Category Archives: HigherEd

Higher education data, policy, and nonsense.

All the president’s (sales)men

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It sucks watching the icons of your youth crumble into dust and decay. And dishonesty.

Growing up as the child of a professor journalism in the last half of the 20th century, there are certain movies that become “stop and watch” events whenever they are on. One of those is “All the President’s Men.” The story of Woodward and Bernstein exposing the cover-up of the Watergate break-in and the activities of the Committee to Re-Elect the President is a great story. It encourages belief in the news media as the Fourth Estate and that there are good guys in the world.

Unfortunately, it appears that honor of the Washington Post, the newspaper that ultimately stood with Woodward and Bernstein and published their reportage, has been bought sold with the paper itself. Tonight we learn from David Halperin (and if you haven’t read his latest e-book, you really should) this:

This week the Washington Post editorialized against President Obama’s “gainful employment” rule, aimed at holding career training programs accountable for leaving students with insurmountable debt, without disclosing that the newspaper’s publisher, Katharine Weymouth, serves on the board of directors of a company that owns for-profit colleges and that is lobbying actively against the rule.

The act of disclosure of any possible conflicts of interest is critical to building trust. Is this being a kept (poorly) a secret from the WaPo staff? Halperin provides a link to the listing of board members of the Graham Holdings, and there it is, plain as day. Either the editorial board is intentionally misleading its readers (lying) or the concept of investigative journalism has been lost at the Post.

It’s a shame. Really.

Especially after the alleged “Fact Checker” column took the US Department of Education (USED) to task for statistics it was using to justify it’s latest iteration of the Gainful Employment rule and said this:

while The Washington Post used to be owned by the same company that runs Kaplan Education, a big player in the market, The Post is now owned by Jeff Bezos, so there is no longer a potential conflict of interest.

Outright lie or just plain ignorance?

Read Halperin’s article. It is damning.

College Decision Day and PIRS

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It is May Day and many thousands of high school students are committing to colleges today. My friends Robert Kelchen and KC Deane have each blogged about it today. I am not going to bother trying to say what they have said, please read both pieces yourself – they are worth it.

Also worth reading is George Cornelius over at FindingMyCollege.com.

So, what happens next?

  • As Robert points out, there will be some melt and not all students will live up to their commitment.
  • In Virginia, sometime in the coming weeks before students enroll for classes, their names and other information will be sent to Virginia State Police to run against various criminal databases to ensure sex offenders are not enrolling, or if they are, they are properly reporting such (and any change of address).
  • Target and other stores will be flooded by students and parents to buy dorm supplies and furnishings. (Much of this will be trashed early in the semester or left in dumpsters at the end of the year).
  • Thrifty students will order new and used textbooks from Amazon and elsewhere as soon as they know what they need.
  • The rest will gripe much more loudly about the cost of text books….for multiple years.
  • According to the National Student Clearinghouse data for the 2007 cohort:
    • Of the students starting at public four-year institutions, only 51% will graduate from the same institution, about 13% will graduate from another institution, and 15% will still be enrolled. (Fyi, the numbers are much better in Virginia.)
    • For the students starting at private four-year institutions, only 59% will graduate from the same institution, about 14% will graduate from another institution, and 10% will still be enrolled. (Fyi, the completion numbers are a bit worse in Virginia.)
    • Only about 26% of students starting at a two-year public college will complete at that institution, with about 17% of all students (including those who completed a two-year degree) finishing a four-year degree and 19% still enrolled.
  • Of course, students who enroll exclusively full-time have much higher graduation rates across the board.
  • According to the Project on Student Debt, 71% of the 2012 graduates (four-year degrees) had an average of $29,400 debt, representing a 6% increase per year for the last five years.
  • If that 6% is accurate and continues forward, then at least three-quarters of those students graduating within four years will owe on average around $41k, and $44k for those in five years, and $47k in six years.  (I would really try to graduate within four years).
  • Even if debt only grows annually by 3%, we range between $35k and $37k.
  • Many of those graduates will likely start out making less money than they, their families, and policymakers have typically expected. This may have more to do with unrealistic expectations than anything else as the more I look at the earnings data, the more it seems to make sense when we look at the stories behind it.
  • These students, and ultimately graduates (many, but not all), will advise future students on how to choose a college and what college to choose. How many will suggest using a federal rating system?

