the large role that foundations are playing in pushing the higher ed reform agenda, I want to fully disclose as much as possible my role and assessment of this situation.

First, readers of this blog know my work as an expert on college student success, and as an outspoken champion for expanding college access to underserved populations. I am proud of the major role I played in the fight against the New Badger Partnership and other local efforts to prioritize institutional prestige over the needs of Wisconsin residents. I am constantly engaged in the struggle to ensure that public institutions of all types survive and thrive. At this point I have been active in Wisconsin research, policy, and activism circles for more than eight years. 

In my work I spending a lot of time interacting with the higher education reform movements nationally.  It is for this reason, over the last decade I have engaged with both Lumina and HCM many times. I am also very well-acquainted with the Gates education initiatives, having been both a grantee (to the tune of $1.2 million for the Wisconsin Scholars Longitudinal Study) and a consultant. Moreover, I participant frequently in the bipartisan higher education working group hosted by the American Enterprise Institute and funded by Gates.  

Why do I do these things, despite recent evidence that these places have ties to ALEC and others?

Good question, and one I'm thinking a lot about.  I think it is because at the heart of it, the main thrust of reform efforts to improve higher education are bipartisan. We on the Left and the Right share a desire to get colleges and universities (and state legislatures) focused on college completion rather than enrollment, and to make opportunities for all people more affordable.  

We diverge most often on the methodology-- what approach we think will work best.  Some people I work with really think innovation is encouraged by competition, while others (including myself) advocate for greater cooperation, and a strong faculty role.  But I have found over time that it is far better to be in active conversation with those I disagree with rather than limit myself only to relationships I am in alignment with because: 

• It makes me much more cognizant of what other points of view mean and how people argue their case 
• It helps me sharpen my own lenses and causes me to ask more relevant questions in my work
• Being around others with differing points of view doesn't change my fundamental principles or make me their pawn but rather helps me establish credibility on both sides of the aisle.  It is because of my continuous willingness to show up and engage-- to banter, to debate, and to speak freely--that both Democrats and Republicans now talk with me about higher education

So, yes, here's the truth: I have received substantial funding from both HCM Strategists and Gates. I talk with HCM partners Kristin Conklin and Terrell Halaska regularly, including about Wisconsin. Kristin is an old friend of my husband's, from when he worked at National Governors Association, before coming to work as Governor Doyle's education policy advisor.  And, I helped Wisconsin become a College Productivity Strategy Lab state.  I did this because Strategy Labs bring money that help us to get people informed on key issues, bring in speakers, and open doors to conversations with other leaders nationwide. The fact is that obviously Wisconsin has had a fair amount of academic and political transition and has not engaged much in the Strategy Labs since Lumina invited it to be part of it in 2010. There is no fee to join, just a commitment to try to improve system and state policies for students. 

Furthermore, despite my known feelings about the current Governor, I have engaged in conversations with his office about the UW online initiative.  To me this is the true fulfillment of the Wisconsin Idea: a government official asked me for input, and rather than put my partisan political feelings in the way, I provided honest, candid feedback and advice.  Given their reputation among education leaders in other states, I didn't want Western Governors University to come to Wisconsin, and I felt it very likely that Walker was already talking to them.  In these conversation I expressed concern about WGU and I suggested that another approach--- making it an in-house public UW initiative-- would be more effective.  The effort to advance an online program was not encouraged by HCM or supported by its technical assistance. The concepts in the program are advocated by organizations like CAEL and in place or under consideration in many states. As UW moves to implement its ideas, the lessons learned from states like Maryland's University College or through SUNY's Empire State college could be accessed through the Strategy Labs.

Yes, online competency-based instruction is now here.  I'm not taking credit or blame for it.  As I wrote recently, we shouldn't be quick to judge a pedagogical technique that has the potential to bring education to people who otherwise wouldn't get any college instruction at all.  Of course we don't want it to fully replace face-to-face instruction, nor should it be operated for profit or cause students to require large loans to afford it.  Of course it shouldn't displace faculty, or be privatized.  But online instruction is likely to be about as uneven in quality as face-to-face instruction, which let's admit it, is quite uneven.

