Our Students Aren't Customers

At Monday's Faculty Senate meeting, I'll deliver the annual report from the Committee for Undergraduate Recruitment, Admissions, and Financial Aid (CURAFA). I have chaired that committee for several years, and while it is not usually something I discuss on this blog, I want to address a comment I made at the last meeting.

At that meeting, my colleague Adam Gamoran delivered a report from the committee on faculty compensation, and as part of that report suggested that the university raise more funds to pay faculty by increasing the overall number of undergraduates from out-of-state (OOS). He was not suggesting we decrease the number of in-state (IS) students, but rather that we grow the total number of undergraduates by enrolling more OOS students.

As CURAFA had not been told this suggestion was forthcoming, and I had not read his committee's entire report for the meeting (my fault), this took me by surprise.  In keeping with my scholarly work on higher education policy, I was aware of the likely reaction from students and the public to a proposal that could easily be read as an effort to put on onus on students and families to fund salary increases. Of course, Adam meant that this was needed only because the state wasn't doing its job of funding the university, but it was also clear right away that this wasn't the media message that would carry.  Further, the idea of increasing enrollment among OOS students was something CURAFA had discussed several times with the Office of Admissions, and it was clear from those conversations that this strategy was much easier said than done.

That is because the percent of OOS who enroll at Madison after being accepted is quite low. That "yield rate" is just 22% for domestic non-residents (this excludes Minnesota) -- lower than the national averages for public universities.  The large gap between applications and enrollments among OOS students is a function of many things-- many students apply to large numbers of institutions to improve their odds of admissions or odds of getting multiple offers that can be negotiated, and also many OOS students expect to be offered a nice merit scholarship to induce their attendance.  Yield is thus a far better indicator than applications of how many students truly prefer UW-Madison and can afford to attend it without scholarships.  The latter shouldn't matter generally, but in the case of OOS students, if we have to heavily discount their costs then we will not generate enough revenue to fund the growth in compensation the faculty desire.  Recent trends indicate that discounting is beginning to fail as a mechanism for attracting students, more of whom seem put off by the higher tuition charged for OOS students at public institutions, and private institutions more generally.  Moreover, UW-Madison is unique is being among a handful of public universities bucking the trend of shifting most financial aid from need-based to merit-based-- giving out relatively few scholarships to freshmen (scholarships to upperclassmen are another matter).

A few more specifics. Over the last ten years, UW-Madison's yield rate among domestic non-residents dropped from 26%  to 22%, even as applications for that group doubled.  During the same period, the yield among international non-residents dropped from 37% to 20%, as applications for that group increased sixfold.  But during that time the yield among Wisconsin residents grew from 60 to 62%, while the number of applications remained steady.   That yield among Wisconsin residents is very high, much higher than the national average, and is likely indicative of demand for more seats among Wisconsin taxpayers.

So the punchline is this:  demand among OOS students for enrollment at UW-Madison simply isn't very strong. That's what I honestly intended to say to the Faculty Senate in my remarks. Accomplishing what Adam's committee was suggesting therefore requires shifting (a) the distribution of merit-based aid, and/or (b) the admissions standards for OOS students.  Right now admissions standards appear to be applied similarly for IS and OOS students, on average.  Unless merit-based aid is used to increase the yield substantially, and unless that discounting is actually successful, growing the number of OOS students would require accepting more OOS students-- and this likely means digging deeper into the application pool.  It is an open and important question as to whether UW-Madison, its faculty, and its constituents want to have differential admissions standards based on residency.  That discussion should be had upfront and publicly, and should not be secondary to (or disguised behind) questions about whether the strategy will generate money.  That has been my point all along, and one I am admittedly quite emotional about since it's my view that UW-Madison's greatest strength is its commitments to high-quality education and service to the state, and its longstanding tradition (including among faculty) of putting those things ahead of monetary concerns.   Ours is not a culture rife with showy displays of consumption; instead we dig in and we focus on our students and our research.

Sadly, I failed in my remarks to make these points.  Moved to respond quickly and without time to gather myself sufficiently, instead I erred in suggesting that the applicant pool of OOS students was weaker academically than that for in-state students. The publicly available evidence (presented in terms of group averages) does not show this to be true, and I regret that I was not better prepared to state my concerns about the yield rate better, or able to discuss why I have some reservations about the data we do have available.  In the future I hope CURAFA and committees making recommendations related to admissions and financial aid will communicate better, so that we can all be better equipped to respond on the spot to proposals and questions at Senate.