“Dude, don’t pick a college that Uncle Sam hasn’t rated at least a three!”

Right after saying, “Don’t go borrowing private loans!”

Yeah, right.

The first article I read a few minutes after six a.m. today was about Secretary Duncan’s statement that the Postsecondary Institution Ratings System will go forward – even without the requested 10 million dollars.

Apart from the fact that I still don’t understand how the Department can legitimately spend $10M on ratings, other than on a significantly enhanced and expanded data collection. They might get more support from the community if he was open about such.

Further, according to the Chronicle:

On Tuesday, Mr. Duncan testified before the House education committee about the department’s budget and policy priorities for the coming fiscal year. During that hearing, Rep. Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina, said the department collects “mounds and mounds of data, but from that we get very little information.”

“We like transparency, and we don’t think we’re getting a lot of transparency from the department,” Ms. Foxx said. As an alternative to the college-rating system, she asked why the department did not just “put out useful information and let the public make decisions.”

What Representative Foxx fails to understand is that the Department has already published everything useful it has…plus a lot of other stuff that is less useful. Anything really useful will require new collections..and money. Perhaps at least $10 million. For another $10 million, I am pretty sure the Department could implement IPEDS Unit Record (if it wasn’t outlawed).

So, here’s the compromise. In exchange for no ratings, give the Department unit record collection via the Student Right-to-Know Before You Go Act.

If this goes on–

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I am working tonight with Cabaret playing on one monitor with a variety of thoughts running through my head, inter-leaving the work I am trying to do with higher ed data. I had listened to Terry Gross interview Alan Cumming, who is now playing the role of the Emcee on stage for the third time in 20 years. He made some interesting comments about the implicit guilt of the “audience” in watching things unfold without criticism or reaction. Nothing new here, it was just the tie-in to the audience.

This then led me to thinking about Robert Heinlein’s If This Goes  On-, one of my favorite dystopic future histories. It is the implicit permissiveness of the audience that allows the charismatic and/or wealthy to take over. Especially with an overly simplistic message about a subject for which there are really no easy answers.

Some things aren’t easy to understand or explain accurately. Especially if one does not put in the effort.

There are so many things happening in education these days it is hard to keep track of them, let alone understand them all. For example, there is lot happening with the Common Core of State Standards (CCSS). I’ve typically only skimmed the articles and have a bare understanding of CCSS because Virginia is not a CCSS state. The State Board of Education refused to adopt common core, not wishing to adopt standards lower than what were already in place.

I worry though that not being better informed leads to the “implicit permissive of the audience” that allows the bad things to happen. I like to believe that most people have honorable intentions, especially those driving policy from positions of power (even if it is informal power derived from sitting on huge stacks of money). However, their words seem to make the honor of those intentions suspect. Or outright lies.

The Greenstein and Phillips piece in InsideHigherEd continues to bother me.

Specifically, the full and faithful implementation of the Common Core could all but eliminate the need for colleges to provide academic remediation to students enrolling in college immediately after graduating from high school. Also called “developmental education,” this remediation costs taxpayers $7 billion every year. It’s estimated that only 17 percent of students who take a developmental reading course go on to earn a four-year degree.

I suppose this possible. I can’t help thinking though, after looking at lot of data for a lot of years, if the same thing couldn’t be accomplished by improved funding to schools and eliminating poverty. Poverty seems to have huge impact on education success.

Maybe high standards and high stakes testing drive away the pangs of hunger.

Maybe test anxiety solves the issue of single-parenting since children are more worried about the next test than why Daddy is gone, or Mommy is gone.

As I raise my grandsons, I don’t see this being the case.

High standards are great. Consistent application of standards and opportunity is great, too. But they don’t solve all issues.

