Well, duh. I did. Kinda sorta, “health communications” is pretty much liberal arts with a healthy dose of health and fitness knowledge thrown in. Besides, it is not like it was my choice. It was his choice. In fact, attending Ferrum was his choice. Now, I did have a lot of influence and I did not have to pay for him to go there.

In fact, I am the one that encouraged him to consider Ferrum, to consider private colleges in general. As a freshling in high school, he was vocal about never attending a private college. Despite the fact I had worked in private colleges for 10 years before coming to Virginia.

Almost 20 years ago, I attended my first Higher Education Data Sharing (HEDS) Consortium meeting shortly after I joined Willamette University. One of the discussion sessions was on the future of private colleges. The presenters were bemoaning the growth of public universities since WWII and reversal of college enrollment from 75% private to 75% public. I spoke up, as I have had a tendency to do, and espoused my belief that state funding was going to continue to drop and within a few decades the “real” cost of college (net price wasn’t really a thing back then) was going to be about the same at both publics and privates.

So, this is why Ferrum won out over Longwood. There simply was not enough difference in net price for my son (and I) to feel that was really a deciding factor. Other factors were much stronger; perhaps the physical similarity of Ferrum to Willamette, and their Methodist histories.

It is a shame though that a small public college (and it really, truly is a college more than a university) like Longwood has a net price for the lowest income students that requires them to come up with $50,000 (usually through debt) to cover four years of enrollment.We can do better.

Back to the liberal arts. For some people the choice of major has about as much relevance as the choice of going to college. These people will be successful no matter what, on their own terms, whether through privilege or a drive to accomplish their own personal vision. For others, the choice of major really is a just an effective way to hold their interest through four-years of study and other activities. For still others, major is about a chosen profession.

The liberal arts can handle most of these students.

Now the uncomfortable reality is that most liberal arts graduates will not make a lot of money. (Yes, I know this. Yes, I have data; but that is for another venue and another day, very soon.)  They won’t be poor, in fact, most will be above average nationally – especially if they marry another liberal arts graduate. The problem is that this is not a problem.

The problem is one of expectations combined with an unwillingness to pay for what we value. If we truly value an educated populace we should be willing to fund that. We are fully able to do so, it is simply a matter of choice. Relatively lower earnings compared to high demand occupations should be used as justification for greater support in order to reduce the reliance on student and parent debt. Policymakers need to develop realistic expectations of what various degrees are worth in the marketplace and what are needed in what quantities. They also need to understand that meeting the needs of the marketplace is not the not the only justification for public support of college education. Education is a good thing. And as the famous college founder, Emile Faber once said, “Knowledge is good.”

Of course, I am biased. I have an art degree (painting and jewelry). My wife is a special ed teacher. My father was a professor of communications. My step-mother, a political scientist. My mother, a K-12 teacher. Two sisters – one, a degree in communications; one, a degree in English literature. A third-generation with four out of five eligible completers (the one non-completer could justifiably be dropped from the cohort) with three of the completers in liberal arts and fourth is pre-med/biology (now a medical resident).

No one is ever hurt by a good liberal education. They can be hurt by too much debt. And a lack of awareness that the credential by itself may not be enough to succeed  in the workplace.

So, yes, I would let my son, or daughter, major in the liberal arts.

For one thing, it means low performance on a handful of federal measures.

Today, Washington Monthly released its college rankings and added four different takes on “America’s Worst Colleges.”  Five Virginia colleges were distributed across the four lists. One of these is Ferrum College, which is where my son attended and graduated. While I am not writing so much to defend  Ferrum, I am going to use it as an example as to the limits of metrics since I think I have enough information feel good about the quality of education there.

Washington Monthly does a separate article about Ferrum in “Held Accountable” to describe the type of school that should fear Obama’s college rankings. It is a fair article and it references the data we produce and publish at SCHEV.

But this explanation goes only so far. Nationally, there is a lack of data that can sharply distinguish between schools that are dropout factories and those that largely serve as feeder schools to more elite institutions. But in Virginia, making that distinction is far easier. That’s because it is one of a handful of states that keep track of whether college students who leave one in-state institution ever wind up graduating from another. And it also tracks what their earnings are if they go on to work in the state after graduating. What this information reveals about Ferrum is not pretty.

No, it is not particularly pretty. Washington Monthly used our data well, and used a pretty full spectrum of the data.

For example, only 22.8 percent of seventeen- to nineteen-year-olds who started their college careers at Ferrum in 2003-04 graduated within four years from Ferrum or from any other public or private nonprofit institution in Virginia. Yet 43.3 percent of their counterparts at all other private nonprofit four-year institutions in the state graduated within four years. Even ten years later, the 46 percent of students who started as seventeen- to nineteen-year-old freshmen at Ferrum had still not graduated from any college in Virginia, compared to a ten-year in-state graduation rate of 62.3 for students who previously attended Virginia’s other private four-year colleges.

Are there schools that do worse on this one metric than Ferrum? Yes, there are a handful. Historically black Norfolk State University, for example. But what makes Ferrum really stand out is the way that it scores consistently low across a broad range of performance measures. For example, Ferrum is a pricy place for what it offers. Even with grants and scholarships, the average net price to attend the college and live on campus still came to $19,324 in 2012. Largely as a result, fully 91 percent of Ferrum graduates take on student debt. This is far higher than the average borrowing rate for all private nonprofit four-year institutions in Virginia, which comes to 69 percent. Multiplying these borrowing rates by the amount of debt incurred by each graduate yields a weighted debt average of $26,169 at Ferrum, compared to an average $18,910 for all private nonprofit institutions in the state.

However, there is a bit more to the story.