Now, I know that some will contend we can simply increase the yield of high-achieving students with better recruitment. I disagree, mainly because this will require substantial additional resources for our relatively small admissions office (eating up the projected revenues from the new students), our Badger Alumni are already doing yeomen work, and because we are losing high-achieving OOS students to places we simply cannot and arguably should not be competing with.  For this group, our yield is just 15% -- 35% go to private institutions like Northwestern, 23% end up staying in-state, and 19% go to another out-of-state institution.   To capture the latter two groups, we have to spend more money through effective discounting -- recruitment alone won't do it.

I'll close with some final words about the overall strategy of using OOS students to increase revenues. It sounds too good to be true because it is.  Yes, it seems efficient and even equitable--if you support redistribution among students).  But as Christopher Newfield has pointed out, the "market-smart and mission centered" approach has a thin empirical evidentiary basis (in fact  more examples of market failures than market successes surround us these days) and brings with it some slippery-slope unintended consequences.  Here's one we are all familiar with: over time, UW-Madison has begun to feel more and more elite-- to both the faculty and to the state.  John Wiley spoke of this concern when he was chancellor, and commissioned a study to look at whether in fact family income among UW-Madison students was increasingly out-of-step with Wisconsin family incomes.  The answer in short is that the reason it feels this way is because of the increasingly high family incomes of OOS students.  The growing proportion of students from wealthier families on campus changes the feel of the place in ways both large and small-- they drive demand for more luxurious accommodations and services (witness Lucky!), enjoy clothing and other aspects of conspicuous consumption that make it harder than ever to "keep up with the Joneses,"and utilize their extensive networks and connections to take on powerful positions help lead votes to charge higher tuition and increase spending, so that UW-Madison will look like the private institutions where their friends attend.  Some even use the higher graduation rates of these more-advantaged OOS students to suggest (without any empirical evidence) that they graduate faster because they pay more.   Sure, they bring greater income and geographic "diversity" to some degree (though the real underrepresentation continues to be among students from below the poverty line) and some will say it broadens the horizons of all student-- but at the same time these changes make the flagship feel less and less like it's part of Wisconsin.  And therein lies the long-term problem.

Madison is not an island. It cannot hover into space, pulling apart from its land. Madison is Wisconsin.  And decisions about changing the degree to which it remains Wisconsin should be make democratically and discussed publicly, openly, and frequently and in arenas that separate these important questions about educational quality and climate from the ever-present, neo-liberalizing discussions about markets and revenue.  Treating our students as students, and not paying customers, is the very least we owe them.

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Squeeze Public Higher Education-- And Watch it Squirm

Make no mistake about it-- a conservative agenda in public higher education, quite similar to the one for public k-12, is steadily progressing across the nation.  The multi-pronged attack includes cutting budgets ("we have no choice-- look at the deficit!"), deriding outcomes ("college is worthless, students are partying"), and applying business models to evaluating success ( c.f. all the efficiency talk).

Today's news is rife with stories suggesting that under attack, public colleges and universities are abandoning their missions, adapting market-centered approaches, fighting with each other, and otherwise jumping ship.

• A new survey reports that 143 public colleges and universities now have differential tuition -- a policy that seems efficient on its face, but may well further stratify opportunities, leaving behind those with the least information and least ability to pay.

• In Florida, a week after announcing substantial budget cuts to state U's, the legislature is pushing for the most elite public universities to jack up their tuition.  Let's create that 1%, why don't we?

• And in California, the Master Plan is nearly dissolved, as fault lines become battles lines and the new cry is "Forget you, state U-- we are better..."

If you weren't alarmed by events last year in Wisconsin, and what they suggested about national trends, you ought to be waking up now.  And assuming you are concerned, come out this week and hear about how public higher education can fight back.  Gary Rhoades is in town, at a visit sponsored by the Wisconsin Academy and the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and he's giving three talks.  Please join us!  The first one is tonight at 7 pm at MMoca.

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Think Outside Your Box

It is often said that access/diversity and affordability in higher education can only come at the expense of quality. Thus, it is all-too-common for critics to cast those in favor of broadening college access as socialists who simply want to destroy high-quality educational institutions. They promote a false dichotomy that has been kept alive for decades by the consistent retelling of the "tragedy of the commons." The tragedy, we're told, is that people will always strive to maximize their private benefits, and that eventually these will necessarily come at the expense of common goods.  Garrett Hardin famously laid this out for us in 1968.