By engaging actively in the debate around the Common Core, higher education leaders can inform it with their expertise, participate in and ensure the full, faithful and effective implementation of the Common Core, and help supporters of improved education and educational pipelines stay the course.

I agree wholeheartedly that higher education leaders can inform the Common Core with their expertise by actively engaging in the debate. However, the last part of the statement seems to imply nothing is really going to change. Asking higher ed leaders (and I hope to God they are including faculty here) to engage in debate around the Common Core while planning to continue its “full, faithful and effective implementation” seems startlingly clueless. Especially to help supporters “stay the course.”

There is no meaningful debate or reason to attempt such, if nothing is going to change. The Common Core might be the right thing to do. It may be incredibly well-designed and will solve the remedial ed problem. Unfortunately, when I read things like this essay, I put it in the category of “too good to be true” and look for the Ronco logo.

Seriously? The PocketFisherman is still available? Apparently the half-life of crap is a lot longer than I thought. The fact that someone still thinks is a good idea is why I feel that I must engage more about the Common Core and other initiatives outside my normal domain.

There will always be someone selling snake-oil and piss.

 

 

More things to consider when thinking about student loans

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I noticed that David Bergeron tweeted this blog post at USED about student loans. It is good advice with five points, but can probably be expanded.

1. Research starting salaries in your field.  Uh, yeah. The federal sources cited in the blog are useful, but the summary below looks like an art graduate would have no problem repaying student loans.

Quick Facts: Art Directors
2012 Median Pay $80,880 per year
$38.88 per hour
Entry-Level Education Bachelor’s degree
Work Experience in a Related Occupation 5 years or more
On-the-job Training None
Number of Jobs, 2012 74,800
Job Outlook, 2012-22 3% (Slower than average)
Employment Change, 2012-22 2,200

I’m not sure that’s true. Students would be well-advised to look at the resources put together by Virginia, Texas, Tennessee, and a handful of other states that have reported wage outcomes for very specific majors/degrees/institutions. For example, the median wage for general art graduates in Virginia at five years out was only about $37,585 in our 2012 reports.

It would also be a good idea to think about the cost of living where one plans to work.

2. Keep track of how much you’re borrowing.

And don’t EVER take out private loans! It is bad enough that there are no bankruptcy protections on student loans, but private loans are not eligible for any of the income-based repayment and public service loan forgiveness options.

Don’t ask or make your parents take out PLUS loans. Accept the fact they cannot pay out of pocket and find another option. PLUS loans have zero repayment options…unless your parents have student loans of their own that they can consolidate together. If that’s the case, they definitely should not be taking out PLUS loans. Accept that life is not fair and you simply may not be able to afford the school you want.

Don’t borrow more than needed.

Keep in mind, especially with PLUS loans, part of those loans is going to the college to redistribute to other students in the form of grant aid. Sometimes these students come from wealthier families than yours.  Also consider that what you might save in not having student loans, might cost you more if your parents have to live with you because they can’t afford to save for retirement while they are paying off student loans they took out for you to attend your dream college.

All three of the Department’s final suggestions come down to basic good practices whenever one signs a contract.

3. Understand the terms of your loan and keep copies of your loan documents.

4. Keep in touch with your loan servicer. 

5. Stay ahead of your student loan payments.  

Don’t ever get behind. Don’t default. Whatever you do.

Become familiar with income-based repayment options (PAYE/IBR) and talk to a financial advisor and see if they make sense for you. Remember – these options do not apply to private loans!

Other suggestions

Research the history of student debt at the institutions you are considering. Virginia  makes it easy and Texas has a couple of web tools that blend debt and wage outcomes products together. This can be useful.

Think hard about what you are doing and why. Look at it as a business decision. By itself, debt is not necessarily bad. But too much debt compared to what you need to live and what you earn is pretty much evil. What is “too much debt” may vary a bit on a case-by-case basis, but not really very much.  USED recommends that student loan payments should be 8% or less. Try for 5% at most.

Borrow cautiously. Very cautiously.

 

 

Free College?