Supporting a position that is also supported by a conservative group does not mean that's the driver of the position.  Not once has HCM or Lumina or Gates ever dictated to me what I should or must say about anything. I have always been my own voice.  I speak truth to power with solid data and a clear stance in favor of students, staff, and faculty.  I know it's hard to believe, but given my disposition and the fact that my core salary comes from UW-Madison, nothing, nothing could ever change that. Sure, I could easily forgo taking their money, but honestly it would make me less effective as a researcher, and less able to have a voice in ongoing policy debates.  I couldn't conduct my large-scale expensive research, couldn't train students to think critically about these issues by actively engaging in them, and couldn't participate in these foundation and policy meetings. In the end, my absence would perpetuate their groupthink.

The fact is that since 2008 Lumina has made many, many grants under the broad umbrella of "productivity." This includes grants to the National Research Council, Public Agenda, and the National Governors Association.  I wrote a paper with Doug Harris on productivity that was funded by HCM.  Through the writing, Doug can attest that I continually worried about that term and all it means, and I tried to make the paper reflect that (the latest version, now under review, finally does). Not once did a funder object, and in fact they brought me many places to speak my mind on the topic without censorship.

As for HCM, those consultants lead a state policy network and advocate changes consistent with Lumina's Four Steps.  To build understanding among state leaders, they bring peers together and give states access to experts. I have helped by writing op eds about financial aid in several states, where policymakers want to strengthen "student incentives," and I push for them to do it in the ways that most help the truly disadvantaged.  The fact that those op-eds are bipartisan (written with Mark Schneider, a Republican), seems to be part of why Wisconsin Republicans are willing to even speak with me.

Locals might also want to know that leaders of HCM Strategists were helpful in the fight against the New Badger Partnership, prodding thoughtful higher education leaders around the nation to weigh in with their opinions. These experts did not support Biddy Martin's plans, noting the very real consequences for access to the general public.  There's no way this was in service of Walker -- or ALEC's -- agenda.

Scott isn't alone in his concerns. Other researchers have examined the issues surrounding Lumina and reached similar conclusions. In a paper presented at AERA this spring, Cassie Hall and Scott Thomas (one of my mentors) noted that Lumina's approach was uncommonly activist, and focused on student success and productivity. I completely agree with that-- but would note that being pro-student success and pro-productivity is not inherently liberal or conservative.  The approach itself could go either way, but the fundamental stance is pro-student, rather than pro-institution-- a stance I firmly agree with and have written much about. As Hall and Thomas write, this stance is driven by "an increasing level of distrust that higher education institutions can successfully enact reforms that will result in meaningful changes to our postsecondary system.”  I think that's well-placed mistrust, given the tendency of most top-level higher education administrators to advance "institutional" interests over those of faculty, staff, or students.  To be clear, I firmly believe that educators, rather than legislators or foundations, should be charged with this work. But the problem is that boards of visitors and high-level administrators tend to alienate faculty and staff, disempower them, and even portray them as the source of inertia rather than the rightful agents of change.

Yes, I would much prefer to see Lumina and Gates, among others, embrace the talents of faculty in rethinking how we can best serve students.  I said this over and over again at a Gates Foundation convening last week.  Recent discussions about the governance crisis at UVA reveal that many professors there have, and are plenty happy to, teach online-- and had they been included in the conversation they would have found good solutions to the problems identified by Helen Dragas and the Board of Visitors.  The same thing could be said about last year's discussion about the NBP -- Biddy Martin and her team did not engage the faculty, staff, or students in the problem-solving needed to address UW-Madison's financial woes.  They went straight to Scott Walker, and embraced an agenda that has demonstrably been shaped by ALEC's desires. This reflects an unfortunate move over the last 20-30 years to portray faculty, staff, and students as naive, ill-equipped obstacles to change, and this I think is not a coincidence-- it is a move to disempower the most expensive part of colleges and universities: the full-time tenured labor. If Lumina, HCM, or anyone else were to support that approach, I'd be utterly opposed to it.