Sadly, far too many people seem to think the tragedy of the commons is a problem that can't be solved. The "iron triangle" model dominating decision-making in higher education confirms this-- since "we know" that spending leads to quality (thus less spending leads to less quality), and that increased access (e.g. more people) requires more money, then it follows that more access means less quality. Right?
Well, no, not really.  First, the link between spending and quality is notoriously weak -- maybe because there's too little variation in spending and/or quality to detect an effect, but maybe not.  Second, just because money is spent on access does not mean that money isn't also creating more quality (especially if diversity is one measure of quality). And third, it's possible to spend less money on quality and yet produce more quality by increasing productivity.

But you can't produce more productivity without greater compensation since people will only respond only to cash, right?  You can't get hard work without inequality-- and inequality is good since a rising tide lifts all boats. Right?? Well, again, no.  It is possible to solicit great effort from humans with other motivators, including security, community, and self-esteem.  Higher education is terrible at distributing these things; it's a climate where professors are said to be "independent contractors," always trying to one-up each other, and it's the very rare administrator who takes time to commend or praise her faculty's hard work.  But places do exist, whole departments even, where people get along, and this keeps them content and productive even when they are not well-compensated according to "market value."

The current crisis in public higher education demands that we make it a priority to grow and nuture such places.  They have to be created by real leaders, and leadership is what's really lacking right now.  Higher education leaders that are educated and experienced in the areas in which they work (e.g. higher education policy), leaders that focus on goal-setting first, and policy development second, leaders that see nothing as inevitable and everything in education as a possibility-- these are so hard to come by.  We are surrounded by narrow-minded thinkers who can't imagine a world other than the one they live in now. But if we encourage and develop people who can think outside the box--the box created by a highly individualistic vision of higher education-- we will find a sustainable model.  We will, as a community, move beyond the tragedy of the commons.

I'm not alone in this vision.  Hear it again, directly from the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics-- Elinor Olstrom.

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Students Occupy Colleges

In a sense, this movement was inevitable.

Higher education has been transformed over the last 50 years, reshaped in many ways that bring into question what it's for, how it works, who should lead it, and most importantly who it is serving. It is the failure of colleges and universities to sufficiently grapple with and address those key questions that led students to Occupy Colleges, and faculty to stand with them, and set up college administrators to be largely inept in response.

The experience of postsecondary education today is highly polarized. Among those attending college are the kinds of students who have always attended college--those who parents and grandparents have degrees, who expected them to go, and ensured they were financially, academically, and otherwise prepared. These are the students who dominate enrollment at the private colleges, take advantage of liberal arts institutions, and who not only earn bachelor's degrees in large numbers but also graduate and professional degrees. But in addition, there is a wide swath of students for whom college was not entirely planned-- it may have felt expected of them, and they did work hard to get ready, but they were unaware of how unprepared college would be to meet their needs. Little did they know that most colleges and universities act as if it's the students' job to get "college-ready," rather than the colleges' job to be prepared to meet the needs of all who enter.

These are the students stunned by the high and rising costs of attendance, and the lack of grant aid available to them. These are the students willing to work long hours to make ends meet, but continually surprised that the faculty and administrators don't respond in turn to accomodate their needs with flexible scheduling, remote advising, and timetables for timely degree completion that don't require full-time enrollment. These are the students who attend the vast majority of our public colleges and universities, and our community colleges, and these are the students at the heart of Occupy Colleges.

Higher education is not sure about these students. Sure, the initial shots were fired long ago, during the Free Speech Movement. But that was about far more than how higher education would work; it was about how society would work. And since that time, colleges and universities have become less--not more-- hospitable to what they like to call "nontraditional" students. Those that some have labeled "tenants" rather than "landowners," decried as "academically adrift," and said to care far less about the hard work of studying. Serving these students has evolved as a speciality, rather than the primary function it ought to be when they comprise at least half of the undergraduate population.

The evidence is everywhere. The growth of the student services industry has segregated the job of meeting students' needs to administrators, letting faculty off the hook. The shift to part-time, contingent labor has lessened the ability of professors to spend the kind of time required to really get to know and address their students' needs--thus creating a stronger rationale for relying on administrators. It would be far better for people to serve dual roles, as teacher and administrator, rather than to continue to pretend the two can be effectively performed in isolation from one another. States have disinvested in public higher education at the same time that the children of the nation's leaders are more likely than ever to opt for private higher education. Public colleges and universities point to those declines in state support and rationalize that since they must have money, they should move to a more "efficient" model of high tuition/high aid, a model that works only in theory. In practical, political life, real world families take sticker prices as real, and mistrust discounting. Politicians and university administrators rarely have the appetite to tie their own hands and fully commit to increasing aid whenever tuition rises. And almost none consider the sharp hypocrisy in their support for free public k-12 education, juxtaposed against their refusal to demand free higher education.