First, any institution with less than a first-to-second year retention rate less than 60% is in trouble. As regular readers know, that is first of two warning measures for an at-risk institution. Second, Ferrum is an undergraduate-only institution with just over 1,500 students. That is well below my second threshold of 2,000 students. Ferrum has challenges, there is no doubt about that.

In 1992, fall enrollment was 1,231 students. In 1997 it hit 908, struggled to 951 the following year, and then stayed below a 1,000 through 2005.  The last eight years have been years of significant growth. Much of this growth has been in the first-year class, representing 585 of last fall’s 1,512 students. This is not an ideal mix.

I can prowl through the data and keep looking for bright spots. The fact is, relatively motivated students with family support can be successful at Ferrum, if they get through the first year. Of first-time, full-time students, 89%  who finish 60 credits with a “C” or better in the first two years graduate within five years. But this is only about 10% of the entering class. Similarly, 65.5% of transfer students who attempt 25 or more credits in their first year will graduate within five years. (I am using 2008 annual cohorts for these measures.)

When I look at graduation rates at Ferrum by income levels, I see that not even income is a good predictor of success, whether based on multiples of the poverty level (accounting for family size) or real dollar amounts. This is unusual, at least in Virginia. What this tells me is that my son’s biggest complaint about his time there, and the source of all his threats to transfer elsewhere, especially in the second year, was valid. There’s not enough to do.

This is a challenge for a small college in what is essentially the middle of nowhere.

Ferrum is a beautiful campus. The town, not so much. Little is really left of what it once was. The nearest community of any size, the nearest Walmart, is Rocky Mount, a full 12 miles away. Staff and faculty do what I think is an excellent job in providing activities and opportunities to keep students engaged. However, there are limits of funding and other resources. Students leave. Some transfer, many don’t. On my last visit to the area, the motel desk clerk recognized my last name and asked if the “big man Massa” that had been at Ferrum was my son. I said that was most likely the case and asked how he knew him.

He had been at Ferrum for a semester and did not go back. College was not for him. Based on other conversations in the area, I am pretty sure his is not an uncommon case. Ten percent (or more) of entering students don’t make it back for a second term. That’s a rather expensive proposition.

Ferrum leaders know they have a retention problem. It is not a secret. They have tried, and are trying, to address it. At least one non-academic attempt to fell flat a few years ago. In 20 years, the rate has never been good – barely over 60% just four times since 1992.

The accounts I heard from my son of the readings and work he did were not trivial. I don’t think there is an academic problem. I’m not even sure there is a support problem. I think there is simply not enough “there” there. One way or another, Ferrum has to solve this problem and build a community that students become invested in and don’t want to leave until they graduate.

Metrics can’t capture this, the best they can do is hint at something missing. At least, as long as the reader has additional information. I don’t think Ferrum has much to fear from the proposed ratings system as it does from its inability to retain more students. Of course, a rating system tied to aid eligibility without a chance for remediation would close Ferrum and dozens or hundreds of colleges across the country.

I wonder though what might happen to some of these campuses, out away from population centers should they close? I guess that is a post for another time.

This is something I think about a lot. I’ve been working with with student-level data for 23 years now. And talking about stuff for longer. There is something uniquely frustrating about conversations in which the person I am talking with does two things: using terms casually and presuming they convey specific meanings.

It drives me crazy because I tend towards the specific when I talk data. Or most other things. Especially if I am talking to someone who I think is supposed to be equally knowledgeable.

Frustrating, and representative of a larger problem. Meaning and bias.

Without going into too much detail, it is kind of difficult to explain well, so bear with me.

When we collect data at the state level, the data are much removed from reality. Institutions collect data for the purpose of running the enterprise. Some pieces they collect because we require it, but there really very few examples of that. Since most data are collected for their purposes, they define the manner of collection that fits their needs best – or as best fits the design of their administrative system.

At this level, we are talking already of two or three levels of abstraction from the original students the data represent. Further, the data are biased according to the definitions used by the institution. Some of these are based on local standards, some on national standards, some simply represent standards implemented by the software vendor.

Since we collect from public and private institutions, two-year and four-year, we impose additional standards and abstractions on the data. This is necessary in order for us to use the data and assure some cleanliness to it (we have thousands of edits in the collection system). However, this adds additional abstraction to the data.

Don’t mistake me, the data are still quite usable. They are simply usable only within realistic limits and are best used for descriptive and trend analyses.

Additional abstraction comes into play in other ways when external taxonomies are applied, such as the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP). Just because something has the same name, that does mean it is the same thing. Sometimes differences are minor, but not always. And of course, sometimes it is just a dead horse being beaten.

Strangeness occurs when taxonomies are linked to taxonomies to taxonomies.

In a completely different dataset I have been working with very recently, I find that a column represents both a desired outcome and qualifying characteristic. Neat trick, huh? The values for that column are based on a crosswalk between two taxonomies (one of which is based on a third). Simply speaking, if there is a one-to-one correspondence, this should not be a problem. However, what if the relationship is one-to-many or, worse yet, many-to-many? Or even worser what if the original value crosswalked for the individual in question is one of multiple options? This provides multiple many-to-many outcomes, yet somehow  the file is produced with only one outcome.

This may be fine and perfectly correct….but how do I know? At this point I can’t even guess how much of this result is based solely on computing algorithm or individual choice in the selection.

It’s kind of crazy.

A week or so ago, someone tweeted the point that algorithms are not unbiased. I’m sorry I don’t remember who it was, or the exact words. The fact is though, algorithms are not unbiased. Some human or three wrote the algorithm and there is every possibility that their biases are reflected in the algorithm – or in how it is used.

So, I guess what I am trying to say is this. The data I work with are as limited as they are powerful. The most important thing they tell us is where to start investigating with less abstract data.