I also fully support and echo Hall and Thomas's concerns about the role these major foundations have played in limiting what is studied and how it is studied, given their small emphasis on peer review and high priority on strategic goals that often do not seem to align with research evidence. In other words, even having been funded by them, I am far from satisfied with their approach and as you can see I still feel confident that engaging in this type of critique will not result in my being deemed ineligible for their support. Recall that I helped bring Robin Rogers' wonderful critique of Gates to the public eye by first running it here before it was in the Washington Post.  For Gates to retaliate would be incredibly unwise, and they know it.  They don't ask me to give them a pass for their errors-- in fact at a recent Gates convening I tweeted openly of my discontent with some of their practices, and their program officers were open to that conversation. 

Perhaps the best way to wrap up this little tell-all is with a quote from Jamie Merisotis from Lumina: “All we can do is be transparent about what we’re trying to achieve and let people decide how we’ve done." While I might prefer to remove the word "all," I think this is basically right. We should hold foundations and public officials, including educational institutions, to full disclosure. In turn we have to consider all potential interpretations of the evidence we have.  And we must weigh their approaches against the alternatives.  In this case, I think the agenda is focused improvements in student success accomplished by increasing the incentives for colleges and universities to focus mainly on high-quality education, rather than competing for rankings driven by dollars spent and enrollment of elites.  That sounds good to me.  Yes, let's keep our eyes on ALEC.  Yes, let's always question and critique.  We must avoid privatization of public education-- and we want to educate people while growing and expanding the labor market so there are jobs waiting on the other end.  But the goal of expanding access to a high-quality education while driving down costs is a laudable one-- as long as the role of public democratic governance of that education is preserved.  Let's focus on that, and together find the best way forward.

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Thoughts on the Obama Blueprint for Higher Education

Today President Obama unveiled his latest blueprint for the reform of higher education at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, a public institution with relatively high tuition and relatively advantaged students, and a place in the midst of a dispute over graduate student labor practices. It's just miles from Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, where on July 14, 2009, Obama released his American Graduation Initiative, a blueprint for transforming the nation's community colleges, which was essentially destroyed as it was caught up in political debates over the health care legislation.

The blueprint responds to the groundswell of concern about the high and ever-expanding cost of college attendance, and the corresponding growth in the costs of financial aid. It resonates with efforts by the Occupy movement, and especially with the agendas of the Lumina and Gates foundation. It's also consonant with the work of many labor economists.

On the one hand, there are many things to like here-- for example, it's about time the Administration shined a light on the fact that tuition is rising primarily because states are cutting their support to higher education. Despite some recent unfortunate remarks by Vice-President Biden, faculty salaries don't account for much of the increase in tuition. While it is the case that the salaries of SOME professors are too high, such discussions serve only to distract from the real problems-- and have the political effect of pitting educators against students. That may be convenient for administrators, or conservatives who simply want to put the predominantly liberal faculty out of work, but it isn't solving the problem of rising tuition. We shouldn't expend effort making policy based on anecdote or a few bad apples, especially when a wealth of data is staring us in the face, pointing the way.

But in many ways, what President Obama does in this blueprint is deeply problematic. First, it demonstrates his clear adherence to market-based logics of educational reform. He seems to actually believe that Race to the Top is working so well that it ought to be replicated by creating another competition in higher education. Where's the evidence to support that? Too much faith in Arne Duncan, if you ask me.

Second, the approach of tying Perkins and SEOG dollars to these new requirements has a consequence--perhaps unintended--of restricting the abilities of financial aid administrators to exercise their professional judgment in directing aid to students. These are some of the most flexible dollars at their disposal-- and some institutions have very, very few. I'm concerned that we don't yet know whether the choices aid administrators make maximize the effects of these dollars in ways that will now be minimized-- and also that these frontline workers would seem to have little control over the institutional and state actions needed to ensure the dollars keep coming in. In other words, aid officers may have fewer flexible dollars to work with now, but no additional control over how their universities set tuition.