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No TV. No internet. No phone.

DSCN0500

It is kind of primitive. Except that I am using my phone to play stored music (for just such an occasion, the same reason I keep my feathers numbered) and I am writing this on Windows 8 tablet while drinking a tumbler of pinot grigio. Maybe it is not too primitive. My wife and are acknowledging/celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary in a CCC cabin at Douthat State Park in western Virginia. This small, one-room cabin is nearly identical to the one we stayed in five years ago at this time at Fairystone State Park. It is simple, relaxing, and as about as romantic as one might like.

So of course I am thinking about higher education. (To be fair, wife is curled up trying to cope with her constant pain in her knees.)

While some folks might consider this cabin to be somethingless than Spartan, it is probably more comfortable and better appointed thanmost traditional dorm rooms. Especially our son’s. It is certainly cleaner.

And this is why I am thinking about higher education.

The Tennessee legislature has approved free community college.

Except it hasn’t. Not really. Not even close.

Bryce McKibbentweeted about this.

This last tweet is most damning. Leaving the poorest students with 67% of the cost of attendance unaddressed is not free community college, it is just a gimmick. Not covering part-time students is perhaps understandable, but undercuts the message.

Sara Goldrick-Rab is out with a proposal for a free two-year college option. It recognizes that the cost of attendance includes living. It is simply not enough to cover the tuition and mandatory college fees and call that free college and leave out the cost of textbooks, supplies, food, and a place to live. Certainly policymakers don’t want to pay for something that is perhaps already being covered by someone else, but we can’t seriously demand that all students work hard academically and simultaneously work to support themselves. I credit their proposal with recognizing that reality. Unfortunately, as part of the funding mechanism it calls for the elimination of public support of students attending private colleges.

That goes too far, in my opinion. I respect her intent, but I disagree.

The brilliance of American higher education is its mix of colleges and universities.

I sometimes wonder if folks that should know better think that visionary public leaders looked around the states and said, “Look, there are no colleges, no universities, we must build them,” in much the same way that the Europeans saw America as an uninhabited wilderness. “Look, there are no people here, no civilizations, we must conquer the wilderness and people a civilization.”

Private colleges were often the first to make room for women, for non-whites. Public colleges have fought to deny access to women, and one became private to win that fight.

The private colleges I have attended and worked for have had their strengths and weaknesses. So too have the public colleges I have attended. If the criticism of private colleges is their costs, well, must I point out that is easier to cost less when one receives a subsidy from the taxpayers. At the end of the day, after adjusting for size and program mix, the cost of education between a public and private college education are very similar.

We are beginning to reach a point where the only discernible differences between a public institution and a private institution in Virginia will be two questions:

  1. Who appoints the board?
  2. Who owns the land?

The passage of TJ21 in 2011 sets the goal of making the Tuition Assistance Grant approximately equal to the state subsidy for in-state undergraduates. We have a ways to go to get there, a matter of $3000 or so per student, but there is a pathway in the law. Virginia law-makers recognize there is value in having a vibrant public and private sectors of higher education. If that goal is ever achieved, we will like face a new discussion about the differences between the two sectors. This is doubly true if the private sector ever achieves its goal of having some kind of state support for capital projects.

At that point, we may be looking at inadequate state support for both public and nonprofit higher education.

This is where I agree with Sara in principle – we should be fully funding public higher education. I suspect we might differ on what that means, but at least it is a place to start a conversation.

It is fully appropriate to question how we fund students in higher education. I think we should always continue to debate that…after we we come to conclusion as to why we are supporting higher education. Let’s have clear goals and agree on them, relative the value of everything else we are doing.

For the record, I think everyone should have the opportunity to benefit from education beyond high school. I just think there are many ways to do that and most of those are worthy of some level of support.

The Beast that Shouted “Notice Me!” at the Heart of the Web

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With apologies to Harlan Ellison. While the story “The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World” itself has not stuck with me over the years, the title certainly has, certainly not the same way that I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream has done so.  Regardless, the question is this. Is “”Notice Me!” all that much different from Love?