Many, but not all, students are catching on. And therein lies the rub. The move to Occupy Colleges is not a unified front: for every student supporter, there is a student who thinks it's stupid. The students I observe decrying the effort are those who have been well-treated by the current system. Same goes for faculty: those who interact all the time with the so-called nontraditional student and know intimately how we are failing them much more often support this movement. The others, especially those who put research first, often do not.

It's clear who has long been most successful. After all, there is now a move to slash a federal financial aid program (Pell) whose costs have risen (a) because it is doing its job in serving the needs of many students from low-income families and (b) because powerful interests have ensured that government considers to subsidize private and for-profit higher education. If Occupy Colleges could end (b) then the costs of the Pell program would fall dramatically. It won't happen--because higher education refuses to even consider being more about the economically disadvantaged student.

Students are laying these issues at the feet of college administrators and they are stumbling and mumbling in response. Their power-hungry allies, including their overly-compensated athletic directors and boosters and police forces, are doing everything they can to stop it.

It should not be stopped. Students should Occupy Colleges. Let's try that again. Students should occupy colleges. Not administrators. Students, and their educators, should occupy colleges.


NOTE: This post was amended on November 23 in response to a very cogent comment submitted to the blog.

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Playing Politics with Financial Aid

She just won't quit. With only a few days left in her tenure as chancellor of UW Madison, Biddy Martin issued a press release this afternoon "asking" that the UW System Board of Regents allow Madison to spend $2.3 million of its new tuition hike on need-based financial aid.

She's a "champion" of need-based aid says the press release, and this must be music to the ears of all of us concerned about affordability--right?

Wrong. Sadly, Martin is playing politics yet again and thinking of what's best for her, rather than what's best for all students from Wisconsin's low-income families.

(1) Biddy Martin lobbied hard for new "flexibilities" for Madison this year and she got them. The money from the state arrives in a block grant, which means Madison now makes its own decisions about use of the differential tuition. She doesn't need to "ask" UW System for this-- and she knows it. (And boy, if she doesn't know that ....)

(2) So why didn't she simply just say "this is what the tuition should be used for," instead of issuing a press release directly to the Board of Regents and System President Kevin Reilly? Because then her actions would be exposed for what they are: a demand on the incoming interim chancellor David Ward. Yes, while she runs off into the distance from the mess she's created, Martin has already begun to boss Ward around. I suppose we can't be surprised.

(3) This is her chance to reiterate her claim that she's all about affordability. As noted in an earlier post, Martin says this is her big thing, reflects her values, etc-- and it's why she wants to go to Amherst. Except for this-- Amherst serves about as many students from low-income families as Madison could cram into a single lecture hall. Puhleese.

(4) This proposal-- hike tuition but give away a bunch of it to financial aid--raises eyebrows among thoughtful people about whether we "needed" the hike in the first place. Why not avoid hiking tuition and instead hold tuition flat for everyone? Martin draws on the arguments of some economists here who argue it's most efficient and equitable to charge everyone what they can afford, redistributing funds from wealthier families to needier ones. Again, sounds good in theory. Unfortunately it's just a mess in practice. In the real world, it pits students against students. It also sends an unintended message to state governments that institutions can take care of themselves. Just look at Martin-- has she said even one word about the importance of the Wisconsin Higher Education Grant? Did she provide input to UW System as to how those limited resources could best be spent? I served on the Legislature's Special Committee on the Reform of Financial Aid Programs last summer and the answer is "nope." We heard not one word from Madison's chancellor about her support for the need-based financial aid program that serves ALL students in Wisconsin public higher education. All we hear about is aid for Madison students. Doesn't smell like team spirit to me.

(5) Finally, there's an irony here. Last week economist Doug Harris and I issued a new study on the effectiveness of financial aid in Wisconsin. It demonstrates the need to target funds in order to make sure they are effective. Martin didn't attend the conference (on Madison's campus) where the paper was discussed, she didn't send a note of support for the event, and she hasn't asked to see the paper that was issued and that has been widely covered in the media. Funny decisions, for someone supposedly so supportive of need-based aid.

No, this is pure politics. Worse yet it's playing politics with the hearts and minds of students from low-income families. And those who truly strive to serve them-- all of them.

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