I'm happy to see some money to promote the adoption of practices that can increase productivity in higher education, but as Doug Harris and I have pointed out, the evidence-base on which to make judgements about cost-effectiveness of programs is very, very thin. So I'm very disappointed that this program didn't begin by first endowing the Institute for Education Sciences with the resources needed to establish multiple higher education research centers, and task them (in part) with evaluating effects of this effort.

Also, given that some of these approaches to enhanced productivity have negative effects for faculty worklife, it would have been good for Obama to at minimum urge policymakers to avoid pitting students against their educators-- as they have in criticizing teachers' unions-- and instead be cognizant that students and professors have many common interests, and those should be emphasized. I predict that next up we'll be told that faculty aren't really interested in student success, and thus can and should be replaced. Of course, no one will produce hard evidence to back that up-- and yet we'll be demonized.

When it comes to specific aid programs, it is absurd for Obama to double the American Opportunity Tax Credit without any explanation, while barely mentioning the Pell Grant. As Sandy Baum and Mike McPherson recently wrote, when "will we also debate whether government expenditures targeting low-income college students deserve much stricter scrutiny in this age of attempted austerity than government expenditures through the tax code targeting more-affluent students?"

Overall, my reaction to this proposal is a simple "Meh." (HT to Sue Dynarski) Lately Obama has come out fighting, talking about the rich and poor, and about not backing the same old policies which got us into this economic crisis in the first place. What I see in this proposal is a lot of his approach to k-12 education and it's neither radical or progressive. Sure, it resonates with the desire of moderates and conservatives (as well as so-called reformers) to hold the academy's feet to the fire, and it does talk about state responsibility. But a progressive blueprint would've referred to higher education much more strongly as a right and a public good, focused on policies that could most benefit the struggling public institutions (think community colleges and state u's-- not flagships) and left all privates out of eligibility, stressed the importance of both faculty success and student success to the definition of "quality", and instead of framing change as a "race to the top" he should have called for a "war on educational inequality."


PS. After reading my take, please consider Clare Potter's. She is spot-on, and I only wish I'd made the case as well as she did!

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The New Badger Partnership is Not About Affordability

According to the Badger Advocates' new television ad promoting the New Badger Partnership, the number one reason this new policy is needed is "To keep tuition affordable and provide more financial aid."

This claim is echoed in speeches by Chancellor Martin and her Administration, and maintaining or enhancing affordability is a central goal for the NBP articulated by student advocates.

Can the NBP achieved its primary policy objective? Will it?

The strong likelihood is no. Here, again, is why.

(1) The value of financial aid depends on cost of attendance. The real cost of college attendance for students and families is the "net price" they pay -- that is, the cost of attendance minus financial aid. Since some students do not respond well to loans, many argue that net price is actually the difference between cost of attendance and grant aid.

(2) The New Badger Partnership makes statements about the need to "keep tuition affordable" but it says nothing about tying increases in financial aid to increases in tuition. This is one of the biggest myths going around right now-- please, look at the legislation-- there is not a word about increasing aid in proportion to tuition in there. In other words, the NBP says nothing about maintaining or reducing net price. While advocates for the NBP rightly note that some higher education analysts support a "high tuition high aid" model, they neglect the clear statements made by those analysts that in order to work -- e.g. in order to maintain or enhance affordability--increases in aid must always accompany increases in tuition. Furthermore, those same analysts insist that since states and institutions rarely behave in such a predictable, responsible manner, it's important that they be required to do so. Yet the NBP does not mandate this.

(3) The New Badger Partnership talks about keeping tuition affordable but says nothing about keeping room and board, or student fees affordable. The cost of attendance, and thus the net price, includes all of those things. And those non-tuition costs have been rising faster than tuition for a long time.

(4) Only if "net price" decreases substantially will affordability may be improved. I see nothing in the NBP that suggests that grant aid will grow much more rapidly than tuition or that such growth will always be sustained over time-- so I think the chances of a substantial decrease in "net price" and increase in affordability are slim to none.