In the 90s, I played with a lot of different technologies on the web. I wrote a fair amount that I never put online nor tried to publish. I actually had more time then than I do now. I don’t  know that I have all that much more to say, but I seem to have a greater desire now to say it or to get document my thoughts.

When we rolled out our revised/renewed website in the fall of 2012, we built social community structure into it with a blog, wiki, and user forum. The forum has not taken off at all, but this did not surprise me. The institutional research community has never been much on such things, and that has been our primary target audience.  I started the blog over there with one thing in mind, but it has morphed into something else as I have blogged there about weekly for most of the year.

At the same time, I created the @SCHEVResearch Twitter account and used it very little for several months. I figured initially we would just push notices that out that way to supplement other avenues. As I spent more time on Twitter, I found out just how useful it is to connect with some really smart people doing good work and stay current on what is going on. Then I began to see the need for a more personal interaction on Twitter that was less appropriate for the account representing a department in a state agency, so I dusted off the unused personal account and announced that I would be moving some activity there.

So, as I eagerly scan for page view accounts and new followers, I wonder two things.

Am I shouting “Notice Me!” loudly enough?

Why, oh why, am I shouting “Notice Me!”?

I think the answer to my first question is probably that I am not. I need to tweet more, follow more people, use more hashtags, all that stuff. Part of the problem is that I still have to be mindful of the limits of free speech for a public official. I censor myself a lotto provide the illusion that I am a serious, thoughtful person.

As to why shout “Notice Me!” that is easy. I am little tired of the lack of awareness of some of things we are doing, that I am doing. For example, I get kind of annoyed when faculty bloggers from Virginia institutions or presidents of Virginia institutions who write op-ed pieces attacking PayScale or USED’s ratings proposal to include earnings measures fail to mention what we are doing in Virginia. While I am glad they are not attacking our work (although some of the presidents seem to like to do that face-to-face) they could at least demonstrate an awareness of what we have done and why it is different. Ignoring it is not going to make it go away – it is the law.

As is the new requirement that all colleges and universities receiving general fund dollars (with direct appropriation or student aid) from the state shall post a link on their websites to our reports (the italics represent new language):

“for each degree awarded by each institution and shall, at a minimum, include the percentage of graduates known to be employed in the Commonwealth, the average salary, and the average higher education-related debt for the graduates on which the data is based; rates of enrollment in remedial coursework for each institution; individual student credit accumulation for each institution; rates of postsecondary degree completion; and any other information that the Council determines is necessary to address adequate preparation for success in postsecondary education and alignment between secondary and postsecondary education.“

School divisions and high schools must also provide a link to the reports. Clearly the patron of this bill is paying attention to my work, and more importantly, likes it.

In many ways, the highered world is becoming more socially directed and those that are not paying attention are going to find themselves to be lost. Those that fail to try to be found, will be equally lost. Scott Adams once suggested in either The Dilbert Principle or The Dilbert Future that the need for a personal webpage may become so pervasive that there would be government subsidies for the homepageless.

I’ve taken a hiatus from membership and involvement with Association for Institutional Research. For many years, that was a large part of my professional life. I’m returning to the Forum this year, and we will see how that goes.

Notice Me!

 

Please?

 

 

 

TANSTAAFL – Obligations of Open Source

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Earlier today I was part of Twitter discussion Barmak (@BarmakN) and Chuck (@ShorterPearson) about Heartbleed and the obligations of associated with open source applications.

I feel pretty strongly about this topic. We use one open source software application at work, or rather five. It’s called Sueetie and pulls together several open source projects (wiki, blog, media server, forum) to create a single unified environment. It’s pretty slick and the integration and value-added wrap-arounds make it ideal for our purposes. As soon as we committed to using Sueetie, I joined the user community site, both for help with the set-up and to give back by sharing what we learned along the way. And we learned a lot.

None of my staff are .Net or C# developers, so it was hard to contribute much at that level. However, on the SQL side we could contribute a lot, which we did – right up until the founder pulled the plug. For whatever reason, after several years of development, the community user group never took off. There were only about three active users, including us, plus the founder. There were plenty of downloads, but not much in the way of real involvement. We were also one of the very few to actually buy the license and premium source code.

As a product, Sueetie never really took off. Maybe it was too much effort for most users. One had to know a few things to install it and have decent mastery of the least-used skill these days – RFC (Reading for Comprehension). I think though it also had a lot to do with lack of understanding of how open source works – participation, support, funding – and the desire to get something for nothing. The community of active supporters was not large enough to be self-perpetuating and the founder eventually needed to move his Sueetie-time to revenue generation.

It just doesn’t work that way. There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. TANSTAAFL. People need to read more Robert A. Heinlein. One way or another, things have to be paid for, either with cash or sweat or service or barter.

We’ve stuck with Sueetie. We’ve invested too much effort in using it and developing content. We have all the source code and will begin updating it, focusing on the areas we use most. Some pieces we may ultimately disassociate from our application because we don’t use them, others we will continue to enhance or integrate the newest versions.

The Heartbleed bug is an example of what happens when folks forget TANSTAAFL. Big moneymakers that adopted OpenSSL, but did not take seriously their role in being part of the OpenSSL community have a lot to answer for. Just a reminder these enterprises include Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Instagram. I feel confident they could have added value along the way…especially Facebook and Google.

I guess it is time to pay up.

Open source code is great. It is powerful, can be affordable, and you can customize it. If you need a cheap solution, that’s okay, but you can still contribute to its development through development, sharing your modifications, bug reporting, crowd-funding, letting the developers know how you are using it, and helping others get started. The last is the easiest, and perhaps the most powerful as it can help a user community become large enough to continue.

Remember: identity, community, and stability all apply to the open source movement. Especially if you aren’t paying attention.

 

 

As a matter of fact, you do need a badge

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Today, APLU hosted a forum on Alternatives to Ratings. Listening to it stream online got me thinking dangerous thoughts.

All through this ratings system conversation I have been thinking about the essential uselessness of creating yet another government website for students. I don’t believe most students think of the federal government as being the authority on schools and colleges. If the ratings are supposed to be consumer information, how do you put them in front of the targeted consumers?

I have also been thinking about the ratings as being rectangular tiles, color-coded to David Bergeron’s proposal – lead, bronze, silver, gold, platinum.

And I thought about the US News & World Report America’s Best College badge. You can see an example here.

But that medal you wore on your chest always got in the way 
Like a little girl with a trophy so soft to buy her way 

So, the feds could simply add another piece to Title IV eligibility requiring institutions to display the appropriately earned PIRS Badge on their websites. Plural. It is not enough to display it on the admissions and/or financial aid page. Instead it should be required to be displayed in the footer of every single page. Perhaps even the header.

Of course, this falls apart for the Lead institutions once they lose their Title IV eligibility. Which means any institution without a badge would be suspect. Unfortunately, this would be unfair to certain institutions that have chosen not to participate in federal aid programs. For those institutions, USED could issue a badge of non-participation.

I think this is an elegant solution to make the ratings meaningful to consumers. And make sure they see them.

Obscenity and Student Borrowing

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I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that. [Emphasis added.]

—Justice Potter Stewart, concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964), regarding possible obscenity in The Lovers.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

As I said in my last entry, I don’t know what the right amount of student borrowing is, but I do know too much when I see it.

The problem with even thinking about what the “right amount” of student debt is that it is going to go up. And keep going up. American colleges and universities do not seem to have found the magic formula constrain the growth of in the total cost of attendance. Institutions have made progress in some areas, but they remain basically expensive, and the rise in part-time adjunct faculty as a cost control measure is probably not serving us well. It was once explained to me very slowly by a member of the Governor’s Cabinet, “But Tod, college costs are always going to go up.” 