(5) If "net price" does not change, affordability is at best maintained. That would be the true meaning of "hold harmless" (as in the Madison Initiative for Undergraduates). But again, I say "at best" maintained because it is also plausible that sticker price has an effect on student decision-making, apart from net price. In other words, some students and families may be "scared off" by the higher tuition, perhaps because they misunderstand discounting. In that case, affordability is eroded.

(6) Misunderstanding of discounting is widespread among all kinds of people, including those in the lower and middle-income brackets. It's a bigger problem among low-income people. Not a single "sticker shock" program has been proven effective-- including those at private institutions-- where research shows the percent of low-income students has not increased despite such campaigns.

Given these facts, why is the NBP being promoted as an effort to maintain or even enhance affordability? At best, this seems disingenuous. Instead, Advocates could talk about the other aims of the policy-- e.g. improving excellence and/or quality--and make the case that increases in those things offset sacrifices to affordability. But they are not making this case, and I suspect it's because they know the argument will not fly with much of their constituency. Instead they have adopted the rhetoric of affordability that appeals to liberals, and used it to paper over a campaign that is ultimately focused on the needs of the elite.

Finally, let's talk about the great fear: "the status quo."

It is true that UW-Madison has grown less affordable over time, that institutional need-based aid did not increase until Chancellor Martin's regime, and that we stand to get higher tuition even absent the NBP. All that is true, and affordability could erode as a result.

BUT THE NBP IS NOT THE ONLY POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVE TO THE STATUS QUO.

Instead of the NBP we could maintain or enhance affordability by doing the following:

(1) Require all undergraduates to complete a FAFSA before enrolling at UW–Madison, although an “opt out” option can be added for personal and philosophical reasons.

(2) Seek a change to the rules governing the use of tuition dollars. Right now we can't use them for financial aid-- instead of asking for the right to set tuition, why not instead ask for the right to use some of the dollars for aid? This is what we did with MIU-- and MIU is different from NBP in that it explicitly tied aid to tuition increases.

(3) Continue to fundraise for institutional need-based aid. The growth in fundraising for that cause under Chancellor Martin's regime came from new leadership at Foundation-- the NBP was not needed. Ask for more support in promoting that campaign.

(4) Gradually shift institutional merit-based aid to institutional need-based aid. Make it a priority-- take a stand.

(5) Lead hard conversations about cost-savings measures to reduce room and board and student fees, to reign in the cost of attendance.

(6) Collect the kind of data needed to measure the impact of institutional need-based aid (right now we do not do this, and we easily could). Document effects and use them for fundraising purposes.

(7) Experiment with a sticker shock campaign. Find a model that works for UW Madison and use it to gain the support for additional tuition increases.

(8) Rethink admissions criteria and their relationship to family income. Consider putting a "thumb on the scale" for family background in order to increase diversity at Madison.

Before you accuse me of putting forth good ideas too late in the game, know this: these are not new proposals. We have made them many times over many years. They have been ignored.

Whatever you think about it, the NBP is not about increasing affordability. It will not achieve that policy objective. Vote for it on other grounds if you must-- but do not do so thinking it will make UW Madison more affordable.

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First, Do Your Homework

There's growing concern with higher education's affordability problem, as well there should be. It's hard to see how college will promote social mobility if a kid's ability to access it is increasingly linked to whether or not his family has money.

So it's heartening to see college leaders attempting to provide solutions. But it'd be even better if we first saw them earnestly attempting to understand where the real sources of trouble lie. I'm afraid that step's being skipped a bit too often, running the risk of making things worse.

Here's a recent example. At this month's Regents Board Meeting, University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly was explicitly asked to name some solutions to promoting affordability at his institutions. There were many ways he could respond. To his credit, Reilly acknowledged the importance of growing the state's paltry support for need-based aid and he said that multiple solutions were needed--there's no one silver bullet. Fair enough. But then he took a bit of a flying leap, saying we also needed an informational campaign aimed at helping students and families understand that it's best to finish college in four years.