I don’t feel compelled to believe that, but I do see the evidence  each year. This also includes evidence that not all cost increases are within institutional control. If not annually, at least on a semi-regular basis, well-intentioned laws are passed that increase the cost of doing the business of higher education. State legislators attempt to solve the problems of constituents through bills to address admission policies, transfer policies, access, affordability, efficiency, effectiveness, economic impact, K-12 involvement and improvement, campus safety, student health, student mental health, and the list goes on. To be fair, institutions bring a lot of this on this on themselves with policies or behaviors that create a news story that upsets people. Sometimes these events are really valid drivers of change, other times they are just the embarrassing reflection of what happens with human-run enterprises. They are called mistakes and they happen. Get over it.

I continue to be amazed at how college presidents continue think that big bills to change the institutional relationship to the state will work out in their favor. More and more they lead to greater intrusion of measurement, control, and direction. Good advice has always been, “Don’t poke the sleeping bear.” Better advice is, “Don’t push a big bill about yourself that hundreds of other people can involve themselves, many of which will do so without your knowledge.” Laws to affect institutional behavior rarely seem to reduce costs. Perhaps never.

Yesterday, Secretary Duncan defended the proposed rating system to congress. He and others continue to maintain this a way to improve and maintain affordability. Here’s a suggestion: quit pushing proposals that require institutional staff and leadership to respond. Quit doing things that require institutions to have federal lobbyists and pay membership dues to lobbying organizations. Just set clear and defensible standards for Title IV participation. The proposed Gainful Employment rules do that, although a lot of lobbying and institutional engagement has been in play there, as documented by David Halperin’s fascinating new book.

Returning to the today’s theme: obscenity is material where the “dominant theme taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest”, and that the “average person, applying contemporary community standards” would disapprove.”  I think we have reached that point with student debt. Or, at least, based on the way student debt is being reported based on horror stories and loose rhetoric. The Vox Cards on student debt by Libby Nelson provide a nice overview on the topic, but I think perhaps they indicate that the discussion on student debt has reached the level of prurient interest – it seems to be as hot a topic as sex.  

Unfortunately, I don’t think we have quite reached the point where we know what the community standards are…let alone what they should be. If the average debt for 70% of bachelor degree graduates is $29,400, is that too much, too little, or just right? Or is the concept of community standards more important than we realize here? Should the average debt in Virginia be higher than the average in Mississippi but lower than that of New York?

What is the right amount of debt?

It is a good question, but it is the wrong one.

The right question is this. “Who are the parties responsible for paying for postsecondary education and making it accessible to all Americans, and what level of responsibility does each party have?” It seems to me that it has been too long since we have had this conversation, if we ever did.

  • What is the role of the federal government?
  • What is the role of the state?
  • What is the role of the family?
  • What is the role of the student?

Until we answer these questions, and agree to live the by the answers, I don’t think we can do any more than limp along and let the debt increase. That’s the real obscenity.

 

Student Debt and the Informed Consumer

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It is hard to consume any media from a broad range of sources without encountering stories about student debt. I think. Maybe it is just because of my job I tend to notice the coverage of student debt. This is probably much the same way that I notice all the new generation Ford Escapes that have popped up since I bought mine in 2012. (However, those have been hugely successful for Ford and they have sold a lot of them.)

The Atlantic had an article earlier in the week about The Myth of Working Your Way Through College highlighting the differences in buying power of minimum wage employment in terms of a per credit basis over time. I’ve seen such analyses before, in fact, I’ve done some in the past for discussions considering new state financial aid models. I love articles like this because of the reader comments. Those are often pure gold.

After reading those for awhile tonight, I clicked onto this Daniel Greenstein commentary which I believe is prep for his speech tomorrow at the AERA conference. I’m always interested in articles about how to measure college performance. (I hope we can start doing that some day – once we have firmly established that we know how to measure what it is actually happening. Then we can measure performance.)  He starts  with a well-known metric “Because nearly 40 percent of students who start at a four-year college won’t earn a degree in six years.” It’s absolutely true – because it is all we have absolutely measured nationally. In Virginia, we know that 75% of all students who start at a public four-year institution, whether fall or spring, full-or part-time, first-time in college or new transfer complete a degree somewhere in Virginia within 10 years. It is 76% for just first-time college. Adding in data from the National Student Clearinghouse we get to almost 80%. It’s not perfect, it can be improved, but more importantly, it is a full measure. (Yes, I am bragging about my work).

Greenstein goes on to say those “who do complete a college degree increasingly carry significant debt, even as employer surveys and international comparisons suggest they lack certain skills. The trends are exacerbated by a steep drop in government funding for higher education and increased costs. Parents and students are questioning whether college is ‘worth it.'” Which is all true.The problem with the discussion of student debt, to my tumored mind, is that there seems to underlying assumption that students are entitled to not have a cost investment in their higher education. I’m not against that idea since I do believe postsecondary education is a tremendous public good, as well as a private good, however, as a nation we have not agreed upon the concept of completely free education beyond K12.

Folks that know me and have participated in meetings with me, know that I am not the least bit shy about pointing out that higher education is the only aspect of American society where parents are expected to pay for the pursuits of their adult children. An 18 year-old has complete freedom to join the military, marry, enter into contracts, and essentially pursue any legal activity except consume alcohol. If an 18 year-old attempts to attend college and ask for financial aid, all of a sudden the world changes and that legal adult must ask their parents for all kinds of personal finance information to complete the FAFSA and perhaps the CSS Profile. Parents can refuse, in which case the student can borrow their way to attendance through private lenders or they can try to prove they are actually independent of their parents (fat chance, but possible).

They are completely free to pay for college themselves – if they have the money.

Again, fat chance.

However you believe it happened, however it actually happened, whatever is going to happen in the future, we have an industry selling a product/experience to a market audience completely unable to afford it. This leaves only three options: getting somebody else to pay for it, student debt, or self-financing through work. For about 60% of undergraduates, it is a mix of the first two or all three.

When we put out the student debt reports to the institutions last fall for review prior to publication, one of the institutions questioned the maximum loan we reported for a five-year period.  The email from the financial aid officer went along the lines of, “Can you verify your data? You show us with a graduate with $171,000 in student debt, and I think that is kind of high for an art major.” Really? Kind of high? My reply was along those lines since I have an art degree as well. Unfortunately, the data were accurate and the school was able to figure out who it was and verify the amount through their own records.

What bothered me most about the entire exchange was that they did not know off-hand they had a relatively recent graduate with that much debt.

It is also bothered that that was the only discussion about such an extreme example…there were others across the Commonwealth.

In conversations about this story, at least one college president made a comment along the lines, “That’s insane! No one should pay that much for a college degree!”

Again, really? Those loans simply represented the total cost of five years of attendance at a private, residential institution. It is simply what it costs to attend…well, that and take some of the tuition money and give it to other students. But, that’s another story.

I am still troubled by this comment as it seems to call into question the perception of the product of the university that president represents. It is also an indictment of the student for not finding someone else to pay for their education. That strikes me as wrong.

I wonder if student debt is like pornography – I don’t know what the right amount is, but I know too much when I see it.

What I do know is that until the cost structure of postsecondary education changes, this discussion won’t change. There does not seem to be public and political appetite to make the current model free, especially with the current cost structure, and so a mix of student debt and having other people pay will continue. How much is the right amount of debt should be an informed decision made by the student. It is difficult to make an informed decision without adequate information about cost of attendance, graduation rates for discrete cohorts of students, likely debt amount, and historic ranges of earnings by program. These things are becoming available, thanks to the work we are doing Virginia and what is taking in other states.

More than knowing what their likelihood of graduation is, students need to know how to graduate. They need clear guidance on what it takes to graduate on time, what it costs for each additional year, and the cost of failure. These are where we should be going. If we are not going to solve the college cost problem, perhaps we can improve the college financial literacy problem.

To some degree, student debt is a choice. Certainly extreme debt is a choice, one that can be mitigated by knowing more about the wide range of options of postsecondary education available.

Wasn’t Men’s Wearhouse whose motto was, “An informed consumer is our best customer”? Might that not be an appropriate goal here?