Huh? This one left me scratching my head.

More specifically, Reilly said that his administration needs to do a better job communicating with students and families about their educational "choices" and the financial implications of those choices. He suggested that students and families do not know that finishing in four saves money, and if they did, they'd make "better" decisons.

Based on what, exactly?

Was Reilly in possession of some new empirical evidence indicating that Wisconsin families don't perceive the returns to a college degree, or one earned on time? Had he or his staff done homework that showed students were taking longer to finish because they lacked a "focus on 4?" I wish this was the case, but I doubt it. The only data Reilly has publicly provided for his argument is this: he compared the completion rates of in-state students to out-of-state students and noted that the latter group pays more tuition and finishes degrees faster. Given the numerous differences between the two groups, this is an especially weak argument, and one that a decent analysis of the data could easily tear apart.

On the other hand, we have a new national report from the Gates Foundation about the most common reason for college dropout: students' overwhelming need to work. There's also a rigorous study from the National Bureau of Economic Research showing that declining resources for higher education (e.g. supply-side factors) contribute more to college completion rates than do student-side factors. In an earlier paper, the same authors pointed to how the overcrowding of non-top 50 public institutions (a category into which nearly all of Reilly's institutions fit) leads to increased time-to-degree. And within Wisconsin I am co-leading a team of researchers investigating precisely how and why affordability matters for college success. None of that work provides support for the idea that students don't know that finishing a degree faster will save them money. Instead, they have a hard time figuring out how to make that happen while juggling work, family, and school.

Of course, Reilly isn't alone in thinking that he needs to share this "money-saving advice" with students and families. The problem is that his assumption and his message aren't benign. In particular, both come across as out-of-touch and insensitive to the harsh realities of some students' lives. Just think about his words on the subject, which include these quotes: "You've got to realize how much more you're going to be paying unless you focus." "...Part of the problem clearly is students choosing to say, 'I don't want to take an 8 a.m. course' or 'I want to take my courses between 10 (a.m.) and 3 (p.m.) on Tuesday and Thursday.,," "We need to be clearer about results of choices that students and families make about college...There are ways that students and families, by planning ahead a bit and making some focused intentional choices, can hold the cost of an education down."

The assumption he's making-- that the choices made by low-income families are not "intentional" or even informed--rests on shaky, volatile ground. As I've argued elsewhere, the common sport of painting working-class students and families as irrational is off-base. In fact, taken in the context of significant constraints on their lives the decisions many students make about extending their time to degree are quite rational. As a former UW undergraduate told me, ‘It's not an issue of choosing to work when classes are available, but often an issue of you don't get to choose your schedule, especially as the number of hours you work increases."

I have a feeling that when making his suggestion, Reilly was referencing those picky students who want to sleep late and be choosy about their courses, a common rep given to the Madison undergrads (for example). The problem is, those aren't the same students not completing degrees in 4 years. In essence, he's drawing on impressions of an elite group of students to shape solutions to the problems of the non-elite. Not gonna work.

In the absence of any empirical support, one has to wonder-- why does this idea have any traction at all? I think its because it fits with American ideals-those who work the hardest and "focus" the most will get ahead. It places the blame squarely on individuals rather than institutions, even when purporting to share responsibility. Constraints be damned; if you "know" what's good for you, you'll do it. Plus, communicating to students what's good for them is far less expensive than providing the financial support they need to make their actual choices pay off.

Crafting solutions to policy problems without doing sufficient homework first can incur trouble. For one, you risk insulting and alienating the very folks you wanted to help. That's certainly what happened here. As the former UW student told me, "Very few people are oblivious to the fact that adding an extra year to your education costs more money... I'm disappointed that the UW-System seems absolutely unaware of the challenges faced by its students, and its president believes that it's due to personal choice or ignorance that a student would not graduate in four years...The system misunderstands the plight of students who have similar circumstances to the ones I experienced."

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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?

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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.

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